Scientific fragmentation: As emphasised by systems thinking, problems like poverty span dimensions (i.e. there are economic, cultural, political, technological, ecological, biological and physical causes of poverty). Accordingly, there need to be strategies for dealing with the different dimensions.
Issues like poverty also span levels (i.e. from the galactic to the sub-atomic). For example, climate change at the planetary level is a co-cause of poverty, as are international and national economic and other policies, organisational behaviour, community and family traditions, personal abilities and attitudes and disease arising from the biological and physical levels within people.
These different dimensions and levels are studied by different scientific disciplines, while the issue itself (e.g. poverty, climate change, or many other problems) spans all or most of them and emerges from their interaction.
There is no formal establishment of a meta-discipline within universities (at least as far as I know) that provides the frameworks, organising principles and methods of inquiry that can deal with transversal problems by harnessing and integrating knowledge from and across disciplines relevant to the issue and that can facilitate transdisciplinary cooperation in analysing them, co-designing solutions and managing their implementation.
An integrated meta-systems approach, like the Biomatrix Systems Approach, could fill this gap.
