Can MSD’s systemic ambitions survive ever-growing market systems?

Promising signs of a systems change agenda that is more ambitious than a green version of business as usual.

Even at the end of tumultuous years like this one, year-end conferences and virtual gatherings offer space for MSD practitioners to share their work and reflect on the road ahead. Diverse voices at forums such as the Market Systems Symposium are energising when we recognise common threads tying different sectors together, or we seize upon new ideas from unexpected places.

This is, after all, how MSD emerged in the first place, through a cross-pollination of microenterprise and subsector development with ideas from economics, anthropology, ecology and even atmospheric physics and cybernetics.

But a gathering of people working in disparate areas also raises troubling questions. Can each of us solving fragments of a bigger problem in our own corner really add up to the scale and impact we hope for? Do our interventions reflect the principles of systems thinking? Does being systemic really shape how we work, learn and lead? Does our progress in developing market systems hold up when we look at the bigger, planetary picture?

Our actions can feel fragmented, even as the systems we work in are tightly interconnected. We sense growing interdependence and face a sobering awareness of where our path might lead: are we caught in reinforcing feedback loops that yield ‘progress’ at first, but over time drive the system towards outcomes that none of us desire?

The two of us have spent most of our careers developing food systems. When we do our job well, supply expands. And it should. Farmers and agribusinesses increase production because prices have become attractive. Investors pour in more capital, and we celebrate. Production capacity grows as producers bring in new land, inputs and infrastructure. Demand rises. As supply increases, prices fall and food becomes more available. Lower prices attract new consumers and open new markets. Retailers and processors respond by seeking greater supply. Capacity intensifies. When prices fall, producer margins shrink. To survive, producers invest in efficiency through larger farms, mechanisation, cheaper inputs or more intensive land use. Those investments raise capacity again and feed the cycle of growth.

Higher output, cheaper food and more investment look like progress. But they also deplete natural resources, squeeze producer incomes and deepen inequality. It is a systemic change that addresses the nutritional needs of many, but regenerative it is not. Recalling Jevons’ Paradox, everyone in the food system works harder, yet few are truly better off in the long run. Gross production increases – at the expense of the planet’s primary materials – without improving wellbeing.

Can MSD’s foundations point us toward a path to genuine well-being?

The ideas behind MSD have a rich history we can be proud of. Generations of microfinance, enterprise development and market analysis professionals learned by doing, and programme staff and private-sector partners pioneered new business approaches long before any formal framework developed, and they provided the core of our practice.

But MSD also draws on an academic heritage. Institutional economists from Thorstein Veblen to Douglas North to Daron Acemoglu revealed economies as ‘institutions’ shaped by human history and culture, not by inevitable neoclassical optimisation functions, which reassures MSD practitioners that economies can be changed. E. F. Schumacher’s case for putting economies in the service of people (instead of people serving economies) anticipated the spirit that put the ‘P’ in M4P.

Other, non-economist thinkers helped us understand how everything connects. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson highlighted the interconnections between economic, social and knowledge systems and foreshadowed our current challenges with measuring systems change. Jay Forrester's team of MIT cyberneticists introduced a model of the ‘world system’, along with mapping techniques that we borrow to visualise market systems. Ecologist H. T. Odum unwittingly gave business economics some of its most potent metaphors, and we talk about an ecosystem of supporting services for good reason. Even ideas from meteorology such as the Lorenz attractor shape how we think about complexity and emergent change. This heritage is not just theoretical: Dana Meadows gave us one of the most practical and humble guides on leverage points for systems change leaders.

It is not necessary for MSD practitioners to master these disciplines to excel at their jobs. They do not even need to know who these people are (or follow any of these hyperlinks). That is part of the beauty of something as multidisciplinary as MSD. However, our intellectual forebears invite us to change our perspective: instead of seeing the planet simply as a provider of ‘ecosystem services’ to the market, we can look at the big thermodynamic picture and place the market in its proper place within the ecosystem. After all,  Bateson, Schumacher and Meadows also influenced the modern environmental movement, and the overlooked heterodox descendants of Veblen’s school of economic thought never stopped their critique of political economies dependent on endless growth.

So where does that leave us? Can our MSD frameworks remain faithful to our intellectual foundations? Or are they fatally aligned with capitalist agendas that prioritise ever-growing market systems over the well-being of people and the planet?

Perhaps, but context matters. Most MSD programmes operate in countries that do not provide a basic social foundation for their people. The moral arguments for degrowth or steady-state economies apply mainly to high-income countries whose wealth derives from fossil fuel overconsumption and imperialism. Emerging and developing economies still need growth, but growth of a different kind. And if Uganda or Ethiopia can develop without repeating nineteenth-century Europe’s industrialisation mistakes, they may well teach a lesson to the so-called ‘developed world’ about respecting planetary boundaries.

Can we do better than just facilitating the green version of business as usual?

MSD is great at accommodating unexpected new ideas. In recent memory it has braved conceptual questions such as the implications of complexity science for MSD,  as well as practical ones such as using grants with the private sector. So in the face of global market systems that violate planetary boundaries while leaving most people in critical deprivation, can we do no better than facilitating more solar micro-enterprises, or strengthening supply-chain traceability to comply with deforestation regulations? Or instead, can we reimagine our basic frameworks and tools, recalling our intellectual heritage and drawing on insights from heterodox cousins of institutional economics, researchers applying patterns from sociobiology to emergent phenomena in human civilization, and movements envisioning a new economic system that is circular and regenerative?

We think it is worth attempting a more ambitious systems change agenda. There are already promising signs. For example, new Green MSD guidance came out this year that alters our canonical MSD doughnut to reflect Kate Raworth’s more existential one and place market systems within the ecosystem. About time. To build on these small steps, we will need to remain curious, look beyond simple cause and effect, stay humble and do what MSD practitioners do best: pragmatic, messy, bottom-up work to make human systems fit for the challenges of the twenty-first century.

• To find out more about the new Green MSD Guidance watch BEAM’s webinar that took place on 4 December 2025: Green MSD: making markets work for people, climate and nature 

This post originated as a rich exchange on the Markets in Crisis (MiC) Group discourse forum concurrent with the 2025 Market Systems Symposium, and it captures only one side of the debate and a fraction of that discussion. You can join the MiC and read additional insights from Sasha Muench, Dan Barthmaier, Sarah Ward, Thomas Byrnes, Githaiga, Malte Reshoeft, Ayman Ramsis, Kristin O’Planick, Lucho Osorio-Cortes and also view the full conversation on BEAM