"If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we end poverty?"

If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we end poverty? This has been debated in various forms ever since the US accomplished their historic moon landing in 1969 (Fishman, 2019). However, while both problems appear highly ambitious, they can be unambiguously distinguished.  Whereas the challenge of the Apollo 11 mission entailed clear technical and organizational boundaries, the global social aspect of poverty alleviation aggravates solution formulation; let alone defining the problem itself (Kuhlmann & Rip, 2014; van Tulder, 2018). Such global social problems have been referred to as grand challenges (GCs) within academic literature and gained emerging interest across organizational theory (e.g. George et al., 2016). Apart from the sheer size GCs entail, organizational scholars have defined various criteria to illustrate the differences between GCs and other social or organizational phenomena (Ferraro et al., 2015). By examining poverty among young adults within developed countries, several criteria are described in the following. Why the GC resist attempts to its solving is further analyzed.  

Firstly, GCs are evaluative (Ferraro et al., 2015). Due to people’s different backgrounds and views, there is not an unmistakable truth on how a GC and the underlying problem is understood (Partnerships Resource Centre, 2016). If a unified problem definition is already difficult, formulating a solution is almost impossible (van Tulder 2018). Such varying understandings become apparent, when examining definitions of poverty (Sarlo, 2019). While large parts of the world define poverty in absolute terms–meeting the basic needs for a decent life–developed economies such as the EU have implemented the understanding of relative poverty, comparing the income or belongings of individuals/households across the society they are embedded within (Duffy, 2020; Sarlo, 2019). Nevertheless, despite preferring the term of relative poverty, absolute poverty does not disappear across the EU (Duffy, 2020). E.g., Dutch studies on poverty examine both criterion with diverging numbers (Hoff et al., 2019). The differentiating perseverance of poverty also continues across Dutch households. As of 2009, 58% of the Dutch population felt that poverty is widespread within their country, while 40% thought the opposite (European Commission, 2010). Hereby, studies have shown that particularly financial backgrounds shape the view on how poverty is perceived. Those that already struggle to make financial ends meet, have a higher probability of perceiving poverty as   a   widespread   problem   than   those   with   a   favorable   financial   situation (European Commission, 2010). Consequently, even if there are objective facts leading the way, subjective representations frame the evaluative understanding of poverty (Ferraro et al., 2015). 

Second, GCs are interrelated (Partnerships Resource Centre, 2016). People living in poverty in the Netherlands are more prone to face health concerns and achieve lower educational degrees (Akkermans et al., 2019). At the same time people with low education levels and those with health issues are exposed among the highest risk of falling into long-term poverty (Sarlo, 2019). Furthermore, studies show that young adults with low education levels have recently experienced the greatest increase of poverty in developed European countries (Akkermans et al.,  2019).Reasons for  this  include rising  costs  within  the  private  renting  sectors,  of  which proportionally  more  young  adults  live  within.  In addition, young adults comparably have the lowest median income across the working groups, and thus, are most vulnerable for changes affecting their societal livelihood (Aldridge, 2015).  Hence, reciprocal feedbacks across interrelated elements within a social system need to be considered, when addressing poverty (Van Tulder, 2018). 

Furthermore, GCs cannot  be  tackled  independently  and therefore  need collaborative efforts(George et al., 2016).While different stakeholders such as governments or organizations that address poverty may have varying interests, the sole action of single actors oftentimes only tackles the symptom, rather than the cause and can even exacerbate the underlying problem(Partnership  Resource  Centre,  2016;  Stroh,  2015).Realizing  that  institutional  change  of poverty alleviation is only possible through joint efforts is therefore vital (Ferraro et al., 2015).Recognizing this,  the Dutch government  has brought  a  collaborative  cooperation  between schools, organizations, and  municipalities  into  life  to  combat  poverty of  children  and  young adults (Rijksoverheid, 2020). Additionally, GCs are continuous (Partnerships Resource Centre, 2016). Every solution is imperfect in terms of that improvements are always possible, simultaneously leading to uncertainty and longevity of GCs (Ferraro et al., 2015; van Tulder, 2018). When trying to address poverty among young adults, stakeholders only have a certain set of known facts to consider (Ferraro et al, 2015).  However, multiple elements remain unknown and unpredictable (van Tulder, 2018). Can future preferences and consequences be predicted? While this might be the case for stable systems, dynamic changes through systemic shocks such as the current corona crises remain largely unpredictable (van Zanten & van Tulder, 2020). Although the Dutch government acknowledges that the crisis has hit hardest the most vulnerable, measures that have been taken to address poverty of young adults remain largely the same as before (despite an increase of over all measures). Nevertheless, the effectiveness of these measures in the long run remains highly uncertain (Malgesini, 2020; Rijksoverheid, 2020).  

However, if these criteria are known, why can’t the GC be solved? One reason is the conventional thinking approach with which stakeholders have tried to address poverty (Stroh, 2015). Instead of enabling needed structural change, multiple solutions focus on symptoms rather than the root causes of the problem (Stroh, 2015). Rather than taking historical interdependencies into account through which western cultures actions led to several causes of poverty in developing countries, some NGOs frame the poor as victims, emphasizing western aid as solution (Kennedy, 2009). Furthermore, welfare has long been understood to be the solution tackling poverty in developed economies (Sarlo, 2019). Recent studies, however, have put this into question, proposing that welfare does not only not tackle poverty, but is even one of the main enablers (Sarlo, 2019). Such maladaptive actions do not have to be intentional, rather stakeholders addressing poverty might focus on the wrong temporal or spatial scales to identify the root causes of the problem (Bansal et al., 2018). Due to governments in developed economies becoming increasingly intertwined, their approaches on tackling grand challenges such as poverty have started to scale up, hampering the identification of latent local issues even more (Bansal et al., 2018). As poverty differs greatly due to local aspects and variations, a small-scale attentional focus seems to be better fitted, when addressing relational poverty (Bansal et al., 2018; Sarlo, 2019). Conclusively, a more holistic approach in terms of systems thinking may encourage stakeholders to start seeing that changes in poverty do not happen in a vacuum (Williams et al., 2019). Instead focusing on short-term output, stakeholders addressing poverty need to be aware of the long-term consequences their activities imply on a socio-ecological level. Systems thinking can support governments and organizations in identifying the root causes of poverty. By this, they might be able to intervene the system in a way that dissolves problems, rather than (re)solving them. 

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