The word "governance" comes from Latin *gubernare* and Greek *kubernaein*, meaning '**to steer**'. Governance is about guiding human activity towards a goal, and is present in every form of social organisation, from families to churches to businesses and all the way up to the United Nations. It connects people to the things they care most about. For that reason, every person should take an interest in governance. Throughout history, there has been a tension between the organic chaos of human relationships, and the desire to steer humanity towards a common goal. Historian Niall Ferguson has observed, "Clashes between hierarchies and networks are not new in history; on the contrary, there is a sense in which they _are_ history." (https://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/06/09/networks-and-hierarchies/). In the effort to coordinate the actions of the human masses, religion could be seen as one of the great inventions in governance. Likewise, representative democracy was a great invention of the Enlightenment, as Pia Mancini points out in this interview with Audrey Tang: <iframe title="Is Democracy Outdated? How Can It Be &quot;Democratized&quot;? InnoMinds with Democracy activist Pia Mancini" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pxJm3eGrC7s?feature=oembed" height="113" width="200" allowfullscreen="" allow="fullscreen" style="aspect-ratio: 1.76991 / 1; width: 100%; height: 100%;"></iframe> Our forms of governance often emerge from our understandings of human nature. What we believe about each other shapes how we choose to govern. For example, Thomas Hobbes believed that nature is "red in tooth and claw", and went on to write one of the most influential books in history, Leviathan, which argued that a Leviathan all-powerful state was needed to impose order. He believed that there was an implicit contract between all of us that gave our governments a monopoly over violence and coercion, to keep us all in line for mutual benefit. Marshall Rosenberg, the developer of Nonviolent Communication, believed that our theories of human nature were part of a self-reinforcing web of relationships: ![[Systems theory of change.png]] In order to change the system, we can't change just one element. We have to transform all of them at once, otherwise the default system will re-establish and reproduce itself. To address the challenge of governance, we must recognise the enormity of this challenge. At Imaginal Seeds, we believe that humans are essentially co-operative, and that it is our cultural and social institutions which have distorted this innate propensity. As with any theory, there can be no absolute claim on Truth, and there are good arguments for believing that humans are innately selfish and competitive. We are, however, making a deliberate choice about what kind of future we are trying to imagine ourselves into, and make no apologies for it. Many of our current models of governance emerged from the social milieu of rising industrialisation in Europe, where social life was indeed a "dog eat dog" world. They also evolved against a background of fossil fuel abundance. See [[carbon pulse]]. This has deep implications – copious energy surpluses give a lot of room for societies to kick the can of reckoning further down the road. As different as they are, neither communism nor liberal democracy ever questioned the idea of perpetual material growth. Marx felt that industrialisation would bring untold benefits to humanity, if only the workers could be put in charge. Liberal democracy promised to expand the benefits of free markets to wider and wider groups of people, a process known as enfranchisement. It wasn't until the 1970s, with the Limits to Growth report, and the steady state economic ideas of Hermann Daly, that people began to think that we needed a different kind of politics, one that is based on constraints. Since then, the idea of constraints is slowly entering the political discourse, by fits and starts (as evidenced by the Degrowth movement). It hasn't been easy, and it's still a tough sell, because constraints feel like the opposite of "freedom', which the French and American revolutions enshrined as a fundamental value. But freedom and constraint are not opposites. In fact, they work together to produce [[coherence]]. The human body is itself a remarkable illustration of this. Our joints introduce constraints strategically, so that the whole muscular-skeletal system has an incredible freedom of movement. Too much freedom, and we are an incoherent blob of jelly. Constraints in one dimension often lead to freedom in other dimensions. Living with constaints is about making intelligent trade-offs. Governance will always be a series of trade-offs. There is no final solution to anything. In fact, the words "final solution" have an ominous ring, because that's what Hitler's Nazi Germany tried to achieve with their genocide. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Francis Fukuyama famously wrote a book called The End of History, declaring that liberal democracy was the culmination of humanity's quest for the governance model to rule them all. But he didn't reckon with a world in which the most important trade-offs we have to make are determined by the planet's bio-physical limits. Today, we can see that both the political right and the political left are pursuing extremely unconstrained visions. The right, in the form of neoliberalism, has tethered itself to the runaway train of free markets, which have become completely disconnected from bio-physical reality and risk destroying our very foundations of life. The left, similarly, has too often espoused different versions of green growth, seeking to reconcile growth with environmental sustainability. Very few who hope to win political office are seriously reckoning with the sober trade-offs that we all have to make. Relying on our mainstream governance systems is like trying to drive a car using a steering wheel that is poorly attached. We have the illusion of control, but that is all there is. Governments and markets are divorced from bio-physical reality, responding more to the 24-hour media cycle, the pressures of quarterly financial reporting, and the straitjacket of election cycles. We are working in a system with poorly designed feedback loops. It might have served in a simpler, less complex time. But as the complexity of a system increases, so do the non-linear effects. This is the famous butterfly effect, where a small change in the system produces an enormous effect. Our paleolithic brains are not equipped to think about non-linear complex systems. We desperately need both to simplify our systems, and to build better feedback mechanisms. And for this to happen, we need spaces for richer discourse. As Helen Landemore points out, our current political systems are not conducive to this: > Electoral systems do not necessarily incentivize representatives to deliberate so much as to posture, grandstand, and eventually bargain.... The civic qualities one would expect from citizens in a truly deliberative democracy—such as open-mindedness to other people’s points of view and willingness to listen to the other side—are at odds with the main virtue that citizens need to cultivate under an ideal of democracy where parties and elections are seen as central, namely partisanship, which is a willingness to commit uncritically (at least up to a point) to a set of values and principles for the sake of political efficacy. - Landemore, Hélène. _Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century_. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. So what kind of politics, and what kind of governance, can help us flourish in a more constrained future? Or as David Fleming might ask, what form of governance would best "recruit the intelligence and purpose of the people in the extraordinary task of inventing a future?" Imaginal Seeds believes that we need to conduct multiple experiments in democracy and governance, to build a library of social tools that are fit for purpose, and flexible enough to handle rising complexity. The core requirement we demand from our governance tools is that they prevent or discourage some people from having arbitrary and/or non-consensual power over other people. That seems to be a requirement for any approach that is looking to scale co-operation. There are many groups of people exploring alternative visions, from small scale intentional communities to large scale political experiments. These are experiments in how to increase accountability, transparency, inclusion, and effectiveness, qualities that are blaringly absent in our political institutions. They operate in the crevices and interstices of our social and political lives. We love the following Imagination Sundial (which could just as easily have been called a Governance Sundial), for it opens our eyes to the kaleidoscope of possibilities that exist in our Spaces, Places, Practices and Pacts: ![[Imagination Sundial.png]] It invites us to dispell the myth of progress and linear time that European colonialism told in order to convince themselves that they were superior to the natives whose lands they took. We need to complicate the narrative which allowed Fukuyama to call his book The End of History. Time is non-linear and cyclical. Our ancestors live, not just in the past, but in the future. Our history is a library of possibilities, filled with many alternative visions of how we can govern ourselves. Indigenous cultures have much to teach us. Instead of seeing European models of democracy as the end point of history, we can flip it around and observe that of all the species in the world, humans are the youngest; and of all the human civilisations, European civilisation is the youngest. How can we help this adolescent grow into a mature elder, and take its place amongst the wise beings of history? The researchers who helped frame the United Nations constitution understood this. When they went looking for other models to guide their thinking, the one they came across was the Constitution of the Five Nations, developed by a legendary Iroquois named the Great Peacemaker, who lived sometime between the 2nd and 12th centuries. (_Basic Call to Consciousness_. Summertown, Tenn: Native Voices, 2005.) ![[The Great Peacemaker.png]] The future will be one of increasing trade-offs. Those in affluent countries, and the affluent in poor countries, can no longer enjoy a world in which their comforts and conveniences are subsidised by exploitation and violence elsewhere. Neither the masses nor the planet will support this. Sacrifices will have to be made. The word "sacrifice" comes from Latin, and means "to make sacred". The governance we need is a spiritual calling, for it must bring sacredness back into our relationships with each other and with the rest of the living cosmos. The following are some examples of experiments in governance that are being conducted around the world. What is common to all these experiments is that they involve deeply deliberative processes in which people can come together under constrained conditions and discuss the trade-offs they are willing to make. - **Children's Parliament of India** <iframe title="POWER TO THE CHILDREN" height="240" width="426" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/427665132?h=4dee2d1d27&amp;app_id=122963" allowfullscreen="" allow="fullscreen" style="aspect-ratio: 1.775 / 1; width: 100%; height: 100%;"></iframe> - **Democratic schools** <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zdHNbQko6ZI" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> - **Helen Landemore's Open Democracy**: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-future-of-democracy/politics-without-politicians - **A proposal to redesign the UN for global governance** - https://archive.aessweb.com/index.php/5003/article/view/3885/6112 - **Amy and Arnold Mindell's Deep Democracy** - http://www.aamindell.net/worldwork - **Bottom up democracy in Rojava, Syria** - https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/rojava-in-syria-growing-local-democracy-and-defending-ecology-in-the-midst-of-conflict/