A Collection of Unintended Consequences

What we can learn from them and how a better understanding of complex systems — with a little humility — can help.

Mrs. Christie Vilsack and USDA Volunteers tend to the People’s Garden located next to the USDA Whitten Building in Washington D.C., on Sept. 22, 2022. USDA photo by Christophe Paul.

By Kirsten Moy and Beth Szurpicki

This post is a supplement to the article, Unintended consequences: Why good intentions go bad, and how to make positive change in an unpredictable world, a conversation between Kirsten Moy and Laurie Mazur, Urban Resilience Editor at Island Press. Here we show how some are applying a complexity approach to problem solving, and share ways of thinking and techniques to use in your own efforts.

Navigate this resource using the headings here:

Unintended Consequences
· A. Maybe we should or at least could have known?
· B. Unintended but not for us! (doesn’t affect me)
· C. Harder to have predicted?
· D. Positive Unintended Consequences
· E. A special focus on so-called UICs leading to natural (and unnatural) disasters; disaster response and recovery actions that lead to more UICs
Systems & Complexity
· A. Introduction
· B. Examples of applying a complexity lens
Solutions & Approaches
· A. Understand the Problem
∘ 1. Mental tools and ways of thinking to help anticipate UICs
∘ 2. Motivational Research
∘ 3. Mapping (incl. Networks)
∘ 4. Looking and Learning from History
∘ 5. Proximity
∘ 6. Harnessing the Power of Computational Tools and AI
∘ Agent-based modeling
∘ AI and Algorithms
· B. Acting/Implementation
∘ 1. First, Do No Harm
∘ 2. Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper
∘ 3. Nature based solutions and biomimicry
∘ 4. Dealing with Emergence
∘ 5. Subtractive Change
∘ 6. Let’s not talk about scale.
· C. Policy, Regulation & Enforcement
· D. Metrics & Evaluation
· E. Systems Change in the Making — Mini Case Studies

If you have stories of unintended consequences or other relevant information, please contact me here on Medium by posting a comment anywhere in the piece.

Unintended Consequences

A. Maybe we should or at least could have known?

· The Cotton Tote Crisis: You can get cotton bags pretty much everywhere. How did an environmental solution become part of the problem? by Grace Cook, The New York Times, August 24, 2021.
The tote bag started as an environmental solution and become a major branding tool, and then an environmental crisis in itself. An organic cotton tote needs to be used 20,000 times to offset its overall impact of production — one use per day for 54 years.

· The Law of Unintended Consequences: Georgia’s Immigration Law Backfires, by Benjamin Powell, Forbes, May 24, 2012.
Labor shortages are a consequence of Georgia’s immigration enforcement law, HB 87, which was passed in 2011. The bill’s goal was “… to eliminate incentives for illegal aliens to cross into our state.” The number of undocumented immigrants living in Georgia has decreased as a result, and the state’s economy, especially in agriculture, is suffering labor shortages of about 40%. A negative consequence for all in the state.

Related: Immigration law already hitting Georgia farmers, by Dallas Duncan, Gainesville Times, June 26, 2011.
Another article about HB 87 in Georgia, showing that even documented workers are scared and leaving the state. Many white residents don’t want the jobs, crops are going unpicked, and one estimate puts Georgia’s fruit and vegetable market at a $200–250 million loss.

· Yet Another Problem with Recycling: It Spews Microplastics, by Matt Simon, Wired, May 5, 2023.
A new study of a recycling plant shows immense microplastics generation from the entire process, contaminating the environment. Though designed to reduce plastic waste, recycling appears to be accidentally contributing to the problem. Did no one know that the recycling process created microplastics that were then not contained?

· Unintended Consequences of International Philanthropy, by Perry Gottesfeld, Alliance Magazine, March 1, 2007.
Multiple examples provided of international aid organizations projects with a focus on their failure to evaluate the likely indirect and unintended impacts on human health and the environment, either before projects begin or after they are completed. Suggests that a formal assessment during the planning stages of development projects may identify and help prevent these undesirable outcomes.

· Punishing Hard Work: The Unintended Consequences of Cutting SNAP, by Stephanie Ettinger de Cuba, MPH and Kate Scully, JD, Children’s Health Watch.org, December 9, 2013.
‘The cliff effect’ happens when an individual or family has an increase in income that results in the loss of some benefit(s), resulting in a net worse financial situation.

· A Simple Way To Reduce Unintended Consequences When Solving Big Problems, by Shane Snow, Forbes, August 7, 2020.
The famine in China that killed 20 million people was the result of an ill-conceived idea: kill all the sparrows that eat some of the grain. If considered with a complex lens, China’s leaders would have known that the sparrows serve other roles in the ecosystem, including eating the locusts that eat more grain than they do. This article explores why humans tend to latch onto ideas without first thinking through (or experimenting) with an idea to learn if it will actually work. The author introduces the concept of first-order effects and second-order effects, and suggests that ‘second-order thinking’ should help mitigate unintended consequences.

· Issue brief: Mounting hunger in the Sahel: The unintended impact of COVID-19 prevention, by Alexandra Lamarche, Refugees International, June 11, 2020.
Some pandemic policies attempting to contain the virus inadvertently endangered the food security of millions across Africa’s Sahel region.

· ‘We’re changing the clouds.’ An unintended test of geoengineering is fueling record ocean warmth, by Paul Voosen, Science (Science, Vol 381, Issue 6657.), August 2, 2023.
Ship tracks are low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and help cool the planet. A 2020 International Maritime Organization regulation has reduced ships’ sulfur pollution, but with it lessened the effect of sulfate particles in seeding and brightening ship tracks. The unintended result: the planet is warming faster as more sunlight gets through.

· Blind Hiring, While Well Meaning, May Create Unintended Consequences, by Noel King, Morning Edition on National Public Radio, April 12, 2016.
Aiming to eliminate bias by hiding a job candidate’s identity, ‘blind hiring’ might accidentally result in hiring personnel no longer actively recruiting the people this is intended to help.

· They Live in Constant Pain, but Their Doctors Won’t Help Them, video by Vishakha Darbha, Lucy King and Adam Westbrook, The New York Times, August 17, 2023.
As a result of the opioid epidemic, in 2016 the CDC advised doctors and pharmacists to limit opioid prescriptions. Today, chronic, debilitating pain sufferers (some 17 million in the USA) are being denied powerful opioids by their doctors. Though well-intentioned the CDC’s move inspired restrictive laws across country, and doctors now worry about losing their license. In 2022 the CDC realized the impacts and updated their guidelines, but the changes have not reached the patients.

· After My Heroin Addiction, Would Pain Medicine Set Me Back? by Maia Szalavitz, The New York Times, January 22, 2024.
Some people with past addictions fear medical procedures that may require pain management by addictive substances — it’s a common belief that they never should take any. An unintended consequence is that people may forego important procedures, negatively impacting their health.

· Van poof! Dutch e-bike maker VanMoof goes bankrupt, leaving riders stranded, by Rob Schmitz, Morning Edition on National Public Radio, August 23, 2023.
Products often broke down and the company couldn’t keep up with maintenance requests; in part because they’re engineered outside of most bicycle standards. Parts are not interchangeable with other brands.

· Standardized Tests are Harming Our Schools, by Patrick Cooney, Michigan Future Inc., March 7, 2017.
No Child Left Behind policy resulted in school districts and educators prioritizing standardized test scores over engaging curriculum. and children are poorly prepared for life and the workforce. In this environment students get drills: quick tricks instead of the conceptual understanding that takes longer to develop, or exposure to a broad curriculum that will aid their comprehension. Further, schools are ranked (and shut down) based on these test results, so simply drilling students on test-style questions takes precedent.

Related: Learning from Florida: 3rd Grade Reading Mandates don’t Work, by Lou Glazer, Michigan Future, November 17, 2022.
3rd grade reading laws took the U.S. by storm, with state legislatures passing laws that would hold back any 3rd graders who fail to earn a “proficient” score on a high-stakes reading exam. The problem: we learned from 2001’s No Child Left Behind policy that this approach doesn’t work. Moreso, there’s significant evidence that NCLB had a negative impact on student learning, with test scores stagnating or declining.

· We Thought We Were Saving the Planet, but We Were Planting a Time Bomb, by Claire Cameron, The New York Times, September 15, 2023.
The author worked as a tree planter in northern Ontario in the 1990s as part of woodland regeneration efforts that we now know have caused more harm than good: poorly planned forests with monocultures of an extremely flammable species have fueled wildfires and had detrimental effects on environment. The article highlights humans’ persistence that we can always right our wrongs, when instead the best strategy is prevent the harm in the first place.

· EVs are a climate solution with a pollution problem: Tire particles, by Paul Krantz, Grist, September 25, 2023.
Electric vehicles are heavier and result in faster wear of tires (estimated increase of 20%), made of microplastics, VOCs and toxic additives that then leach into the environments they float through. Do electric vehicles make drivers think it’s okay to drive as much or more? Article highlights the need for a systems view and a goal of curbing car use (behavior change) altogether.

Related: Opinion: Cars have a weight problem, and it’s damaging more than the environment, by Nik Berg, Hagerty, March 28, 2023.
Heavier vehicles require more energy (fuel/electricity) to power, cause more road damage, kill more pedestrians and cyclists, wear internally faster (brakes, tires, etc.), and the author argues are less enjoyable to drive.

B. Unintended but not for us! (doesn’t affect me)

· Big Oil is selling off its polluting assets — with Unintended Consequences, by Rachel Chason, The Washington Post, May 27, 2023.
Shell’s divestments in Nigeria help the company meet its green goals. But villagers and watchdogs say conditions have worsened after the sales. Private firms tend to be worse environmentally, as they are less transparent and often less accountable to investors.

· A Road System’s Unintended Consequences, by Adam Burke, National Public Radio, June 27, 2006.
Without its interstate highway system, the United States would have far fewer suburbs, fewer fast-food joints, and “just-in-time” production would be all but unknown in America. The vast road system has changed America forever — for good or ill.

See related: Justice and the Interstates in the Looking and Learning from History section.

· Government Cheese: Well-Intentioned Program Goes Off the Rails, by Kenny Malone, Morning Edition on National Public Radio, September 17, 2018.
The unintended consequences of government subsidies: In 1977 President Carter wanted to help dairy farmers by raising the price incrementally, with the government purchasing it to move it at the increased price. The problem: there was too much to store, so much so that it was stored in caves, but then had no way to sell it. In the end, the Great Cheese Giveaway to ‘needy’ people, without stealing business from real cheese sellers. The lesson: Government intervention in markets can have butterfly effect if you don’t consider the unintended consequences.

· Under poaching pressure, elephants are evolving to lose their tusks, by Dina Fine Maron, National Geographic, November 9, 2018.
An increase in tuskless elephants, a genetic trait, is the result of Mozambique’s Civil War and the slaughter of 90% of country’s elephants for their ivory 50 years ago. Researchers are trying to understand how the trait is passed on and the impact it is and will have on the population. Other countries with similar poaching histories are showing the same trend.

· No ‘Oppenheimer’ fanfare for those caught in first atomic bomb’s fallout, by Karin Brulliard and Samuel Gilbert, The Washington Post, July 29, 2023.
The Manhattan Project’s tests in New Mexico unleashed radioactive ash on unsuspecting — and uninformed — residents in surrounding towns. In the 78 years since, these ‘downwinders’ have suffered serious health consequences that have not been acknowledged as related, and civilians from New Mexico have never been eligible for compensation due to radiation exposure. From the article: “‘They were counting on us to be unsophisticated and uneducated and unable to stick up for ourselves,” said Tina Cordova, a Tularosa native who for 18 years has led the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium.’”

C. Harder to have predicted?

· Caliber 60 podcast, Texas Public Radio for National Public Radio, March 15, 2023.
Explosive U.S. demand for avocados has fueled the growth of the Narcos and illegal arms dealing in Mexico.

· The Creator of the AR-15 Didn’t See This Coming, by Zusha Elinson and Cameron McWhirter, The Atlantic, September 27, 2023.
The inventor of the AR-15, a marine vet, just wanted to help his country during the Cold War. But he ‘didn’t get to control how [the gun] would be used … or the fraught, outsize role it would play in American politics.” Upon reflection in 2019, one of the gun’s co-creators reflected on his contribution, and his responsibility to think more about what he was creating. With a systems approach, could the gun’s legacy as the primary tool in violent mass shootings been foreseen? A good reminder that anything controlled by humans can be used both for good and evil — without the appropriate policies in place.

· Addicted to Cool, by Philip Kennecott, The Washington Post, September 21, 2023.
As the planet heats up, the desire for, and associated manufacturing, transportation, and environmental costs of air conditioning must be weighed. Since its advent it has changed the way we live and is now shifting from convenience to necessity. And it begs the question, “Where would we be without it?” Would our cities have been built more resilient in the face of extreme heat? Would more environmentally friendly cooling alternatives (e.g. passive) have become more widespread? And with this knowledge, what’s our next step?

· Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses, by Stacy Mitchell, Beacon Press, October 1, 2007.
Illustrates how mega-retailers are fueling many of our most pressing problems, from the shrinking middle class to rising pollution and diminished civic engagement. Highlights how a growing number of communities and independent businesses are effectively fighting back. Some of the individual UICs could have been know (e.g. small businesses will close) but when you combine everything, from newspapers to economic development to supply chain and employees, you see how everything was affected.

· Bangladesh’s garment workers and the problem of unintended consequences, Matthew Lesh, CapX, May 23, 2024.
Post-Rana Plaza disaster agreements improved safety, but they also increased operating costs and led to hundreds of factories simply being shut down and therefore significant unemployment for garment workers.

Further, things that are truly difficult to predict go beyond a human being’s ability without the use of computation tools, which can help us get closer with probability. See section below: Harnessing the Power of Computational Tools and AI.

D. Positive Unintended Consequences

· How wildlife is thriving in the Korean peninsula’s demilitarised zone, by Lisa Brady for ChinaDialogue, Guardian Environment Network, The Guardian, April 13, 2012.
The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea has benefited from locking people out: it has preserved Korea’s ecological heritage as it is home to thousands of extinct and endangered animal and plant species. The rest of the peninsula’s 100 years of conflict has resulted in a ‘severely degraded natural environment’.

· Did Scientists Accidentally Invent an Anti-addiction Drug? by Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic, May 19, 2023.
People taking Ozempic for weight loss say they have also stopped drinking, smoking, shopping, and even nail biting.

Related: Accidental Discoveries, by Lexi Rock, PBS, February 27, 2001.
Seven unplanned medical discoveries, including X-rays and pencillin.

· Cities Use Spikes to Keep Birds Away. Birds Are Using Them in Nests, by Meghan Bartels, Scientific American, July 18, 2023
Classic “nature fights back”: Bird nests have been found built like a fortress with the bird spikes, hilariously using them as they’re intended (to keep other birds, and predators, away). A new report highlights birds using all sorts of man-made materials in nests, and they hope to learn if they are helping, or hurting, them.

E. A special focus on so-called UICs leading to natural (and unnatural) disasters; disaster response and recovery actions that lead to more UICs

· Lahaina used to be a wetland; Nature didn’t turn the historic Hawaiian community into a tinderbox. People did., by Emily Atkin, Heated, August 13, 2024.
Calls into question if the wildfires should be considered a ‘natural’ disaster, as we consider all of the factors that resulted in the wildfires.

· How Invasive Plants Caused the Maui Fires to Rage, by Simon Romero and Serge F. Kovaleski, The New York Times, August 13, 2023.
As sugar plantations, brought by colonialists, shut down, extremely aggressive and flammable nonnative grasses took over, now believed to have been instrumental in the spread of the wildfires. Many have been warning of these risks for decades, and of our ability to mitigate them.

· The Scary Science of Maui’s Wildfires, by Matt Simon, Wired, August 18, 2023.
As Hawaii enters the pyrocene with an ecosystem not adapted to fire, understanding the why and how has brought history and the interconnectedness of everything to the forefront.

· Lahaina Residents Fear Rebuild Will Shut Them Out, by Newser, August 13, 2023.
Residents are concerned that rebuilding efforts will be led and dominated by outsiders with money — and why shouldn’t they? If we look at history, we will see the same patterns continue to emerge time and again.

· The Battle For Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists, by Naomi Klein, Haymarket Books, 2018.
In the rubble of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans and ultrarich “Puertopians” are locked in a pitched struggle over how to remake the island. In this vital and startling investigation, bestselling author and activist Naomi Klein uncovers how the forces of shock politics and disaster capitalism seek to undermine the nation’s radical, resilient vision for a “just recovery.”

· Forest Service report finds Cerro Pelado Fire sparked by agency prescribed burn, by Scott Wyland, Santa Fe New Mexican, July 24, 2023.
US Forest Service has announced that the 2022 fire is now third to result from prescribed burn gone wrong.

· Unintended Consequences, Hidden Deaths, by Cardiff Garcia, National Public Radio, July 6, 2020.
Using two examples from natural disasters, guest Tim Hardford highlights how our minds are better at solving problems that we can see directly than they are at anticipating problems and risks that our decisions might be creating down the line.

· Predicting Hurricane Ian’s track has been difficult. An expert tells us why, by Bill Chappell, National Public Radio, September 27, 2022.
Forecasting a hurricane’s path helps in preparation efforts, but those predictions are notoriously difficult because the atmosphere — conditions that directly impact the hurricane’s path and strength — is constantly changing. By solely focusing on the eye of the storm, for example, or the primary city it’s going to hit, we fail to prepare for all of the other impacts of the storm.

· Why was the Morocco earthquake so deadly? By Michael Marshall, Nature, September 12, 2023.
The September 8 earthquake magnitude of 6.8 was large for the region, but the lack of preparation is what constitutes it a deadly disaster. Strengthening buildings with more earthquake resilient materials could have helped reduce lives lost, but this solution in an impoverished reason is unrealistic; the broader systemic problems would have to be tackled first. Disaster researcher Ilan Kelman at University College London says, “building earthquake resilience means tackling broader societal problems such as poverty and lack of education.”

· How Maui’s Wildfire Sparked a Disaster Capitalist Power Grab for Hawaiʻi’s Public Water, by Elena Bryant, Earth Justice, August 28, 2023.
The struggle for water and its control in Hawai’i is not new: colonialists and their enterprises, from plantations to real estate, have significantly altered the landscape over nearly two centuries. But native Hawai’ians have organized and secured some wins that protect and preserve water as a public trust. These changes give insight into how this previous wetland went up in flames.

· Can Seawalls Save Us? by Daniel A. Gross, The New Yorker, November 5, 2023.
As climate change ushers in rising sea levels, coastal communities must decide how to manage their evolving coastlines. Complexity approaches (harm reduction, learning from history, nature-based solutions) might prevent some of seawall’s unintended consequences: a forever dependence on fortifications, accelerating erosion, coastal habitat destruction, and the destruction and displacement of less wealthy communities, highlighting the inequities in global warming impacts and fortification protections.

See related: Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature in the Nature based solutions and biomimicry section.

· Maui police footage reveals how emergency response breakdowns put cops at risk, by Brianna Sacks, John Farrell, and Kim Bellware, The Washington Post, November 12, 2023.
The entire disaster response plan and efforts were insufficient, highlighting potentially the lack of systems thinking in preparing for disaster, and resulting in catastrophe. From communications to traffic patterns, it seems everything went wrong; and if anyone had walked through (‘tested’) a potential disaster they would have run into the problems and been able to rectify them.

Systems & Complexity

A. Introduction

You will find many of these items touched upon later in detail.

· Introduction to Complexity for Community Development Practitioners (slide deck), by Kirsten Moy, January 2020.

· A Complexity Primer for Community Development Practitioners, by Kirsten Moy and Eric Lin, July 2018.

· Complex Socio-Environmental Systems and How they Change (slide deck), by Sean Geobey, Waterloo Institute for Complexity & Innovation, October 2023.

· Summary of Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows, by Khalil Ibe, Medium, May 2, 2019.
“This is kind of a book which will introduce you to think in a different way about our daily life problems that are found in nature, business or society. Edited by Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations. It is a great book to start regardless of your background.”

Related: Thinking in Systems: A Primer, by Donella Meadows, Chelsea Green Publishing, December 3, 2008.
“This is a primer that brings you to a tangible world where anyone can understand systems and engage with them in meaningful ways. The problems facing the world — war, hunger, poverty, climate change cannot be solved by quick fixes in isolation. We need to see the whole system and understand how each piece interacts. Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, which is a first step in finding solutions.”

· Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World, by Brian Walker and David Salt, Island Press, August 2006.
Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure. As the authors of Resilience Thinking remind us: Resilience Thinking is Complexity Thinking. In six short chapters they lay out the fundamentals of complexity thinking, but even a quick read of the first chapter will give you an invaluable introduction to this scientific discipline.

See related: Resilience Practice in the Mini Case Studies section.

· Systems Change: A Guide to What it is and How to Do It, by Rob Abercrombie, Ellen Harries and Rachel Wharton, New Philanthropy Capital for LankellyChase Foundation, June 2015.
This paper was written to make systems change more accessible. “This systems change guide: Clarifies what is meant by systems and systems change; Describes the main perspectives on systems change; Outlines good practice for systems change; Identifies what is and is not agreed upon by experts in the field; Provides recommendations for charities, funders and the public sector on how to act systemically.”

· Systems Thinking in Design series from Somia CX Thoughts channel, Medium.

Example: Systems Thinking in Design: What is it? — Part 1, by Chelsea Effendi, Medium, September 26, 2023.

Example: Systems Thinking in Design: Why is it important? — Part 2, by Kara Andarini, Medium, October 6, 2023.

· The Systems Thinkers, by Alexandru Botezatu, Medium, May 26, 2023.
Understanding your users is the first level but in todays’ world we should design for sustainability of the humankind. Taking a holistic approach with a systems thinking mindset results in seeing problems as interconnected elements, people, and activities organized in ways that produce patterns of behavior over time.

· Collective Impact 3.0: An evolving framework for community change, by Mark Cabaj and Liz Weaver, Tamarack Institute, 2016.
As CI has become a popular community change approach there has been much experimentation since its inception. Here Tamarack Institute captures some of the framework’s limitations and lays out ways the framework can evolve. Students of complexity will likely recognize a number of complexity science principles invoked in this evolution. The co-authors implore community change practitioners and those who support them to be actively involved in this evolutionary process.

Related: Complexity and Community Change: Managing Adaptively to Improve Effectiveness, by Patricia Auspos and Mark Cabaj, Roundtable for Community Change, The Aspen Institute, September 2014.

· Systems Thinking vs Design Thinking, What’s the Difference?, IDEO U.
IDEO explains the characteristics, benefits and drawbacks of each, and some tools and frameworks to use to apply both in human-centered systems thinking.

· Applying Intersectionality & Complexity Theory to Address the Social Determinants of Women’s Health, by Elizabeth McGibbon (St. Francis Xavier University) and Charmaine McPherson (St. Francis University), Women’s Health and Urban Life, Vol 10, pg. 59–86, May 2011.
Feminist Intersectionality theory has long recognized and studied the compounding effects of such factors as race, poverty, and lack of access to education and health care when they interact on an individual’s wellbeing. This paper describes how feminist intersectionality theory can be applied together with complexity theory to reduce inequities in the social determinants of women’s health.

· Systems thinking is becoming sexy. Should we be worried?, by Houda Boulahbel, Medium, May 15, 2024.

Related: A linear thinker, a design thinker and a systems thinker walk into a bar…, by Houda Boulahbel, UX Magazine, December 22, 2022.

B. Examples of applying a complexity lens

· The Cotton Tote Crisis: You can get cotton bags pretty much everywhere. How did an environmental solution become part of the problem?, By Grace Cook, The New York Times, August 14, 2021.
The tote bag started as an environmental solution and become a major branding tool, and then an environmental crisis in itself. An organic cotton tote needs to be used 20,000 times to offset its overall impact of production — one use per day for 54 years.

Related: Why Banning Plastic Grocery Bags Could Be a Bad Move, by Greg Rosalsky and Stacey Vanek Smith, Planet Money on National Public Radio, May 23, 2019.
A study of bag bans in California found that immediately after the bans for into effect, the sales of garbage bags (which are thicker) as well as paper bag use increase, resulting in an increase in GHG emissions.

· How to Keep Thrift Store Donations from Becoming Trash, by Riya Anne Polcastro, Triple Pundit, June 5, 2023.
Americans want to do right by the planet, but waste disposal alternatives likes wish-cycling allow us to continue to consume even though our donated items still end up in landfill (estimates put rate of resale for clothing donations in North America at 20%), and shipping/repurposing is carbon intensive.

Related: Climate Coach column, by Michael Coren, The Washington Post.
Coren provides advice for everyone wondering what they can do to reduce their climate footprint. He is hosting an ‘honest conversation about the environmental choices we face in our daily lives, which he approaches with curious optimism and vigilant skepticism.’

Example: Why you Should Buy Clothes to Last (almost) Forever, by Michael Coren, The Washington Post, November 7, 2023.

· It Wasn’t Just Trump Who Got It Wrong: America’s coronavirus response failed because we didn’t understand the complexity of the problem, by Zeynep Tufekci, The Atlantic, March 24, 2020.
The pandemic was a complex systems phenomenon: if we had approached the epidemic from a complex systems perspective, we would’ve been able to predict the forthcoming disaster and prepared to combat it better.

· Sharing Perspectives: Our team talks food, forests, and sustainable solutions, with Shin Furuya and Mary Cobble of Domini Impact Investments, June 2, 2023.
Our food systems must meet the demand of our growing population into the climate-change future; however today’s agricultural practices are widely unsustainable and ignore their global impacts. With a look at agriculture and its relationship to forests, soil and climate, we see that no system works independently. A few emerging agricultural trends and their benefits demonstrates the importance of recognizing the value of interconnected solutions that are sustainable for future generations. Further, Mr. Furuya’s thought process is a good example of complexity thinking.

· Why planting tons of trees isn’t enough to solve climate change, by Carolyn Gramling, Science News, July 9, 2021.
Tree planting is widely touted as a simple, bipartisan climate change solution, but the approach needs to be more diverse and focus also on reducing emissions, not solely on carbon-capture (negative emissions ‘technology’). Does allowing people to focus on trees give them freedom to ignore the other components? Additionally, a popular study on the potential for tree planting and associated capture has been highly criticized as flawed, not taking into account many variables; this is dangerous because once people and incentives come into play choices are made based on flawed data. The piece is also an example of errors in metrics as many tree planting efforts result in majority dead saplings: tree planting is not the goal, tree growing should be.

Related: As the climate changes, cities scramble to find trees that will survive, by Laura Hautala, Grist, April 24, 2024.
The world is warming too quickly for arboreal adaptation, so planting for the future is critical today. Scientists and urban foresters are considering the dimension of time in the system they’re problem-solving within.

· Mobility as a Service (MaaS): A Feasibility Study on Implementing MaaS in the Greater Toronto Area, AECOM and Canadian Urban Institute.
MaaS reframes the challenge of ‘transportation’ as everyone’s need for mobility, and therefore brings transit providers and users, policymakers, urban planners, technology innovators, and more to the table, promoting multi-sector collaboration to develop an integrated mobility solution. The transportation platform combines multiple modes including public transit, taxis, ride-hailing, scooter, bike, and car sharing, and sometimes even parking fees and road tolls on one easy-to-use navigation and payment app.

· Oxford Study Shows ‘Heat Can Lead to Food Insecurity in a Matter of Days’, by Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams, August 21, 2023.
New research shows that policymakers across sectors should consider how the socioeconomic links between heat, health, income, and food insecurity can be integrated into research, heat action plans, food programs, and labor regulations.

· Indigenize the Plate film, by Natalie Benally and Ernie Zahn, Tse’Nato, 2023.
Filmmaker Natalie Benally (Diné) travels from New Mexico to a Quechua community in Peru to learn how they are addressing the link between food sustainability and cultural sustainability for Indigenous communities. As extraction, water displacement, and climate change impact food sustainability in indigenous communities, this is having a direct impact on cultural sustainability, but a Quechuan community in Peru has developed a way to address this challenge in their own region.

· Feeling the Heat: Climate Change’s Impact on Worker Financial Security, Commonwealth, October 2023.
To understand the true cost of climate change and its impact on worker financial security and the labor market, Commonwealth surveyed 1,200 U.S. workers and found negative impacts on financial security, health, well-being, and living situations. The report includes their perceptions of how employers and other institutions can help mitigate these impacts.

· Here’s what’s missing from San Francisco’s understanding of its Honduran drug dealers, by Oscar Estrada, San Francisco Chronicle, September 3, 2023.
Only by understanding the full historical, political and environmental impetus for the Honduras exodus that has landed on San Francisco’s doorstep can we develop more effective strategies to solve these serious problems.

· A New War on Cancer: The Unlikely Heroes Revolutionizing Prevention, by Kristina Marusic, Island Press, May 2023.
With the knowledge that up to two-thirds of cancer cases are linked to preventable environmental causes, Marusic highlights key prevention efforts which all take a systems approach to treating cancer by removing carcinogens from our world.

Related: How technology is reshaping the way cancer is diagnosed and treated webinar, featuring Renee Wegrzyn (Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, ARPA-H), Eric Topol (Scripps Research), Amelia G. Ramierz, DrPH (National Latino Health Equity Program) and Gladys I. Rodriguez, MD (START Center for Cancer Care), host Frances Stead Sellars, The Washington Post Live, November 8, 2023.
A discussion of how technology and innovation are reshaping cancer care. The Health Equity in Early Cancer Screening segment is an important conversation between two involved in making early screening more accessible to marginalized populations.

Related: Cancer as a Systemic Disease, G. Zajicek, Medical Hypotheses (Science Direct), Volume 4, Issue 3, May–June 1978, Pages 193–207.

· Global Food Systems Network Map, Meridian
An ‘online tool designed to visually represent the relationships among stakeholders involved in food systems-related efforts worldwide.’

· Building a Community-Centered Housing Preservation Ecosystem, Urban Habitat and Ground Works Consulting, October 2023.
In the hot housing market of the Bay Area, existing affordable housing is lost to the market at a rate that is speeding up the displacement of families (despite production of new units). The approach outlined looks at the affordable housing ecosystem and instead of focusing on production of more new units it aims to preserve existing with strategies of community self-determination and control, local partnerships and collaborations for ownership, and deed restrictions to make housing permanently affordable.

· Interrupting Criminalization
“Interrupting Criminalization (IC) offers political education materials, organizing tools, support skill-building and practice spaces for organizers and movements challenging criminalization and the violence of policing and punishment to build safer communities. use a systems and complexity-informed approach to try to reduce criminalization and incarceration and all the bad things that go along with it.” They are a hub for resources.

· The Magic of ‘Multisolving’, by Elizabeth (Beth) Sawin, Stanford Social Innovation Review, July 16, 2018.
Multisolving brings together three foundational principles and practices that, through an iterative process and cycles of welcoming new partners, learning and documenting, and generating a narrative of what is possible, build over time to create impactful, sustainable results.

Related: Multisolving: Crossing Borders to Achieve Better Outcomes in Health, Equity, Biodiversity, and Climate Resilience, by Elizabeth R. Sawin, Kelsi Eccles, Susanne Moser, and Tina A. Smith, Stanford Social Innovation Review, November 1, 2023.
Various borders (system boundaries) must be crossed to facilitate and accelerate meaningful change. Borders between issue areas are often studied by different people, with policies informed and made in isolation of each other. Borders between jurisdictions can cause solution challenges. Multisolving can help.

Related: Everyone has to do something, but no one has to do everything — Letter from the director, by Elizabeth (Beth) Sawin, Multisolving Institute, October 11, 2023.

Solutions & Approaches

A. Understand the Problem

This is an extensive section that calls for many different approaches. This article helps explain why it is important to understand the problem:

The Most Important Thing I Teach My Students Isn’t on the Syllabus, by Frank Bruni, The New York Times, April 20, 2024.
A call for humility: humility opens the doors to curiosity, to exploration, to deeper understanding, to inclusion, to new and different ideas.

1. Mental tools and ways of thinking to help anticipate UICs

· Employing some form of the Precautionary Principle such as the Wingspread Statement:

“On January 15, 1998 the precautionary principle was defined at a weekend meeting at Wingspread, headquarters of the Johnson Foundation in Racine, Wisconsin. Subsequently known as the Wingspread Statement, the precautionary principle was defined as follows: ‘When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.’

The roots of the precautionary principle can be traced to statements by Aldo Leopold (1949) and Sir Austin Bradford Hill (1965), and it is also addressed in Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development of 1992: ‘In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.’

The precautionary principle is increasingly recognized as a foundation for decision making to protect human heath and the environment. Below are its five key elements:

1. Taking anticipatory action to prevent harm in the face of scientific uncertainty.
2. Exploring alternatives, including the alternative of ‘no action.’
3. Considering the full cost of environmental and health impacts over time.
4. Increasing public participation in decision making.
5. Shifting the responsibility for providing evidence to the proponents of an activity.”

· Looking at 1st and 2nd order effects: See A Simple Way to Reduce Unintended Consequences When Solving Big Problems in the Unintended Consequences, Maybe we should or at least could have known? section.

· Fully interrogating the problem, i.e., asking a more thorough set of questions and better questions

e.g. Creating a Better World Means Asking Better Questions, by Hildy Gottlieb, Stanford Social Innovation Review, July 24, 2020.
A leading technique in this field is the catalytic thinking framework, which aims to dig into the factors — our assumptions and beliefs — informing our decisions. The questions we ask directly impacts our results, so when determining our questions and the tools we use to problem solve, we must be aware of the role of our assumptions and beliefs, and remove our blinders to reflect the values we are working towards.

e.g. Business Model Red Flags from Shift
Even the most well-intentioned organizations can continually inflict negative impacts on vulnerable people, despite plenty of efforts to address these issues. Often the root of the problem is deeply embedded within the business model and therefore will persist. Shift has developed this set of 24 indicators in business value propositions, value chains and revenue models that show how companies are hard-wired to put people at risk, and ideas for how they can take action to resolve the problem. While not intended to be a complete list, Shift hopes that using this way of dissecting a problem will allow for the identification of more red flags.

· Organizing or categorizing the information in actionable ways; e.g, Green Science Policy Institute’s Six Classes approach allows us to better understand the chemicals of concern that are in our everyday products, their functions, where they are used, and how they can be avoided. This ‘group of substances’ approach can prevent a cycle of “regrettable substitution,” whereby a phased out harmful chemical is replaced with a closely related chemical which may cause similar harm.

2. Motivational Research

· Success 2.0: Getting What you Want, with Uri Gneezy and host Shankar Vedantam, Hidden Brain, podcast audio, May 8, 2023.
We all rely on incentives to get people to do things they might otherwise avoid. Parents reward kids for doing their homework. Companies offer bonuses to their high-performing employees. Charities send gifts to their donors. Economist Uri Gneezy shares how incentives can help us to achieve our goals, if we know how to avoid their pitfalls.

· Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us, by Daniel Pink, Riverhead Books, April 5 2011.
The secret to motivation is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

· The complex economics of self interest: In social systems, incentives can work in perverse ways, by Samuel Bowles, The Christian Science Monitor, June 23 2016.
The author suggests that, “in the language of complexity theory, how well an economy works is an emergent property of the interactions of the people making it up: it is something about the whole that cannot be inferred from the parts, or at least not by adding up the parts, or by any other simple rule.”

3. Mapping (incl. Networks)

Systems Mapping: A visualization technique used by change agents to make sense of complexity. Mapping out a system allows us to think about context and the many interacting factors that contribute to the development of the issues facing us (Student Guide to Mapping a System). There are many tools and techniques that can be used to map a system (e.g., a network map, a causal loop diagram, an iceberg model).

· Tackling Heropreneurship, by Daniela Papi-Thornton
An apprenticing with a problem approach to move us away from social entrepreneur to social impact. Working to solve the problem is usually prioritized over working to understand the problem, resulting in wasted efforts. Creating effective solutions, especially those that shift a broken system, requires a deep knowledge about the problem to be solved

· Student Guide to Mapping a System, by Anna Johnson, Daniela Papi-Thornton, and James Stauch, Skoll Centre for Entrepreneurship, Said Business School, University of Oxford, January 2019.
A 12-step guide to mapping a system.

Related: Map the System, University of Oxford
“Map the System is a global learning programme and social innovation competition that equips students to use systems thinking to tackle social and environmental challenges.”

· Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life, by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Basic Books, 2014.
A study of networks, the underlying order and laws that govern them, and how understanding their behaviour can help us solve problems more effectively.

· Systems Mapping Tools & Design Levers, by Ketut Sulistyawati Ketut Sulistyawati, Somia CX Thoughts channel, Medium, October 12, 2023.
Explains three different tools for mapping a system: network map, iceberg map, and journey map, and how to identify leverage points within a system.

· Start Systems Mapping Right Now, by Bryan Lindsley, The Effective Problemsolver newsletter (bryanlindsley.com), March 1, 2022.
Lindsley proposes that systems mapping is intimidating because of the many approaches and barrier to entry. Here he explains six types of mapping, each with an example, when to use it, and a guide for getting started.

· Tools for Systems Thinkers: Systems Mapping, by Leyla Acaroglu, Medium, September 20, 2017.
A useful read for those new to systems mapping, including some analog tools, the cluster ‘brain-dump’ and connected circles maps, to help dive right in (and make a mess). Acaroglu encourages letting go of the need to know everything or get it right, and instead to explore and embrace the chaos.

4. Looking and Learning from History

· Book talk: Justice and the Interstates, with authors Amanda Phillips de Lucas and Ryan Reft, facilitator Jackson Nutt-Beers (SPUR), Island Press and Spur, May 25, 2023.
Makes the case for looking at history for how harms started and are perpetrated which will hopefully lead to more deeply informed and better designed solutions.

Related: Justice and the Interstates, the Racist Truth about Urban Highways, by Ryan Reft, Rebecca Retzlaff, Amanda Phillips de Lucas, Island Press, January 2023.
Highways were purposefully routed through poor communities and communities of color and the federal government claimed all the negative consequences were unintended. A Truth and Accountability structure examining the history of interstate highway construction and myth that fed gov funded and created highways was unintentional in aspects, always intended for inter-urban travel, not intra-urban. While all negative effects were claimed to be accidental, the government was aware of the negative intra-urban realities and effects and whitewashed it as unintended consequences. This is all rooted in the US lacking a robust culture of analysis, that combines historical inquiry, top down policy history, and concerns and experiences of practitioners as a means of looking at projects to learn from.

· Finding the future in the Pacific, by Zainab Kakal, UNDP Strategic Innovation channel, Medium, June 13, 2023.
Strategic foresight and anticipatory action are key pillars to delivering development in the region impacted by climate change and serious geopolitical risks.

· Rachel Maddow Presents: Deja News!, by Rachel Maddow and Isaac-Davy Aronson.
Seeking a deeper understanding of a story in today’s headlines by asking: Has anything like this ever happened before? Would knowing that help us grapple with what’s happening now… and what might happen next?

· Note to Florida and DeSantis: Enslaved Africans were already skilled, by Gillian Brockwell, The Washington Post, July 24, 2023.
History does not support the premise that the enslaved were without skills and thus that they benefited from their enslavement by being taught new skills.

· 1491: The Untold Story of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann, Vintage Press, August 9, 2004.
Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought, and indigenous populations actively molded, used, and impacted the land and its resources. Understanding the true history of the Americas, the advanced civilizations and large populations, can inform future ideas and decisions, and specifically, environmentalists.

5. Proximity

· The Power of Proximity with Bryan Stevenson, speaking at Fortune‘s CEO Initiative, uploaded by Unyte.life, YouTube, June 26, 2018.
Stevenson shares how proximity can help find collective and institutional ways to embrace and witness our struggling neighbours and communities, and the harm that distance and separation has. Without proximity to these realities we are unable to truly understand, let alone help solve them.

Related: Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, by Bryan Stevenson, Spiegel & Grau, October 21, 2014.

· Appendix: Gift of Proximity; Halfway Home, Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, by Reuben Jonathan Miller, Little, Brown & Company (Hachette Book Group), February 2, 2021.
Being close to a social situation allows a researcher/ethnographer, and their reader, to understand through what is seen and felt, the social situation of others. Sharing these things (e.g. how something feels) helps the reader more objectively assess the researcher’s data.

· Matthew Desmond on ‘Poverty, by America’, with Matthew Desmond and Damian Paletta, Washington Post Live, March 30, 2023.
Author Matthew Desmond discusses his new book that “tries to answer two questions: why is there so much poverty in America, and what can we do to eliminate it.” He shows how poverty in the U.S. is a vicious cycle, built on systems and policies of oppression and discrimination, that causes so many to become evicted. He shows how seemingly unrelated topics — like the cost of cheap consumer goods compared to the cost of essentials like food and medical care — inform and perpetuate the cycle.

Related: Disrupted Lives, by Elizabeth Gudrais, Harvard Magazine, January-February 2014.
Desmond’s work is fueled by the power of proximity: his ethnographic research into eviction and poverty is founded in listening, observation, and comfort with uncertainty.

Related: Evicted, by Matthew Desmond, Crown Publishing Group, March 2016.
Desmond has turned the eviction epidemic inside out by disputing paradigms, getting proximate, and dissecting the complex web of social, political, and economic structures that allow so many victims to suffer poverty and eviction, including the complicity of everyone who benefits from this same system.

See related: items featuring Matthew Desmond in the First, Do No Harm section.

· Patient-led Research
Patient-led Research is grounded in the knowledge that those who experience an illness are best able to identify research questions and solutions: they are not only involved but lead the research. The Patient-Led Research Collaborative is a group of Long COVID patients and patients with other illnesses who are also researchers in relevant fields — biomedical research, participatory research, neuroscience, cognitive science, public policy, machine learning, human-centered design, health activism. The patient-centric nature of the research allows those impacted most, the patients themselves, to be involved in and informing the research directly. They are therefore better able to understand patient concerns, document what patients are experiencing, and create surveys that reflect these concerns and experiences. In conventional medical research, patients not included, doctors and researchers decide what outcomes matter and what hypotheses should be tested, which often results in a discrepancy between the research that patients want and the research that happens.
Patient-led Research Scorecards help evaluate how effective a patient group and research-partner collaboration will be at conducting truly patient-led research.

· Worker-Driven Social Responsibility: A New, Proven Model for Defining, Claiming, and Protecting Workers’ Human Rights, by Susan L. Marquis (Princeton University), Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School, June 19, 2023.
The Worker-Driven Social Responsibility (WSR) model originated in Florida in the 1990’s and its proven effectiveness in ending abuse and protecting workers’ rights can be best understood through the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ (CIW) Fair Food Program. Beyond addressing abuses when they happen, the approach is effective because of its systems lens: it prevents abuses by eliminating the conditions that allow them to exist.

· Shifting Power to Communities Through the Use of Community-Driven Data webinar, with Brody Wamble (PowerCenter Community Development Corporation), Brandin Walker (Sankofa Community Development Corporation), Vedette Gavin (Verge Impact Partners), Moderator Kevin Leacock (Build Healthy Places Network), Build Healthy Places Network, November 1, 2023.
“Conversation explored how community development corporations (CDCs) can utilize data and research techniques to produce community-driven and community-defined evidence.”

6. Harnessing the Power of Computational Tools and AI

Agent-based modeling

· Predicting the Unpredictable, by Eric Bonabeau, Harvard Business Review, 2002.
Emergent phenomena result from the actions of various individual actors. They’re often unpredictable and counter-intuitive, and have a life of their own that is separate and distinct from the behaviors of their constituent parts. Bottom-up agent-based modeling can help understand emergent phenomena and guide better decision making

· Don’t Trust Your Gut, by Eric Bonabeau, Harvard Business Review, 2003.
Powerful new decision-support tools can help executives quickly sort through vast numbers of alternatives and pick the best ones. When combined with the experience, insight, and analytical skills of a good management team, these tools offer companies a way to make consistently sound and rational choices even in the face of bewildering complexity

· Generative design for COVID-19 and future pathogens using stochastic multi-agent simulation, by Bokyung Lee, Damon Lau, Jeremy P.M. Mogk, Michael Lee, Jacobo Bibliowicz, Rhys Goldstein, Alexander Tessier, Sustainable Cities and Society (Science Direct), 2023.
A real-world example of an attempt to address a complex problem involving groups of people interacting with systems. Aimed at helping building designers reduce the risk posed by COVID-19 and future pathogens, this custom multi-agent simulation randomly generates activities and movements of individual occupants and tracks the amount of virus transmitted via air and surfaces among occupants of an office. The simulation was used to generate office layouts that minimize the intake of virus particles.

· Cutting Cartel Recruitment could be the Only Way to Reduce Mexico’s Violence, by Sara Reardon, Science, September 21, 2023.
Despite significant numbers of cartel members being imprisoned regularly, cartels and their violence continue to grow. This study demonstrates approaching the problem at its source, as opposed to traditional efforts that only address its symptoms.

· The En-ROADS Climate Solutions Simulator, from Climate Interactive, MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and Ventana Systems.
En-ROADS is a freely-available online simulator that provides policymakers, educators, businesses, the media, and the public with the ability to test and explore cross-sector climate solutions. Because it is a systems model, it shows users the effects of certain implementations on other factors within the system. Therefore it can show how some popularly held solutions might not in total have the positive impact they have, and may also unveil unintended consequences.

AI and Algorithms

Our goal in this section is to provide a few articles or other resources with some basic information on AI, examples of positive contributions being made by AI, as well as examples of harm resulting from its misuse, and some cautionary tales about the potential for AI to exacerbate unintended consequences. In the end how AI is used will depend on us, and we conclude this section with a discussion on the religious and moral implications of AI.

· The Future of Artificial Intelligence with Melanie Mitchell, uploaded by Santa Fe Institute, YouTube, November 15, 2023.
An overview of the current and future potential of AI. “AI expert Melanie Mitchell demystifies how current-day AI works, how ‘intelligent’ it really is, and what our expectations — and concerns — about its near-term and long-term prospects should be.”

· The threat of wildfires is rising. So are new artificial intelligence solutions to fight them, by Kelvin Chan, Associated Press, September 24, 2023.
Firefighters and startups are using AI-enabled cameras to both predict the next potential wildfire and detect early signs. Though AI may offer a headstart, humans are still needed to make sure the tech is accurate.

· How Big Tech AI models nailed forecast for Hurricane Lee a week in advance, by Dan Stillman, The Washington Post, September 21, 2023.
AI forecasting models are able to use historical weather patterns and ensemble modeling to generate a range of possible outcomes that can be evaluated to identify the most probable, more efficiently (and cheaper) than conventional models.

· Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again, by Eric Topol, Basic Books, March 12, 2019.
Topol shares how AI can help mend our healthcare system, from the patient-doctor relationship to diagnosis and treatment.

See related: How technology is reshaping the way cancer is diagnosed and treated webinar in the Examples of Applying a Complexity Lens section.

· Hypotheses devised by AI could find ‘blind spots’ in research, by Matthew Hutson, Nature, November 17, 2023.
AI is entering the world of hypotheses, an intricate process typically reserved for humans with the ability to ask good questions. Because AI can absorb large amounts of data and literature and sift through it all quickly — complicated information that is being collected too fast for humans to evaluate effectively (think data from giant telescopes) it can help hypotheses, and therefore innovations, come faster.

· Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines, by Joy Buolamwini, Penguin Random House, October 21, 2023.
“Unmasking AI goes beyond the headlines about existential risks produced by Big Tech. It is the remarkable story of how Buolamwini uncovered what she calls “the coded gaze” — the evidence of encoded discrimination and exclusion in tech products — and how she galvanized the movement to prevent AI harms by founding the Algorithmic Justice League. Applying an intersectional lens to both the tech industry and the research sector, she shows how racism, sexism, colorism, and ableism can overlap and render broad swaths of humanity “excoded” and therefore vulnerable in a world rapidly adopting AI tools. Computers, she reminds us, are reflections of both the aspirations and the limitations of the people who create them.”

· Health Care Bias Is Dangerous. But So Are ‘Fairness’ Algorithms; Medical systems disproportionately fail people of color, but a focus on fixing the numbers could lead to worse outcomes, by Sandra Wachter, Brent Mittelstadt, and Chris Russell, Wired, February 8, 2023.
Medical AI systems prioritize fairness between groups as opposed to better outcomes for all groups. A focus on fixing the numbers could lead to worse outcomes, highlighting the importance of identifying the correct metrics.

· The Power and Perils of Emergent Behaviors in AI: What You Need to Know, by Noura Elgendi, LinkedIN, March 26 2023.
Emergent behaviors (complex patterns or behaviors that arise spontaneously from the interactions of simpler elements or systems) are becoming increasingly prevalent in AI systems. As AI systems become more advanced, understanding emergent behaviors is crucial because they can lead to unexpected and potentially harmful consequences, and understanding them can help us improve AI systems by harnessing their potential. For instance, studying the emergent behaviors of AI agents in simulations or games can help researchers develop better algorithms and more efficient solutions to complex problems.

· The Unexpected Risks of Algorithms, Project Liberty newsletter, September 19, 2023.
Algorithms are shaped by the knowledge and assumptions [and bias, like racism and sexism] of their human creators, and trained on data that is frequently, if not always, incomplete or selective in its scope. As a result, algorithms have the potential to exacerbate some of the biggest problems in society. It’s important that we take steps to rectify these issues before AI becomes too firmly embedded, and too complicated, to fix.

· “Your Face Belongs to Us:” Will Big Tech End Privacy As We Know It?, With Kashmir Hill and host Hari Sreenivasan, uploaded by Amanpour and Company, YouTube, September 25, 2023.
New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill discusses her new book, “Your Face Belongs to Us” focused on facial recognition company Clearview AI. The talk highlights some of the challenges and risks of facial recognition, and reminds us that no matter the ‘purity’ of the software humans can wield these technologies in unethical or dangerous ways.

Related: Your Face Belongs to Us by Kashmir Hill review — nowhere to hide, by Charles Arthur, The Guardian, September 21, 2023.

Related: Your Face Belongs to Us, by Kashmir Hill, Penguin Random House, September 19, 2023.
“The story of a small AI company that gave facial recognition to law enforcement, billionaires, and businesses, threatening to end privacy as we know it.”

· The Religious and Moral Impacts of AI, Project Liberty newsletter, January 30, 2024.
Examples of current explorations at the intersection of religion and technology, and how different communities are responding to the moral and ethical considerations within.

B. Acting/Implementation

1. First, Do No Harm

To solve a problem as opposed to just mitigating symptoms, we will ultimately have to stop the causes, i.e., the harms that are causing the problem; and the sooner we stop the harm, the less mitigation we’ll have to do (and the lower the price we will pay).

Stopping an action is generally faster and cheaper than creating a new program to deal with the results of the action.

When harm is done, it is often the most vulnerable, marginalized, and poorest individuals and communities who are most impacted. Continuing the harm will continue the disproportionate impact and further widen the equity gap between those individuals and communities and mainstream populations.

Rarely, if ever, do actions and programs to address past harms ever succeed in restoring situations or communities to the place where they were before the harms were inflicted.

· Matthew Desmond: The Privileged are Complicit in America’s Poverty Crisis, with Matthew Desmond and Michel Martin, uploaded by Amanpour and Company, YouTube, March 30, 2023.
“The United States — the richest country in the world — has a higher rate of poverty than any other advanced democracy. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond examines the dire situation in his new book,” Poverty: by America, and here he explains why the problem persists.

Related: Poverty, By America, by Matthew Desmond, Penguin Random House, March 21, 2023.

See related: entries featuring Matthew Desmond in the Proximity section.

· School district asks to stop being “robbed”: Tax abatements drain school funding, by Arlene Martinez, Good Jobs First newsletter, September 13, 2023.
Property tax abatements given to companies hurt schools, since property taxes remain K-12’s biggest revenue source. GJF study analyzing the impact of corporate tax breaks on school districts across the country found 149 schools districts were losing more than $1,000 per student per year. One school board on Long Island, New York is taking action.

Related: A School Board Says No to Big Oil, and Alarms Sound in Business-Friendly Louisiana, by Richard Fausset, The New York Times, February 5, 2019.
With the help of Good Jobs First efforts to bring transparency to corporate tax breaks, a grassroots coalition has democratized the system, and now the establishments being affected have a say. From Good Jobs First website: “By 2022, TLA’s campaign was saving almost $300 million annually for schools, public health, public safety and infrastructure.”

· Flint searches for environmental justice 10 years after water crisis, by Ashli Blow, Prism, November 29th, 2023.
Insufficient consideration before switching Flint’s water source caused a wave of negative impacts still being felt (and mismanaged) today.

· The Beyond Do No Harm Principles, Interrupting Criminalization.
“The Beyond Do No Harm Network is a group of US-based health care providers, public health workers, impacted community members, advocates, and organizers working across racial, gender, reproductive, migrant and disability justice, drug policy, sex worker, and anti-HIV criminalization movements to address the harm caused when health providers and institutions and public health researchers and institutions facilitate, participate in and support criminalization. Below we offer thirteen principles for supporting people’s agency, self-determination, dignity of risk, and general wellbeing.”

· “Doing no harm” in and through education, by Global Education Monitoring Report, World Education Blog from UNESCO, April 6, 2020 (updated on February 1, 2022).
Through the lens of remote learning brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, the piece explores how the ‘do no harm’ principle, often cited in relation to healthcare, should be applied in education, and the implications it would have in crafting education policies and interventions.

· The American Buffalo, Ken Burns documentary, 2023.
After detailing the devastation of the buffalo population in North America, the film explores the numerous interconnected initiatives, legal actions and campaigns that have helped to bring the population back from extinction.

· Redonda: Tiny Caribbean island’s transformation to wildlife haven, by Gemma Handy, BBC, September 30, 2023.
The recovery of Redonda island from barren rock to its former glory as home to many globally-important species found nowhere else highlights the importance of stopping the harms. With only removing the invasive rat and goat populations, the island has rebounded on its own and been designated a protected area.

· Exclusive: Historic California dam removal, meant to help salmon, sees massive die-off, by Kurtis Alexander, San Francisco Chronicle, March 2, 2024.
Hundreds of thousands of hatchery-raised salmon released as part of a fish restoration and dam removal project have died after going through the tunnel constructed to maintain river flow while the dam is demolished. One might think that among the most important considerations when introducing an animal(s) into the wild would be ensuring the conditions are appropriate to receive the animal(s), but here instead of a step towards rebuilding the population, hundreds of thousands of fish died. For such an unprecedented project at this scale, starting smaller by releasing less young salmon, they could have avoided the loss of so many fish.

2. Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper

· Tactical Urbanism, Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia, Island Press, March 2015.
The Tactical Urbanism movement are rooted in quick, often low-cost and creative community-based projects — from pop-up parks to open streets initiatives, and they are a powerful and adaptable new tool of urban activists, planners, and policy-makers seeking to drive lasting improvements in their cities and beyond. Whether creating vibrant plazas seemingly overnight or re-imagining parking spaces as neighborhood gathering places, they offer a way to gain public and government support for investing in permanent projects, inspiring residents and civic leaders to experience and shape urban spaces in a new way.

· Dream Play Build, James Rojas and John Kamp, Island Press, February 2022.
The authors share their insights into building common ground and inviting active participation among diverse groups. Their approach, “Place It!,” draws on three methods: the interactive model-building workshop, the pop-up, and site exploration using our senses. Dream Play Build offers wisdom distilled from workshops held around the world, and a deep dive into the transformational approach and results from the South Colton community in southern California.

· The Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper Transformation of Public Spaces, Project for Public Spaces.
“LQC” interventions are simple, short-term, and low-cost solutions that are having remarkable impacts on the shaping of neighborhoods and cities. Although many of the challenges facing today’s cities go well beyond the scope of these individual interventions, taken together they demonstrate that incremental and place-led change is possible, even in the midst of ongoing social, economic, and political obstacles. The movement goes by many names–action-planning, guerilla urbanism, pop-up projects, city repair, D.I.Y. Urbanism, and Tactical Urbanism–and has application for problem solving beyond placemaking and neighborhood transformation.

3. Nature based solutions and biomimicry

· The World is Poorly Designed. But Copying Nature Helps, video by Christophe Haubursin, Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt, Vox in partnership with 99% Invisible, uploaded by Vox, YouTube, November 9, 2017.
The history of biomimicry with examples of mimicking form, process and whole ecosystems. Features Janine Benyus, who coined the term “biomimicry’ in 1997, encourages all designers to bring a biologist to the table, and shares some insights into how biomimicry can help society be more sustainable.

· Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Milkweed Editions, 2013.
The author argues that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world.

Related: The Turtle Mothers Have Come Ashore to Ask About an Unpaid Debt, Robin Wall Kimmerer, The New York Times, September 22, 2023.
An urge for a change in worldview, “from the fiction of human exceptionalism to the reality of our kinship and reciprocity with the living world,” wrapped up in an emotional story about snapping turtle mothers whose usual nesting spots are flooded from unusually high rainfall. “We have betrayed the millions of other species with whom we share this leafy paradise with an extractive culture that threatens their inherent right to be. Turtles among us carry a warning: We need to acknowledge our unpaid debt and create solutions that protect not only our species but our more-than-human relatives as well.”
Watch Robin Wall Kimmerer perform this essay with animation and live music here.

· 30 Animals that Made Us Smarter, by Patrick Aryee, Island Press, May 2022.
Wildlife biologist, TV host, and BBC podcaster Patrick Aryee tells stories of biomimicry, or innovations inspired by the natural world, which enrich our lives every day — and in some cases, save them.

· How ‘Unbuilding’ Can Help Weather Climate Disasters, by Laurie Mazur, US News, July 25, 2023.
Communities grappling with the impacts of pollution and climate change are pushing for green and resilient solutions, which are better at absorbing flood waters and improve quality of life. Highlights how the communities closest to and therefore most affected by decisions should be leading them.

· The surprising benefits of switching to ‘lamb mowers’, by Michael J. Coren, The Washington Post, October 24 2023
The natural lawn movement brings back a very old technology: the original lawn mower. Replacing sheep for lawn mowers has many benefits: cuts net emissions by one-third, naturally fertilizes, requires no potentially toxic chemicals, and brings joy to everyone involved.

Related: Dear Climate Coach: The Post’s climate advice columnist explains how individuals can be “entrepreneurs of norms” in their everyday lives and how solar panels have become more widespread in acceptance.

· The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters, by Sean B. Carroll, Princeton University Press, March 7, 2017.
Biologist and author Sean Carroll tells the stories of the pioneering scientists who sought the answers to such simple yet profoundly important questions, and shows how their discoveries matter for our health and the health of the planet we depend upon.

· Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature, by Stephen Robert Miller, Island Press, October 2023.
The author describes in the introduction a book about unintended consequences, about fixes that do more harm than good and the folly of overconfidence.

· ‘The wildlife that has come is phenomenal’: the UK farmers holding off floods the natural way, by Helena Horton, The Guardian, January 11, 2024.
As flooding becomes a more frequent reality, a better understanding of how water moves through the environment has led to more use of natural solutions like river restoration, creating floodplains, and planting trees,, with some unintended benefits for wildlife and ecosystems.

Island press has a number of publications on nature-based solutions here.

4. Dealing with Emergence

Emergence is the process whereby complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions, a process that is not predictable.

Emergence must be considered and accommodated in Complex Systems and in dealing with Complex Problems; emergence is an integral property of complex systems, part of what makes prediction so hard, and why planned long-term top-down solutions are doomed. Self-organization is the essence of proximity, and the recognition of Emergence is an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of Self-organization in action. The reality of Emergence makes learning and adaptation indispensable in the pursuit of solutions for complex problems.

· What is Emergence? directed by Emily Driscoll and animated by Lottie Kingslake, Quanta Magazine, December 20, 2018.
Depictions of emergence in different systems in ants and hurricanes, illustrating how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

· Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds — A Review, by Lyndi Hewitt, Mobilizing Ideas, July 30, 2019.

Related: Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, by Adrienne Maree Brown, AK Press, 2017.
A guidebook for getting in right relationship with change, using our own nature and that of creatures beyond human as our teachers. Brown uses complexity science concepts and principles to metaphorically illustrate ways to make social change.

Related: Practicing New Worlds: Abolition & Emergent Strategies, by Andrea J. Ritchie, AK Press, October 24, 2023.
Practicing New Worlds explores how principles of emergence, adaptation, iteration, resilience, transformation, interdependence, decentralization and fractalization can shape organizing toward a world without the violence of surveillance, police, prisons, jails, or cages of any kind, in which we collectively have everything we need to survive and thrive.
*Ritchie is a co-founder of the Interrupting Criminalization initiative.

· Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, by Steven Johnson, Simon & Schuster, September 10, 2002.
“Explaining why the whole is sometimes smarter than the sum of its parts, Johnson presents surprising examples of feedback, self-organization, and adaptive learning. The power of self-organization — coupled with the connective technology of the Internet — will usher in a revolution every bit as significant as the introduction of electricity.”

5. Subtractive Change

Less can be more and a way to avoid a lot of unintended consequences.

· Innovation 2.0: Do Less, Hidden Brain, with Leidy Klotz, host Shankar Vedantam, June 6, 2022.
“The human drive to invent new things has led to pathbreaking achievements in medicine, science, and society. But our desire for innovation can keep us from seeing one of the most powerful paths to progress: subtraction. Engineer Leidy Klotz says sometimes the best way forward involves removing, streamlining and simplifying things.”
It’s common to think that to contribute we must constantly innovate and add-on to what’s existing: new programs when the ones we have aren’t working, new infrastructure or policies to improve failing systems. But sometimes the best course of action is to do less.

· More Impact By Doing Less With Subtractive Change, by Bryan Lindsley, The Effective Problemsolver newsletter (bryanlindsley.com), March 8, 2022.
“Everyone thinks you have to take additional action to make change, but what if the most effective way of solving problems is defined by what you don’t do? In this short post, I show how the subtractive systems change is backed up by scientific research, ancient wisdom, and modern business strategies.”

· From the Archives: In Praise of the Dead (Investors), by John Rekenthaler, Morningstar, February 14, 2020.
While a fundamental expectation, or at least hope, for trading on the stock market is to improve returns, this tongue-in-check tribute to dead investors highlights the positive impact of trading less.

6. Let’s not talk about scale.

Complexity science says that in complex systems change cannot be engineered from the top down but comes from the bottom up, evolves, and spreads when the proper conditions exist; thus change happens in an iterative fashion from the bottom up through the interaction and contribution of the many elements or agents of the system (so proximity is embedded in the process) and the work is in helping to create, enable or facilitate the needed conditions for an outcome to take place.

Complexity science also says that change is nonlinear (small efforts can lead to big changes or disruptions while large efforts can sometimes have very little impact). As complex systems are nonlinear and cannot be predicted, to propagate desired change we need to think in terms of virtuous cycles.

· Scaling — from “reaching many” to sustainable systems change at scale: A critical shift in mindset, by Woltering L., Fehlenberg K., Gerard B., Ubels J., Cooley L., Agricultural Systems (Science Direct), June 15, 2019.
Describes a broader approach to scaling to more effectively contribute to lasting systemic change.

· TEP #010: Three Lies About Scaling Impact (and the actual truth), by Bryan Lindsley, The Effective Problemsolver newsletter (bryanlindsley.com), November 22, 2022.
Solutions, like problems, are not the same in different contexts, and therefore should not be replicated or scaled. Lindsley provides three alternatives to traditional solution scaling thinking: solutions depend on the level they’re applied; all solutions are contextual; and small changes can be more effective and impactful than large.

· Virtuous Circles: Values, Systems and Sustainability, by Andy Jones, Michel Pimbert and Janice Jiggins, The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the IUCN Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy (CEESP), 2011. See executive summary on pages x-xxvi.
The interconnectedness of everything, from food and energy, water and climate, and cost of living and poverty, demonstrates how once in a vicious cycle, elements exacerbate each other and it is hard to alter course. This book illustrates a path out, reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and the resulting consequences.

· Restoration and Repair of Earth’s Damaged Ecosystems, by Holly P. Jones, Peter C. Jones, Edward B. Barbier, Ryan C. Blackburn, Jose M. Rey Benayas, Karen D. Holl, Michelle McCrackin, Paula Meli, Daniel Montoya and David Moreno Mateos, Royal Society Publishing, February 2018.
Given that few ecosystems on the Earth have been unaffected by humans, restoring them holds great promise for stemming the biodiversity crisis and ensuring ecosystem services are provided to humanity. Nonetheless, few studies have documented the recovery of ecosystems globally or the rates at which ecosystems recover. Even fewer have addressed the added benefit of actively restoring ecosystems versus allowing them to recover without human intervention following the cessation of a disturbance. This research found that active restoration did not result in faster or more complete recovery than simply ending the disturbances ecosystems face.

· How wildlife is thriving in the Korean Peninsula’s Demilitarised Zone, by Lisa Brady for ChinaDialogue, Guardian Environment Network, The Guardian, April 13, 2012.
The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea has benefited from locking people out: it has preserved Korea’s ecological heritage as it is home to thousands of extinct and endangered animal and plant species. The rest of the peninsula’s 100 years of conflict has resulted in a ‘severely degraded natural environment’.

· Central Pacific Coral Reef Shows Remarkable Recovery Despite Two Warm-Water Events, by Steven Koppes, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, July 6, 2022.
A testament to the resilience of nature, a new 10-year study from Palmyra Atoll in the remote central Pacific Ocean shows that reefs outside the reach of local human impacts can recover from bleaching. Important to note is that humans did not do anything to intervene and actively attempt to facilitate recovery, but instead the reefs showed their own capacity for recovery in the absence of local stressors.

· Hanauma Bay water clarity significantly improves without visitors, by Sarah Hendrix, University of Hawai’i News, July 20, 2022.
During Covid researchers noticed that sand and sediment lingers in the water longer than originally thought after visitors depart. Similar data on changes in the biological communities, like fish behaviour and coral growth, was being collected, which may show the ability of nature to rebound once humans step back.

· In Montana, Wild Bison Are Back, and an Entire Ecosystem Is Healing, by Molly Hanson, Earth Justice, November 1, 2023.
Since the early 2010s, the effects of bison released to a tribal reservation in northern Montana to roam free highlight the realities of an ecosystem and the impact each component has on the others. The story of the American bison shows if we heed the calls of science and nature, including taking action to protect vulnerable species, we can not only avoid disaster but help nature foster a stronger and healthier ecosystem that benefits all.

See related: Bison Return to Ancestral Lands in the Policy, Regulation & Enforcement section.

C. Policy, Regulation & Enforcement

· Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon drops 34% in first half 2023, by Carolina Pulice and Jake Spring, Reuters, July 7, 2023.
Deforestation declines after enforcement of existing environment policy, more resources for environmental enforcement.

· Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act
Enacted in 2021, Prohibits importation of goods produced with forced labor in the People’s Republic of China, and developed enforcement strategies.

Related: Withhold Release Orders for goods produced with forced labor.

· Environmental Justice Law
Landmark legislation in New Jersey requires Department of Environmental Protection to evaluate environmental and public health impacts of certain facilities on overburdened communities (OBCs) when reviewing certain applications. Requires community engagement as part of the permitting process.

· ‘Twisted to conceal:’ How laws meant to protect children help police evade scrutiny, by Laurence Du Sault, Open Vallejo (openvallejo.org), June 23, 2023.
Using a law aimed at protecting the reputation of minors, incidents of police using force against minors are also being ‘protected,’ and with it the names of police officers involved.

· Still Broke: Walmart’s Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism — A Book Talk and Panel Conversation, with Rick Wartzman (Bendable Labs), Byron Auguste (Opportunity@Work), Julie Gehrki (Walmart), and moderator Maureen Conway (The Aspen Institute), Aspen Institute, March 30, 2023.
An honest exploration about the limits of corporate do-gooding (even with a sincere attempt) and the need for regulation when your basic business model has other objectives and priorities.

· ‘A Watershed Moment’: California Sues Big Oil Over Decades of Climate Destruction, by Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, September 16, 2023.
The lawsuit makes California the largest economy on the planet to take legal action against fossil fuel companies over their efforts to deceive the world about their destructive — and immensely profitable — business model. This comes shortly after previously unreported documents that detail Exxon’s behind-closed-doors effort to cast doubt on climate science after 2006, when the company publicly acknowledged the link between fossil fuels and climate change for the first time.

Related: Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections, by G. Supran, S. Rahmstorf, and N. Oreskes, Science, January 13, 2023.
For decades, some members of the fossil fuel industry tried to convince the public that a causative link between fossil fuel use and climate warming could not be made because the models used to project warming were too uncertain. Supran et al. show that one of those fossil fuel companies, ExxonMobil, had their own internal models that projected warming trajectories consistent with those forecast by the independent academic and government models. What they understood about climate models thus contradicted what they led the public to believe.

· Massachusetts Textile Recovery policy
“In November 2022, Massachusetts banned textiles from disposal. Textiles include clothing, footwear, bedding, curtains, fabric, and similar items that are clean and dry. Even if your textiles are worn, torn, or stained, they can still be donated to a textile recycler.”

· Bison Return to Ancestral Lands, Earth Justice, January 7, 2013.
A 2012 state policy to allow Yellowstone bison seasonal access to foraging land north of the park was met with lawsuits aimed at keeping their roaming restricted and allowing their hazing and slaughter. A Montana judge rejected the lawsuit, allowing bison — the only native wildlife species unnaturally confined to the park — the ability to roam free.

See related: In Montana, Wild Bison Are Back, and an Entire Ecosystem Is Healing in the Scale section.

D. Metrics & Evaluation

While many volumes have been written about metrics and evaluation and ways to improve evaluation to make it more participatory, better recognize the complexity of many initiatives, reflect changing circumstances, etc., our goal in this section is not to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of the field but to highlight some examples of approaches that appear to be more participatory, adaptive, and accessible.

· 5 words that shape social change (and how they limit us), by Jara Dean-Coffey and John Kania, Collective Change Lab, Medium, April 16, 2024.
These 5 words are reused repeatedly in evaluation and perhaps require reconsideration as to their meaning and use.

· MediCapt to Document Medical Evidence of Sexual Violence in Kenya, by Dr. Angeline Ithondeka, Naomi Gikonyo, Serem Keitany, Emily Kiragu, Rachel Kirumba, Benjamin Kuria, Sylvester Mesa, Evelyne Mudhai, Grace Muthima, Ruth Ngugi, Purity Thirikwa, and Benson Wahome (NCRH) and Katy Johnson, and Suzanne Kidenda (PHR), Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and Naivasha County Referral Hospital (NCRH), November 2019.
PHR’s Program on Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones uncovered the reason many sexual violence court cases fail: a lack of or poor quality of evidence. PHR identified health care professionals as an opportunity to reduce the problems that lead to insufficient evidence, and developed MediCapt, a mobile application that allows medical professionals to collect medical evidence, including photographs, and securely transmit the data to law enforcement and legal teams. This is an example of how to acquire quality data under difficult circumstances.

· Outcome Harvesting, Ricardo Wilson-Grau and Heather Britt, Ford Foundation, May 2012.
Outcome Harvesting is an evaluation method that collects evidence of what has been achieved and works backward to determine whether and how the project or intervention contributed to the change. It focuses on all results, good or bad, intended or unintended. Outcome harvesting is inherently a very participatory process, that requires input (data) to be harvested from all actors, whether obvious or not, in an environment (and the environment may need to be reconsidered or redefined as learnings emerge).

Related: Resource Review: Outcome Harvesting, Principles, Steps, and Evaluation Applications, by Mark Cabaj, Tamarack Institute, December 2018.

· Causal Link Monitoring brief, by Heather Britt (Social Solutions International), Richard Hummelbrunner (ÖAR Regionalberatung) and Jacqueline Greene (Social Solutions International), April 2017.
An attempt to bring complexity-informed thinking into monitoring and evaluation, and to find ways to work with and adapt the linear logic model which forms the basis of so much evaluation methodology not only among U.S. funders but funders all around the world. Two particularly useful aspects of CLM are the importance given to bringing in a diversity of perspectives and the importance of context.

· The Unintended Consequences of Data Standardization, by Cathleen Clerkin, Stanford Social Innovation Review, April 4, 2024.
Data standardization, for all its value, must be viewed through the same lens of complexity and nuance as the sectors for which the data is being evaluated. Three common challenges are shared, including valuing data or results more than process and understanding, for example through the standardized tests of education, along with recommendations to prevent the unintended consequences that come with these pitfalls.

· UNDP Strategic Innovation Medium channel
The UNDP (United Nations Development Program) characterizes its work as the support of countries in their path towards the Sustainable Development Goals and that poverty eradication remains at the core of its work. In the 2022–2025 Strategic Plan, UNDP indicated it would invest in impact measurement as one of six key areas, the urgency being that traditional, linear results-based management has not evolved to measure the complexity of today’s initiatives and the outcomes of the organization’s complexity-informed portfolio approach. UNDP’s Strategic Innovation unit is developing systems of monitoring, evaluation and results measurement better suited to these new ways of working, that value learning as results, and can track transformative change over longer timespans. The five articles that follow highlight different aspects of this M&E (Metrics and Evaluation) work.

Practicing what we preach — our experience rethinking M&E in complex settings, by Andrea Bina and Søren Vester Haldrup, Medium, November 28, 2023.

Evaluation and Innovation in a complex world, Oscar A. Garcia, Medium, December 7, 2021

How to track and report on progress when working with complex problems, by Søren Vester Haldrup, Medium, March 14, 2023.

How do we measure systems change? by Søren Vester Haldrup, Medium, September 19, 2023.

Adopting a portfolio approach to help Paraguay reach its climate goals: What have we learned so far? Hans Baumgarten (UNDP Paraguay), Medium, May 17, 2023.

· The ‘Bill Gates problem’: do billionaire philanthropists skew global health research? by Andy Stirling, Nature, February 12, 2024.
This is a review of the 2023 book by investigative journalist Tim Schwab that explores the impact on philanthropy of global wealth, power and privilege being increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few hyper-billionaires. While the author of the book review points to a number of potentially troubling consequences cited by Mr. Schwab, we highlight two we feel of particular concern in the area of Metrics and Evaluation: the fact that the metrics used to evaluate worthy projects in philanthropy more and more resemble metrics used to evaluate private sector investments: e.g., the value and emphasis placed on projects with the potential for accelerating innovation and scaling up technologies; and the concern that evaluators who receive funding from the same philanthropic entity(ies) that funded the project they are evaluating may feel undue pressure or influence.

· Achieving Outcomes That Matter: What Now? Ep. 6 with Craig Carmoney, with Craig Carmoney (Meridian Public Schools), host Sarah Szurpicki (Michigan Future), Michigan Future, December 17 2020.
Highlights the critical differences that result from choosing different measures for educational success: a project-based learning approach better prepares students for the future.

E. Systems Change in the Making — Mini Case Studies

· Feeding Dangerously, by José Andrés, Steve Orlando, and artist Alberto Ponticelli, TKO Studios, November 8, 2023.
A graphic novel sharing stories of the people who will do anything to feed their communities, featuring Chef José Andrés and the beginnings and growth of World Central Kitchen.

Related: 25 Million Meals: The Latest from Ukraine, wck.org (newsletter content), May 16, 2023.
World Central Kitchen’s network approach supports greater impact.

Related: Chef José Andrés Launches New Institute to Tackle the Global Food Crisis, Hari Sreenivasan, Amanpour & Co., PBS, June 2, 2023.
Andrés roots the new institute in the need to start creating smarter policies, consider food a national security issue, and place national food security advisors in every country. Need to start small and build, and bring all of the ecosystem actors to the table (the US runs over 200 food programs and none of them connect).

· The White Helmets
Nowhere is the need for and power of on-the-ground mutual aid initiatives more apparent than in a disaster scenario in a war-torn country. Syria Civil Defense, popularly known as the White Helmets, is comprised of teams of volunteers from all walks of life working in all areas of Syria. While these teams initially came together in 2012 in response to aerial bombardment of neighborhoods and the withdrawal of essential services like firefighting, they now provide a range of community services. The White Helmets were the first, and in many parts of Northwest Syria are still the only, aid organization to provide humanitarian relief following the devastating earthquakes of February 6, 2023.

· CityTalk: How can we work together on the mental health crisis in our downtowns? with Dr. Andrew Bond (Inner City Health Associates), Cam Guthrie (Mayor of Guelph), Kyle Marcus (Downtown Sudbury BIA), Dr. Suzanne Shoush (Inner City Health Associates), Howard Tran (Vancouver Police), Al Wiebe (Homeless Advocate and host of Of No Fixed Address), facilitator Mary W. Rowe (Canadian Urban Institute), Canadian Urban Institute, May 31, 2023.
A discussion with practitioners from across the homelessness ecosystem, from support systems to business owners and politicians, about the future of downtowns and main streets, how they’re affected by the mental health crisis, and how a systems lens can help address it. We know that mental health is closely linked to homelessness and embedded in complex systems.

· Yield Giving
Recognizing that anyone’s personal wealth it the product of a collective effort, Yield Giving was established by MacKenzie Scott to share a financial fortune created through the effort of countless people, and is named after a belief in adding value by giving up control. Yield holds the “conviction that people who have experience with inequities are the ones best equipped to design solutions.”

Related: Millennials and Gen Z are Challenging Traditional Notions of Giving, India Development Review, April 26, 2024.
While Yield Giving is putting power back into the hands of communities at the philanthropic level, the same is happening through mutual aid, which does not impose reporting requirements or other limitations on recipients. This highlights that at the individual level, we can all make choices to turn control over to those trying to impart positive change in their communities. Furthermore, the article notes that, driven by Millennials and Gen Z, “the idea of what constitutes philanthropy is changing, […] and approximately 74 percent millennials consider themselves to be philanthropists.”

· Center for Peer Driven Change
History has shown that in communities where progress and resources are shared, entire communities tend to move forward together. “Today there is a growing awareness that outsider driven solutions are failing to close the gap in wealth and social standing. It is important to now shift the leadership, responsibility, and resources back to the very people we want to help.”

Related: The Alternative: Most of what you believe about poverty is wrong, by Mauricio L. Miller, updated and abridged edition 2023, originally published 2017.
“Social Change is about personal relationships, not institutions.” Mauricio’s “simple solution is to invest in people’s demonstrated strengths, rather than weaknesses. The evidence provided shows that families, when working together with friends creates sustained positive change. Recognizing low-income families as contributors rather than takers from society begins to break the negative stereotypes that divide us and helps to bring our society together.” The “updated revision of the book not only adds and clarifies many of the lessons learned but also portends how a movement is growing around this alternative approach that can finally begin to close the growing gap in wealth and existing social divides.”

Related: When Peers Work Together to Drive Social Change, by Rohit Menezes, Simon Morfit, Willa Seldon and Bill Breen, Stanford Social Innovation Review, June 24, 2020.
Makes the case for peer-driven change with examples from history of this ‘often overlooked pathway for advancing social change.’

Related: Where strategic philanthropy went wrong, by Mark Kramer and Steve Phillips, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2024.
An acknowledgement that at the foundation of philanthropy is the belief that those being served cannot be trusted or responsible for solving their own problems, and one that explains “why philanthropy could do so much good and yet didn’t seem to be solving our society’s problems.”

· ioby
“ioby is a national nonprofit organization whose approach is rooted in the idea that residents know best what their communities need, and that real change springs from the ground up.” It works from an ecosystem perspective. ioby provides a crowdfunding platform for community change agents, along with fiscal sponsorship and a personal coach. Probably no other placebuilding/placemaking organization has as deep an understanding of the relationship between civic engagement and community development as ioby. As of November 2023, they have raised $19.9M, supported 3,672 projects, and trained over 33,000 neighborhood leaders, some of whom have subsequently run for local public offices and won.

Related: We Run Brownsville
A walk/run wellness program exclusively for women that is designed to prioritize individual care through the lens of collective responsibility and active community activism.

· The Role of Social Systems in Preparing, Responding and Recovering from Catastrophic Events, Jose Holguin-Veras, Meeting of the Minds, January 24, 2022.
Successful disaster response plans require broad networks of locals and local knowledge and resources: the strength of social networks is critical.

· Positioning Public Health to Respond to Gun Violence webinar, with Dr. Monique Williams PhD (Cure Gun Violence), Rana Epps (King of Kings Foundation), and Host Ericka Burroughs-Girardi MA, MPH (County Health Rankings & Roadmaps), uploaded by County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, YouTube, November 14, 2023.
Cure Violence Global’s (CVG) community-based violence interruption model has effectively reduced aggression, including gun incidents, in many American cities. In this webinar, CVG’s Dr. Monique Williams explains how this prevention model works, and Rana Epps shares how the CVG model is disrupting patterns of violence in Jamaica Queens, New York and building healthy conflict resolution skills in youth.”

· The Big City Where Housing is Still Affordable, by Binyamin Appelbaum, The New York Times, September 11, 2023.
While most major cities have skyrocketing cost of housing, Tokyo — the world’s largest city — has been able to maintain affordability. Many factors have come into play: investing in and prioritizing transit and development near stations, policies/zoning laws that make it easy for private developers to build and pivot (e.g. from commercial to housing), including no preservation priorities for historic buildings; and a history that includes wars and natural disasters means much of the city’s past is gone, making it easier to focus forward and on new construction (more equipped to survive the next earthquake).

· Mars Assisted Reef Restoration System (MARRS)
The MARRS systems works with local communities where reef restoration is needed to develop contextually appropriate sustainable solutions that the locals can build, implement and manage.

· A New Way of Life: Safe Housing Network
This replication model was designed for women experiencing re-entry, by formerly incarcerated women, to support with housing, opportunities to reconnect to their communities, and space to heal. This community-based re-entry program is able relies on the firsthand knowledge of its grassroots network while also advocating and organizing to remove institutional barriers and effect systems change.

· Resilience Practice: Building Capacity to Absorb Disturbance and Maintain Function, by Brian Walker and David Salt, Island Press, August 2012.
A case study is presented after each chapter (about describing systems, assessing their resilience, and intervening as appropriate) of various social-ecological systems and how resilience makes a difference to that system in practice.

· Priced Out of Housing, Communities Take Development Into Their Own Hands, by Keith Schneider, The New York Times, May 13, 2024.
The community-owned cooperative real estate strategy has taken root in various cities across the US over the last decade, providing a way for communities to have more say and more control in how their cities develop, and who benefits. While the strategy is, in principle, the same with each application and can be replicated, as an approach it is designed to incorporate local context and community needs.

· Cities for Life: How Communities Can Recover From Trauma and Rebuild for Health, by Jason Corburn, Island Press, 2021.
Three cities featured are taking a deeper approach to helping their communities heal from trauma by prioritizing healing and health across all sectors, from urban planning and public policy to policing and poverty. “This means not only centering those most traumatized in decision-making, Corburn explains, but confronting historically discriminatory, exclusionary, and racist urban institutions, and promoting healing-focused practices, place-making, and public policies.”

Related: Webinar featuring the author discussing the book hosted by the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University.

Related: Saving Lives: Alternative Approaches to Reducing Gun Violence, by Angie M. Wolf, Angie Del Prado Lippman, DeVone Boggan, Caroline Glesmann, Estivaliz Castro, International Science Index, 2015.
An evaluation of the Operation Peacemaker Fellowship, established in Richmond, California, which “combines components of evidence-based practices with a community-oriented focus on relationships and mentoring to fill a gap in services and increase community safety.” The approach “invests in the lives of young men who once were labeled their community’s most violent, even most deadly, youth.”

· Island Press has a number of publications on ground-up initiatives, such as From the Ground Up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Cities, and Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities.

Disclaimers:

The examples provided in this Bibliography are not intended to represent an exhaustive list of Unintended Consequences, and we acknowledge there are many important examples that we may not have been aware of or which we could not include due to limitations of space. Also, this Bibliography is time-delimited, and we know there will be new articles and information coming out all the time. We encourage Readers to explore additional examples of Unintended Consequences, especially in their special areas of interest, to gain a more comprehensive understanding of this fascinating subject.

Some of the items (articles, posts, reports, studies, slide decks, videos, etc.) listed above may be behind a paywall and/or require membership for access. Some articles can be accessed through institutional subscriptions, libraries, or academic databases commonly available to researchers, students, and academics. Please access items through legal means only and do not violate any copyright law(s).

This bibliography is periodically updated. This is the current version as of June 30, 2024.