Grand Challenges

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The Grand Challenge in International Development

A grand challenge is a technically complex societal problem that has stubbornly defied solution. It can range from cures for cancer to better management of resources. With globalization, a grand challenge is no longer limited to being a domestic issue. There are a number of global grand challenges. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals each copes with a grand challenge that is faced by the international community. With this understanding, solutions to grand challenges are no longer limited to cooperation between domestic actors and coordination between different sectors within a country. The solutions lie in global connection and coordination of resources. Under global strategic frameworks like the MDGs and SDGs, there are a variety of actors including international organizations, international NGOs, private sector, and local and foreign governments. While development projects by international organizations see global strategic frameworks as guidelines, it is not always the case for foreign government projects. To address grand challenges, an alignment between different actors is essential.

One of the many ways to encourage various actors, especially governments to follow international guidelines in the face of grand challenges, is to build platforms for multistakeholder global governance. The absence of such multistakeholder governance mechanism may result in escalation of conflicts. In early September, 2017, indigenous communities in Ecuador carried out protest against Chinese mining because the mining company did not negotiate with the communities for its projects which were creating damage to local environment and wildlife protection. The protest escalated into violent conflict and resulted in one death and multiple injured. If there were a multistakeholder governance mechanism in place for this project, a more peaceful conversation would have taken place instead of violent conflicts. A global multistakeholder governance mechanism would create a platform where the Chinese state-owned mining company and local communities would be equal actors in the face of the global grand challenge of resource management. This would encourage the Chinese government to apply global strategic frameworks to its development projects and contribute to the global efforts by making positive impact.

Multistakeholder global governance mechanism is valued more and more by international organizations, such as the inclusion of Major Groups and other stakeholders by the UN. This mechanism should not be limited to policy-making at the global level. It should also be applied to decision-making and policy-making on regional and bilateral platforms. In this way, we can build a more holistic global partnership in addressing the grand challenges faced by all.

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Grand Challenges and Why They Matter

Progress can only be defined by the way that major obstacles are overcome. Without hardship, there cannot be progress. Since history itself, humanity has faced many grand challenges that have shaped the world into what it is today, and the grand challenges that we currently face will determine what the future looks like. But what are grand challenges and why are they so important? To start, grand challenges are issues that directly affect humanity as a whole and require multi-stakeholder partnerships and cross disciplinary work to achieve results and find a solution within a given time frame. This term was first coined during the cold war, when the Kennedy administration ambitiously set out to land man on the moon for the first time. In 1961, Kennedy announced to the country: “before this decade is out, [we will be] landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” At this point in history, this was a grand challenge because no one thought it could be done and that it was out of the realm of what humanity was capable of. Yet it was achieved in 1969 with international help and with scientists from many disciplines, and the belief that it could be done.

If we look at some of the main issues of today, it seems impossible that we will ever end poverty, or ever become more sustainable, or be able to eliminate inequality. When the UN OWG met in Rio of 2012, 30 state members gathered together to address these grand challenges and frame them into the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Not only did they gather to identify the problems, but they gathered to set a critical deadline for when these goals should be achieved by 2030. Since the sustainable development goals were implemented, significant progress has been made. Between 1999 and 2013, poverty has been reduced from 1.7 billion to 767 million, which is very significant. Progress has also been made in hunger with the amount of undernourished people going from about 930 million in the early 2000’s to 793 million in 2014. In the field of medicine, “The risk of dying between the ages of 30 and 70 from one of four main non‑communicable diseases (NCDs)—cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes or chronic respiratory disease—fell from 23 per cent to 19 per cent between 2000 and 2015” (UN, Sustainable Development Goals Report 2017). However, with the deadline of 2030, the progress is not happening fast enough to achieve everything that the UN set out to do.

Although it may seem impossible to meet all of the goals set out by the SDGs before the year 2030, by setting an agenda and a deadline, it pushed countries around the world to take initiative and move in the right direction. Regardless of whether the goals are actually met by the given year, there will be significant progress made in making the world a better place for all.

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Grand Challenges

Grand Challenges are complex problems that have no clear solutions. For USAID, these Grand Challenges include battling and curing Ebola and Zika, securing water for food, and having all children reading, among others. The United Nations addresses a variety of Grand Challenges in the Sustainable Development Goals, ranging from the elimination of poverty to affordable and clean energy to partnership for the goals.

Looking at the name, the two words “Grand” and “Challenge” are heavy, serious words. These words can overwhelm and overpower people. While “grand” does mean large in size, it also means magnificent in appearance and style. Similarly, “challenge” can denote something is hard to overcome, but it also means something that tests abilities. So while this phrase can mean large problems that are hard to overcome, it can also mean magnificent ways to test someone’s abilities. That is what organizations like the UN and USAID are doing: they are testing us, as a society, in our abilities to solve issues that we face every day.

These grand challenges have been used to frame the end of some of the world’s largest problems, like climate change or poverty. These frameworks make it so that we, as a society, see the means to the end – collaboration. This directly relates back to SDG 17: partnership. The rest of the goals tackle specific problems like poverty and hunger, but this final goal, number 17, tells us how to accomplish the rest: through partnerships. By framing it in a way that we believe that collaboration and teamwork is needed for success, it involves more people than it would if it solely dictated that we have to do x, y, and z in order to overcome the issue.

Grand Challenges exist on a local, state, federal, regional, and global scale. Each level has different challenges that it must solve and overcome. For example, the city of Bangor, ME might have accessible public transportation as a grand challenge. The state of Maine might not view this specific issue as a grand challenge, but might focus on accessibility for Medicare and Medicaid. On the federal level, a grand challenge is combatting drug trafficking. On a regional level, a grand challenge is migration within the region (people leaving country A to go to country B, etc.). On a global level, the grand challenges in the SDGs are some of the most prominent. On each stage of government and on each level of the scale, there will be overlap in grand challenges. Accessible public transportation is a grand challenge in Bangor, ME, but it is also one on the federal level with the idea that more big cities need better and more accessible public transportation. This is also reflected in SDGs 9 and 11.

Continuing with the challenge of accessible public transportation, a variety of organizations—governmental, non-governmental, and inter-governmental—have come together to try and solve this problem. One example of this MetroAccess in the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority (WMATA, commonly referred to as Metro). When living in both Spain and Costa Rica, I did not see the same efforts put in for people who needed transit to be accessible. In Madrid, many of the metro stations are not accessible, but they do have a plan in place to make them so. The buses are not all accessible, but they are making progress into making them so. In Costa Rica, many people use buses to travel around, but a majority of these buses were not accessible. This has not been a priority for Costa Rica, with not a large need for accessible transportation, but even one person provides justification for need.

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Grand Challenges of Sustainable Development: Encouraging Integrated Approaches

Grand challenges represent opportunities for collective efforts to work towards common goals. Historically, these grand challenges have presented themselves across various disciplines including medicine, space flight, energy, and development. For American physicist and policy advisor Lewis Branscomb, these grand challenges are extremely complex and stubborn in definition, requiring comprehensive solutions in which the scientific community, members of government, civil society, and public population must cooperate closely to focus their efforts. For Branscomb, accurately defining the Grand Challenge is crucial to finding an effective solution. In the realm of sustainable development, defining Grand Challenges of sustainable development has been achieved in the creation of a comprehensive frameworks like the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In the creation of the SDGs, which expanded upon the Millennium Development goals, the development community effectively established measurements and indicators to track progress at specific challenges that make up the larger grand challenge of global sustainable development. The creation of this framework is landmark because it provides a concrete mechanism through which the international community can focus their ambitious vision of a sustainable future into practical, achievable measurements and indicators.

Since the end of the 20th century, it has become overwhelmingly apparent that global grand challenges of sustainable development are fundamentally intertwined with one another. For example, to address the issue of global food insecurity, issues of economic opportunity, agricultural sustainability, as well as peacebuilding must also be considered in strategies of improving food security. The interconnected nature of these issues of sustainable development has resulted in a need for integrated approaches to development. If we, as a society, are to achieve these grand challenges of sustainable development, a segmented approach in which actors in development operate independently of one another is not sufficient. In order to make the ambitious goals of the sustainable development community’s “moonshot thinking” a reality, then an integrated approach in which civil society, governments, private sector, and expert researchers can effectively implement initiatives and policies that navigate the intersections within issues sustainable development is required. In doing this, actors working within sustainable development can better ensure that the design of sustainable development initiatives work to advance multiple goals of sustainable development in addition to fostering an inclusive environment that does not discriminate along the lines of gender, ethnicity, economic status, or disability.

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Why is Multi-stakeholder Cooperation Essential for Sustainable Development?

In the field of development, there is a multitude of actors that promote the SDGs and work towards improving the world on many different levels. These levels can go from grassroots movements, to local government action, to International cooperation. Each level of development has its own methodology, its own approach to resolving the Grand Challenges that we face, and each development actor presents different tools and knowledge for resolving the issues.

At the grassroots level where NGOs and other developmental organizations that are locally based perform hands on development work, they operate directly with the target population and do most of the developmental field work necessary to help local communities grow. These organizations collect over time the knowledge of what works and what doesn’t work on a local scale, and it allows them to understand the needs of the population, making the development work as efficient as possible. However, grassroots organizations often lack the funding and resources to expand the scale of operations to affect more people, and because of this, the impact of their development work remains local.

Governments also play an essential role in development work as they manage the resources of the country and therefore have more power to fund development projects. The government also has a large extent of knowledge on the needs of the population. However, what the government has in resources and knowledge, it lacks in efficiency. Governmental development is often criticized for its bureaucratic red tape that makes it very difficult to efficiently manage and run development projects, and this lack of efficiency results in development operations that become much more expensive and yield lesser results.

Finally, international developmental organizations such as the World Bank, the IDB, the United Nations, the HLPF, and many others offer a macro approach to development through international cooperation. The advantages to this approach are that it allows to create a conversation surrounding specific developmental issues and brings them to light, making governments realize the importance of development work in the grand scheme of the SDGs. It is also a good place for different governments to propose ways to implement development with the purpose of meeting a particular criteria and through treaties, binds countries to meet the goals. Unfortunately, there is not a strong enforcement mechanism that forces countries to implement the development work they signed off to.

At each level of development there are partial solutions to meeting the SDGs but still encounter specific difficulties at each layer. The difficulties that the different levels of development encounter however can be solved using the tools and knowledge that other actors operating at different scales have to offer. No single actor possesses the solution to development, but by putting actors together, the optimal combination of knowledge and resources would be met, allowing for the maximum amount of progress to be made. This is fundamental to understanding the importance of multi-stakeholder operations in development and why it is essential to have platforms where the different actors operating at different levels of development can share ideas and knowledge to all resolve Grand Challenges.

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Moonshot Thinking and the Grand Challenges

Moonshot thinking is the art of believing anything is possible and solvable despite preexisting capacities. In 1961, John F Kennedy presented to Congress his moonshot idea of putting the man on the moon, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” Eight years later Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin explored the moon and lived to tell the tale. Critical, persistent, and complex societal problems require moonshot thinking. The Grand Challenges are pressing socioeconomic issues obstructing development efforts, such as global health epidemics and climate change. Adapting moonshot thinking calls for ambitious and defining goals for developing solutions to the World’s most pressing problems. The aim is to catalyze innovation and advancements within science and technology, and call attention to collaborative mechanisms for problem solving. Grand Challenges allow big and small picture thinkers to come together and create tools and innovations to address issues needed for the advancement of humankind. Overcoming challenges is a natural pursuit of the human race and requires constant forward and positive thinking. In the sphere of Grand Challenges and moonshot thinking, nothing is impossible and our capabilities are contingent upon the efforts and development of each other.

While our society is faced with an abundance of challenges towards development, technological and scientific innovations have provided us with greater understanding and capabilities to address these persistent problems. Grand Challenges require the involvement of diverse actors and perspectives that represent the complexities and localized differences of the problem at stake. Information and communication technologies (ICTS) are just one way to further moonshot thinking and addressing the Grand Challenges. ICTS improve our global network which propel collaboration and facilitate knowledge exchange. Monitoring the Grand Challenges and assessing progress requires multistakeholder collaboration and constant communication, thus ICTs are powerful mechanisms to propel moonshot thinking. Lewis Branstorm states that the heart of the innovation challenge is the process of “moving the products of science into innovations and from there to new industries” (Branstorm). Through this notion, policy makers are advised to deconventionalize policies to better support Jeffersonian science, which combines top-down and bottom-up strategies that encourage all kinds of research and innovation. The role of the government is thus to create policies and funding opportunities in disciplines that lack critical knowledge development.

Addressing the Grand Challenges requires top-down and bottom-up approaches and while these obstacles may yield concrete solutions, working towards these goals and targets provide inherent advancements in knowledge systems, which can be built upon to lead to future solutions. Furthermore, reassessing and reconfiguring the role of policy and policy makers is integral to addressing the Grand Challenges and expanding societies capacities and competences towards science and technological advancements. Individuals should be encouraged to enact moonshot thinking in their daily lives and to present the world with ‘crazy’ ideas that seem impossible. This ideology requires creativity and a sense of fearlessness of the potential societal repercussions of seemingly infeasible notions. Leaders from all different sectors must embrace the possibilities that derive from failure.

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How Does the NUA Include Rural Development as an Essential Part of Its Implementation?

When the New Urban Agenda: Habitat III conference was held in October, 2016, the main focus of the conference was to promote the idea of sustainable cities and start developing ideas on how to implement strategies of urban development. Although this document’s main purpose focuses on the urban landscape, the first draft of the NUA III official document contains fifteen mentions of rural development as a part of the plan for urban development:

Article 43: integration of rural development in the framework of developing cities and human settlements

Article 44: integration through ” transport and mobility, technology and communication networks and infrastructure”

Article 62: working with both urban and rural areas, “strengthening the sustainable management of resources ”

Article 77: ensuring coherence of local governmental policies regarding land development keeping rural areas in mind

Although it may not be evident how including rural development helps meet the targets of Habitat III, it is essential to consider what dynamics exist between the two and how improving one can indeed improve the conditions for the other.

One of the biggest challenges that we are currently facing is the overpopulation of our cities and how to accommodate for increasing numbers. This increase in population is mostly due to the migration of poor populations living in rural areas that look towards the city for better work opportunities. If we are to resolve overpopulation of cities, we need to look to what can be done in the rural landscape to provide sufficient opportunities and benefits to rural populations to keep them from migrating to the cities. This is the main goal of articles 43 and 44, where a stronger integration of rural-urban development through technology, communications, and infrastructure can bring a level of development to the rural setting, providing more economic opportunities in those areas and mitigating rural-urban migration.

Another important aspect is the effect that urban development has on the rural landscape. As cities grow, the need for resources such as land, water, food, electricity, etc… increases and most of the time, the use of those resources impacts rural communities. A lot of the waste generated by cities ends up polluting rural communities, which affects the crop outputs and therefore the livelihoods of the populations living in areas most affected. Article 62 emphasizes a strong partnership between the two in order to advance the goal of sustainable cities that would benefit rural areas as well. The urban sector bring to the table new technologies that can help improve the efficiency of the resources it uses, such as creating the infrastructure for green energy (solar panels, hydroelectric, wind energy) and reduce the amount of pollutants that cities emit, and the rural sector provides the conditions under which these resources work best, and provides insight on the effects that the pollution has. Sustainability is therefore an issue that needs to be addressed with the rural sector in mind if it will work at the highest degree of success.

It is impossible to achieve the goal of “sustainable cities” without considering the effects that it has on rural communities and without taking into account the tightly wound relationships that exist between the two. This is why rural development plays an important part in the development of Habitat III and helps us reach most of the Sustainable Development Goals in the 2030 agenda.

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Entitlement Theory and Access to Communication

Amartya Sen, author of “Development as Freedom,” first coined the term of entitlement theory in his paper “exchange Entitlements” as a way to describe the causes of famine. What he found was that famines often are not due to a lack of food, but rather a lack of access to the food that the country has available. In class, we discussed the importance of ICTs in the development framework and how people living in different societies and living in different areas of the world don’t have the same access to communications resources as people who live in large concentrated urban areas.

In the Maitland Commission Report, the ITU presented the idea of a “missing link” in the age of communication as there is still a large percentage of people that live completely isolated from the rest of the world due to a lack of access to telephone lines, internet and other forms of ICTs. One of the reasons that these populations remain without access to these technologies is because companies in charge of installing the infrastructure do not see any benefit in spending time and resources to provide this technology to marginalized communities. Another issue is that often, even if the technology is available to the communities, they are unable to afford the fees for using the internet or cellular reception. How then can these populations be given access to these technological entitlements?

One way to address this issue is through government intervention to ensure all people get access to the ICTs. By providing subsidies to companies providing the communications infrastructure, it gives private enterprises an additional motive to provide the services to marginalized communities. Another way to provide the service is through government acquisition of the technology and provide it themselves. However, involving the government in providing ICTs to the population leads to other challenges such as a loss in efficiency due to additional bureaucratic transaction costs, an increase in prices as the government tries to compensate for the higher costs, and problems with the quality of the good provided due to lack of competition.

In order to find the perfect combination of public and private that would allow marginalized communities to access ICTs, there are several conditions that need to be met that Amartya Sen defined. The first condition is that the highest level of efficiency is achieved in democratic governments. This is because democratic institutions provide greater stability and are subject to the interests of the voters, and therefore have a responsibility towards the population. There are cases in countries where the government intervened in the distribution of ICTs in order to spike the prices for personal gain or for military spending, but in the case of democratic institutions, there are checks and balances that keep that from happening.

A second condition is to ensure perfect competition and a breadth in the market. Having a large diversity of suppliers that can compete on an even playing field would cause prices of ICTs to go down and would also decrease the prices of the infrastructure, therefore making it more beneficial to provide the good to the most consumers possible, making it more affordable and more available to people in marginalized communities.

Finally, in order to set these things in motion, it is essential to raise awareness of the importance of bridging the “missing link” because through awareness, the government can act and start implementing strategies to provide greater access to the rest of the population living outside of concentrated rural areas.

In a quickly modernizing society where technological progress increases exponentially with each passing year, it is essential to make sure that no one gets left behind. ICTs are an essential part of development work, and without this access to information and communication, marginalized societies will be perpetually trying to catch up with the progress in the rest of the world and will never be able to achieve the same levels of development.

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Grand Challenges

The grand challenges of today are vast and many, as can be seen by looking at the Millennium Development Goals, the Millennium Development Goals Outcomes, and the Sustainable Development Goals. By following the changes between the Millennium Development Goals and its successor, the Sustainable Development Goals, we can see that there is an expanding understanding of what Grand Challenges we face as a society today. With the continuance of expanding technology and innovation, we are able to find more challenges surmountable even if we are unsure of just how to solve them.

One example is Millennium Development Goal 7: Ensure Environmental Sustainability. This was broken down into six different goals in the Sustainable Development Goals. These include Affordable and Clean Energy (7), Sustainable Cities and Communities (11), Responsible Consumption and Production (12), Climate Action (13), Life Below Water (14), and Life on Land (15). The expansion of this single goal under the MDGs into six separate goals with their own measurements and specified indicators under the SDGs at least shows our greater understanding of the issues our world faces today. At worst, we learned what needs to be fixed further and things that did not work under the MDGs. At best, we have a more clearly defined notion for the future of these works and are able to build off of and add to what was accomplished under the MDGs.

While this is an international idea about Grand Challenges that should be addressed, it was interesting to find the domestic take by looking at the White House website for Grand Challenges. It was down for maintenance and has been for at least a month and a half. While things like this are common under a new administration and the government tends to run slowly, Trump’s campaign was built off a series of his perceived Grand Challenges that have yet to appear on this site. Compared with the USAID take on Grand Challenges, which is very in depth and has specific examples they are working to fix, there is a disconnect. While Grand Challenges are inherently difficult, they are focused on because they are able to be solved in some way, even if that way is difficult and tiresome. But this distinction shows that one reason we have not worked as far towards accomplishing these things is because of a division of resources and focus. Before we are able to fix these things, agreements must be made about how to do so.

 

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The Grand Challenge of Disability and Development

“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people….We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” John F. Kennedy announced at Rice University on September 12th, 1962. And we did- America landed on the moon that same decade on July 20th, 1969. That is the original “moonshot thinking”, or the idea that we must tackle ambitious, impossible projects in order to create change.

“Grand Challenges” encapsulates moonshot thinking, although the term itself is credited to David Hilbert, who laid out 23 mathematical questions at the International Mathematical Congress in Paris in 1900.  Those original Grand Challenges detailed “technically complex societal problems that have stubbornly defied solution” (as defined by Lewis Branscomb) and challenged a cross-section of experts to work together on solutions.  While traditionally focusing on science and technology, Branscomb and others instead favor larger societally-focused projects. Their vision of the Grand Challenges conceptual framework has been embraced by USAID, the White House, and the UN. Examples of programs oriented on the Grand Challenges framework include the USAID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s partnership on Ensuring Effective Health Supply Chain as well as other USAID projects like Scaling Off Grid Energy, Combating Zika and Future Threats, and All Children Reading.

The Grand Challenge is Sustainable Development Goals and its preceding Millennium Development Goals. The Sustainable Development Goals are a 15 year plan to tackle Grand Challenges across 17 different issue areas established in 2015. This look at systemic challenges worldwide creates an alternative mindset to development. In fact, they have become key in defining how we think about program effectiveness by giving targets and indicators to meet. These goals provide a unifying framework for state and nonstate actors worldwide to enact progress.

The SDGs made the UN framework more inclusive by including the grand challenge of disability and development with eleven explicit references to persons with disabilities. This is important because it will guide behavior by states. This has been furthered by high level work such as the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2006 that shifted conceptual thinking from disabilities as a medical condition to a human right, which creates opportunities and higher equity for the traditionally marginalized 15% of every country’s population. This is an important step towards to true equality. While public policy focused on the inclusion of disabled persons may not spark the same initial general interest level as landing on the moon, it is surely a moonshot idea to radically shift how we think, talk, and create policy for this excluded group. This opens a window for a population whose potential contributions to society have been dismissed.