This case-based course will look at structural social change and the odd bedfellows, unlikely coalitions, and quirky collaborations that such change requires. The course will focus on macro social change – national-level improvements in the lives of excluded, marginalized, and endemically impoverished groups – and identify the factors that make such change possible. Included in the course will be long looks at Rwanda, Mali, China, Costa Rica, Botswana, Brazil, Bangladesh, and Mozambique. Students will acquire strategic thinking tools that promote and foster unusual and innovative partnerships to address knotty and complex social problem. Students will also learn and then improve upon a structured methodology to analyze and identify leverage points for change in complex adaptive systems. Behind these tools will be a persistent ostinato that challenges student’s ideas of what power is, how it works, and what it means, connecting power to culture in ways often ignored – or at least marginalized – by high-level development decision makers.