The neoclassical case supporting competitive frames and market solutions has failed to promote stable world-wide economic development. Other approaches in economics incorporate social culture, increasing returns, market power, ecological limits and complementarity, yielding broader applications...

The concept of planning horizons serves as a measure of many unsettled aspects of economic analysis. First and foremost, the notion is ordinal: we speak of ‘horizon effects’ as directional shifts in planning horizons without tallying ‘wits’ or calibrating horizonal axes of change....

The six metaphors analyzed in this paper unfold stepwise into an interdisciplinary systems framework based on planning horizons. The notion of planning horizons serves as an ordinal measure of rationality and organization, in a social systemic context of ecological interdependence. Each metaphor...