Sovereignty First, LLC

Civic and Social OrganizationsColorado, United States2-10 Employees

Since 2012, Sovereignty Firs worked with the US stability operations and nation-building community, including the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, the US Army War College, the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy and other peacebuilding NGOs, active and retired ambassadors, generals and colonels, politicians, and social impact investors to develop tools to improve self-governance, the quality and likelihood of success of stability operations, and investments in politically and culturally opaque countries with weak rule of law and weak contract enforcement. Sovereignty First CEO's observation: 

Human societies coordinate responses to complex challenges through three collaboration architectures: routine, centralized, and distributed. Today, a growing class of unbounded complex challenges—such as climate governance, post-conflict stabilization, fragile-state transitions, and large-scale societal polarization—cross political, institutional, and cultural boundaries in ways that overwhelm both approaches. Routine coordination fails when environmental change exceeds the adaptive capacity of existing institutional practices (the rate-of-change threshold), while centralized coordination fails when no actor possesses legitimate authority to coordinate action across multiple sovereignties (the sovereignty threshold). When both thresholds are crossed, durable cooperation must emerge through distributed collaboration. 

Wolterstorff has developed a threshold-based model of collaboration regimes and proposes a distributed institutional architecture—the Solutions Accelerator—designed to cultivate the conditions under which locally legitimate self-governing agreements can emerge and scale.

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