Some societal challenges resist categorization.
Topics like time-use, heat, or care do not belong to any single institution or administrative box, yet they shape the very foundation of well-being and security. They are transversal issues, cutting across sectors, requiring a rethink of institutional structures to address them effectively.
Security has long been recognized as reaching beyond protection from threats and into areas that make societies more resilient to disruption. For example, research indicates a community’s social capital as a key element in disaster readiness. Transversal issues such as wellbeing, time, care, and happiness, shape security as much as military or financial safeguards do. Without these public goods, societies and the individuals comprising them have a diminished capacity to withstand shocks.
In an era of accelerating crises, the traditional architecture of security is proving inadequate.
How can public institutions evolve to tackle transversal challenges like heat, care, or time—issues that cut across silos?
If we had to invent a governance system from scratch, how would it manage these transversal issues?
The Challenge
The impact of transversal issues related to wellbeing is hard to overestimate.
- Consider time: an unequal distribution of time impacts access to care, participation in the workforce, and even health outcomes. Poor time management has serious implications for society. Insufficient sleep results in estimated losses to national GDP of 1–2% and serious health problems like diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and mental dysfunction. Time poverty affects physical and mental health, with women suffering a more acute cost. It is a good predictor of societal well being.
- Heat is not just an environmental concern—it affects crime rates, economic productivity, and public health. It is an invisible killer and is increasingly disrupting daily life around the world. Between 2000–2019, studies show approximately 489,000 heat-related deaths occurred each year, with 45% of these in Asia and 36% in Europe (WHO, 2024).
- Care, often dismissed as a private issue, is in fact central to social cohesion, economic stability, and gender equality.
These dimensions of security—security to thrive, security in health, security in public spaces—are deeply intertwined, yet institutions often approach them in isolation.
Public institutions are built for more clear-cut issues like health, education, and security, but some of the most critical challenges—time, heat, care, loneliness—cut across sectors. Governments struggle with what lacks clear boundaries.
Heat is not just an environmental issue; it affects public safety, health, and economic productivity.
Time influences gender equality, well-being, and labor markets.
Care underpins social cohesion, yet remains fragmented across policies. These issues resist easy measurement, and are therefore frequently left unmanaged.
Pathways for Institutional Innovation
The interconnected nature of today’s challenges makes them difficult to address within rigid bureaucratic structures.
Spanning both public and private domains, they create cascading vulnerabilities that traditional governance approaches struggle to manage. Addressing these issues requires the evolution of new kinds of institutional capabilities that move beyond regulation and towards integrating multiple different approaches towards a collective mission on wellbeing.
This requires a fundamental shift — embedding issues like wellbeing, time-use, or social stability at the core of institutional design requires systemic, cross-sector interventions that reflect the complexity of the forces shaping the collective experience of wellbeing.
An increasing number of cities and countries are signaling new institutional forms to address transversal issues:
- Cities like Bogotá are leading the way by embedding caregiving services into public infrastructure through Care Blocks, which consolidate childcare, elder care, and health services within neighborhoods to support caregivers and working families.
- Singapore’s Agency for Integrated Care (AIC) has redefined care as a coordinated system rather than a fragmented service.
- The Time Use Initiative has pioneered policy approaches that redistribute time equitably between work, care, and leisure, acknowledging time poverty as a structural barrier to well-being. In response to rising climate pressures, cities have also begun embedding heat governance into institutional frameworks.
- The emergence of Chief Heat Officers in urban centers signals a growing recognition that climate resilience must be integrated across health, infrastructure, and urban planning.
These spaces are also opportunities to economic development articulated around the opportunities and challenges related to these issues:
- Japan’s Society 5.0 envisions a human-centered, resilient society where economic development and social well-being are mutually reinforcing, bridging the physical and digital worlds.
- Similarly, the rapid aging of populations in Latin America and the Caribbean is prompting a rethinking of health, housing, transportation, and financial services.
- The Inter-American Development Bank through its Silver Economy initiative is working to transform this demographic shift from a challenge into an opportunity, demonstrating how systemic approaches can break down silos and drive inclusive innovation.
At IID, we engage with examples that signal a shift—proof that institutions can evolve to address transversal issues differently.
Yet, these remain exceptions rather than the norm. Institutions are still structured around rigid silos, making it nearly impossible to govern challenges that cut across sectors. Tackling these issues requires more than adding new roles; it demands integrating collective intelligence and developing governance structures that transcend institutional silos as well as work on the short and long-term during several administrations.
