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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Define the success of governance by the well-being of people.

Pathway

While economic measure such as GDP and growth can be useful, they don’t provide reliable insight into the holistic well-being of humans and nature. As a result, we should move away from using these metrics to define the success and efficacy of governance systems and their outputs, and instead measure governance systems by how well they advance well-being, broadly.

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ADDITIVE PERSPECTIVES

Global challenges like climate change require our governance systems to refocus on well-being, considering its effects on the mental health of individuals and communities at a planetary scale. For instance, studies have highlighted the disproportionate effects of climate change on people who rely on land based activities -such as farmers or indigenous communities-, which have led to increasing levels of anxiety, grief, and depression.

Considering this has a direct impact on the well-being of individuals and communities, an urgent response is needed from policymakers, researchers, and educators to properly address these pressing challenges, that directly affect our governance systems. Responses might include training on mental issues induced by climate change, clinical assessments, and individual and community therapies for affected populations. (Source: The Lancet)

ADDITIVE PERSPECTIVES

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is chairing a program that focuses on Well-Being, Inclusion, Sustainability, and Equal Opportunity (WISE). Using the latest data and innovative methodologies, WISE is researching the driving forces of our well-being beyond GDP. By using enhanced statistics at the local level, this research is being used to fill the gap between standard macroeconomic statistics for other indicators that have a more direct bearing on the quality of people’s lives.

Building on the pioneering OECD Well-Being Framework and other OECD tools, WISE is developing guidelines and improving the metrics used to assess more accurately the inclusiveness and quality of workplaces and jobs, environmental quality, subjective well-being, trust, safety, and many other important aspects of our lives. (Source: OECD)

First Principles of Healthy Governance

First Principles of Healthy Governance

Explore First Principles

Goals of Healthy Governance

Goals of Healthy Governance

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Define the success of governance by the well-being of people.

ADDITIVE PERSPECTIVES

ADDITIVE PERSPECTIVES

How might we...

design metrics that truly gauge well-being?

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