Governing
Together
Governing Together responds to one of the greatest challenges of our time: the growing gap between the complexity of the crises we face and the institutional capacity required to navigate them together. We reframe psychosocial conditions and relationality as critical infrastructures that must be deliberately designed, invested in, and continuously strengthened through practice.
Much of the dominant logic shaping public sector innovation, systems transition, and institutional reform — influenced by technocratic, managerial, and modernist approaches to governance, including New Public Management – still focuses primarily on the ‘what’ world: technical solutions, policies, strategies, and siloed interventions alone, while paying far less attention to the ‘how’ world of change – how transformation actually happens in practice through human behaviour, institutional and leadership cultures, trust, coordination, power dynamics, politics, and real-world implementation conditions.
As a result, many initiatives struggle to navigate the messiness, unintended consequences, competing incentives, and relational realities that shape whether meaningful change can emerge, endure, adapt, and scale over time.
Relationality is the new bottomline.
Relationality is increasingly described as the new bottom line, and relational intelligence as one of the defining capacities for humanity's future in a world shaped by AI, institutional fragility, and complex societal crises. Yet relationality cannot simply be taught through abstract frameworks, presentations, reports, or slide decks.
Relational capacity is becoming one of the defining conditions of whether societies, institutions, organisations, and teams can collaborate effectively, navigate complexity, build trust, adapt, and deliver meaningful change over time.
Ulay / Marina Abramović, Rest Energy, Performance for Video, 4 minutes, ROSC' 80, Dublin, 1980, © Ulay / Marina Abramović, Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives
Our Four Leverage Points and Interconnected Areas of Practice
We believe meaningful societal transformation requires working across multiple layers of governance and institutional change simultaneously. In practice, Governing Together operates through four interconnected leverage points that together support paradigm shifts, institutional breakthroughs, and healthier forms of governance.
Deepening Governance and Civic Literacies
This area focuses on strengthening governance and civic literacies so people can better understand how decisions are made, power is exercised, and responsibility is shared. By working with learning, practice, and lived experience, it supports shifts in deeper cultural codes and assumptions that shape how people relate to institutions, authority, and one another.
Shifting Entrenched Power Dynamics, Logics, and Master Narratives
This area helps open up and question inherited and hidden power dynamics, logics, and frameworks, supporting the emergence of alternative narratives and practices that allow for transformative change.
Designing New Governance Frameworks, Spaces and Innovation Pathways
This area supports the design of governance spaces, both formal and informal, that enable collective sense-making and decision-making across institutional, cultural, and political divides. It focuses on creating conditions where knowledge, power, and accountability are shared in ways that allow decisions to be made with, rather than for, others.
Redesigning Standards, Metrics, Accreditations, and Impact Evaluation
This work challenges existing standards and evaluation practices that often reduce complex social change to narrow indicators. It supports the development of metrics and assessment approaches with a new logic that are better aligned with lived experience, relationships, and long-term outcomes.
Relational Governance for
Institutional Breakthroughs
Through a multi-level and multidisciplinary learning approach, Governing Together explores what we – and increasingly many funders and institutional partners – refer to as ‘institutional breakthroughs’: practical shifts in governance practices, decision-making processes, leadership and organisational cultures, learning approaches, and collaborative infrastructures that enable institutions to respond to complex societal, economic, and ecological challenges in more adaptive, collaborative, and resilient ways.
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Our Multi-Level Learning and Institutional Change Approach
Our learning and practice model explores institutional change across multiple interconnected levels simultaneously
Micro Level
At the micro level, we investigate the interpersonal relational, psychosocial, and trust-building conditions that shape collaboration and collective intelligence within and across organisations.
Meso Level
At the meso level, participating institutions and practitioners develop grounded use cases that function as live experimentation sites for testing governance innovations and institutional change in practice.
Macro Level
At the macro level, the initiative examines the wider governance environments, institutional logics, and societal paradigms shaping how institutions, sectors, and collaborations operate.
The Village
At the heart of Governing Together is a fundamentally different way of learning, governing, and building change together.
We operate as a growing ecosystem we call ‘The Village’: a practice- and learning-based ecosystem bringing together public and private institutions, researchers, civic organisations, municipalities, designers and creative practitioners, funders, technologists, and communities to collectively design, test, implement, and learn through real-world governance transformation efforts.
Our Current Ecosystem of Partners and Collaborators:
Adam Somlai Fischer (Prezi, HU)Arno Rohwedder (Dark Earth Carbon & Upendo Honey, TZ)Bernadett Szél (Central European University, AUT)Cam Perkins (Darebin City Council, AUS)Dan Lockton (Norwich University, UK)Eric Hubbard (Urban Biodiversity Hub, Global & NATURA Network Africa Regional Team, SL/AF) – Eric was a relentless, creative, and passionate changemaker, and a friend who inspired us tremendously. We are deeply grateful for his contributions to our work, and his spirit will be missed by many of us.Eurera Tarena (Tokona Te Raki, NZ)Fede Vaz (European Commission, BE)Gabor Papp (Creative Technologist, SE)Gabrielle Baron (The Centre for Public Impact, Global)Gina Hara (Filmmaker, CA)James Plunkett (Kinship Works, UK)Jonathon Davies (De Montfort University, UK)Kate Barranco (Concious Futures, US)Katya Petrikevich (Participation Factory, US)Kevin Chang (Kuaaina Ulu Auamo, US)Louise Marix Evans (Quantum Strategy & Technology)Maayan Ashkenazi (Space Relations / Collective Faculties, UK)Marisa Morán Jahn (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US)Miriam King (LIVING PROOF, UK)Phil Korbel (Carbon Literacy Project, UK)Shari Davies (Economic Democracy, US)Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, US)Tanya Chung-Tiam-Fook (7GenCities, CA)Thomas Marois (McMaster University, CA)
Deepening Governance and Civic Literacies
Shifting Entrenched Power Dynamics, Logics, and Master Narratives
Designing New Governance Frameworks, Spaces and Innovation Pathways
Redesigning Standards, Metrics, Accreditations, and Impact Evaluation
Public Sector Innovation and Municipal Transformation
Developing a platform for place-based collaboration and ecological stewardship across a country and its (bio)region.
Embodied and Experiential Learning for Relational and Institutional Capacity-Building
Using digital play-based simulations to build shared understanding, shift mental models, and accelerate institutional change across the globe.
Corporate Social Innovation and Private Sector Stewardship
Partnering with global corporations and brands to embed relational governance in business transformation.
Civic and Governance Literacy
Building immersive, relational learning experiences that make collective decision-making engaging and actionable, and help people reflect on what proactive citizenship means in the twenty-first century.
Relational Finance and Public–Public Collaboration
Shaping financial systems to govern for public value.
Healthy Soil as a Metaphor for Healthy Societies
Governing Together offers a hopeful way of understanding the world, grounded in the continuous enrichment of our human and more-than-human condition. Like healthy soil – which is not a fixed or static thing, but an emergent quality shaped through countless interactions and dynamic flows – our societies, systems, and institutions work in much the same way.
The more nutrients we add to a system, the more likely we are to see healthier outcomes emerge: policies shaped through lived experience; technologies, KPIs, and blueprints that better account for actual human behaviour; governance processes that strengthen trust and cooperation; and designs that take long-term and unintended consequences into account.
Extractive Soil
Unhealthy Societies as depleted Soil
Shifting core values and logics
Growth / Visible Layers
Wealth accumulation alongside deep inequality; concentration of power; division and othering; declining civility; resentment; increasing microaggressions; individualism and isolation; short-termism; ideological rigidity; extraction; instrumentalism; loneliness; distrust; systemic insecurity and risk.
Declining Health Layer
Weakening flows of relationality; eroding trust; increasing polarisation and social fragmentation; and the erosion of 'soft' infrastructures such as trust-building processes, shared and compatible norms, public legitimacy, shared meaning, collective efficacy, and cooperative capacity.
Declining Substrate / Foundational Layer
An absence of integrity, benevolence, conscience, competence, and reciprocity.
Shifting paradigms
Societal/meta layer
Broken or weakened institutions; fragile and under-resourced infrastructures; dysfunctional systems of education, health, and social care; eroding cultural and media ecosystems; ecological degradation; economic instability; declining civic participation and trust.
Organisational layer
Working in silos; ineffective and costly solutions; solving the wrong problems; unhappy teams; high turnover; risk aversion; rigidity; repeating the same patterns; outputs over outcomes; lack of learning and iteration; poor adaptive capacity; weakened collective intelligence.
Interpersonal layer
Low trust; weakened relationships; blame cultures; conflict escalation; poor listening; incivility; decreased loyalty; weakened motivation; transactional dynamics; fragmentation.
Individual layer
Fighting for survival; loneliness; crisis of agency; crisis of imagination; lack of motivation; hopelessness; numbness; feeling paralysed; passive observation; passive citizenship.
Generative Soil
Healthy Societies as Regenerative Soil
Shifting core values and logics
Growth / Visible Layers
Justice and equality; civility; collective intelligence; financial and psychological security; the ability to repair; plurality of worldviews, logics, and experiences; trust; care; loyalty; solidarity; a sense of belonging; stewardship.
Improving Health Layer
Strengthening flows of relationality through deliberate and well-designed processes, practices, and tools ('soft' infrastructures); growing trust; increasing collective intelligence; kindness; psychological safety; stronger social cohesion; increasing cooperative and adaptive capacity.
Strong Substrate / Foundational Layer
A strong foundation rooted in, and continually nurturing, psychosocial conditions such as integrity, benevolence, conscience, competence, and reciprocity; financial and psychological security; dignity.
Shifting paradigms
Societal/meta layer
Resilient and adaptive institutions; appropriately resourced infrastructures; thriving systems of education, health, and social care; nurturing cultural and media ecosystems; ecological preservation and regeneration; economic and financial stability; proactive civic participation; trust-building; public value creation.
Organisational layer
Working collaboratively; high-performing teams; improved collective intelligence; effective solutions and meaningful outcomes; creative and innovative thinking; high retention and loyalty; risk-taking capacity; cognitive flexibility; adaptiveness; learning from patterns and failures.
Interpersonal layer
Trust-building; stronger relationships; confidence; civility; open-mindedness; patience; collective efficacy; creativity; collaborative working; critical thinking; deep listening; safety; freedom to challenge constructively.
Individual layer
Material and structural security; a sense of dignity; secure employment; a regulated nervous system; personal growth; continuous learning; a sense of purpose; self-reflection; kindness; the capacity to think and imagine.
Dive Deeper into Governing Together
Explore our publications to learn more about our research and discoveries.
Launch Publication
Our beginnings and initial research discoveries into relational governance.
49,000+
impressions across the globe
1–2%
globally of all professional posts on LinkedIn at the time of sharing
Global
reach with readers and feedback from Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Pakistan, India, China, Canada, and beyond
Quotes from our readers & partners to our launch publication:
“Really critical work from Governing Together reimagining governance through the lenses of collective action and trust!”
“This is gold! ✦ When scrolling the news feels a bit like watching the apocalypse unfold, proposals for “Designing with and for relationality” from the initiative Governing Together are like hope on the horizon.”
“The Governing Together research nails it: we’ve lost our ability to make sense of the world, and it’s stopping us from making good decisions together… The goal is to create a space where people can genuinely listen to each other’s worldviews and hear what’s really being said.”
“Thought provoking piece on why we need more collective sense making and what that means for governing differently!”
“If you’re someone working in the governance space, or just curious about these larger-than-life systems (especially in the complex world we live in today), this publication is a treasure trove. It transforms abstract concepts of relationality into granular explorations, and expands seemingly straightforward processes into beautiful, complex ecosystems. It really opens your mind to reimagining how governance works and why it fails and could not be more timely.”
“An important discussion about how we can de-centralise decision-making, and share power with communities … in a truly meaningful way.”