Increasingly complex challenges like climate disruption and pandemics require more than just traditional government institutions and elections. Instead, healthy and effective governance needs to function as an ecosystem: interconnected, interdependent, and dynamic. Taking an ecosystem approach to governance would allow us to dream and act together in ways that will better serve us now and into the future.

First Principles of Healthy Governance

Governance designed as an ecosystem can provide more agency and greater well-being for individuals, collectives, and the natural world. Our research surfaced five mutually supporting elements of an effective governance ecosystem:

Being Together - pathways to strengthen and improve connectivity to each other, to future generations, and to nature.
Working Together - pathways to increase our individual and collective agency over the issues that affect our lives.
Weaving Together - pathways to help us respect and interweave our different values, identities and stories.
Deciding Together - pathways to create trustworthy and legitimate decision-making processes and structures.
Caring Together - pathways to strengthen and improve the social compact.

For example

Whatever specific form these processes take, we believe they work together as a dynamic ecosystem of governance, addressing the changing people, context, problems, and opportunities existing in any specific locale. For example, a community struggling with unprecedented severe storms triggered by climate change might:

Use a customized digital platform to bring citizens, elected officials, businesses, and community organizations together with current scientific data to share information and ideas (Being Together process); that would feed into a:
Process designed to crowd-source options for making the community more resilient to floods and other extreme weather-related events (Working Together process); that would be strengthened by a:
Process that addresses the divides, mistrust, and strained relationships existing between the diverse racial, ethnic, and socio-economic groups that have been historically marginalized in the community (Weaving Together process); and that:
Provides better input and strengthens the legitimacy of decisions taken by their local town council (Deciding Together process); which in turn:
Improves the ability of the community’s social service agencies, businesses, community organizations, and religious institutions to mitigate the more extreme effects of the severe weather, especially for vulnerable parts of their community (Caring Together process)

Goals of Healthy Governance

Common themes resonated across the First Principles that point to key outcomes that healthy governance systems should produce. As with the First Principles, these goals are interconnected—working towards one goal inevitably relies on and impacts the others:

Holistic Well-being - people’s well-being as individuals and with each other, future generations and nature.
Inclusive Belonging - people’s confidence that they are cared for and have a legitimate place and say in governance.
Maximal Participation - the ability of all who wish to participate in governance processes to do so meaningfully
Distributed Power - the ability of people to affect the issues they care about.
Trustworthy Facilitation - trusted assistance that allows diverse groups to deal with complex problems.
Adaptable Governance - dynamic governance structures capable of coping with changing issues and people.
Healthy Information Ecosystems - trusted means for sharing, accessing and understanding quality information.
Responsive Guardrails - mechanisms that foster pro-social behavior and responsible digital spaces.

For example

For example, a community struggling with unprecedented severe storms triggered by climate change might build an ecosystem of governance based on the First Principles for healthy governance (e.g., being, working, weaving, deciding and caring together.) If successful, this ecosystem would accomplish the following gains for the community:

Strengthen people’s holistic well-being so that they are more likely to have the time, skills, and energy to engage with this issue and achieve;
Maximal participation in climate mitigation efforts. But this maximal participation will require (or will be advanced by):
Healthy information ecosystems so people have good information on which to make decisions;
Trustworthy facilitation so that the processes they participate in are well run;
and responsive guardrails to make wide participation safe and respectful;
In turn, this increases people’s sense of safety and feeling that they have a legitimate place and sense of kinship with other participants (inclusive belonging). This emotional commitment and quality of participation distributes power to more people on climate related matters, and;
Taken together this creates adaptable governance that is able to cope with a rapidly changing issue, which, in turn means that the system better supports people’s holistic well-being.

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Distributed Power

A key output of a healthy governance system is the ability of people to affect the issues they care about.

Many of our current systems are organized to be hierarchical, representative, and exclusive. What these models may have gained in efficiency is offset by what they lose in responsiveness, inclusivity, and protection against corruption. We need to explore new ways of distributing power broadly, aided by technological development, so that our governance system can act collectively when needed, without losing the value and dignity of individual agency.

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Goal