Thirdly, a ‘change perspective’ requires interdisciplinarity. Most participants in our project events were legal professionals with no specific sociological, psychological, or other relevant key knowledge. Although legal reforms are immensely important and often a necessary basis for change, change is a highly complex phenomenon, especially in the field of criminal justice, requiring an interdisciplinary and holistic perspective. In fact, adopting a mere legal perspective to identify problems or solutions can often be limiting as it comes with a temptation to view change as linear: how often have you experienced frustration over the fact that a sound legal reform did not show any meaningful result in practice? Thus, it is important to involve a broader pool of background and professionals, in addition to legal professionals (see below, §2.4). Finally, we became aware of the necessity to better understand the context in which procedural rights exist, the reality of policing and its impact and the actual needs of all suspected and accused persons. To grasp this reality, interactions across movements, beyond actors and organisations working on criminal justice and procedural rights, might be needed and would be an interesting aspect to include in the design and implementation of future projects. Further, we need to better reflect upon, analyse and understand how individual rights fit into a broader system, structure and practices of policing. Strengthening individual procedural rights are “only part of the picture” to improve the rights of suspects and accused. Overall, while shifting the perspective on how change happens was not without challenges, the feedback we received from the participants shows that the regional consultations were perceived as inspiring and motivating. The present report hopes to take these first reflections further by exploring useful models and methods to develop and exchange on effective strategies. In the following section, we present three approaches/methods that greatly influenced this project namely the ‘Systemic Approach’, the ‘Change Formula’ and ‘Theory of Change’. 2.1.1 A systemic approach to human rights practice The project was based on a systemic approach/ systems thinking. In his work ‘Systems Thinking for Social Change’ David P. Stroh argues that systems thinking enables practitioners to “achieve better results with fewer resources in more lasting ways.”14 Duncan Green in his famous book ‘How Change Happens’ formulates this more simply: “Systems thinking changes everything.”15 It particularly does so by: • • • • Reflecting on one’s own assumptions, intentions, and action, including one’s own contribution to possible problems and negative consequences of well-intentioned solutions; Helping to look for areas of greatest impact and for high-leverage interventions; Identifying and mobilising diverse stakeholders to get change going; Motivating and supporting continuous learning.16 While it is difficult to define a systemic approach, for the purpose of this report we limit ourselves to referring to “10 Guiding Principles of a Systemic Approach” for increasing the effectiveness of human rights practice, already developed in the framework of a previous EU funded project of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Fundamental and Human Rights.17 14. Stroh, Systems Thinking for Social Change (2004) 1. 15. Green, How Change Happens (2016) 9. 16. See more in Moritz Birk and Walter Suntinger,‘A Systemic Approach to Human Rights Practice’ in Patricia Hladschik and Fiona Steinert (eds), Menschenrechten Gestalt und Wirksamkeit verleihen: Making Human Rights Work Festschrift für Manfred Nowak und Hannes Tretter (NWV 2019). 17. The 10 Guiding Principles found in the box are taken from the publication Suntinger and Birk, ‘Systemic Thinking in Preventive Human Rights Monitoring’ (2021), where they have been applied to Preventive Monitoring work of National Preventive Mechanisms; for a more detailed description see also Birk and Suntinger, ‘A Systemic Approach to Human Rights Practice’ (2019). 12