This paper identifies eight strategic challenges and crises facing governments around the world, and outlines pathways by which these problems can be turned into opportunities for transformation. These transformations were selected based on an analysis of the components of the “polycrisis” we face and the macro-level trends shaping the global environment. From these dynamics, we identified a set of challenges for which genuine transformation is most likely to be feasible at the national and multilateral levels for a wide range of countries. 

Each chapter examines a specific challenge; identifies a potential pathway to solving it; surveys the obstacles to that solution; and proposes a transformation – i.e., an approach to using the causal machinery of the challenge itself to create a self-sustaining path to progress. By directly taking on the causal structure of the challenges facing their citizens – and by enlisting those citizens in transforming the challenges into opportunities – government leaders can unleash the vast power of human agency that is currently blocked in so much of the world by resignation, despair, and civic disengagement, creating new solution-centered renaissances in their communities, countries, and indeed the world.