Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Agriculture face interacting climatic, ecological, economic, and institutional pressures that cannot be addressed through isolated technical interventions. Responding to these pressures requires approaches capable of engaging with complexity, multiple actors, contested priorities, and long-term transformation. Systemic design offers such an approach by combining systems thinking with design-oriented processes for reframing problems, developing desirable futures, and supporting systemic change. However, it remains unclear whether agricultural systems design has explicitly adopted systemic design theory or has developed comparable practices through other intellectual traditions. Clarifying this relationship is important for understanding both the current maturity of agricultural systems design and its potential contribution to sustainability transformations. Here we review how agricultural systems design literature explicitly uses, or implicitly aligns with, Peter Jones’s ten systemic design principles. Bibliographic searches identified 4,605 records, of which 121 studies published between 1992 and 2025 were retained and coded for systemic design principles, objectives, methodologies, practitioner groups, benefits, and challenges. The major points are the following: 1) none of the studies cited Jones’s principles, showing that alignment with systemic design was implicit; 2) the strongest alignments concerned appreciating complexity, idealization, and purpose finding, whereas system ordering, generative emergence, and self-organization were less frequently identified; 3) the field is methodologically plural, combining participatory workshops, co-design, modelling, scenario planning, analytical assessment, and evaluation; 4) most studies focused on tool development, system redesign, management support, and assessment, while explicit transformation objectives and implementation pathways remained uncommon; and 5) researchers, farmers, extension agents, and policy-makers were frequently involved, but their roles and influence were often insufficiently specified. These findings reveal a conceptual disconnect: agricultural systems design frequently performs systemic-design-like work without explicitly structuring or evaluating it through systemic design theory. Systemic design could therefore add value by strengthening how agricultural research addresses uncertainty, contested boundaries, multiple purposes, and sustained system reorganization.</p>