Good Governance
Good governance is about effective coordination when knowledge, data, resources, and power are widely distributed among a variety of stakeholders within a society. It bridges both organizational silos and moments of time. Our institutions of government are the principle tools we use to affect that coordination. Governments are essential for any healthy community or society because differences abound, requiring some means to mitigate the inevitable conflicts between people, and to foster their cooperation and innovation.
Today, however, effective coordination is handicapped by three major, inter-related governance conditions:
a tendency to wallow in oversimplified stylizations of complex governance systems, systems like “leadership”, that were designed for well-understood, simpler problems
a reluctance to abandon conventional governance methods even when they’ve proven incapable of dealing with the ill-structured, complex, evolving problems of today that demand extensive collaboration where no one is (or can be) “in-charge”
a propensity to assume that coordination just magically materializes – without clearly understanding why, or how, to induce cooperation.
Yet daily we are confronted with the impacts of megatemperatures, megafloods, and megadroughts; a freely spreading Level 3 pandemic equivalent to the plague; unimagined and accelerating inequality; a 6th Great Extinction; and growing threats to democracy itself. Instead of pursuing responses to these complex problems through widespread social coordination and effective collaboration, we focus on minute concerns, refuse to connect the dots, and ignore the big picture.
For instance, Canada lost 5% of its total boreal forest (17 million hectares) due to wildfires in 2023 and 200,000 people were evacuated. Whole towns were burned. Yet our governments continue equivocating on their commitments to phase out fossil fuels. Massive floods occurred in Nova Scotia, Montreal and Ottawa even as drought was experienced across the country, especially Vancouver Island, and southern Alberta and Saskatchewan. Science says these aren’t one-time events but demonstrative of an emerging new climate - one not seen in the 300,000 years of humanity’s history. But instead of directly addressing global warming, we debate about creating a firefighting wing in the Canadian military; about who will provide insurance to victims; about food price inflation because of poor crop yields; about restorative funding for First Nations who lost their villages and livelihoods; and about how to affordably cool our homes.
Yet the principal cause of these calamities is clear and has been for decades – the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. But our governments have consistently refused to act seriously on this despite their promises. They resort to PR announcements that are received with great pomp and ceremony in the press but once delivered are immediately forgotten.
What stands in the way is our obsession with leadership, our failed notion of democracy as a once every 4-year activity, and our belief in collaborative magic. Today’s needs require ever more collaboration and working together. However, we suffer from the medieval legacy that someone must be in charge. And we refuse to recognize that if no one can be in charge, then many, if not all, must be. So how do we improve our collective capacity? Democracy declines globally, just when more democracy, more “rule by the people”, is what’s really needed. Leadership is antithetical to today’s needs.
We must bring more people into the governance conversation. We must learn to foster better shared learning. We must discover how to pool our collective resources better. We must become more transparent so everyone can see the contributions of others and that progress is being made. Finally, we must ensure that everyone benefits equitably.
To do this requires a change in governance practice. Looking to the past will only bring the past into the present. New mechanisms and institutions must be created. We must begin with a conversation about the future we all want to live in, and then follow that up with conversations about the knowledge, tools, practices, mechanisms and culture we need to get us there. This task of revising our governance is now an existential challenge and one that must be addressed today to give us any hope of a future for tomorrow.
