From Multisolving: Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World by Elizabeth Sawin. Copyright © 2024 Elizabeth Rachel Sawin. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 1 Multisolving: Promises and Obstacles (pages 1-6)
Some years ago, my colleagues and I began studying interventions that solve multiple problems at the same time. We found them everywhere, at both neighborhood and national scales and in every country we looked. We found them across sectors: in urban planning, health, agriculture, forestry, energy, transportation, and disaster management.
On the surface, these projects were all quite different, and the people undertaking them certainly didn’t think of themselves as using any special methodology. Still, we found that the projects had much in common with each other.
It would be helpful, we thought, to find a word that would categorize these diverse projects. It seemed to us that they had much to learn from each other and much to teach the world. We couldn’t find any word in use that quite captured these approaches and their potential impacts. So, we began to use the word multisolving.
We defined multisolving as using one investment of time, money, or energy to address multiple problems. Once you start looking, examples of multisolving are easy to find.
For example, when a city greens by increasing its number of parks, gardens, and trees, it addresses multiple problems. It improves the sense of well-being of residents. It reduces energy use for cooling and reduces the urban heat island effect, a burden of warming climates that disproportionately falls on marginalized communities. It can help reduce urban flooding by absorbing and slowing the flow of stormwater. That’s multisolving: the single solution of greening the city solves multiple problems.
Multisolving can also address problems that play out on different time scales. For instance, reducing burning of fossil fuels addresses the health impacts of air pollution in the near term and protects the climate for the long term.
Importantly, multisolving can address symptoms and root causes at the same time. That’s because so many of our current crises are the result of a worldview of disconnection and separation. Multisolving happens best when people adopt a worldview of interconnection. So, a community that comes together to address flooding, energy bills, and the impact of climate change on its most marginalized community members is addressing symptoms: flooding, economic hardship from energy costs, and high heat days. But by working together to benefit many issues at once, the community is also forging new relationships and working together in new, more connected ways. They are solving problems from a different frame of reference than the frame that created those problems.
Multisolvers around the world are showing us what might be possible if more of our efforts to address one problem could address several all at the same time. They’re demonstrating another way to steer systems in new directions, toward justice, health, equity, and sustainability.
In tumultuous times, we know we need to navigate short-term crises while also steering systems in a different direction for the long term. Multisolving is one powerful approach for that. And it’s available to us all.
Although our team began using the word multisolving in 2015, the idea of solving several problems with one effort is, of course, nothing new. I grew up hearing the adage “kill two birds with one stone.” While a little bit gruesome, the saying does convey the essence of multisolving. My grandmother, who raised her family through the Great Depression and the Second World War, was a great multisolver, out of necessity. Quilts kept the beds warm, but she could also use them to create a makeshift room around the wood stove to create a steamy spot and help her croupy baby breathe easier. The church suppers she helped organized fed people, raised money for the church, and helped maintain a sense of community.
The small farmers I know are master multisolvers. Scraps from the table become food for the pigs, solving a waste disposal problem and a cost-of-feeding-pigs problem. In his essay “Solving for Pattern,” Wendell Berry described the work of managing a successful farm as optimizing for many things rather than prioritizing just one:
“The farmer has put plants and animals into a relationship of mutual dependence, and must perforce be concerned for balance or symmetry, a reciprocating connection in the pattern of the farm that is biological, not industrial, and that involves solutions to problems of fertility, soil husbandry, economics, sanitation—the whole complex of problems whose proper solutions add up to health: the health of the soil, of plants and animals, of farm and farmer, of farm family and farm community, all involved in the same interested, interlocking pattern—or pattern of patterns.”
Permaculture practitioners refer to the principle of “stacking functions,” getting multiple types of use out of each element of a permaculture design, such as a plant that produces both food and fiber, or shade and food, or even all three. Permaculturist and author Toby Hemenway described this idea in a 2014 interview:
“Nature is marvelous at what we call ‘stacking functions,’ where if you have a conventional landscape designer, they may choose a tree for shade or fruit or, you know, a single function. And, if you look at what a tree is doing in any natural system, it is producing fruit, it is producing shade, the leaf litter is building soil, the roots are breaking up heavy soil, it is harvesting rain and channeling it somewhere. It is habitat for a zillion different kinds of creatures. And, that is the kind of thinking that permaculture recommends.”
Though not so named, the concept of multisolving is also a part of many Indigenous knowledge systems around the globe. In his book Native Science, Tewa author and professor Gregory Cajete describes the traditional planting techniques of some Indigenous peoples in North America:
“When soil was planted with the traditional ‘three sisters’ of corn, beans, and squash, with other native plants such as marigolds nearby, corn provided shade for the delicate beans and a stalk on which the vines of squash and beans could grow. The squash provide extensive ground cover, reducing weed habitat and weeding, and simultaneously shielding the soil from rain erosion while capturing a maximum of available rainfall. Beans fix nitrogen in the soil through their roots, and so improve fertility.”
This way of thinking may be common and ancient, but before our team began using the word, I couldn’t find a simple term that seemed to capture its essence.
At the time (and still today) one way to talk about projects that meet many goals is to refer to “co- benefits.” But co-benefits imply a “main” benefit. Often that main benefit is something global or something off in the distant future, like climate protection. Is climate protection the main benefit of closing a coal-fired power plant? Maybe, but if you are a parent to a child with asthma, the benefit of cleaner air might feel central, not “co-.”
Co-benefit language, perhaps unintentionally, implies a hierarchy of benefits, with the long-term and global often seeming more important than the short-term and local. The point of multisolving is that it doesn’t matter which benefit is core for you and which is core for me. If we can collaborate to accomplish both benefits, then that’s a win for both of us. One reason I like the word multisolving is that it frames all the benefits of a project as important. The word is a reminder that all the constituencies being served are important and puts all goals on equal footing. The word reminds us that we are all in this together.
Another advantage of the word multisolving is that it can be a verb. Multisolving is something you do, an action you take, as opposed to a result (like a co-benefit). The word itself is a good reminder that multisolving is a way of working one can cultivate and improve at over a lifetime.
Systems
Multisolving is an approach that is designed for complex systems. A system is an interconnected set of elements that function together. Your body is a system, of course. Within your body, your liver is also a system, and so is a liver cell. Book clubs are systems, as are neighborhoods, political parties, grassy meadows, and tide pools. Systems are complex. Often, they are highly interconnected. Their behaviors change as the connections within and between them change.
Your family is a system that influences both political and ecological systems. And of course, those political and ecological systems turn right around and influence your family.
Each of us is a system nested within multiple systems, subject to a vast array of interconnections. In fact, the cascading and converging of problems described in the Introduction stems from these interconnections.
Interconnections are why one problem can make another worse. A single crisis, via cascades and ripples of cause and effect, triggers others. Reinforcing feedback can amplify problems, which can then grow so large that they push systems across unexpected thresholds, giving rise to entirely new problems. The complexity of systems gives us plenty of good reasons to be concerned about problems interacting and amplifying each other.
But the highly interconnected nature of systems isn’t always bad news. It also means that, sometimes, a single intervention can set off ripples of connected solutions. Some problems become easier to solve when you tackle them together. One well-crafted intervention can solve many problems at the same time.
Notes: Multisolving: Promises and Obstacles
- Elizabeth Sawin, “The Magic of ‘Multisolving,’” July 18, 2018, https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_magic_of_multisolving#.
- Anuradha Varanasi, “What Are the Hidden Co-Benefits of Green Infrastruc- ture?” State of the Planet (blog), September 3, 2019, https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/09/03/hidden-benefits-green-infrastructure/.
- Paul R. Epstein, Jonathan J. Buonocore, Kevin Eckerle, Michael Hendryx, Benjamin M. Stout III, Richard Heinberg, Richard W. Clapp, et al., “Full Cost Accounting for the Life Cycle of Coal,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1219, no. 1 (February 2011): 73–98. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010.05890.x.
- Wendell Berry, “Solving for Pattern,” in The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays, Cultural and Agricultural (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1981),
- Toby Hemenway, “Toby Hemenway: Explaining Permaculture,” Resilient Life Podcast, May 14, 2014, https://peakprosperity.com/toby-hemenway-explaining-permaculture/.
- Gregory Cajete, “Plant, Food, Medicine, and Gardening,” in Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 2000), 142–43.
