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Since launching health health-promoting settings approach to health by WHO, valuable progress has happened in implementing its holistic concepts in settings such as cities, schools, workplaces, hospitals and healthcare services. However, significant knowledge–intention–success gaps still exist in creating sustainable health-promoting changes in settings. The complexity of the task of bridging this gap has contributed to the call for a complexity-informed paradigm shift to health as well as settings, followed by increasing consultation of relevant complexity theories, frameworks and tools in health research. This paper provides a critical scoping review of the application of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory in settings-based health promotion research. We included 14 papers, mostly qualitative studies, reporting on planning or implementation of change initiatives, less on its evaluation. CAS theory application was often incomplete thereby reducing the potential benefit of using this lens to understand change management. We suggest some recommendations how to comprehensively apply the CAS theory in setting-based health research and to report on all CAS characteristics to enhance the understanding of settings as adaptive health-promoting settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]