7 Lessons & 3 Big Questions for the Next 10 Years of Governance

Reposted from Medium

Milica Begovic, Joost Beunderman, Indy Johar: The intent of putting the Next Generation Governance (#NextGenGov) agenda at the centre of the Istanbul Innovation Days 2018 was to start to explore the future of the world’s governance challenges, and to debate how a new set of models are needed to address a growing ‘relevance gap’ in governance and peacebuilding.

Any exploration into the Next Generation of Governance requires us to recognize that in an increasingly multi-polar world, a world where power is increasingly more directly used and the singular rule of law we had ‘hoped’ for is being challenged, the future of governance is not only about the technocratic capacity to make rules (even if they are machine readable rules), but also our ability to construct new social legitimacy for all and by all.

  • Nearly 350 participants came together at Istanbul Innovation Days in Nov 2018 to discuss the future of governance.
  • Nearly 350 participants came together at Istanbul Innovation Days in Nov 2018 to discuss the future of governance.
  • Nearly 350 participants came together at Istanbul Innovation Days in Nov 2018 to discuss the future of governance.

In a world where we are facing urgent calamities and deep-running risks like never before, organizations like UNDP
are witnessing a growing gap between the incremental progress in
practice and a rapidly accelerating set of challenges — whether rampant
inequality and its impact on social cohesion, growing ranks of
forcefully displaced people, the fragmentation of state agency, rapid
depletion of the commons, or the seemingly intractable rise of new forms
of violence. This gap — between the emerging reality (strategic risks)
and existing practice — is set to exponentially grow unless there is a
major rethink of development practice and how we remake governance fit
for the 21st century.

Earlier, we hypothesized that across the world, our governance models are broken:
we are holding on to 19th century models that deny the complexity of
the ‘systemocracy’ we live in : a world of massive interdependencies.
#NextGenGov therefore is an exploration — the first of many — of the
type of experiments that chart a way towards a future in sync with the
Sustainable Development Goals. It aims to explore the lessons,
challenges and gaps emerging with governance not relegated to a single
goal (SDG 16) but as the prerequisite of achieving the SDG agenda as a
whole.

A very 21st century kind of failure

It could be argued governance is the central failure of the 21st century — sidelined as an inconvenient overhead, governance innovation has seen consistent underinvestment and a lack of attention. Our means of governance and regulation have become relics in an age of growing complexity. New capabilities and trends like rapid real-time data feedback loops, algorithmic decision making, new knowledge of the pathways of injustice and inequality, and the rise of new tools and domains of power are challenging established ways of decision making. Frequently hampered by simplistic notions about the levers of change, awed by networked power dynamics in the private sector and undermined by public sector austerity, many of us seem scared and disoriented in responding to the scale of failure and new needs we are witnessing. Worse still, we seem unable to make the case that ultimately, good governance should not be a means of state control but a means to unleash sustainably the full and fair capacity of all human beings.

In
this context, the growing strategic risks of our age are making past
governance protocols and processes increasingly incoherent and
misaligned to the need of both member states and our broader global
ecosystems; both real-world precedents and statistically derived
probability are collapsing as viable decision-making tools. This
incongruity is revealed at different scales and conditions:

1.
The existing structures, governance and business models, skills, and
institutional cultures are producing solutions that do not fit the new
nature of problems they are supposed to be addressing (IPCC’s 1.5 C report and genetically engineered baby in China as most recent proxies of misalignment of current practice and emerging existential threats).

2.
Business-as-usual as a method to address the entirely new scale and
modality of problems is a recipe for decline and irrelevance (consider
ongoing efforts to apply current regulatory paradigms to distributed technologies like blockchain).

3.
Governments and investors too are experiencing the lack of coherence
between existing solutions and emerging problems, and are therefore
eager to restructure their relationship with UNDP and similar
organisations.

Towards new Zones of Experiment

Searching
for fresh perspectives, our approach was to hone in on a series of
Zones of Experiment — a range of domains that could unlock some of the
great transitions the world is facing. We looked at new ways to protect
and restore the commons, to actualize the human rights of landless
nations, and to prevent conflict and empower civic actors in revealing
abuses. We also explored science fiction, arts and culture as seedbeds
for imagining alternative economic systems, the role of new technologies
in urban governance, and new practices in the way power is organized,
manifested and influences decision making.

Across
these zones of experiment, we are seeing how a new generation of edge
practitioners is challenging the status quo, and how their experiments
enable us to learn both context-specific and transferable lessons.
Together, they point the way to the #NextGenGov agenda as a new approach
to strategic innovation (and feedback coming in after the IID2018
indicates the need to explore additional Zones of Experiments with
emerging new practices such as governance of digital financial markets
and impact of systemic structural issues, such as decline of trust on
single point sectors including attitudes towards vaccination).

Underlying all these is the double edged sword of rapid technological progress in a multi-polar world that is challenging established ethical certainties. The unexplainable AI is one such manifestation, where the advanced identification of correlation is argued to be sufficient to guide decision-making be judicial or even law enforcement, challenging — even perhaps regressing — us to a pre-scientific age and undermining the basic principles of governance — accountability and equality of treatment (as argued by Jacob Mchangama).

As Primavera de Filippi outlined in her keynote speech, new technological capabilities always carry the potential both to disrupt the status quo or conversely reify existing structures of power and inequality. If we want to put the new tools of power in the hands of the many not the few, we need to focus on the governance of the new infrastructures rather than rely on governance by those infrastructures. However, whether in blockchain applications (Primavera’s domain) or elsewhere, it is evident that often we simply don’t know yet what kind of detailed issues, unintended consequences or unexpected feedback loops we might face when applying new technological capabilities. This means experimentation can’t be seen as an add-on but should be at the core of exploring the future and rapid learning about implications of emerging trends.

This is not the place to summarize each zone of experiment discussed during the Istanbul Innovation Days. But we can outline a series of shared lessons and implications for the future of governance and peacebuilding.

1. Micro-massive Futures — A series of new micro-massive data, sensing, processing and influencing capabilities (as revealed in the work of Metasub, PulseLab Kampala and Decibel)
is enabling state and non-state actors to transcend the tyranny of the
statistically aggregated average, and instead focus on the micro, the
unique and the predictive — early warnings on looming epidemics or
weather-related crop failure, emerging signs of microbial antibiotic
resistance, or the compound impacts of pollution on individuals,
particularly in disadvantaged populations. The much more fine-grained
understanding they enable (whether through big data, social media
mining, or specific sampling and real-time blockchain-anchored
measurement) creates radical new pathways to harboring and enhancing the
public interest. Achieving decent average outcomes (of health,
pollution, human development…) has more than ever become obsolete as a
goal: the geographically, individually and temporally hyper specific
data we can obtain, and the wicked nature of the issues at hand, require
new ways of understanding ‘risk’ — and acting on it. This same
micro-massive future on the other hand is also weaponizing the capacity
to mine data in order to influence outcomes at the societal
scale — opening up huge new questions about the meta governance of these
new capacities in the first place. This implies a double set of
responsibilities: if we can now govern and influence outcomes at the
micro-level of the individual and molecular detail, and
at the massive scale of societal bias, with at both scales growing
capabilities to understand risk and predict possibilities — how do we
govern in this new reality in order to use these powers for good? Or
conversely how to ensure that the emerging capabilities of new governing
realities are not resulting in human rights abuses, discrimination and
violence?

2. From control to ennoblement — Where such distributed data generating and analysis capacity comes into its own is through new contracting agreements that change our capacity to manage shared assets. The multi-party contributory contracts, e.g. the blockchain-based agreements at the heart of the Regen Network, show us how the collective inertia around agricultural restoration could be overcome. Crucially, rather than disincentivizing ‘bad behaviours’ through control, such ennobling regulatory systems can now be imagined to incentivize, communicate and verify contributory systems. Equally, this capability is paving ways for entirely new class of governance mechanisms for the commons — including bestowing legal rights on rivers and the Amazon. How do we reimagine governance if such ennoblement and restoration would structurally be our objective?

3. Making the invisible visible — New
ways of building the politics of change are continuously emerging.
Using mapping, animation, arts and other visualization tools,
practitioners like Forensic Architecture and Invisible Dust — and in
different ways, Open Knowledge Germany — are empowering citizens and
civic groups to reveal issues which for a wide range of reasons tend to
remain hidden — whether in the case of state agents committing human
rights abuses or pernicious, slow-moving killers like air pollution
(which in many case of course equally implicates states in failing to
uphold human rights). By involving distributed civic networks and
creative professionals from right across traditional disciplines, and by
connecting to the aspirations of populations in different ways, such
emerging tactics act as a powerful complement to established tools to
build the demand for change.

4. Hybrid participatory futures — Getting
to a next level of citizen engagement in the transitions we face
requires a next generation of platforms that enable engagement with
complexity, new technology and alternative imaginings of the future.
This is about new settings for deliberation, new ways of extending
invitations to take part, and tapping into the creative resources of
science fiction and the arts to reimagine social contract and
alternative economic systems. Medialab Prado in Madrid, the Edgeryders community,
the deliberative citizens’ assemblies in Ireland or, at local scale,
RanLab’s deliberative polls across Africa, show in different ways that
new settings for participation can engender new cultures of
participation cutting across ‘online’ and ‘offline’. Their deep
investment in the tactics of convening people enable the creation of new
and highly constructive new communities of concern around difficult
topics, as well as building legitimacy for bold experimental approaches.
This in turn enables the prevention of potential policy failure or the
addressing of topics hitherto thought untouchable by established
political players. In an era that frequently bemoans the decline of
trust in the abstract, such cultural infrastructure rebuilds avenues
towards greater trustworthiness across different parties, and an ability
to imagine futures unconstrained by current divisions and biases, as
the mitigation of risk. As differing platforms have differing biases in
terms of who they attract an what behaviors they foster, such
participation will always needs to be hybrid — well curated online
platforms, temporal gatherings and permanent physical spaces all play a
role in building the shared legitimacy for civic innovation. Enabling
the participatory co-creation of the future is a fundamental component
of the governance architecture in a complex world: we must complement
the nudging of people’s behavior (a crucial tactic which has been
applied with considerable success) with nurturing human imagination and
facilitating deliberation and engagement with evidence.

5. Public goods & rights beyond the state — In
an era where about 68 million people are currently stateless and this
number is expected to rise significantly in the coming years, we are
seeing state players as unable, unwilling or simply absent in the
anchoring of fundamental human rights like people’s individual and
family identity, and unable to access public goods provided outside the
national boundary. The Rohingya project and IRYO show powerful
alternatives and lessons for the remaking of public services like
healthcare for both refugee populations and other contexts where access
to such services is patchy. These positive alternatives are equally
matched by more challenges examples of the quasi privatization of
justice — where large technology multinationals are already acting
something like a judicial system — “one that is secretive, volatile, and often terrifying.’
They also reveal the need and possibility to reimagine not just service
provision but also new architectures of governance beyond the nation
state — consider the incoherence of applying national laws to growing
numbers of stateless people, para-state futures around the world. The
fundamental question arises whether the seemingly limitless rise in
populations on the move and para state governance could compel us to
imagine and construct at a more structural level new domains of service
provision potentially disinter-mediated from the state — and whether
that might be more than just dire necessity but also an opportunity to
achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

6. From Evidence based to Experimentation Driven Policy — In
an age of increasing complexity, the danger of traditional evidence
based policy leading us by the rear view mirror is evident. Instead, the
zones of experiment — whether EcoLogic’s futuristic urban landscapes or
the service design innovation shared by Pia Andrews from both New
Zealand and New South Wales — show the possibility of a new arc of
policy formation: experimentation is used to create new forms of
situated intelligence and learning, consisting of both new evidence and
new insights to underpin the ongoing and iterative development of
policies and programmed. These pathways enable institutions to make
sense of changes, (re)formulate intent and execution pathways, and thus
co-evolve in an open and collaborative process. Fundamentally this is
about recognizing 21st century governance will be structurally
different: the new institutional capacity can clearly not be designed in
vitro but has to grow in-situ, informed by strategic portfolios of
experimental options in order to grow the evidence necessary for policy
intervention.

7. Sovereignty 2.0.
In an age where a vital commons governance can now also be advanced
either by imbuing ecological entities — such as rivers in Columbia and
elsewhere — with legal rights or by emerging new sets of capabilities
like smart contracts and machine learning — as indicated by Regen
Network — could this mean the massive scaling of strategies that imbue
new types of bodies with ‘sovereign’ powers and capabilities for e.g.
machine-based contracting and fining? If so, and heeding Primavera de
Filippi’s warnings, the governance of these infrastructures will be a
crucial field of innovation.

Whilst
even individually these are important new trajectories, when taken
together these emerging lessons show how we need to challenge our
existing practices at a deeper level. Given the degrees of uncertainty
and emergence we face, this implies a call for strategic investment in a
broad portfolio of experiments can guide us to the future;
fundamentally these are learning options that enable UNDP and its
partners to seed and test new ways of governing across different
domains. In parallel,#NextGenGov
also pointed towards a further set of questions and challenges we face
when staring into the future of Governance in a multi-polar tomorrow.

1. BEYOND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.

In
a world of sped-up complexity and change, the social contracts and
legitimacy underlying our governance systems are constantly in question,
not least because the relevance gaps affecting nearly all players
(between needs and capabilities; between promise and delivery; between
aspiration and capacity) means that not just trust, but actual
trustworthiness is in decline. Across the world, we are seeing broadly
two cultural-societal paradigms that underlie potential future social
contracts: both of which could be argued as falling. Where individualism
is the main tenet, we all too often fail to mainstream and anchor
societal innovations that would reduce collective risk, whether
vaccination rates or distributed flood prevention strategies. Where the collective
is seen to take priority over the individual, the possible inability to
accommodate divergence and diversity risks undermining the distributed
creativity, energy and drive needed (and available!) to address wicked
issues. The challenge we face is to move towards social contracts based
on an explicit recognition of interdependence — reaffirming the need for
the hybrid participation structures suggested above to provide the
distributed fertile ground for this, as well as opening the space for
discussions on system governance beyond the human
governance. In future Innovation Days and Next Gen Gov experiments we
need to transcend natural rights and embrace new sovereignty 2.0: such
as sovereignty for rivers, trees and forests, opening the scope for
dynamic interactions of such rights frameworks for a new social
ecological contract.

2. MORE THAN ONE DEMOCRACY?

Irrespective
of scale or context, it is clear that no sole actor — whether state,
civic sector, corporate or start-up — has the ability to tackle the
wicked issues of our time alone. This means that discourses on good
governance and democracy fundamentally have to be about the distributed
power to co-create society. Clearly this is conditioned both by the
openness of institutional infrastructures and by the socio-economic
fundamentals that enable or hinder people’s agency. Recognizing
democracy as creating the positive freedom of ‘being able to care’
(whether about individual life choices, the craftsmanship of work, and
about wider social and planetary interdependencies) implies not just a
concern about the trends that reduce such capabilities (such as
declining economic growth, growing job insecurity or the disasters that
uproot people’s lives) but also a focus on the multitude of avenues that
enable such care to be expressed and acted upon. The challenge we face
is that in this reality, seeing multiparty parliamentary systems as the
sole mechanism for delivering democracy seems increasingly hollow:
citizen assemblies and participative, high-frequency accountability
& feedback systems are examples of vital complementary mechanisms
for the enhancement and preservation of public and shared goods. The
examples we have seen are evidence of how they can unlock positive,
inclusive new avenues to the future at any scale from the local to the
global — in ways that ‘politics’ as usual cannot.

3. BUREAUCRATIC REVOLUTION.

In the non-pejorative sense of the word, bureaucracy is at the core of governance. Innovation and experimentation in the realm of our everyday bureaucracy can change the nature and people’s experience of governance and everyday life itself — look no further than Mariana Mazzucato’s work on the role of bureaucracy to create new markets. Just like the 19th century centralized bureaucracies shaped the notion of the modern state, the present ‘boring revolution’ in our capabilities (e.g. around data insight, zero overhead cost of micro transactions and transparent multi-actor contributory contracts) can drive a radical reinvention of the notion of governance and power. This is what is at stake. The challenge we face is evident in the many salutary lessons that IID2018 provided, on how positive outcomes of this process should not be taken for granted. Instead they can only result from clear intent, human-centered design and an approach to strategic innovation that is up to the magnitude of the issues at hand.

Beyond IID2018…to be continued

The IID2018
was an effort to manifest the strategic relevance gap between our
rapidly growing needs and risks, and our all-too-slowly developing
practice — in this case that of increasingly inadequate global
governance models and implications across a range of interdisciplinary
policy spaces. If revealing strategic risks and their interrelated
nature is about building the demand side for ambitious
change — Invisible Dust’s credo of “making the invisible visible”
clearly struck a chord — then what comes next has to be a strategic
innovation response that goes beyond organizational tweaks or individual
responses. After all, in a show-of-hands poll on the first day of
IID2018, only 5 people thought the world is on track in achieving Sustainable Development Goals — hardly
surprising, given recent news on climate change or the accumulating
impact of air pollution on health and learning. Addressing governance
failures is at the heart of delivering the SDGs and it will require
concerted belief, effort and strategic scale investment.

By
virtue of its cross-sectoral strategic development role, UNDP has a
natural and unique responsibility to focus on addressing the strategic,
entangled and systemic governance risks facing us at a national,
transnational and global level — and in doing so it needs to act as
integrator on a country and transnational levels, whilst recognizing and
respecting the necessity of a multipolar yet machine advanced
interoperable future — where the notion, means and conceptions of
governance are fully reimagined and socially co-created for a 21st
century. Practically, this means NextGenGov was just the beginning of
investing in and building a strategic portfolio of experiments that
enable partners to learn, manage risk, and effect system change, in
order to rebuild the (technical, political, informational, financial)
capability of states and civic actors for agile, iterative governance
that is premised less on building solutions and more about dealing with
our new certainty — uncertainty.

*Special thanks in developing a part of this blog (strategic relevance gap) go to Luca Gatti of Axilo.
The post 7 Lessons & 3 Big Questions for the Next 10 Years of Governance appeared first on P2P Foundation.