A canvas for wild problems

1. Intro

There is a course property hiding in North Zealand. It's in Helsinge, and two years ago I drive up there in my old car.

Along the way, I wonder if I'll have to stand trial. Because the Prime Minister has invited me to speak to the circle of ministers and department heads following the publication of the book Entreprenørstaten - a book in which I grapple with society's inability to solve the wild problems of our time.

So are they mad at me in the government?

I enter Kursuscenter Bymose Hegn in Helsinge on the 10th floor, a place that needs a gentle cleaning and gives no indication that the power in Danish politics has entrenched itself here.

"Welcome," says Mette Frederiksen as she greets you in the low-ceilinged room.

"Can you teach us anything about solving problems?" a minister asks in passing on stage. "I can try," I mumble.

I walk on and look out over the circle of power and then say: "We are facing the paradox of modern democracy: the problems are getting wilder, while the solutions are getting tamer". I add in a slightly too high-pitched tone: "We need to rethink our democratic framework to address today's wild problems".

In Denmark, however, the paradox of modern democracy is quite new. Because since World War II, we have delivered an impressive leap in prosperity through patient problem solving. Denmark has overtaken many countries that we were on par with. This is because for several years we have been adept at solving so-called tame problems. That is, problems that are limited, understandable and where there is an obvious solution - think of the construction of road networks and nursing homes or the introduction of rights to pensions, schooling and hospital treatment.

Today, however, we are left with what I call wild problems. That is, problems that cannot be easily defined or solved by constructing a building, introducing a right or giving a bonus. In fact, much of what Danish politics is about right now, both locally and nationally: recruiting more people than we have, boosting productivity, tackling youth unhappiness or fixing the climate crisis. These problems are wild, and they are hard to get a grip on. They require something different from us - and here in Denmark, we are far from impressive in our problem solving.

We're in a situation where we're trying to solve the wild problems of the 21st century with 20th-century policy ideas and 19th-century political institutions. And it rarely goes very well. Because our ambition to address the wild problems often ends up with more rules and supervision, more control and coordination. Maybe because historically, in the 19th century, we built the tripartite system of power, a party system and a representative democracy. Perhaps because our policy ideas come from the 20th century, with a hierarchical chain of command based on a string of performance contracts and supervisory authorities, all designed to ensure that the money fits and the law holds when policy is pushed out from the center of power to citizens and businesses. All of this works well when we solve tame problems. But is it the answer to the wild problems of the 21st century?

In a situation where journalists, officials and politicians are running faster than ever, few have the time or incentive to look at how we tackle these wild problems. It's not out of ill will. Rather, it's because the wild problems are indeed wild, and it's easier to show decisiveness with a quick reform filled with pseudo-policy that falls far short of addressing the root of the wild.

When you get wild problems on the brain, it becomes relevant to (re)assess the democratic framework of the 19th century and the policy ideas of the 20th century - and then (re)visit the narratives embedded in our understandings of how political life plays out. So that's the topic of this chapter. Because the many futile attempts to address wild problems illustrate that they often require something different than the tame problems.

2. About wild and domesticated problems

In 1973, two researchers from Berkeley, California published a scientific paper that would prove to be highly influential. The two professors are Horst Rittel and Mel Webber, and they made a distinction between wicked problems (wicked) and tame problems (tame).

Rittel and Webber's contribution was ahead of its time. This is evidenced by the fact that the article was very little cited for the first 20 years after it was published. However, once the Cold War was over, the political agenda shifted. The focus shifted to stubborn societal problems such as climate, unhappiness, public health, poverty, crime, integration and many others that stood out as difficult to solve. This suddenly happened during the 1990s and sparked interest in Rittel and Webber's work. Today, their article has over 500 annual citations - quite an impressive number. Still, it's important to critically examine their dichotomy between wicked and tame problems if we are to use their insights in Denmark when trying to tackle today's problems. There are three main reasons why I've chosen to redefine wicked problems as wild problems.

My first and most important criticism of Rittel and Webber is their failure to recognize the political context in which a problem is played out. In other words, the vastly different political pools that a problem appears in over time. Rittel and Webber had very little faith that social problems could be solved - because the problems were too complex for policy to be implemented with rigorous planning from the desks of the state. But Rittel and Webber do not take sufficient account of the fact that the political situation can change and have a major impact on the opportunity space. Basically, the political pool can change from election year to election year, from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, from policy to policy. Consider, for example, how climate and public schools in Denmark have gone from conflict to consensus, from red pool to green pool, so that society's actors help to achieve a higher degree of collective problem solving.

You could say that Rittel and Webber's article was influenced by their time. They wrote the article at a time when a technically tame problem could be solved in the natural sciences and thus get us to the moon in 1969 with NASA as whip. Conversely, social science could not solve the 'evil' problem of urban poverty in the US, even though President Johnson had attempted major reforms under the title The Great Society. When Rittel first used the term wicked problems in 1967 at a conference at the Department of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, it was in response to the question of whether NASA's space approach could be applied to political solutions. The short answer from Rittel was no.

A few years later, Rittel and Webber put their money where their mouth is and wrote that in this sense, these unsolvable wicked problems concern: "Virtually all public policy areas". But this interpretation is too strong in my opinion. Rittel and Webber's interpretation of wicked problems is too wicked in its view of what can be done, big and small, in the political arena to counter wild problems. This is why I choose to use the term wicked problems. The term wicked problems brings to mind something unapproachable and unsolvable, which can scare many actors away from even confronting a wicked problem.

My second criticism is that a sharp dichotomy between wicked and tame doesn't make sense in a political reality where many problems tend to move on a sliding scale. For example, a binary choice makes little sense to a municipal official who wants to assess whether public health or youth unhappiness is an evil (wild) problem. Rather, the story is that they are both wicked (wild), but that one is probably harder to deal with than the other due to lack of policy solutions or uncertainty about causality. And only when we can describe these factors in more detail can we translate it into action. Namely, that there may be more knowledge missing about youth unhappiness than there is about public health. Or vice versa. In this light, I want to introduce a continuum - unlike Rittel and Webber's dichotomy - with clear opposites. I propose a sliding scale from tame to wild.

Third, I want to define wicked problems more simply and usefully than the ten points set out by Rittel and Webber to capture a wicked problem. I draw on researcher N.C. Roberts, who zooms in on problem-related aspects and solution-related aspects. This leads to my minimal definition of wicked problems as: Problems where there is varying degrees of lack of consensus on the definition of the problem itself and varying degrees of lack of consensus on solutions. With this minimal definition, which should encompass most perceptions of wild problems, sub-classifications can be made that are more specific a la super-international wild problems or politically conflictual wild problems.

With these three critiques as a backdrop, I spend the rest of the chapter showing that enterprising practitioners, as the scholar John Kingdon calls policy entrepreneurs - that is, practitioners ranging from politicians, civil servants, business leaders, funders and civil society actors - have always acted in different situations or rather policy pools, as I call them. I think it needs to be emphasized much more than Rittel and Webber did that it is just as important to look at the pool in which the wild problem is played out as at the wild problem itself. In this way, it is clear that Rittel, who invented the concept of wicked problems back in 1967 when he taught architecture and design, looks more at the nature of the problem, while I as a political scientist orient myself more contextually towards the political pool in which the problem is played out.

3. The green pool

I will argue that politics today is presented as a game between rational individuals in a hierarchical organization. In other words, the baggage we have from the 19th and 20th centuries. However, for most of human history, politics has actually alternated between different political states - what I call pools. I define a pool (green, blue or red, as we shall see) as the atmosphere that surrounds the current political situation. In a pool there is a set of conscious and unconscious rules for (a) how people behave 'correctly' in political actions and (b) what the 'right' political organization should look like for a society to be maintained or changed.

I look through history and see at least three political pools. A green pool based on cooperation and preferably horizontal organization, whose prevalence and importance in political history has sometimes been underestimated. A blue pool, which is the most common today and, as mentioned, is based on rational individuals and hierarchical organization. And then a red pool based on relationships and raw power, where the most fearsome survive.

Life in the green pool has existed for many thousands of years, which is often forgotten today when looking beyond the political reality, where the blue and red pools seem more prevalent. With this in mind, I'm devoting a few extra pages to this green pool with the help of disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology, neurobiology and evolutionary psychology. This is because there is scepticism among many decision-makers about whether a political-administrative system can deliver collaborative problem solving (green pool) when people can be cruel (red) or self-interested (blue) and when societies can be managed more simply through fear (red) and hierarchy (blue). In what follows, I will show that the green pool view of people and society, as well as the blue and red pools, has produced great results. And that far from there being any social laws about (A) society and (B) people that should hold us back from using the Green Pool to deal with wild problems when the situation calls for it. Quite the contrary.

(A) The community in the green pool

In 1994, German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt began excavating a colossal complex of shrines in southeastern Turkey. Before long, he found beautifully carved T-shaped columns weighing over 20 tons placed in a particular pattern. Imagine Stonehenge; only much wilder.

After years of excavations, the researchers wanted to determine when the whole thing was built - and now they got a huge surprise. It turned out that the shrine was over 11,000 years old. And that was remarkable, because at that time we lived in a hunter-gatherer society without a strong central state that could impose decisions through logistics, leadership and a good deal of forced labor. At least that's what we've believed for many years.

The shrine Schmidt found is called Göbekli Tepe (the pointed-bellied hill) and was a hub of knowledge and prosperity at the time. According to researchers, it is an example of a collective work event. Thousands of nomads, pilgrims, hunters, gatherers and other good people came from near and far with different skills. And together they realized the impressive structure that now stands as perhaps the oldest shrine in the world. When construction was complete, they celebrated with a big party where they ate grilled gazelles, as you can tell by the excavation of huge amounts of bone remains from their 'barbecue party'.

For policy entrepreneurs to solve tomorrow's wild problems, perhaps the cure is to think more like Turkey of the past. Maybe we need to go back to the future. In Göbekli Tepe, the various players came together in probably the first large and well-developed partnership in world history. But what made it work? A storytelling, a common language. Yes, a particular mindset around which the players could converge. In earlier times, it was often a more religious framework that tied everything together; a form of prehistoric storytelling, according to researchers who have studied Göbekli Tepe. We'll take a closer look at this in the following.

But first we need to understand that the discovery of Göbekli Tepe and other recent excavations force us to recreate the narrative of what drives change in a society. Prominent scientists like Jared Diamond and Francis Fukuyama have argued that when more people gather in cities and states, only hierarchical political systems solve problems by getting people to move in step. Look at the pyramids in Egypt or the terracotta army in China, which required a strong hand in the side of hundreds of thousands of (forced) laborers. This has been the doctrine behind the construction of political-administrative systems we have in the Western world. It's what Hobbes described as a Leviathan that kept the hordes in check.

However, the standard myth also points out that in smaller societies, as formulated by Rousseau, cooperation can occur without a Leviathan ruling and deciding. Diamond writes that "as recently as 11,000 years ago", human life consisted of people living in small groups, often related to each other and living a miserable existence by "hunting and gathering whatever game and plants there were". They roamed, according to Diamond, in an egalitarian road trip that just didn't make progress because no strong political organization could be established in small nomadic communities.

As we saw, Göbekli Tepe is also dated to 11,000 B.C.E. So we now know that Diamond's interpretation is not quite right. And it gets even more complicated. Fukuyama also continues down the historian's one-way street. He argues that the rise of agriculture meant that human organization went from herds to tribes. We became sedentary and thus power-focused to share in agricultural food surpluses. Now humanity abandoned its innocence and started wars and created hierarchies, just as Hobbes had predicted. Before long, the chief of the tribes had persuaded his subjects to call him king. The history leading up to today's political organization is seemingly inescapable:

"Large populations cannot function without leaders who make the decisions, authorities who implement the decisions and officials who administer the decisions and laws."

Thus writes Diamond and continues to those who wish for a flatter organization a la Rousseau:

"You must find a tiny group or tribe that is willing to accept you, where everyone knows everyone, and where kings, presidents and officials are not needed."

Today we know that a causal chain from large societies to hierarchical political organization is far from accurate. Recent research in an alliance between anthropology and archaeology suggests that our past looks quite different. It was neither Rousseau nor Hobbes. It was much more diverse. For example, in 2022, researchers Singh and Glowacki published an impressive study looking at 34 different societies at the time Diamond and Fukuyama describe. The researchers' analysis points out that: "social organization has been much more diverse than predicted by the classical nomadic-egalitarian model". All of this is an important lesson in tackling savage problems today, because it is utterly mind-expanding that both large and small communities can appear in all three pools.

Danish historian and Assyriologist Thorkild Jacobsen already knew and showed this in 1943 when he published the scientific article "Primitive Democracy in Ancient Mesopotamia". There just weren't many people listening in other fields of research. Perhaps it is Jacobsen's term "primitive democracy" that has kept people away. There is nothing to suggest that the political organization was simple or even primitive. It just wasn't hierarchical in the first 1000 years of Mesopotamia's urban life from 3500 BC - a place that, paradoxically, in our modern consciousness is referred to as the Kingdom of Kings, and which the Bible texts have popularized.

Today, many have built on Jacobsen's insights. The researchers point out that life in Mesopotamia was characterized by elected councils, citizen assemblies, and continued to be locally self-organized - even after there were rulers in central monarchies: "District assemblies participated actively in local administration [...] Murder cases, divorce cases and property disputes seem mostly to have been the domain of city councils." The city of Uruk is believed to have been home to up to 50,000 people in 3000 BC. Similar examples can be found among the Olmec (Central America) and Chavin (South America). These were not hunter-gatherer societies, as Diamond and Fukuyama would probably assume from the political organization, but rather large machines that were organized on partially horizontal facets, where the development and organization of society was not just a matter for officials.

However, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar is still not entirely convinced that wildlife problems can be solved in the green pool. And with him many others who are building on his research. Dunbar has developed a concept with his own name: Dunbar's numbers. Based on studies of primate brain size and average social group size, he concludes that we can have 150 stable relationships. Or as Dunbar puts it: "The number of people you wouldn't feel embarrassed to join for a drink if you happened to meet them in a bar". It sets images in motion. Dunbar believes that when you get over 150 relationships, conflicts will arise because there's no longer a kinship bond and you need an administrative class to keep track of things.

The response that has challenged this otherwise established research in recent years is still resounding. Many people are just as interested in other people as they are in their own family, which most people would probably agree with in their quiet minds. And when given the choice, we often prefer to spend time with people other than our family. Recent studies of contemporary (residential) groups from Tanzania to Australia show that they do not appear to consist of biological relatives. Similarly, research into genes from the past points to similar trends in the hunter-gatherer era. So, unlike apes, humans can imagine being with more than 150 people who are not from our wider family tree. This means that humans can engage in large collective work events such as in Göbekli Tepe 11,000 years ago.

The same is true today in large companies like Patagonia, FAVI, Morning Star, RHD and, more specifically for this book, in a welfare case study with Buurtzorg, the Dutch home care organization that has over 10,000 employees but no managers! Buurtzorg is run by more than 800 self-governing teams of 10-12 people who provide award-winning care to the elderly through shared knowledge, 'belief systems' and specific practices. The big question is: What is it that makes humans have this propensity in this green pool to work with others that we are not related to? The answer to this question began in Neander Valley.

(B) People in the green pool

In August 1856, something surprising happens in the Neander Valley. It takes place at a limestone quarry near Düsseldorf, where two miners are digging away. Suddenly, they find a skull and several bones, and it turns out that they have made a discovery that will be crucial for mankind. The bones and skull are picked up, but the mine owner thinks they are just from a cave bear and hands them over to Johann Carl Fuhlrott, a local schoolteacher with a passion for bones. Apparently a common diversion in these parts.

However, the bone man Fuhlrott soon discovers that the bones are very old as they are highly mineralized. Likewise, the skull cap reveals large eyebrow arches and a low forehead; the other bones are unusually thick and robust - all of which is different from humans today. Fuhlrott contacts Professor Hermann Schaaffhausen from the University of Bonn. They meet and the professor believes that the bones are neither from a great ape nor from a modern human, but from a completely different species of human. Schaaffhausen believes that it might be: "the oldest memory of the earliest inhabitants of Europe".

However, the time is not ripe for this kind of ancient music. Darwin's book on the origin of species was not published until three years later in 1859. So at a meeting on February 4, 1857 at the Rhineland Medical and Natural History Society in Bonn, eyebrows are as arched as the skull from Neander Valley. No one really wants to believe what they actually have in their hands.

The criticism continues in the following time from a British colleague of Schaaffhausen. From the curved back bones, the Brit believes he can determine that it is simply a riding Russian Cossack from the Napoleonic Wars that has simply lost its way. Other imaginative interpretations suggest that it's just a poor local hermit who has stumbled into the valley.

Today we know that on that day in August 1856, our own human species, Homo sapiens, found a different species than our own. Namely Homo neanderthalensis. Until recently, the general perception has been that Neanderthals were a bunch of weirdos, but the story is not that simple. And that's interesting for our own time's ability to tackle wild problems. Because we know that Neanderthals were not only stronger than us with their thick bones and jaws, but actually smarter too. In fact, their brains were about 15% larger than ours.

The question arises: Why is it Homo sapiens who built welfare states, while Homo neanderthalensis lie like bones in museums? In other words: What is it first and foremost (I) in the evolutionary winning strategy for us, Homo sapiens, that has brought us this far? - And secondly, what can it (II) teach us about solving wild problems in the future?

(I) The first part of this question was one that a Russian professor specializing in genetics would - quite unwittingly - answer 100 years after the Neanderthal discovery. Professor Belyayev of Moscow State University had a bold hypothesis about human evolution: that we are domesticated apes, where the friendliest did best by building language, relationships and forms of cooperation.

This is where it gets interesting for us and the wild problem solving. Because maybe it could explain why we as humans are able to collaborate, while Neanderthals walked around separately with their big muscles and brains, but could not form strong bonds to solve problems. So when a freezing ice age or a scorching volcano hit Europe many thousands of years ago, Homo sapiens were much better equipped because we found solutions together, while Neanderthals went extinct because they couldn't cooperate.

Belyayev needs a helper to test his hypothesis. In 1958, a young Moscow student, Lyudmila Trut, arrives at the professor's office and offers her help. He makes it clear that this is a secret and dangerous experiment, as research and especially genetics are in 'bad standing' in the communist Soviet Union. Trut accepts anyway. Little does she know that this yes means that she and Belyayev will go on to solve the riddle of human evolution's winning strategy.

Before long, Trut is on a train heading to Siberia, where Belyayev has set up his experiments far away from government surveillance in Moscow. Belyayev has a concrete idea to test his hypothesis in the cold east. "He told me he wanted to make a dog out of a fox," as Trut described it many years later. In short: They took a lot of aggressive silver foxes in Siberia, and Trut would continuously select the friendliest ones and breed from them. That way, they could speed up the evolution of their experiments and see what happened to the cooperative foxes.

When the experiment was in its fourth generation in 1964, Trut saw the first fox wagging its tail and several of them had become playful. Suddenly they could talk (bark) and engage in relationships (exchange signals). There were also obvious physical changes. Their tails curled, their snouts became shorter, and now they responded when the zookeeper called their name, which they had never done before. The foxes had been domesticated at lightning speed into something resembling good-natured dogs.

In 1978, the Russian government suddenly took a different view of research. And there was a wild discovery in the snowy land of Siberia that the world had to hear about. The International Genetics Conference is held in Moscow in August that year. All participants are welcomed with Russian bubbly and caviar in the grand Kremlin Palace.

And then Belyayev starts his lecture. He shows pictures of something very strange: a wagging silver fox. He explains that he thinks it's due to hormones. That the bred friendly foxes secrete less stress hormones (red pool) and more oxytocin (green pool) - a hormone that is somewhat pompously called a love hormone. And the theory can "of course also be applied to humans", says Belyayev.

If Belyayev is right, we should be able to see it in humans. And a group of researchers have since looked into it. They have looked at human skulls from the last 200,000 years and confirm a trend towards gentler facial expressions and body structure. Something more feminine and young: our jaws and teeth have become more childlike or pedomorphic, as the researchers describe it.

When we compare the evolution with Neanderthals, it is clear that we are getting rounder skulls. This evolution took off about 50,000 years ago. Interestingly, at the same time that Neanderthals disappeared and we invented bows, fishing line and grinding stones. But how does it make sense that we're still here when our brains became smaller and our bodies more childlike? Indeed, how can this evolutionary development help us solve wild problems?

(II) This leads us to the second part of the question I posed earlier. A question Brian Hare was able to answer in 2017 by zooming in on our intelligence. He is an American professor of evolutionary anthropology and he published the scientific article "Survival of the Friendliest: Homo Sapiens Evolved via Selection for Prosociality" in 2017 in the renowned journal Annual Review of Psychology.

Professor Hare had heard about the experiment with the hardy silver foxes in Siberia. Hare's focus was on intelligence, not least how it changes over time, and he was keen to do an intelligence test on both wild and domesticated foxes to see if there was a difference. In 2003, Hare went on a wondrous journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway. By the time he arrived, the fox trial had produced 45 generations. It's fair to say that Trut and co. had wasted no time in the last few decades.

Hare conducted his intelligence tests and interestingly enough, the tame foxes were much smarter than the aggressive foxes. Hare therefore concludes that intelligence must be an essential by-product of friendliness - hence the title of the study "Survival of the Friendliest". In later research, he extends his thesis to humans: The evolution of Homo sapiens is again due to extreme selection for kindness, which led to domestication. This process led to physiological changes with more oxytocin and morphological changes with rounder heads, smaller teeth, smoothing of the arch of the eyebrow and the emergence of the whites of our eyes that make it easier to see what people are thinking and feeling, which is not the case for other primates. Hare's studies have caused a stir in the scientific community, who would like to see more studies that support his far-reaching conclusions. This has happened recently, with other researchers backing Hare's findings.

All this is interesting for us today. Because this evolution in human neurobiology and physical appearance is leading to a change in human social cognition that is enhanced with strong collaboration and communication capabilities. Consider something as simple as how much we now use our eyebrows or eyes to signal what we mean when we communicate. This evolution turns Homo sapiens into learning machines that are not inherently smarter than Neanderthals, quite the opposite. On the other hand, we learn from each other, so when one human has developed a fishing rod or a language - the rest of us follow suit, even though many of us are not so brilliant that we could invent something ourselves.

Professor Hare believes that human evolution has rewarded prosocial behavior in the reproductive race over many thousands of years. "With foxes we're up to about 50 generations of selection, but with humans over the last 50,000 years of evolution the number is much higher.

If we now collect the pieces from both societies and people over the last many thousands of years in the green pool, it becomes clear that the world is quite complex. When we talk more generally about the long history of humanity, many people have an image of a chessboard with empires, city-states and kingdoms that were almost constantly in a vicious Hobbesian war with each other in the red or blue pool. However, these organizations were only small islands of political hierarchy in a world with many more horizontally organized societies in the green pool, taking care of the lives of many thousands of people and running large projects and plans that solved problems. Maybe even wild problems. The interesting thing is that we don't know as much about these societies in the green pool as we do about the others in the red and blue pools. Take the Egypt of the pharaohs, the Uruk of Mesopotamia or the China of Shang. They are all described in detail with their strict rules, bureaucracies and forced labor.

It is thus thought-provoking to dwell on why we are rarely presented with prehistoric examples of alternative organizations to the political hierarchy in the blue or the fear-based organizations in the red pool. Could it be because we mirror today's Western societies in the past? Take Egypt, for example. Most people who have visited the country's national museum are familiar with the division into the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms. These realms are separated by so-called intermediate periods, often described as chaotic, culturally and politically. However, this was more about the fact that there was no single ruler over Egypt, so power was dispersed locally, but many great achievements were actually made during these intermediate periods.

In their work The Beginning of Everything from 2022, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow argue that these in-between periods suddenly become the interesting periods. At least if we are looking for inspiration today to expand our horizons to tackle wild problems in the green pool. Because those periods in history with relatively high levels of freedom, equality and experimental forms of local political organization are often described as transitional phases. They are therefore nothing in themselves, even though these periods produced equally interesting architectural expressions, social arrangements, technological advances or works of art.

Our imagination is thus dulled as soon as we have to think of alternatives to mafia-like red organization or a state hierarchical blue organization, because we have learned that the green pool's antics do not work in large societies. We now know that the world is more nuanced after our tour of the latest knowledge from anthropologists to archaeologists to geneticists in their efforts to map human inclinations.

One person who has known this for a long time is Elinor Ostrom. She has won the Nobel Prize in Economics and has tried to formulate how to act in the green pool. Her starting point is "the commons" - a common property, which I will understand very broadly here. That is, a place where actors come together to solve a problem. Ostrom has looked at examples of all kinds of commons: "from commons in Switzerland and cultivated land in Japan to shared irrigation in the Philippines". Ostrom and her colleagues collected over 5000 examples of successful common property. Many of them exist today and have done so for many years, such as water reservoirs in Nepal. Here we see that community ownership works better than what the government implemented top-down with all kinds of engineering power. In fact, professors Grønnegaard Christensen and Bjerre Mortensen use the Nepal example to formulate their criticism of rapid Danish reforms. Another example is the fishermen in Alanya who draw lots for fishing rights, or the so-called team organization at Buurtzorg in the Netherlands, which is being tested by many municipalities, not least Ikast-Brande Municipality. In the elderly care sector in Jutland, they have started to let the nursing staff lead themselves, creating self-organization in everything from planning visits to prioritizing tasks and involving relatives, for example.

Derek Wall has laid out a number of design principles in his 2017 book, Elinor Ostrom's Rules for Radicals: Cooperative Alternatives Beyond Markets and States. Among other things, he mentions that Ostrom has shown that a successful commons requires a clear overview of who can use the commons, a minimum level of self-determination, an effective control system against cheating, and that the rules of the commons must be adapted to the local context and respected by the government.

The rest of this book's chapters are packed with examples of how, over time, actors come together in the green pool when an opportune moment makes it possible. Whether it's through organizing missions in a portfolio approach to tackle mental wellbeing, organizing in partnerships to tackle the toughest problems in schools, systemic leadership in crime prevention or co-creating local climate solutions. There is a wealth of possibilities that create a different kind of organizing than the one we often know from both the red and blue pools.