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“The system is dying from the middle, but there’s vitality at the periphery.”
With an apt mix of despair and hope, James Plunkett front ends a very handy inventory of some evidence of the energy and renewal typically found at the edges as harbingers of system shift and renewal. It’s where he’s increasingly looking for convincing evidence that, when it comes to institutional renewal and the search for new models of public governance and public sector work, all is not lost. Better still, there’s plenty of energy and invention if you know where to look
It’s presumably symptomatic of the transitional times through which we’re navigating that the big systems of public governance, including the state of politics, feel dead in the middle despite clear evidence they are thriving at the edge. Most innovation starts at the edge; it’s where change often comes from to look for conditions to grow and embed and where it retreats when conditions become hostile.
Here’s where James starts this review:
The progressive Left leans professional, managerial, technocratic, and the Right leans energised, slapdash, insurgent. This seems to be at least partly because the Right, and Trumpism in particular, has mainlined energy from every weird corner of the internet, while elite progressivism is relatively detached from the wider ecosystem from which it drew energy historically.
That all sounds terribly familiar and a little bleak. So where’s the edge and what kind of vitality is it incubating?
He picks out 10 domains of change and reform. I’ve extracted the fill list but have only provided a brief explanation from the longer piece. You can check out the detailed descriptions in James’ original piece here.
Contemporary civics. “There’s a whole plethora of great working happening — both theory and practice — to rejuvenate a thicker, more active conception of citizenship and civic life.”
Community agency. “A more specific set of techniques, now mature in both theory and practice, to activate agency in communities. And often to re-activate agency where a community’s confidence and capacities have been depleted.” He provided some UK examples include Wigan to Blyth to Grimsby, and codified approaches, such as the Citizen Incubator or the 100-Day Challenge.
Deliberative democracy. “A mature set of practices ready to be used more widely, supported by a vibrant sector. This work likewise has deep foundations in theory, reaching back to the pragmatist conception of creative democracy. Taiwan is an obvious example; Ireland too and there are Australian and New Zealand examples too.” He makes a nice point abut this work which
“…is about seeing democracy as a living process in which we debate, listen, and change our minds. It sees democracy as residing in neighbourhoods, more than in elections.’
Relational state capacity. “Likewise a mature craft, underpinned by deep theory but also embodied in a set of ready-to-use practices. e.g. this Working Paper on relational state capacity from Dan Honig, as part of a wider research agenda.” These examples could have been added – work from Jennifer Pahlka and Jennifer and Andrew Greenway and this from Australia – the Centre for Relational Care.
James makes the point:
“..we know that relational approaches are far more effective than technocratic solutions that treat the symptoms of isolated individuals. Yet, like the other practices in this list, these readily available approaches are still little understood, or are viewed with scepticism”
Internet-era ways of working. “This is an obvious one but it’s worth mentioning because diffusion still has decades to run. We now have a whole generation of people who are native to internet-era operating models, moving up through the public and civic sectors, transforming institutions from within.” He picks out two broad agendas here. One is mission-driven government, “…a broad idea — a new statecraft tailored to problems of extraordinary complexity and ambition,” He calls out UCL IIPP for pioneering this work, and to others for fleshing it out: Demos Helsinki, Sweden’s innovation agency Vinnova, Future Governance Forum,
The other is a bottom-up model of public service reform in which local, mixed-discipline teams work close to a problem, iterate in response to real world feedback, and drive change up and through the system. (The Radical How is good on this model.). To get a sense of this “test, learn and grow” approach, these principles shared recently by Nick Kimber from the UK’s Cabinet Office public sector reform team ”prefigure a different type of state — less of a hierarchy and more of a mesh or network of local teams; more agile, porous, and human.”
The climate movement. “This is a vertical rather than a horizontal domain and included for two reasons. First, the sheer scale of the work: money, attention, institutional capacity, urgency, etc. Second, because the best climate work is prefigurative…the best climate work acts on two levels: (1) it responds directly to an aspect of the climate crisis and (2) it models a new way of doing things”
Novel institutional forms. “…there’s a lot of energy around new institutional forms — ways to organise human activity that differ from the predominant forms of the 20th century (the corporation, the bureaucratic department, etc). See, for example, the mutualism movement, or the lively debate about governing the commons…it envisages a very different role for government, less as solving problems and more as ‘building institutions that bring out the best in people’.
James also calls out the work of The Institutional Architecture Lab driven by Geoff Mulgan and others and, James speculated, signalling “…the rebirth of political economy — i.e. we now realise we lost something when we lowered our sights to managerialism — running institutions, rather than shaping and building them — and so we are trying to relearn the craft of institution-building.”
Post-capitalist or non-extractive economic models. “These are tricky phrases, but the essence of this work is to experiment with economic models that are regenerative and distributive by design, e.g. see the thriving community around the Doughnut Economic Action Lab. There are lots of great examples, such as Onion Collective.”
Regulating a digital economy. “There’s a lot of really imaginative thought going into the question of how we regulate a digital economy. When I talk about pockets of energy here, I’m thinking partly of the more creative/rebellious thinkers working on these challenges within regulators, but also of the high calibre of debate that exists around regulators.”
It’s a conversation James will be expanding during his next Australian visit in August this year.
Making sense: signs of ‘governing human”
What sense can we make of these paradigm-testing green shoots?
“What’s happening here” James suggests “is that the dominant logic of the old system — a blend of social democratic Fabianism, technocracy, and a narrow class of institutional forms and managerial practices — has proven incapable of governing affordably, safely, and responsively in contemporary conditions (for example, in light of the complexity of accumulated ecological and human crises (loneliness, mental illness, etc), and the first and second order effects of digital technology).”
So part of this is paradigm fatigue, a sense that a particular way of seeing the world has stopped being useful in making sense of what it’s seeing or offering ideas about how to react.
We shouldn’t be surprised “…that the buds of new approaches are growing at the edges of the system — from local services, to pioneering councils, to the dynamic edges of civil society, to reform-minded team leaders.”
That’s a familiar pattern for system shift:
“The edges of the system are, after all, in direct contact with the new environmental conditions, so they feel more keenly the inadequacy of the prevailing methods. The edges also tend to be more engaged in direct delivery, as opposed to policy, so they have a useful pragmatism — they have no choice but to find workable ways to do things. The edges also have quicker feedback loops, so they learn faster what works.”
The brief inventory of the edge’s energy prompts questions about the art and science of speeding up these paradigm shifts and the big transitions of theory, practice and performance they usher in.
And a final observation about the “craft of speeding the transition”, which includes strategies such as: “pushing resources and decision-making to small teams at the edges; carving out legitimating environments for rebels in the system (money, permission, etc.); and sprinkling small sums of unrestricted money liberally around the edges of the system as fertiliser.”
These might be not much more than breadcrumb trails through the thick forest of governing and public sector reform paradigms and a reaching for evidence of, and some possible names for, what’s coming next.
It seems to me it’s a trail worth following. And it’s a trail that appears to be luring at least some of those prospecting exactly these answers as part of the UK public sector reform program. More on that soon …
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