WPI was established because we were tired of seeing efforts to address wicked problems in global affairs, like forced migration, constantly being swallowed up by the machinations and bureaucracies of the top-down, macro-level approaches typically used to address problems of this scale. These approaches are too often defined by a lack of accounting for the human elements that constitute the wicked problem on the ground. This hole in the problem solving approach has left us all witness to a repetitive cycle of insufficient or failed efforts to move the needle on the wicked problems afflicting global affairs. The current institutions tasked with addressing these problems are falling short because they are often unconducive to the types of practices and mindsets needed to address these challenges.
“The power of solutions lies primarily in the people who believe in and own them.” — V. Srinavas
Evidently, relying solely on the existing top-down political and macro level approaches is insufficient if genuine progress on these problems is to become a reality. While states and the public sector will always have a crucial role to play, and public-private approaches will be a necessity in the long run, WPI believed that the largest and most immediate opportunity to progress changemaking is to focus on bottom-up efforts by empowering private sector social change actors. These actors, for instance social enterprises and socially minded corporations, are better able to focus on and respond to the on the ground realities of these wicked problems. As such, WPI was born to fulfil the mandate of enabling these actors to assume a more powerful role in the problem solving process.
When first looking at this challenge, WPI believed we identified two key problems hindering non-government approaches from playing a bigger role:
Problem 1: The bodies that exist to build knowledge on the problems (e.g. academia and think tanks) and the bodies that exist to implement change against the problems (e.g. social enterprises) don’t integrate to the necessary extent. This lack of integration means that knowledge lies unused, and the implementers are acting without leveraging all the potential knowledge available. However, further to this lack of integration, the knowledge generation entities themselves often approach problems through a limited number of subjects or lenses, e.g. just economic, which means that many other contributing aspects of the problem are ignored. There was a lack of the interdisciplinarity necessary to build the cohesive bodies of knowledge required to empower those acting against the problems.
Problem 2: While social change entities (especially social enterprises) are growing in number in order to fix the insufficiency of top-down approaches, the lack of an overarching coordinating agenda and architecture means that the impact of these entities either remains confined to unconnected ‘small wins’ or these entities work in ways not optimally suited to the demands of the problem. As such, the private sector social change industry was not meeting its potential in moving the needle against wicked problems on a large scale.