Under national or state-based legislation, local governments are commonly required to prepare municipal health and wellbeing plans. Yet, the issues these plans aim to address are often complex, and programmatic planning approaches traditionally used by practitioners struggle to engage with such complexity as they assume these issues can be ‘solved’ in isolation. Systems thinking is increasingly being used as an approach to deal with those struggles more effectively, yet little is known about whether local governments and other stakeholders think systems approaches are feasible and acceptable in practice. This study tested a systems thinking approach to gauge if it could better address complex place-based health and wellbeing issues, such as to reduce noncommunicable diseases. Guided by a systems change framework, the approach comprised a facilitated systemic inquiry and rich picture process involving diverse stakeholders in a remote municipality in the Australian state of Tasmania. Among the participants there was broad support for the systems approach tested and they thought it was effective for increasing systems thinking capacity, collaboratively revealing systemic issues, and identifying opportunities to address those issues. They valued the rich picture because it created shared understandings of local issues. The findings suggest more is needed from macro-level policy to support place-based stakeholders to undertake systems approaches in practice, which could result in more sustainable and effective systems change required to improve health and wellbeing outcomes. The findings have implications for theory, research, and practice across interdisciplinary fields concerned with placed-based systems change, especially in rural and remote municipalities.

根据国家或州级立法，地方政府通常需要制定市政健康和福祉计划。然而，这些计划旨在解决的问题通常很复杂，而从业者传统上使用的程序化规划方法很难处理这种复杂性，因为他们认为这些问题可以单独“解决”。系统思维越来越多地被用作更有效地处理这些斗争的方法，但对于地方政府和其他利益相关者是否认为系统方法在实践中可行和可接受的问题知之甚少。这项研究测试了一种系统思维方法，以衡量它是否可以更好地解决复杂的基于地方的健康和福祉问题，例如减少非传染性疾病。在系统变更框架的指导下，该方法包括一个便利的系统调查和丰富的图片过程，涉及澳大利亚塔斯马尼亚州一个偏远城市的不同利益相关者。参与者广泛支持所测试的系统方法，他们认为这对于提高系统思维能力、协作揭示系统问题以及确定解决这些问题的机会是有效的。他们重视丰富的画面，因为它创造了对当地问题的共同理解。调查结果表明，需要更多的宏观政策来支持基于地方的利益相关者在实践中采用系统方法，这可能导致改善健康和福祉结果所需的更可持续和有效的系统变革。这些发现对理论、研究、