Abstract
This paper revisits The Limits to Growth (1972) as a landmark in environmental systems modeling and a product of late Cold War political economy. While scholarship has focused on the empirical accuracy of the World3 model, less attention has been paid to the normative structure embedded in its scenario architecture. Through textual and structural analysis of the twelve World3 scenarios and subsequent updates (1992, 2004), alongside later empirical reassessments (Turner 2008; Herrington 2021; Nebel 2024), it argues that the scenario design embeds a hierarchy of interventions in which non-collapse outcomes require coordinated global stabilization across population, capital, and pollution variables. By abstracting from ownership structures and geopolitical asymmetries, systems modeling reframed ecological limits as a universal management problem — a move with asymmetrical implications in Cold War competition. The paper contributes to political economy by reading global models as governance artifacts and proposing a typology of intervention logics in World3.
