Systems Perspectives on Business and Peace: The Contingent Nature of Business-Related Action with Respect to Peace Positive Impacts

We examine three business-related initiatives designed to achieve peace positive impacts in the Cape Town township of Langa. Each was seemingly straightforward in its purpose, logic, and implementation. However, their positive intent was frustrated and their impacts ultimately harmful to their articulated goals. Understanding why this is so can be difficult in violent, turbulent, and information-poor environments such as Langa, confounding progress even by actors with ethical intentions. To aid in sense making and to provide insight for more positive future action, we develop from 125 interviews conducted for this study causal loop models for these initiatives within their conflict subsystems. These explain the perverse impacts of these initiatives by illuminating their (lack of) salience to key conflict factors, their (in)sufficiency to effect positive change in light of competing systems dynamics, and their (in)attentiveness to interdependencies with the intentions and actions of others. We thus contribute to understanding of the factors required to achieve positive social outcomes in more extreme contexts. More generally, we demonstrate the value of systems analysis both for scholarship related to business and peace and for reducing blind spots that can inhibit sound planning for ethical business action amidst complexity.