Jacob Wisén
Sweden’s free education in combination with my curious and sometimes ambivalent mind, made my initial academic endeavour to understand and address societal issues rather non-linear. But after having left a civil engineer program, been intrigued and then unsatisfied with the simple models of supply and demand in an economics program, a red thread between my explorations of academic subjects emerged.
This manifested itself during my bachelor thesis as I got the opportunity to conduct a field study in Jordan where I investigated the impact of a labour market integration policy for Syrian refugees. The discrepancy between the intentions of the policy and the experiences of the people it was aimed to help, intrigued me to further understand implementation barriers of policies. Little did I know that my future work would focus on just that: exploring and support social and health impacts of policies.
The only relation I had with LSE was my weekly consumption of the public lectures podcast, but it had never strike me that it was possible for me to apply – less so get admitted – to the institution behind it. But after graduating from Lund University and having been encouraged by a friend of mine, I applied to the MSc in International Social and Public Policy in 2018, intrigued by the described interdisciplinary approach. Through studies of policy making processes, demography, urban development and political psychology, my analytical world expanded greatly. With very engaging and challenging seminars coupled with inspiring public lectures, I got in touch with the many perspectives of the fantastic students and teachers at LSE and came to view societal issues and proposed solutions to them in a more nuanced way.
After graduating, I spent months of applying for jobs while thinking about how – if ever – my academic training at LSE would translate into an opportunity to work with similar topics, before finding and getting a job at RISE Social & Health Impact Center.
As part of the national research institute, we aim to contribute to a systemic transformation towards increased proactivity in the welfare sector. We do this by supporting public, civic, and private actors in designing, delivering, and evaluating innovative solutions for better social and health impacts. For instance, we’re currently setting up a collective impact structure in Stockholm together with civil society actors aimed at equal health outcomes; developing a measurement of quality of life to guide policy decisions in City of Helsingborg; and develop cities capacity to transform ambitious social sustainability programs to pragmatic structures of delivering them.
I lead these implementation processes aimed at building our partners collective capacity to deliver evidence based, preventative welfare services. This can entail everything from setting up decision-making structures for cross-disciplinary interventions, to develop the very measurements of social and health values that are used in policy goals. Parallel to the operative projects, we work with national and international partners to improve the understanding of the value and challenges of social investment strategies – which curiously links back perfectly to my previous academic experiences.