Throughout my career in strategy, research & partnerships, and since my humble beginnings as a frontline social worker, my relationship with governance has been a journey of growth and understanding.
When I started working with asylum seekers, I could see the governance of processes — what decisions we needed to make and how different agencies I worked with to understand how best to support asylum seekers to access support, eligibility for support or safeguarding for the children.
Then, there was the governance of the Home Office, which decided who could stay in the country or not and how the governance worked from a legal perspective in terms of rights of appeal. However, this felt more like the exercise of power than governance.
When I went to work for think tanks, I didn’t occupy myself with governance. I was looking for innovations in different sectors and communities, even though I’ve learnt that often, these innovations were one-trick ponies or didn’t always have the infrastructure needed to support them. If only I had read The Boring Revolution by Indy Johar and Dark Matter and the stack of interventions to support innovation in governance.
Then, I helped set up a network of groups across three and ten European cities, which we turned into a cooperative. There, I learnt how important governance is to hardwire values, which means embedding them profoundly and permanently, and ways of thinking and doing what we wanted into a set of rules & rhythms to support people to co-produce festivals and projects in their cities within a network.
Even then, though, I didn’t think this could be adapted to a local government context. We had been friends that then attracted people who were passionate about the purpose, and only a couple of years later did we recruit paid staff.
Then, I started supporting participation in my local government role with residents, enabling them to develop ideas on what we spend our money on, run activities and programmes and even develop cooperatives.
I’ve also developed partnerships, but even then, I’ve focused more on investing time in how we work together rather than how we make decisions.
But in life, as humans, we make decisions all the time…So the series by Forum for the Future on exploring transformational governance made me think I’d got it all wrong about governance, reimagining the myths we have about it to move it to:
- How might we embrace governance as a constantly evolving journey?
- How can we, as a collective, work relationally and with collaboration at the core of governance? This is not just a question for me, but for all of us who are part of this journey.
- How can we create the conditions for flows of healthy power, which involves empowering all stakeholders and ensuring that decision-making processes are transparent and fair?
- How can we, with a sense of joy and optimism, embrace the messy yet beautiful partsof governance? Let’s explore the potential of these complexities.
