There seems to be an inverse relationship between the magnitude of the problems facing the world (pretty darn massive) and the apparent solutions offered by many politicians and progressive policy advocates (not nearly meeting the moment, and even worse, perpetuating it with their system compliant fixes).
Responses are often focused on amelioration and helping people and planet survive and cope with the shocks and blows and buffeting winds of today.
This work is an important response to immediate need, there can be no debating that.
But it’s not enough.
One of the reasons that problems persist is that they are responded to after they happen, whack-a-mole style, rather than at their roots. They are downstream responses, not upstream actions: they are constantly about pulling people out of a river downstream rather than stopping them falling in in the first place, upstream.
With my colleague Liz Grant, I have laid out some of the practical reasons for the prevalence of downstream focus, exploring why upstream work is so challenging. But there are some very human, even emotional reasons that are worth acknowledging too, because in being acknowledged, they have more chance of being addressed.
Difference between downstream and upstream
First, it is worth noting what I’m referring to when I use terms such as downstream responses and upstream work at the root causes of problems. Heading upstream means exploring the root causes of a challenge as opposed to treating the symptoms. It means the systems and contexts behind the challenge can be teased out and appropriate solutions identified: such as the circumstances people live in, the control and agency they are able to exert, the choices they are able to make, and barriers (and people and interests) that mitigate their flourishing.
And these circumstances, control, agency, choices and barriers are almost always an outcome of the economy. Going upstream therefore requires recognising that many challenges communities are grappling with today – floods, bushfires, food insecurity, homelessness, loneliness, suicide and so on and so on – have roots in how the economy is approached (mindsets), designed (policy instruments), and delivered (outcomes).
This is despite ample evidence about the social determinants of health, of how poverty and inequality constrain people’s options, and how the structure of the economy is linked to environmental damage. So going upstream to the economy inevitably requires shifting away from the way the economy is currently conceptualised, assessed, and impacts people and planet to an economy that serves people and planet.
What upstream entails in terms of work
Working as far upstream as the economy isn’t easy. It is a certain type of work that requires:
- Challenging powerful folk that benefit from business as usual and confronting powerful institutions that lock in business as usual
- Investing in relationships, often with people you might disagree with on many matters
- Eschewing the tangibility and credit of visible and more immediate progress
- Calling for new ways of doing things that are, by definition, unproven and hence often seen as impossible
- Holding a bigger picture, when the expertise that is most understood and acknowledged (let alone appreciated) comes from deeper and often narrower knowledge
- Being told you are being naïve and unrealistic
- Slugging away for mindset shifts and long-term change
How it feels upstream
This type of work can bring with it some tough personal reactions and emotional responses (noting that these are just how I have felt at various time, but in talking to others, I suspect I am not alone):
- Lonely and an outsider
- Marginalised and small
- Scunnered
- At sea
- Lacking a sense of individual efficacy
Why working upstream is hard
There are a range of reasons why working upstream is harder on a personal level, not just a practical level (though typing these words I realise the distinction is probably rather flimsy in reality).
Let’s run with the metaphor of a river mentioned above: upstream is where there is less water, and often more rocks and obstacles, and they are closer to the surface. The water is therefore choppier and hard to see through. In contrast, downstream is where the water is calmer, the river often deeper (there’s more of it) and the water is clearer because there are less rocks and obstacles getting in the way, and if they are there, they are out of harm’s way.
How this plays out is that working downstream feels steadier, part of larger community, operating withing a better funded metaphorical boat with the life-rafts of job security, and so less overwhelming and at less risk of capsizing.
Another reason is that it is natural to gravitate towards work that goes with the grain; to operate within the art of the possible; and to ‘paint what you see’. This means people often constrain their ideas and stances to what they think is feasible to obtain in the short term, and in the current paradigm.
The problem is, something might be attainable and immediately actionable, but it isn’t necessarily sufficient or adequate in the face of the depth and impact of the challenges society and our planet faces. Such response might offer greater potential of tangible ‘wins’ and quantifiable impact (and the basis for evidence-based policy), but rarely do they bring the scope for system change to the extent and depth of challenges require.
Something might be realistic because it has been done before, but that’s a problem when what has been done before hasn’t been enough.
Reinforcing the pull to downstream work is the unsafety prevailing institutions present to working upstream. The spaces in which many decision-makers work are designed in ways that undermine conditions for breaking out of the status quo, instead creating risk for those who might otherwise seek to challenge and change business as usual, let alone to help build a new paradigm. Think, for example, of:
- Individual promotion at work is often based on “successful innovation”, which creates a bias towards the status quo
- How oppositional politics, Parliamentary Committee hearings, and media ‘gotchya’ moments up the stakes for failing
- The way that quarterly reporting for companies and income linked to share price for CEOs undermines longer term focus
- Short term impact reporting when we need long term ‘cathedral thinking’.
All of this adds up to a reinforcement of BAU as system compliant fixes are easier and safer than systemic change at the roots of a problem.
Conclusion: what can be done?
Despite these challenges, getting to work on the upstream economic roots of today’s challenges is a privilege. Not least because it inevitably is about working in community: no single person can make much of a difference in attending to the root causes of the challenges people and the planet face, so collaboration and movements are essential. For example, while doctors can prescribe a pill, it will take a mosaic movement to tackle the circumstances that give rise to much mental and physical ill-health. And that is something to be embraced and revelled in.
Working on the upstream economic roots also offers the scope to find other sources of efficacy, for example by noticing way markers, instead of waiting to get to the winner’s podium (because in upstream work, there is no such thing). The alternative is to cherish the very real buzz that comes from learning from and working together with people sharing a sense of the task at hand and wanting to do so collectively.
Finally, I want to share some of the ideas that came from a gathering I was lucky to be part of in London back in 2017. The report that it generated is called a Wayfinders Guide to Systems Transformation. The group wrote that they
…had all been through times of professional loneliness and impatience, times of the exhilaration [of] witnessing a ‘window open’ or minds changed, and we all shared the sense that this work is vital if the future is going to be one of human and ecological wellbeing.
They shared tips such as:
- Start with trust
- Invite ‘the others’
- Vulnerability is bravery
- Relationships are the unit of change
- Hold a convenor mindset
- Co-create ‘with’ not ‘for’
- Go for a big vision
- Naivety is a skill
- Stay standing
- It’s ok to be strategic
Now, almost ten years on, I would add one more: embrace compassion as a methodology for system change.
* With thanks to the brilliant team at Neighbourhood Economics for their useful comments on a previous draft of this piece
