A Quiet Opening

This is Muévete en Bici, one of the largest weekly car-free street programs in the world. It began in 2007, not as a vision for urban transformation, but as a modest experiment; an attempt to create a few hours of cleaner air and safer movement. Today, it invites over 100,000 people into motion each week.

Every Sunday in Mexico City, an alternate future unfolds. Not as spectacle, but as ritual. At 8am, the city starts to close its major streets to cars. By 9, Reforma is humming with bikes, wheelchairs, strollers, rollerblades and market carts. The traffic has disappeared. In its place: laughter, language, velocity, sweat.

But what’s unfolding here is more than mobility. It is an emergent form of urban stewardship. A participatory choreography of care, refusal and belonging.

“We didn’t know what would happen,” Camilo, one of the original volunteer marshals, told me. “We thought maybe a few people would show up. But they kept coming. And they made the city theirs.”

This is not a story about bicycles. It’s a story about memory and how a city can be governed back into coherence. Not through policy alone, but through persistence

Ritual as Infrastructure

Governments tend to imagine infrastructure as static: concrete, steel, metrics. But infrastructure can also be relational. Something built from the repetition of gestures. Something that thickens over time.

Muévete en Bici doesn’t announce itself with banners. There are no speeches. It begins the same way each week. Cones laid down, volunteers in fluorescent bibs, a slow trickle of riders filling the boulevard. And yet, this small, regular act has changed the structure of the city.

The air is cleaner on Sundays. Small businesses along the route report increases in weekend sales. Ecobici stations along the corridors see surges in usage. Families ride together who otherwise wouldn’t. And most importantly, for three to four hours each week, the city signals that it belongs to someone other than the car.

What began as event has become expectation. What began as mobility has become governance.

“It’s a small thing,” one volunteer told me at a stop sign. “But small things done weekly for 17 years aren’t small anymore. They shape the city’s rhythm.”

And in that memory lives a provocation: what if infrastructure isn’t something we build once and maintain, but something we practice? What if governance is not a set of decisions, but a form of sustained attention?

On Learning to Move Slowly

When I arrived in Mexico City, I didn’t know how to ride in a city this big. London teaches you to duck and weave, to flow through gaps, to flatten your presence. But here, on Sunday mornings, there was no rush. No danger. No need to prove.

I borrowed a bicycle and pedalled through Reforma. Children rode past me in Spiderman costumes. A man fixed tyres under the shade of a jacaranda tree. A woman handed out watermelon in slices. The silence of engines revealed the rhythm of life underneath.

And I remember thinking: this isn’t a protest. It’s an invitation for everyone.

Each week, people show up. Some on fancy road bikes. Some on rusty frames with squeaky chains. Some pushing carts of tamales, or hauling buckets of tools. They ride not to go anywhere, but to belong.

And I wondered; what else could be built like this? What else could be imagined into being by simply refusing to go away?

The Mesh

Mexico City did not become a cycling city through design. It became one through accumulation. What exists today was never written in a single plan. It emerged, entangled, layered.

A bike lane in Condesa. A night ride in Iztapalapa. A guerrilla stencil painted in the dark. A neighbourhood audit mapped with chalk. A bureaucrat willing to listen. Another unwilling. A family on their way to market. A protest after another cyclist killed.

Each moment small. But over time, they wove a mesh. A distributed civic network of movement, attention, and insistence.

The Layers of This Mesh:

• Physical infrastructure: Over 300km of bike lanes now line the city. Some wide and protected. Others barely distinguishable from the street. Painted on by ‘Cycloactivists’. Each one telling a story of negotiation, protest or compromise.

• Policy scaffolding: Muévete en Bici runs weekly. Ecobici, the public bike-share program, now has over 9,000 bikes and 687 stations. Its 2019 renewal was one of the first in Latin America to use open contracting, inviting public feedback and drastically lowering costs - making it more accessible for more people.

• Economic ripple effects: Public health researchers estimate over $90M USD in annual health savings. Along car-free corridors, local vendors report sales increasing by 15 to 40 percent on Sundays alone.

• Cultural infrastructure: Ride groups now exist for almost every identity and geography; Rodadas Rebeldes for feminist rides, Bicitekas for systemic advocacy, night rides for visibility, Indigenous groups for rural transit justice. Each remapping what safety and presence means.

These layers do not form a hierarchy. They form a living system. One that cannot be managed from the top-down, but create new ways of interacting with urban and civic spaces.

Co-Production or What Refuses to Die?

Officially, most cities consult. They run public forums, surveys, workshops. But in Mexico City, something else has emerged. A practice of co-production that isn’t formalised, but seems more real than the alternatives.

The people who built this system did so without budget or money. They showed up with spray paint, repair kits, Google Maps and institutional patience. And often, the state followed them.

Four Moments of Co-Production:

1. Guerrilla bike lanes: Activists painted ghost lanes in dangerous corridors where cyclists kept dying. For years they were erased. But eventually, planners stopped fighting. Some became formal. The city adapted to the already-existing.

2. Citizen mapping: Riders used Mapillary to document danger points: potholes, missing signage, blocked paths. This data, often more accurate than city records, began influencing street-level upgrades.

3. Night rides as safety audits: Feminist and LGBTQ+ groups rode at night, not just for joy, but to test where the city failed. When they published their findings; where lighting was absent, police response delayed, fear concentrated. Some routes changed. Infrastructure followed the movement, not the model.

4. Open contracting for Ecobici: The city opened up its procurement process. Bidders were scrutinised. Budgets were public. Citizens could give feedback on station locations. It wasn’t perfect. But it was a signal. Not just consultation, but invitation.

“Sometimes we painted at 3am,” one Bicitekas member told me. “We didn’t know if we’d be arrested, threatened or just ignored. But we knew no one else was going to do it. So we did.”

These aren’t romantic stories. They’re stories of exhaustion. Of learning to hold power accountable when it will not hold itself.

They are also blueprints. Not for what to build. But for how to stay.

The Line Between Risk and Ritual

One morning, I met a woman at a corner in Doctores, taping signs to a traffic pole. A cyclist had died there the week before. The sign said, Aquí murió alguien que iba en bici. Here died someone who was on a bike.

It wasn’t an official memorial. Just paper, marker, and tape. She said she’d made four of them already this year. One for each loss.

I asked if it made a difference.

She shrugged. “Maybe not to the city. But people see them. They slow down. They remember. That’s all I want.”

I walked past on another afternoon, a group rode through. Slowed at the sign. Touched the pole. Kept riding.

It struck me that maybe this is what governance looks like when it stops pretending to control everything. Not enforcement. Not perfection. But presence. A system of quiet warnings and remembered grief.

We are so used to thinking of infrastructure as what prevents harm. But sometimes, it’s what allows us to carry it.

Who Stewards Whom?

The language of public life often assumes direction. Governments govern. Institutions deliver. Citizens receive.

But what if the direction is reversed?

In Mexico City, the story of the cycling movement is not one of benevolent policy handed down from above. It is the story of people who stewarded the institutions. Riders who mapped where officials had not. Volunteers who showed up before the city did. Groups who held grief until it forced a response.

This is governance not as service, but as relationship.

When a route lacked lighting, women’s groups rode it together and documented the danger. When potholes swallowed wheels, neighbours marked them with crates and cones. When procurement was closed, advocates cracked it open. When a child was killed, rides turned into vigils. And when the city listened, it was because people insisted long enough to be heard.

“They didn’t ask us what we needed,” said Clara, an organiser in Tláhuac. “So we rode. And we mapped. And we made the dangers visible to them.”

These are not moments of consultation. They are a form of civic stewardship. A mutual obligation. Not for a city that exists. But for one that must be held into being - by all those live there. We can’t just wait for the changes we want, we need to make them, we need to create them.

And beneath these gestures is another kind of labour: care. Often invisible. The volunteer steward tying cones at 7am. The mother who rides with three kids strapped to a single frame. The Sunday vendors who open early to feed the movement. Their contributions are not captured in metrics, but the system would not survive without them.

We often think of infrastructure as hard. But here, the soft keeps it alive. It is easier to show up then you imagine.

Whose Future?

Urban transformation often speaks of the future. Smarter cities. Green infrastructure. Active transport. But too often, these futures are mapped only for the central, the visible, the counted. And I don’t pretend to be an expert here at all.

In Mexico City, early cycling investment centred on Roma, Condesa, Juárez. Affluent, walkable, already watched. The periphery remained an afterthought.

But beyond the mapped core, other mobilities have always existed.

In Milpa Alta, a southern delegación built along volcanic ridges and ejido lands, people have long travelled by bike, foot, and cart. Not for leisure, but for market, medicine, family and ceremony. The city did not plan for them. So they planned for themselves.

“We don’t call it mobility,” said Julio, an organiser in San Pedro Atocpan. “We call it life. We walk the same paths our grandparents did. The city calls it rural. But we know it’s where movement begins.”

Here, rides are not about emissions or health goals. They are about sovereignty. The right to move between villages. The right to access care. The right to remain in place.

Indigenous riders from Milpa Alta and Xochimilco began to organise. They mapped missing links, built alliances with businesses, showed up at city forums that weren’t designed for them. Their maps didn’t match the city’s, because their values didn’t. But their presence could not be ignored.

And they weren’t alone.

Caregivers asked for cycle lanes that could carry strollers. Market workers mapped safer routes for transporting food. Disabled riders built modified tricycles and formed visibility brigades. Young mechanics turned sidewalks into repair stations. A different city began to assemble. Not from scratch. From what had been excluded.

“We weren’t invited to the planning,” said Julio.

“But the land remembers us. So we ride it differently.”

These voices did not just call for inclusion. They demanded a shift in who narrates the future. They revealed that what we call mobility is often just a proxy for recognition.

And that a just city isn’t one that builds more paths. It’s one that listens to where they already are.

Lessons for Cities Everywhere

The temptation, as always, is replication. To study what has worked and carry it elsewhere. To turn the rides into a toolkit. The system into a slide deck. We all do it, whether designing, consulting, financing.

I have been thinking a lot about how to make a similar movement happen in Sydney or London. But the more I think, the more I realise that Mexico City’s cycling movement resists this. It does not offer a model. It offers a method.

“We didn’t change the city all at once,” said Areli.

“We just kept riding. And eventually, the city had to ride with us.”

That method is not efficiency. It is staying.

Staying with grief, with friction, with missed connections. Staying when a lane is erased. When a life is lost. When the city says no. And still showing up with a can of paint or a wheel to repair. For all movements. Keep going.

If you are elsewhere; another city, another terrain… this is your invitation:

• Don’t replicate the route. Trace your own.

• Don’t begin with infrastructure. Begin with presence.

• Don’t ask what policy allows. Ask what practice demands.

• And don’t wait to be included. Start from where you are.

What the rides in Mexico City teach is not how to build better mobility systems. They teach how to rebuild trust. How to reconstitute a public around rituals that endure. How to embed governance in action, not abstraction.

Each Sunday, a city reassembles. Not through force, but through invitation. Not through decree, but through participation. The street becomes a commons. The commons becomes memory. And memory becomes infrastructure.

The lesson is not the lane. It is the line of people who return to it. Week after week. With care.

“We didn’t just build bike lanes,” Areli told me, watching the riders pass beneath a jacaranda. “We built the muscle of a public.”

Core Mobility Programs & Policy

1. Muévete en Bici – Program Background

   • Wikipedia – Muévete en Bici

   • PeopleForBikes – How to Build a Bike City: Lessons from CDMX

2. Ecobici – Public Bike Share System

   • Ecobici – Official Overview (Wikipedia)

   • Open Contracting Partnership – Procurement Case Study (CDMX Ecobici)

3. Open Contracting for Urban Mobility in CDMX

   • Open Contracting Partnership – Ecobici Redesign

Economic & Public Health Impact of Cycling

1. Health and Economic Impacts

   • Drexel University LAC Center – Public Bicycle Program Evaluation

   • Urban Transitions – Sustainable Mobility Case Study (CDMX + Guadalajara)

Civic Participation, Advocacy, and Protest

1. Bicitekas + Areli Carreón – Activism and Civic Leadership

   • BYCS – Interview with Areli Carreón

   • The World – Feature on Bicitekas and Carreón’s Role

2. Rodadas Rebeldes + Feminist Cycling

   • Forum Vies Mobiles – Feminist Urban Mobility in CDMX

3. Citizen Mapping & Grassroots Infrastructure

   • Mapillary – Community Mapping Case Study: CDMX Bike Lanes

4. Cycloactivism and Guerrilla Bike Lanes

   • National Geographic Podcast – Guerrilla Cyclists of Mexico City

5. Academic Context – Power, Participation, and Exclusion

   • IJURR – Bicycle Policy in Mexico City: Urban Experiments and Differentiated Citizenship

   • ResearchGate – Cycloactivism in Mexico City

If you’ve been following, I’m working with my neighbours to create a rooftop garden in our apartment building. It’s early. Two meetings in. The idea is still a work in progress. The people are kind (and a mix of life-timers, gringos). But like any new project; it’s still unclear how we make decisions together.

We just had the second meeting. It felt slower. Not tense, just murky. A few people did most of the talking. One person wasn’t sure if they were meant to be involved. Another had done extra work and felt it wasn’t acknowledged.

So I brought a page of questions I’ve been sketching across the last few weeks. Not a method. Not a fix. Of course - here I am testing my thinking heh. I hoped it would help us see how governance was already happening (or create it) - even if we hadn’t named it yet.

What happened when we used it

We picked a few prompts to talk through (also because my Spanish isn’t the best):

• Who decides?
  No one was sure. Some assumed I was leading. Others weren’t sure they had a role in making decisions.

• Do we share the same goal?
  Some imagined a green rest space. Others wanted food. Some just wanted to meet people.

• Is it fair?
  Two of my favourite neighbours had done most of the work (having made a small plan to create shade). One hadn’t been included in early planning (because they didn’t come before).

• Can we change our mind?
  People wanted flexibility. One person said: “I just need to know it’s okay to say no later.”

Nothing was resolved. But the tone shifted.

It became a group conversation. Not just parallel monologues. We didn’t get consensus. But we saw what mattered, and if we could trust each other.

The questions I’m sitting with

I’ve written a lot about governance as story, care, entanglement and power. But lately, I’ve been trying to work out:

• How do you start from trust?

• How do you design governance that’s relational from the very beginning and not bolted on later?

• How do we help people reflect before they decide. So decisions don’t fracture the group or default to control?

• How do we create the sandbox to test all of this? And make the process adaptable?

And how do we support different kinds of decisions. Whether someone is:

• Starting something (a garden, a campaign, a new service)

• Progressing something (revisiting purpose, changing direction)

• Ending something (closing a programme or org)
  …across strategy, operations, even moments of crisis?

That’s what I’m trying to shape through this tool.

It isn’t really a model - maybe just some basic questions or prompts. A check-in for whether governance is already holding or if it needs redesigning. I am not sure how it would it an institutional context; but I think you could still apply it.

*Drum Roll*… The Double-Ring Governance Wheel

It’s 11 prompts (at the moment… is that too many?):

• 8 about real-time dynamics: trust, voice, feedback, adaptability

• 3 about the wider horizon: care, equity, long-term thinking

Used together, they hope to surface whether your group is ready to make a shared decision; or whether something needs tending first.

You can run through it in 20 minutes. Or sit with it over weeks. It doesn’t give you a “go.” Or a plan…

It helps you ask: are we ready to go?

What it helps reveal (the good stuff!)

• Where decisions are already being made, informally

• Where expectations are unspoken or misaligned

• Whether the group has enough relational trust to carry a shared decision forward

• Whether power and care are in conversation or pulling apart

It’s not perfect.

But it’s something that right now seems useful; in a rooftop garden, and hopefully in new / other spaces too.

The tensions we (I) keep running into

The tool also helps surface and educate around recurring governance trade-offs:

• Speed vs inclusion

• Clarity vs creativity

• Stability vs adaptability

• Participation vs purpose

• Control vs care

You don’t need to solve them. But we really need to start to name them.

Most governance breakdowns don’t come from bad ideas. They come from invisible trade-offs that get decided by default.

Want to (maybe) try it with me?

I’m (slowly) drafting a simple workbook:

• The 11 prompts

• A method for group reflection and triangulation

• Trade-off playbooks for tension-heavy decisions

If you’re working in public services, local projects, digital transformation, care systems or collective impact. I’d love your help to test it.

I really don’t think it is about getting it right. It’s about building the conditions for governance to begin with trust; not repair it later (and we have all been there before!)

We haven’t planted anything yet.

But the way we’re starting. That might be the real garden.

Let’s decide together.

—

Hit me up if you want to try the workbook, test the prompts, or share your governance experiments. This is very much a work in progress and I’d rather build it with you than finish it alone.

-

It’s called What a Biocentric Policy for Cities Could Look Like. A continuation of my last zine on rooftop governance but this one moves down into the soil. It’s slower and stranger. Less strategy and more compost.

It’s a week in a speculative city that’s learning to care. Where rivers are on the council, moths shape the lighting, and policies are passed in public ritual. There’s no utopia in this one. Just quiet experiments. Small charters. Stories passed around like seed packets.

The illustrations are all hand-drawn. Risograph-inspired, messy, rough around the edges. I was trying to find a visual language that felt rebellious but kind. A little punk. A little soft. Most of it was drawn in Procreate in between walks and emails and moments where the systems I work in didn’t make sense anymore.

It’s out now on Metalabel. If you’re into speculative infrastructure, civic dreaming, or cloud-headed characters who don’t say much but still pay attention… have a read. And support me :)

Because it doesn’t really have a beginning. Only this aching middle.

A few weeks ago, I was asked in a job interview what I thought about DEIB.

And I said what I meant:

That I will only work in places where people can be real.

That queerness is not a flavour. That trans rights are not a slide in a PowerPoint. That no one should have to contort themselves to feel safe at work.

I said it with a steady voice. I was proud. But here’s what I didn’t say:

That I am tired of my survival being something I have to argue for.

That I still shape myself around palatability.

That I’ve spent years learning how to say radical things in careful ways.

That I leave things out. That I still shrink sometimes. Even now.

And that guilt is a quiet thing.

Not loud or sharp; but low and constant, like a hum in the walls.

Because the truth is, I do know how systems work.

I do know where the violence is.

And yet I also look away. Scroll past. Take the contract.

Say “next time I’ll speak up more.”

Say “it’s not the right fight here.”

Say “I need to survive this too.”

And maybe you do that, too.

Maybe you sit in meetings where someone says something dehumanising and you don’t say a word.

Maybe you post about justice while working for companies that quietly erase it.

Maybe you feel something breaking, but pretend your hands aren’t on it.

Maybe you tell yourself that it’s not the right moment. That you’ll be braver later.

But I don’t know if later comes.

Because my trans friends are fighting for their lives.

Because people are being legislated out of existence.

Because the world is full of names we’ll never know, lives lost without witness or justice.

We are watching genocides unfold in real time.

We are not planning for mass displacement, not listening to those who know the land, not naming the grief we swim in.

We are taught to keep things tidy.

To make things strategic.

To avoid being “too political.”

But everything is political.

The water, the wages, the silence, the design brief.

The algorithms. The pauses in conversations.

The visa rules. The aid cuts. The death tolls.

Everything.

And we know it.

We feel the script bending under us, and still we play our roles.

Even the well-meaning ones. Especially them.

We call it governance. We call it innovation.

We fund projects while the sea swallows homes.

We write statements of solidarity while our taxes buy bullets.

James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

So I am facing this:

I am implicated.

I am compromised.

And I still believe something else is possible.

Not just better policy. Not just inclusion.

But a total reordering of what we think power is for.

A new social contract.

One not written in the language of permission or tolerance.

But in relation. In reciprocity. In refusal.

Refusal to be silent.

Refusal to be professional when the world is bleeding.

Refusal to wait until it’s safe to be honest.

Audre Lorde said, “Your silence will not protect you.”

I believe that. And still; I have been silent when it suited me.

But the fire is already here.

And I want to stop pretending I’m not standing in it.

If this makes you uncomfortable, good.

If it makes you cry, even better.

Not because we want pain; but because we need movement.

One different conversation.

One truth you don’t walk back.

One moment of courage when the room goes quiet.

We don’t need more frameworks.

We need grief.

We need rage.

We need imagination powerful enough to shatter the world we were told to accept.

Everything is political.

Even when you pretend it’s not.

Especially then.

In strategy roles, policy spaces and systems thinking work, governance often arrived as something static; rules, authorities, flowcharts, reform packages. But the more I listened to people and places navigating complexity, the more I realised governance isn’t something we design and deliver. It’s something we participate in. A living practice, a way of tending to relationships, responsibilities and possibility.

I’ve sat in rooms where the governance model was elegant but no one felt safe. Where citizen voice was collected but nothing changed. Where systems were “transformed” while frontline workers burned out in silence.

This series has been my attempt to reimagine governance not as policy but as perception.

Each piece explored a different shift in how we might see and shape power:

• Governance as Storytelling — the myths that legitimise authority

• Governance as Care — designing for wellbeing not control

• Governance as Entanglement — working with complexity not against it

• Governance Beyond the Human — attending to distributed agency in systems

This final post brings those ideas together not as a solution but as a lens. A way to notice the assumptions we carry and the possibilities we might unlock when we relate to governance differently.

Together they shape the Relational Governance Field Guide — a tool for navigating power in complexity beyond command and control.

The Four Planes of Relational Governance

These shifts form a field; a terrain of movement, not a ladder. Think of it like a weather system. Fluid. Contextual. Directional.

Each plane holds a core question and principle. The combination is not a doctrine.

From Control to Care

How might we design governance as a system of trust, repair and collective wellbeing?

Principle: Accountability should feel like restoration, not punishment.

From Story to Relationship

How might we reimagine the narratives that legitimise power and structure consent?

Principle: To govern well we must first reimagine the stories that legitimise power.

From Simplicity to Entanglement

How might we build governance that moves with complexity rather than denying it?

Principle: Design for emergence. Expect contradiction. Practise response not control.

From Human-Centred to Relational

How might we recognise and work with agency that is not human — machines, ecologies, networks?

Principle: Relational legitimacy matters more than centralised authority.

What Happens If We Don’t Shift?

We are still governing as if we live in a stable world. As if power flows from the top. As if the planet is passive. As if AI is a tool not an agent. As if the public is a problem to be managed.

But the conditions have changed.

The governance of collapse will not look like the governance of growth. And we are still clinging to the latter.

If governance cannot listen, relate and adapt, it will lose its legitimacy. And in a polycrisis age, governance without legitimacy becomes violence.

Putting the Framework to Work: Eight Practices in Action

These lenses become powerful when applied to real practices. Below are eight things that I have previously been apart of, each explored through the four planes of relational governance. Together, they offer strategic shifts in how we make decisions, build legitimacy and respond to complexity. (And also a very random assortment that just came to me as I was doing this(

Urban Planning / Civic Life

• Story: Anchor design briefs in community memory, not just zoning maps

• Care: Shift maintenance from contracts to local stewardship agreements

• Entanglement: Replace masterplans with modular, feedback-driven design

• Relational: Give standing to rivers, streets or soil as decision-making agents

Climate Adaptation

• Story: Frame climate not as an external risk, but as kin and ancestral force

• Care: Fund adaptation efforts that heal both ecological and social wounds

• Entanglement: Combine climate modelling with local observation and seasonal cycles

• Relational: Design for land, water and weather systems as co-governors

Public Services

• Story: Reframe services as shared infrastructure for collective dignity

• Care: Build trauma-informed, relationally attuned pathways through the system

• Entanglement: Use real-time feedback to evolve services with communities

• Relational: Involve staff, users and ecological actors in service governance

AI Governance

• Story: Recognise algorithms as authors of narrative, not just tools

• Care: Evaluate harm through a relational lens — social, emotional and environmental

• Entanglement: Layer algorithm audits with lived experience panels and citizen juries

• Relational: Treat AI as an agent within governance — requiring co-designed accountability

Citizen Assemblies

• Story: Begin with storytelling and shared history, not position papers

• Care: Embed time, care and translation to build trust and inclusion

• Entanglement: Deliberate across interdependent systems, not in silos

• Relational: Include proxy voices for ecologies, youth and future generations

Policy Design

• Story: Use policy as a tool for reframing societal narratives

• Care: Craft policies that centre restoration, not just regulation

• Entanglement: Design iteratively — prototype, learn and adapt in public

• Relational: Write policy in dialogue with ecosystems, communities and machines

Portfolio Funding

• Story: Frame funding as long-term narrative investment, not transaction

• Care: Resource slow, trust-based work and capacity-building, not just outputs

• Entanglement: Manage uncertainty with diverse, emergent portfolios

• Relational: Involve communities, ecologies and future-oriented impact models in decision-making

Digital Transformation

• Story: Frame transformation as cultural, not just technical

• Care: Build digital systems that support psychological safety and civic wellbeing

• Entanglement: Use iterative cycles that respond to lived realities

• Relational: Embed platforms in social, ecological and intergenerational systems

If You’re Reading This… What Now?

This isn’t a blueprint. But it can be a provocation. Here’s how to use it:

If you’re a policymaker: test your next policy against all four planes. Where is it still built for control?

If you’re a civic technologist: audit your systems for the myths they reinforce and the actors they exclude.

If you’re a funder: invest in infrastructure for imagination, relationship and repair.

If you’re a public sector leader: shift from organisational control to systemic care.

If you’re a designer or facilitator: map governance as relationships not just roles.

A Final Invitation

In the next decade, legitimacy will no longer come from authority. It will come from relationship.

Governance that cannot adapt, listen or share power will collapse.

The future will not be governed. It will be stewarded.

Governance is not a structure.

It is not a flowchart.

It is a pattern of relationship; shaped by who is heard, who is held and who is held accountable.

To govern differently, we need to relate differently.

Let’s begin there.

There’s no new city this time. No sense of possibility. Just a quiet kind of undoing. A season that’s heavier, slower, harder to name.

Over the last few months, a lot of the people I worked with were laid off or left on their own terms. I watched them peel away from the same systems we once shared. Some of them started collectives. Some picked up tools and built things. Some disappeared for a while and came back with something entirely new. It’s been beautiful to watch.

And I’ve been here, waiting. Trying. Noticing the gap between their becoming and my stillness.

The interviews come in cycles. Panels and take-home tasks. Role plays and reflections. Rounds designed to measure your coherence, your confidence, your energy on Zoom at 9 a.m. in a time zone not your own. I know this is not a new story. Everyone’s tired of this process. But there’s something about it that feels hollow in a different way now.

There was one job that would’ve made sense. A year of stability. I didn’t get it. And though I want to be okay with that, I keep replaying the interviews in my head. Wondering if I was too honest. Too much myself. Too much something that couldn’t be slotted in cleanly.

And then a family member got very sick. Suddenly. I’m making plans to go home. Back to Australia. That part is clear. The rest is not.

I keep asking what I’m returning to. I left because I was looking for something. I still am. But maybe that’s the wrong way around. Maybe it’s not about what’s already there, but what I’m ready to make.

Lately I’ve felt a kind of rage sitting just under the skin. Sadness too. And a need for something to hold onto. Back in December I felt like I was turning toward something — building, choosing, opening. Now it feels like I’m dissolving again.

There’s also been a loneliness that’s hard to name. I’ve had people around me. Connections, moments. But not quite a circle. Not quite a community. And the questions keep looping in my head — what did I do wrong. Where did I go wrong.

Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

I usually sit down on a Friday morning every second week to write these. But this one came earlier. It had to. I went back and forth about whether to post it at all. But something about putting it out there made it feel lighter. Like maybe writing it was the only way to hold it. I just want to stand on a shoreline, any line. Somewhere.

I write this not to repeat that vision, but to build alongside it and ask:

What happens when governance stretches even further — beyond the category of ‘steward’ and beyond the centrality of humans altogether?

The river was granted legal personhood.

For years, activists fought to protect it from pollution, arguing that it had rights just like a corporation. When the ruling finally came, it was a victory. But then came the real challenge: how do you govern something that isn’t human?

Who speaks for the river?

How does it make decisions?

And what does governance mean when the governed are ecosystems, AI systems, informal economies and distributed digital networks?

Governance is still shaped by the industrial-era belief that human actors, particularly formal leaders, sit at the centre of power. But today’s world is governed as much by machine learning as by ministers, as much by markets and microbes as by ministries.

We live in a world where:

• AI allocates access to services faster than regulators can react

• Ecosystems demand representation in legal and policy systems

• Financial markets and social networks self-regulate without central authority

• Informal governance systems in the Global South shape everyday life for billions

If governance assumes human control, it will fail in a world that exceeds human limits.

The Living Stewardship Agreement shifts us toward collaborative ecological governance. But what if we go one step further?

What if governance wasn’t just about humans stewarding systems, but about recognising all systems — human and non-human — as co-governors?

Trade-offs, tensions and questions of power

To move beyond human-centred governance, we must first admit:

Human control was never neutral.

• Who decided what counted as intelligence?

• Whose systems of governance were privileged and whose erased?

• How did we come to believe that humans alone should decide what thrives and what fails?

In many places, governance is already decentralised and plural, not by design but by necessity. Communities self-organise outside the state. Ecosystems respond to stress through feedback loops. AI makes invisible choices that shape the public sphere. These forms of post-human governance already exist. We just haven’t recognised or designed for them.

Dark Matter Labs’ work helps reclaim governance as a living collective act. But the next step may require us to also release the idea of human stewardship as the primary framework and move toward relational governance, where the goal is not control or care but co-evolution.

What could exist instead?

If we stop assuming that humans sit at the centre, we can begin to imagine:

• From ownership to stewardship to relational governance
  Where land is not ‘managed’ but related to, negotiated with and listened to

• From oversight to entanglement
  Where governance is co-produced by AI, communities, sensors and stories

• From fixed structures to evolving constellations
  Where systems adapt to their context, informed by both data and cultural memory

• From imagined neutrality to epistemic plurality
  Where Indigenous, ancestral and informal governance systems shape the frameworks of the future, not just the margins

Designing governance this way isn’t only legal or technical. It’s deeply imaginative. And imagination is shaped by structure — by time, by trust, by access to language and infrastructure. If we want truly inclusive futures, we must also design imagination as a public good, not a luxury for the privileged few.

Questions to take with you

• Where does your governance system still assume human centrality?

• How might systems of governance relate with AI, ecosystems and distributed communities, not just speak for them?

• What practices of governance are already alive — in shadow, in kinship, in data flows — that we haven’t yet recognised?

• What does accountability look like when power is diffuse and interdependent?

This isn’t a complete map. It’s a thread in a longer weave.

It sits beside the work of those designing stewardship contracts, decolonial governance, mutual aid, cooperative AI and the thousands of quiet relational acts that hold communities together every day.

As always, I offer this as a question, not a solution.

What if governance wasn’t a structure but a relationship in motion?

I found myself sitting on a fallen tree in the middle of a forest outside the city. It must have been close to 80 meters long, collapsed but still powerful, surrounded by others just as tall still standing. There was something disorienting about its size, its stillness. Like time had paused just long enough for it to fall with grace. I sat there for a while, not really thinking, just listening. The scale of it made me quiet. Made the whole city feel far away.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to look back while still moving forward. These months have pulled things out of me I didn’t expect. I’ve missed structure. I’ve missed deep conversations about work that matters. I’ve missed knowing how to explain myself.

But I’ve also remembered what I love. Riding through the city with no destination. Fixing something with my hands. Drawing something over and over. The bike shop has taught me more than I thought it would. About care, patience, intuition. About listening to the subtle friction between chain and cog.

There’s something about bikes. They don’t rush you but they move.

On Sundays the city does something ‘crazy’. It closes whole roads, clears the traffic, opens the streets to people. Eighty, ninety, sometimes a hundred thousand cyclists, runners, skaters and strollers take over. It’s not an event. It’s just what happens. I ride through it and feel something shift. Like this is what cities could be. What they were meant to hold. I try to imagine it in London or Sydney and struggle. The joy of movement without urgency. People gliding, chatting, pausing in the middle of the street without flinching. A temporary world where the rules are rewritten just enough to remind us that change is possible.

I keep wondering if I used these months well. If I made the most of them. I’ve met people. Seen things. Started making again. But part of me wonders if I should have kept moving. More travel. More doing. More stories. That slippery fear of missing something else never really leaves. Maybe it’s just what happens when you stop long enough to notice you’re still choosing.

Lately my thoughts about work have stretched beyond my own career. It’s not just about finding the next role or a better title. I’ve been wondering what comes after employment altogether. What happens when we stop pretending that jobs are the only way to contribute, to survive, to matter. If employment is no longer the centre of the social contract, then what holds it all together.

Maybe we’re already past the edge of that old world and just haven’t admitted it. Maybe our work now is to imagine what comes next. An economy based on care, creativity, community. A world where value isn’t measured by output, and governance is something we practice together, not something done to us. The tools are here. The crisis is already underway. The future won’t be handed to us. We’ll have to write it.

Somewhere in the background I’ve been making too. Released my first zine. (I even made some money, thanks for those who supported me!) Started sketching out a new one. Helping with a friend’s garden design business. Designing a workshop for a London council on decision-making and collaboration. Reading more about how we govern across boundaries; especially in a world that might be drifting beyond employment. That’s where the next zine is heading. ‘What a biocentric policy for cities could look like’ (what a mouthful) is starting to take shape.

I keep reading about AI and most of it feels backwards. Everyone’s asking what it will do to us. To jobs. To institutions. To thinking. But the more interesting question is what do we do because of it. How does it change what we expect from the systems we’ve already outgrown. Could we use it to write with the voice of a mountain or a river or a forest. Could we use it to design futures that aren’t just digitised copies of the present.

It’s hard to know where I fit in all of this. I keep trying to catch a glimpse of the version of me that exists ten years from now. What he’s doing. What he’s fighting for. What he’s making with his hands. But it all feels blurry. Too many directions. Not enough money.

It’s the start of a new month. Another decision point and still no map.

I don’t know what comes next. I’m tired of saying that like it’s a problem.

Maybe what matters is that I’m still paying attention.

We were on a rooftop, looking across the city. It was late afternoon and the sun was hitting the tops of buildings like an invitation. So much flat space. So much potential. So many stories that hadn’t started yet.

We talked about food. About commons. About how power flows in subtle ways; who holds the hose, who makes the rules and who quietly stops showing up.

And I kept thinking: What can a rooftop garden teach us about care, power, and collective life?

This zine is what came out of that.

It’s called Above Us Only Soil, and it’s part reflection, part system map, part visual storytelling.

The cloud-headed figures were fun to create and feel like mine. Born from my love of clouds, of softness, of shape-shifting identities that hold both mystery and emotion. They don’t explain anything. They just exist, like all of us, trying to grow something under a strange sun.

I wanted the characters to feel a little off. A little stretched. Like they’re in a world that’s both sketchbook and city. Because that’s where I feel like we are.

It’s about rooftop farms, sure. But it’s really about the systems we try to grow, the cracks that form, and the small rituals of holding things together.

You can read it / buy it here. (If you want to support me with a few bucks)

Make it yours, thanks for reading.

A wildfire breaks out.

Emergency services respond, but they don’t act fast enough. Multiple agencies have conflicting protocols. Local communities organise mutual aid. Social media spreads misinformation. A group of Indigenous fire practitioners, who had warned about this exact risk for years are ignored.

By the time the fire is contained, it’s clear the real failure wasn’t response time; it was governance.

Governance assumed the crisis could be managed through structure and hierarchy. But the world didn’t work that way. It moved in networks, unpredictably, through relationships and knowledge that sat outside formal institutions.

A Core Provocation

Governance is failing because it assumes control is possible.

The world is complex, nonlinear, constantly shifting. Governance is still rigid, top-down and obsessed with predictability. The result? A growing gap between how power is structured and how the world actually works.

If governance keeps failing in complexity, maybe complexity isn’t the problem - governance is.

A Reflection on Trade-offs and Tensions

Governance always makes a choice:

• Hierarchy over networks.

• Stability over adaptability.

• Risk avoidance over resilience.

Governance assumes that top-down decision-making is more effective than decentralised coordination. But in reality, centralisation often slows down response times, disconnects decisions from lived reality and creates bottlenecks.

The trade-off?

• Governments retain control, but lose the ability to respond quickly.

• Institutions maintain authority, but ignore local intelligence.

• The system protects itself, but fails the people moving through it.

Where This Breaks Down & What Else Could Exist

When governance assumes control we see:

• Disaster responses that reinforce bureaucracy instead of helping people.

• Governance paralysis when problems don’t fit existing structures.

• Decision-making removed from the people who actually experience the impact.

But governance could be designed differently:

• From rigid control to adaptive systems → Governance as a learning system that evolves over time.

• From top-down to polycentric → Multiple, overlapping centres of decision-making, where power is distributed.

• From certainty to sensing → Governance that listens and responds to reality rather than forcing reality into pre-existing models.

What This Might Look Like in Your Context

• In local government: decentralising small budget decisions to communities

• In a nonprofit: treating service delivery as co-designed, not top-down

• In a global organisation: designing learning loops instead of annual reviews

These are not radical acts.

They’re simple shifts; away from control, toward relationship.

Questions to Take Away

• Where is your governance system pretending the world is more predictable than it is?

• How does control slow down or even block solutions in your field?

• What governance models already exist that thrive in uncertainty—and what can we learn from them?

Take five minutes today. Map a moment where your governance structure blocked flow. Then ask: what would trust have done differently?

What if a townhall worked like that? Less stage, more hive. A space shaped by collective rhythm instead of fixed roles. Maybe not a place to perform governance, but to practice it; together, in motion, in tune with the environment it lives in.

Lately, I’ve been playing with these ideas while working on a small zine to engage people around rooftop farming in Mexico City. It started with soil and plants, but keeps drifting upward… toward bees, clouds and shared care for central spots. There’s something there about listening to non-human patterns. Designing cities that regenerate rather than extract.

The hive doesn’t usually wait for permission. It adapts. Maybe our civic spaces should too.

And yet, we govern it through the dry language of control; zones, rights, extraction quotas. Governance becomes a game of lines drawn in water.

This is not a fully-formed argument. Just some research and a sketch of some possible ideas or thinking. Notes towards a different kind of ocean governance. A way of asking: What if the sea was not something to own or control, but something to be in conversation with?

I have been super influenced by the work of Dark Matter Labs and others exploring Planetary Governance & Civics and was wondering where the ocean comes into this. So I did some research (because I have some time at the moment…)

What if it could be otherwise?

For now, our ocean governance systems rest largely on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). A framework designed before climate collapse, before deep-sea mining, before the internet ran through the seafloor.

We’ve inherited a system where states claim zones, negotiate quotas and trade access — still playing an extraction game, just with new rules.

Before diving into possibilities, we must confront the significant challenges of reimagining ocean governance. The current system is deeply entrenched, with powerful stakeholders resistant to change:

Stakeholder Resistance Includes:

• Multinational shipping companies see their economic models threatened

• Deep-sea mining corporations view ecological considerations as obstacles

• Traditional maritime powers fear losing territorial control

• Technological skeptics question AI-driven governance approaches

These aren't just bureaucratic hurdles. They represent fundamental shifts in how we perceive our relationship with the ocean - from a resource to be exploited to a living system we're part of.

Meanwhile:

• Pacific Islands fight to stop deep-sea mining from scarring their waters

• Indigenous-led marine protected areas reclaim stewardship

• Blue carbon markets turn kelp and mangroves into commodities

• Shipping lanes sprawl wider, scattering oil spills, noise and ghost nets

We govern as if the ocean is static. As if it will hold.

But what if it doesn’t?

A Different Story: The Ocean Commons Trust, 2040

Imagining and thinking about something different.

It’s 2040. Off the coast of what was once called Indonesia, a vast ocean expanse is no longer governed by a nation-state but by a polycentric Ocean Commons Trust.

It is held by:

• Coastal communities

• Migrant fisher alliances

• Indigenous elders

• AI models trained on monsoon and migration data

• A rotating citizens’ assembly; island nations, global south cities, climate-vulnerable communities

Technical Architecture of Ocean Governance:

The system isn't just conceptual. It's a sophisticated, adaptive network:

• Satellite monitoring integrated with Indigenous knowledge repositories

• Machine learning models tracking ecosystem health

• Real-time adaptive management interfaces

• Transparent, open-source algorithms preventing black-box decision-making

Together, they manage not just extraction but restoration.

Coral reefs are reseeded for resilience, not market value.

Data on fish, carbon sinks and ocean health flows into a public ocean ledger… transparent and non-extractive.

Profits from fishing quotas fund coastal defences, schoolships and floating markets.

The ocean is no longer a resource. It is like one of us, with legal standing, agency and rights.

No-take zones expand and contract based on real-time feedback. Ownership fades. Reciprocity takes its place.

(Side note: I still find it strange that feels radical when it should feel obvious by now. And we haven’t look at giving ‘commons’ or ‘the world’ more of a voice.)

Lessons from Existing Alternative Models:

Our vision isn't pure speculation. We can learn from:

• Māori ocean governance in New Zealand, recognising the ocean as a living entity

• Vanuatu's community-centered marine resource management

• The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park's adaptive management strategies

Potential Pilot Regions:

• The Coral Triangle in Southeast Asia

• Caribbean Large Marine Ecosystem

• Pacific Island Nations Collective

What could we change to get there?

• Deep-sea mining permits stall because governance includes the unborn, the sea floor, the fish

• Shipping lanes shift - following whale migrations, not market schedules

• Ocean reparations emerge - redistributing wealth from centuries of extraction back into island and coastal communities

• Governance becomes less about control from above, more about negotiating interdependence in real time

The system learns to move like water. I have been talking about it being adaptive, but perhaps it is just fluid and water is the best analogy?

Reflections on Systems and Governance

The ocean keeps teaching us: governance is always provisional.

Currents shift. Storms hit. Fish migrate. We cannot govern a living system through fixed structures alone.

We need governance that stays in conversation: open, fluid, reflexive.

The Palermo Network Governance paper reminds us that governance itself is a structure of conversations; a constant negotiation of meaning, power and care. When done poorly, it risks becoming nothing more than a talking shop.

But what if the conversation is the point?

A space where we hold tensions, shift frames and stay present to change.

The challenge isn’t technical. It’s imaginative. We can do this now.

Where Could We Start?

Every future system begins somewhere small. A new conversation. A change in where power sits. A different way of valuing life.

Here are a few places we could start:

• Seed a Living Ocean Ledger

A public, non-extractive ocean data commons prioritising ecological health, not just economic activity.

Shaped by Indigenous knowledge and climate science. Accessible to fisher alliances, citizen assemblies and ocean kin.

Of course, who holds the data (and what it’s used for) feels like the real governance question. A ledger like this could just as easily replicate extractive logics if we’re not careful. Feels like one to sit with.

• Pilot Ocean Reparations Funds

Wealth redistribution from historic extractors to fund coastal resilience, cultural revival and restoration. Modelled after climate reparations but ocean-specific.

I wonder what it would mean to treat reparations not just as money flowing back, but as a shift in power. What if reparations shaped the governance itself, not just funded it on the side?

• Prototype Polycentric Ocean Trusts

Test-run new governance in specific regions. Marine protected areas led by Indigenous leaders, migrant fishers, councils and ecological AI monitors. The question of AI came up recently on LinkedIn. It would be good to do more thinking around how we give voices to things that we possibly can’t ourselves…

• Build Governance Experiments Around Tidal Rhythms

Governance cycles timed to tides, migration seasons or monsoons. Mot quarterly markets.

Feels simple but strange — what happens when governance follows the sea’s pace, not extraction’s urgency? (I also do not have that much knowledge on shipping rhythms)

• Shift Legal Standing — the Ocean as a Legal Person

Extend rights frameworks to the sea itself. Start testing what happens when the ocean is recognised as a stakeholder.

Feels like a small legal shift, but maybe a massive psychological one.

Where next? I am not sure.

The ocean doesn’t need us to govern it. It needs us to stop pretending we’re in control. But this topic has really interested me - and maybe something more of what I want to look at. It seems impossible, but also entirely possible?

We stand at a choice point. Double down on extraction or turn toward governance as relationship. A practice of care, of listening, of staying in conversation with something vast and beyond us.

I think we forget the oceans sometimes. Maybe because there aren’t any people there. No cities, no crowds. But it’s one of the most important networks we have — carrying life, memory and connection.

I’ve always felt a pull towards the sea. There’s something about its scale, its indifference and its generosity that stays with me. It holds so many stories we’ve never heard and maybe never will. Plus I am a total sea baby.

1. Indigenous Ocean Governance — Borderless Oceans, Indigenous Guardians, exploring Indigenous-led marine governance models

→ Read here

2. Blue Carbon Futures — Carbon markets, non-state actors and climate linkages

→ Nature Communications article

3. The BBNJ Treaty — Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ), a new legal framework signed in 2023 for the high seas

→ United Nations BBNJ Treaty Summary

4. Global Fishing Watch — Mapping human activity at sea to increase transparency

→ globalfishingwatch.org

5. Pew: What is Ocean Governance? — A useful grounding overview of current governance challenges

→ Pew Ocean Governance Summary

6. Planetary Civics – MultiPolarity — A Deeper Multipolarity: Framing governance as mediating civilisations, planetary systems and justice

→ Read the concept note (PDF)

7. Palermo Network Governance Paper — Governance as a structure of conversations — understanding the need for reflection, negotiation and shared meaning-making

→ Read the paper (PDF)

The in-between I’ve been sitting in for months is starting to feel thin. I can see the edges now. I’ve stopped waiting for the next thing to appear and started asking what happens if it doesn’t.

I keep thinking about the future — what shape it takes, where it begins. But it’s hard when it already feels like the starting gun went off two months ago and I’m still tying my shoes. There’s this quiet panic beneath it all. Like I’m catching up to something I never saw leave.

And somewhere in the background the news keeps landing harder. Development and HIV funding pulling back, shrinking, shifting somewhere else. A slow erasure. It’s terrifying. Not just because it feels personal — it is personal — but because it signals something bigger. A world that keeps deciding what matters and what doesn’t. I don’t know what my role is in that yet but I know I want one. I’m scared of watching it disappear without trying to hold it in my hands.

And then somehow a romance spiralled in when I wasn’t looking. Sudden, warm, disorienting. Like turning a corner and running straight into it. The kind that reminds you your body is still here. That being wanted is not just a concept. It’s been soft, surprising. No declarations. Just the quiet pleasure of being seen. I didn’t plan for it but it’s here now. Orbiting alongside everything else I can’t quite name.

Instead I’ve been making a mess. Colours layered where they shouldn’t be. Ideas stretched until they fall apart. I made a poster the other day that felt like a portal to nowhere. It was perfect.

There’s something about choosing to make things not for work not for anyone that feels like clawing back a little control. A reminder that I exist outside of applications and timelines.

I think I’ve stopped searching for the perfect job or the project that explains me. Lately I just want to get good at noticing the world again. The way paint dries differently when the light hits it. How a bike frame feels when it’s finally smooth under your hand.

I keep circling the idea of freedom. Not the kind you buy. Not the kind that comes with quitting. But the kind you feel when you realise no one’s watching. No one cares what you’re making. You’re free to make it anyway.

I caught myself smiling at that last week. Somewhere in between painting a bike and sketching a poem I realised maybe this is it. Maybe the next chapter isn’t a job or a fellowship or some big move. Maybe it’s just the quiet practice of making things. Claiming space.

There’s still a part of me that aches to be chosen. For the work. For the love. For the next thing. But another part has stopped waiting. It’s busy. Hands full of paint. Pockets full of scrap paper. Already working on what comes next.

Frustrated, she walks into a community centre. A volunteer listens to her, helps her navigate the forms, calls a caseworker. Within a week, she gets the support she needs.

Two systems of governance: one built on efficiency and control, the other on care and relationship. One makes her feel like a burden. The other makes her feel human.

And it is not just governments. Organisations, platforms, even workplaces make these same trade-offs, often without noticing.

A Core Provocation

What if governance was not designed around efficiency, control, and risk management—but instead around care, reciprocity, and relationship?

A Reflection on Trade-offs and Tensions

Governance always prioritises something over something else:

• Control over trust

• Efficiency over relationship

• Certainty over possibility

Most governance structures avoid care because care is unpredictable. It requires human judgment, trust, and response. Things that cannot be automated or controlled.

So governance makes a trade-off. Prevent fraud at all costs, even if it means preventing access to those who need help.

Who benefits from this choice?

• Governments reduce liability

• Institutions avoid complexity

• Systems maintain order, but often at the cost of the people they are supposed to serve

Where This Breaks Down and What Else Could Exist

When governance prioritises efficiency over care, we see:

• Automated systems that deny benefits without explanation

• Hospitals that feel like factories. Patients waiting hours for ten-minute appointments because the system is designed for throughput, not care

• Cities that manage people as data points rather than as neighbours

But governance could be designed differently:

• From transaction to relationship → Systems built around trust, discretion, and human connection

• From risk avoidance to well-being → Governance that prioritises flourishing over mere compliance

• From neutrality to accountability → Care as a systemic responsibility, not just an individual choice

Care is not a soft principle. It is a governance logic. Without it, systems become violent in their indifference. Because when care is missing, governance becomes harm by design.

And care doesn’t just live in one service or system. It shows up when systems work together. When housing, health, education, and community services stop operating in silos and start collaborating.

Care becomes collective. Governance shifts from single-point transactions to shared responsibility. Impact grows when systems are designed to listen, adapt, and act together. Not just efficiently, but relationally.

Provocative Questions to Take Away

• How does your governance system enable or block care?

• Where has efficiency replaced relationship in decision-making?

• What would governance rooted in care actually look like in your context?

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

One day, a local organiser rewrites the narrative. Instead of focusing on bureaucracy, she reframes the project as a story about the city’s survival; a test of its ability to protect its people. The media picks it up. The framing shifts. Suddenly, politicians stop talking about budget restrictions and start talking about legacy. The project moves forward.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The flood barrier isn’t just infrastructure. It’s a story about power, responsibility, and who gets to decide the future.

A Core Provocation

Governance is not just rules and structures. It is a story we tell about power.

Every governance system is built on a narrative:

• Who has the right to lead?

• What is considered “good” governance?

• How do we define failure or success?

I have been thinking about how we change the story, and how that might change governance itself. Changing the way we think about it, speak about it and interact with the narrative could help us move to something new.

A Reflection on Dominant Myths & Who Benefits

We are taught that governance is objective, technical, neutral. But in reality, it’s shaped by myths:

• The Hero Leader → We’re told that strong governance requires a single, visionary leader. But most systemic change happens through collective action.

• Governance as Control → Power is framed as the ability to enforce compliance. But governance can also be about enabling, inviting, and distributing.

• Efficiency as a Moral Good → Good governance is defined as making things run smoothly. But sometimes, real change requires disruption.

The key question: Who benefits from these myths?

• The myth of control serves those already in power.

• The myth of efficiency benefits those who design the system, not those who move through it.

• The myth of the hero leader keeps governance hierarchical, rather than relational.

But stories about governance are never neutral. They are shaped by tensions and trade-offs. Who gets to define the narrative? Who benefits from keeping things as they are? The fight over governance myths is often a fight over power itself: control vs. care, stability vs. disruption, expert knowledge vs. lived experience. Rewriting governance is not just about new stories. It’s about who gets to tell them as well.

Where This Breaks Down & What Else Could Exist

When governance is too attached to its own myths, it fails:

• Cities that invest in “smart” governance but ignore the lived experiences of their residents.

• Organisations that promote leaders based on charisma rather than collective intelligence.

• Governments that pursue efficiency at the cost of care, automating systems in ways that exclude the most vulnerable.

But governance could be reframed:

• From control to care → Governance that enables communities rather than imposing top-down solutions.

• From heroism to collective intelligence → Decision-making that distributes power rather than centralising it.

• From neutrality to narrative awareness → Governance that acknowledges how stories shape systems and actively rewrites them.

We can change the narrative now. A new story is arising - we just need to start making those changes.

Some questions worth taking away…

• What are the dominant governance myths in your organisation or system?

• What story does your governance model tell about power, control, and responsibility?

• How could shifting the narrative create new governance possibilities?

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about it in the everyday, in that why-does-this-feel-so-broken way.

Like when disaster strikes and the system shows up late, with forms to fill out, instead of actual help.

Like when governments plan five-year strategies for a world that changes in five-minute cycles.

Like when leadership still assumes power is about control, even when everything around them suggests otherwise.

Governance isn’t just failing because of bad decisions. It’s failing because it was built for certainty and control in a world that thrives on complexity and connection.

It’s not just governments. Organisations, institutions, collectives, networks; we are all governing something.

And too often, we inherit governance models that centralise power, manage risk, and prioritise efficiency at the cost of care, adaptability, and trust.

But governance is a choice. It isn’t neutral. It always prioritises something over something else.

Control over trust.

Efficiency over relationship.

Certainty over possibility.

What if we made different choices?

A short investigation: A different way to see Governance

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be reframing Governance for how it makes sense to me. Not policy recommendations. Not blueprints for reform. (Maybe after these definitions) But a different way of seeing governance itself - and then go from there.

Each one will explore a shift in thinking:

• Governance as Storytelling → The myths that shape power, and why governance is as much about narrative as it is about rules.

• Governance as Care → What happens when we stop designing governance for control and start designing it for well-being.

• Governance as Entanglement → How governance fails in complexity, and what it means to govern in a world that refuses to be predictable.

• Governance Beyond the Human → What happens when power isn’t just held by people, but by networks, AI, and ecosystems.

Each of these ideas is simple but radical. They push at the edges of how governance is structured, not just in governments but in organisations, communities, and everyday systems of decision-making.

Because governance isn’t just about leaders and policies. It’s about how systems hold together, how collectives make decisions, how tensions are navigated.

And if we aren’t questioning it, we’re reinforcing it. By going into these four lenses I hope to answer some of my own questions moving forward.

An Invitation

This isn’t just a series of essays. It’s an attempt to rethink the foundations of governance; to step away from the systems we’ve inherited and towards something different.

I don’t have all the answers. But I know the old ways are failing. And I know the future of governance won’t be built in boardrooms or think tanks. It will be shaped by conversations, experiments, refusals, and reimaginings - I am going to be exploring who to talk to, if I can ‘make’ a collective etc etc etc. Stay tuned.

So this is an invitation. To read, to reflect, to challenge, to add to the thinking.

Because governance isn’t fixed. It’s always being rewritten.

And we get to decide what comes next.

And now I am here. The novelty hasn’t quite worn off, but the weight of what next has not settled into something clear. The question that follows me: travel and see, or find and do?

Some days, I think I should keep moving. Follow the pull of places, let experience be the guide, trust that work and purpose will come. Other days, I feel an ache for something more solid. A focus, a project, something to hold onto. Something that makes me feel like I am building rather than just observing.

And then there is work itself. The challenge of generalism.

I read something recently about generalist disease. That consulting makes you good at a lot of things, but only just enough. That you learn how to analyse, synthesise, strategise, but rarely get the chance to go deep enough to feel like a master. I feel that. The sense of always skimming the surface, of shaping the thing but never owning it. Of moving between complex, fascinating problems but never staying long enough to leave an imprint I can touch.

And then I came across this idea, the 10/10/10 career rule. The first 10 years are for figuring out what you want to do. The next 10 are for getting really, really good at it. The 10 after that? That is when you should make the impact, the money, the ‘legacy’.

I have believed in this for a long time. The idea that if you move with intention, you eventually hit a point where everything clicks into place. But what if it does not? What if the first ten years do not lead to one thing, but many? What if mastery is not about depth in one area, but in the ability to move between them? I think I am slowly working it out. There is something I want to master... I can feel it, it just seems out of reach right. Governance (maybe), systems, stories, trust. The way things fit together and fall apart.

Then there is ‘me’. Who am I in all of this?

I have always tried to be authentically myself. In work, in life, in the way I move through the world. But this whole job-searching thing has really spaced me out. The process of packaging myself up, of translating what I do into something digestible, has made me feel further from myself than I expected. It is strange, trying to sound like the best version of me while also wondering if I am getting it right. And who am I getting it right for?

I have been playing with these ideas a lot lately. Writing more. Building bikes. Testing the balance between simple and thoughtful, sharp and personal. And now, I procrastinated and made a random WIP website. It is not perfect, but I am putting it out there anyway - is it a CV? Is it a business page? No sé. I am trying to build something that feels like me, without waiting until I have the perfect words to describe it (although it still feels way too jargon to be me - and maybe I just will make it all about bikes eventually).

And the ideas. So many ideas right now. I know where I would take things if given the space. I can see the gaps, the problems, the solutions waiting to be tested. But the thing about ideas is that they need avenues. And right now, I do not have one. Not in the way I want. There is a frustration in holding something you know has potential but not having the platform to push it forward. But this city, does not let you sit in frustration for too long. It moves. It makes you move. People here just do things. They do not wait for permission, for the perfect structure, for someone to invite them in. Conversations with Liin, and my new roomie, keep bringing me back to that. If I do not see the space for my work, I might have to make it myself. What does that even look like right now?

And in the middle of it all, I am watching my friends grow. Some moving forward with total clarity, others finding new versions of themselves in places they never expected. It is a strange and beautiful thing, watching lives expand and diverge. It makes me think about timing. How we are not all meant to bloom at once. How being in sync with the people around you is a temporary thing, and then, without warning, you are all running in different directions, no longer sure when you will cross paths again.

But maybe that is the point. Maybe the only real choice is to keep moving, to follow whatever feels alive, to trust that clarity comes in motion, not before.

:)

Since I started writing about governance, I’ve had some great conversations. People have shared insights, challenged my thinking, and offered perspectives I wouldn’t have seen alone.

I want to be clear: I don’t have the answers. And I strongly believe that there isn’t one answer. No single governance model will fit every system, every place, every moment.

Instead, I write these articles as a way to learn in public. Governance is something I care about, and this writing is a way to explore it: to ask better questions, connect ideas, and see where they lead.

To those who’ve approached me with thoughts, ideas, or critiques, thank you. Right now, I don’t have a single “project” or outcome I’m working toward, but I hope these discussions lead to something meaningful.

Reframing Governance: The Invisible Structures That Shape Action

Dark Matter Labs describes governance as a system of “invisible structures”1. (This writing was heavily inspired / a re-telling of the article in the footnotes) Rules, norms, legal codes, and financial mechanisms that dictate how we organise society. These structures shape our ability to act, yet they are rarely questioned. In my next article I would like to go through the different layers where these tensions happen - but right now, just tensions!

Example: We have governance systems for owning land, but not for stewarding it. We have legal codes for corporate profit, but not for ecological restoration.

Governance isn’t just failing. Many of its foundational assumptions no longer apply.

Defining Governance Tensions

Governance today must operate across multiple overlapping forces, each with its own logic, incentives, and contradictions. Understanding these forces helps us see where governance is stuck, and how to unlock new possibilities. (Again - these are from the latest Dark Matter post)

1. Civilisation Longevity-First

📌 Core Priorities:

• Historical legitimacy, cultural identity, continuity

📉 Sacrificial Trade-offs:

• Present instability, resistance to rapid innovation

🌍 Examples:

• China’s Confucian revival, Russia’s imperial nostalgia

2. Present-First

📌 Core Priorities:

• Short-term economic stability, immediate political concerns

📉 Sacrificial Trade-offs:

• Long-term sustainability, structural reform

🌍 Examples:

• Western market-driven economies, election cycles

3. Future-First

📌 Core Priorities:

• Anticipatory governance, technology, risk mitigation

📉 Sacrificial Trade-offs:

• Present disruption, detachment from historical claims

🌍 Examples:

• AI governance, degrowth strategies, post-national experiments

4. Planetary-First

📌 Core Priorities:

• Ecological survival, regenerative systems, biospheric governance

📉 Sacrificial Trade-offs:

• Economic pragmatism, national sovereignty

🌍 Examples:

• Degrowth movements, climate treaties, nature rights

5. Land-First

📌 Core Priorities:

• Territorial control, resource-based sovereignty, land stewardship

📉 Sacrificial Trade-offs:

• Planetary coordination, digital and AI-led governance

🌍 Examples:

• Indigenous land movements, nationalist land claims

6. Historical Justice & Reconciliation

📌 Core Priorities:

• Redressing past inequities, reparative governance, decolonial finance

📉 Sacrificial Trade-offs:

• Present economic interests, elite power structures

🌍 Examples:

• Climate reparations, land back movements, IMF debt reform

How These Logics Collide

Governance breakdowns often occur where these logics clash; when governments, institutions, and movements prioritise different values without mechanisms for negotiation.

For governance to function across layers, we need frameworks that acknowledge these competing logics and find ways to bridge them rather than forcing one over the others.

Tensions at the Heart of Governance Breakdowns

These tensions show up in almost every decisions, conflicts, and governance failures. Below, I’ve tried to find real-world examples, showing how different actors collide over governance questions.

1. Land vs. Planet: Who Governs the Earth?

🌿 Case Study: The Maasai Community and Conservation Efforts in Tanzania

The Tanzanian government is forcibly displacing the Maasai to make way for safari tourism and carbon credit projects. While these projects aim to protect biodiversity, they often come at the cost of Indigenous rights and livelihoods (source).

Conflicting Actors & Interests:

• Governments prioritise conservation but define it through state control and economic benefits (tourism, carbon credits).

• Indigenous communities argue for land stewardship based on centuries-old sustainable practices.

• Global conservationists advocate for biodiversity but often ignore land rights in their strategies.

Governance Breakdown: Conservation policies exclude Indigenous governance models, despite their long history of sustainable land management.

Possible Hybrid-Solution:

• 🌍 Planetary Trusteeships: Could nations be compensated for stewarding planetary ecosystems rather than extracting from them?

• 🔄 Climate Reparations: Could wealthy nations pay into an Amazon conservation fund to account for their historical emissions?

A thought for Policymakers: We need governance models that extend beyond borders. Ensuring planetary resources are treated as interdependent systems, not extractive assets.

2. Present vs. Future: The Struggle Over Housing & Displacement

🏠 Case Study: Housing Developments in Climate-Vulnerable Zones in the U.S.

In Punta Gorda, Florida, new housing developments continue to be built in hurricane-prone zones despite the increasing risk of climate disasters (source).

Conflicting Actors & Interests:

• Developers push for more housing because demand is high and the market is profitable.

• City planners know the risks but lack the legal tools to stop development.

• Homeowners resist relocation because they have deep community ties.

Governance Breakdown: There’s no governance mechanism to align short-term economic incentives with long-term climate risks.

Possible Hybrid-Solution:

• Managed Climate Retreat Plans that offer financial incentives to relocate before disaster strikes.

• Regional Climate Resilience Funds that help cities invest in sustainable housing before crisis forces action.

A thought for Cities & Planners: We must govern for movement, not just permanence; adapting housing and migration systems to real-world population shifts.

3. Historical Justice vs. Civilisation Longevity-First: Who Pays for the Past?

🌍 Case Study: The Xikrin Indigenous People and Mining Contamination in Brazil

Nickel mining by Vale has contaminated water sources, caused health crises, and displaced Indigenous Xikrin communities, raising questions about governance failures in corporate accountability (source).

Conflicting Actors & Interests:

• Corporations prioritise profits but resist responsibility for environmental harm.

• Governments depend on resource extraction but face public pressure to regulate.

• Indigenous communities bear the costs but have little legal power to demand accountability.

Governance Breakdown: The legal system protects corporate interests over environmental and Indigenous rights.

Hybrid Governance Solution:

• Indigenous-Led Land Trusts that ensure direct community control over resources.

• Stronger Environmental Regulations with corporate accountability for long-term damage.

A thought for Financial Institutions: Governance must recognise past injustices; ensuring wealth isn’t hoarded at the cost of planetary collapse.

The Cost of Change: Navigating Trade-Offs in Governance

Trying to change governance tensions doesn’t just come with technical challenges… it comes with power struggles.

Governance is not just policies and systems. It is people, institutions, and deeply held interests. And many of those who hold power within the dominant governance logic of a system will resist change because it challenges their position.

The question isn’t just: How do we design better governance?

It’s also: How do we get those with power to work with those demanding change?

Why Do Power Holders Resist Change?

Resistance isn’t always about bad intentions… it’s often about trade-offs.

• Governments fear instability: changing governance models can mean losing control, disrupting economic stability, or triggering political backlash.

• Corporations resist systemic shifts: because profit models are designed around current governance structures, not future ones.

• Communities cling to the present: because even broken systems can feel safer than the unknown.

How Do We Get Power Holders to Accept Trade-Offs?

Make It Work for Them – Frame governance shifts as opportunities, not just sacrifices.

• Example: Climate adaptation finance for cities: showing local leaders how early action saves money rather than just demanding costly changes.

Use Negotiation Over Ultimatums – Many governance models collide rather than co-evolve.

• Example: Indigenous land stewardship and conservation efforts - instead of pitting these against each other, create co-governance structures that recognise multiple interests.

Redefine Success – The biggest governance battles are often fought over different definitions of progress.

• Example: Corporations and sustainability - if profit remains the only success metric, then planetary governance will always lose. But shifting toward regenerative finance models can align profit with sustainability.

Governance isn’t about eliminating tensions. It’s about orchestrating them. Change happens when we stop treating governance as a zero-sum game and start designing models where multiple interests can negotiate trade-offs in ways that create stability, not just conflict.

Who Needs to Act First? What Does Change Look Like?

1. Governments & Policymakers

What They Can Do:

• Develop “Governance Sandboxes”—pilot policies on small scales before rolling them out nationally. Listen and find the tensions.

• Build Planetary Governance Models that extend beyond national sovereignty to shared ecological responsibilities. Map the stakeholders, understand the different strings and levers you are pulling.

Example: Amsterdam’s circular economy governance model where waste, energy, and land are co-managed as common goods.

2. Business & Financial Institutions

What They Can Do:

• Shift investment models to reward stewardship, not extraction.

• Align finance with planetary thresholds—so businesses cannot exceed ecological limits.

Example: Patagonia restructured its governance model to ensure environmental impact takes priority over shareholder profit.

3. System Thinkers & Collective Impact Leaders

What They Can Do:

• Facilitate negotiation between conflicting governance models.2

• Develop governance literacy tools to help communities understand power structures and engage in governance design.

Example: The Participatory City movement in the UK is co-creating governance structures with local communities.

Closing Question: The Future of Governance is Being Written. Who Gets to Shape It?

Governance doesn’t change overnight. It changes through thousands of small decisions, negotiations, and trade-offs.

The question is: Who gets to shape these decisions?

• Will governance be restructured by those already in power?

• Or will it be co-created with those at the margins, those pushing for change?

• Will governance protect the present at the cost of the future?

• Or will it find a way to evolve, before collapse forces change upon us?

This isn’t just a theoretical discussion. It’s happening now.

The governance models that emerge in the next decade will define the world we live in for generations. The question is who will be in the room to decide them?

1

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/indy-johar-b440b010_deep-multipolarity-activity-7302778146964074496-Eoq6?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAixJbIBMQHNzXAte_m6s05Oi_kSLd6AVMg

2

https://medium.com/good-shift/governance-in-and-for-complexity-eac108d8b589

Imagine a storm rolling in over the Atlantic. A ship, caught in the chaos, sends distress signals as waves batter its hull. The crew scrambles, but there is no lighthouse on the horizon, no guiding light to navigate towards safety.

The shipwreck is the global economy. It has been steered for decades by the singular logic of Return on Investment (ROI), a system designed to extract as much financial value as possible while disregarding long-term stability. The missing lighthouse is a financial system built for resilience, one that understands value as more than just quarterly returns.

The more I look around, the more I see these conversations emerging. What if investment was not about extracting wealth, but about stewarding it? What if capital was measured not just in financial yield, but in environmental regeneration, social well-being, and shared prosperity?

Although it still feels like a theory, I have been digging into this space, speaking with mates, and finding that these shifts are already happening. New models of polycentric governance and systemic investing are reshaping finance. This post builds on previous questions I have explored, inspired by the work of Dark Matter Labs and other practitioners, (aided by AI to find some case studies) leading the charge in redesigning financial systems.

The Myth of Maximisation: How ROI Became the Default

I am not an economist or a finance expert. But I have worked in systems change long enough to keep coming back to the same frustration: why aren’t we funding solutions for problems we know are coming?

To understand why, I had to look back into why modern finance is the way it is.

For much of history, wealth was not something to be maximised. It was something to be circulated. Feudal lords funded cathedrals. Indigenous societies practised communal reciprocity. Early banks pooled resources to finance long-term trade routes, absorbing risk together rather than extracting profits immediately.

But in the 20th century, things shifted. The rise the shareholder, Milton Friedman’s infamous doctrine (that corporations exist only to maximise returns), and the financialisation of everything turned capital into a zero-sum game.

What we lost in this transformation was the ability to invest for the long term. Instead, finance became extractive, measured only in short-term ROI, leaving a trail of environmental collapse, social instability, and economic precarity.

Now, the cracks are impossible to ignore.

• Climate disasters will cost billions, yet preventative investments remain underfunded.

• Housing markets collapse, while hedge funds extract profits from scarcity.

• Healthcare systems buckle, despite research proving that investing in well-being yields greater long-term savings.

It is time to ask: What if finance looked different?

From Extraction to Stewardship: The Rise of Systemic Investing

A new generation of investors, philanthropists and public institutions is challenging the ROI-centric mindset, replacing it with Value on Investment (VOI) – a way of measuring capital that accounts for social, environmental and systemic returns.

1. Systemic Investing: Funding Entire Ecosystems, Not Just Assets

Rather than focusing on isolated projects, systemic investing funds interconnected solutions.

• In climate resilience, it means not just funding solar energy startups, but also investing in policy advocacy, grid infrastructure and workforce training to ensure an entire sector transforms.

• In public health, it means backing food security programmes, clean air initiatives and preventative medicine, not just hospitals.

A great example is Regen Melbourne, a coalition of 180+ organisations that fund projects for a regenerative city, pooling resources for green infrastructure, cooperative enterprises and social equity initiatives. Instead of a single entity making investment decisions, stakeholders share governance, ensuring long-term alignment.

2. Catalytic and Patient Capital: Investing for Systemic Impact

Traditional finance is impatient. If a project does not show returns in three to five years, it is deemed unworthy. But many of the most transformative investments, climate infrastructure, social housing, ecosystem regeneration, take decades to realise.

What is Catalytic Capital? (The best definition I could find below…)

Imagine you are planting a native forest. If you only fund trees that will grow quickly and provide immediate economic returns, you end up with a monoculture: efficient, but fragile. Catalytic capital is like funding the slower-growing species, the deep-rooted trees that create resilience over time.

It provides early, risk-tolerant funding to unlock investment where the market would otherwise fail.

To shift towards long-term, systemic investment, we need:

✅ Blended Finance – Combining public, private, and philanthropic funding to reduce early-stage risk and attract mainstream capital.

✅ Flexible Investment Models – Moving beyond rigid funding cycles to adaptive models like revenue-based financing or evergreen funds.

✅ Community-Led Investment Vehicles – Ensuring capital is distributed through local networks, not just top-down institutions.

✅ Policy and Tax Incentives – Governments encouraging patient capital through tax benefits and de-risking mechanisms.

Where It’s Working:

• Renewable energy – Public and impact-driven investors took early risks, making it a trillion-dollar industry.

• Affordable housing cooperatives – Funded through community wealth-building to prevent gentrification.

• Regenerative agriculture – Investors supporting soil health and climate resilience over decades.

Governance for Mission-Driven Investing: The Guardrails Against Drift

Even when capital shifts towards impact-driven models, there is one persistent challenge: mission drift.

Profit incentives have a way of creeping back in. They start as a small compromise; a shift in priorities, a more “commercially viable” direction. Over time, purpose becomes secondary, impact is diluted, and eventually, the structure that once existed to solve a problem is indistinguishable from the system it was meant to transform.

And more broadly:

• How do you maintain coherence without central control?

• What mechanisms ensure trust between semi-autonomous nodes?

1. Governance That Hardwires Impact

Successful mission-driven investments through:

• Charters & Investment Policies: Legal commitments to impact-driven decision-making.

• Impact Committees: Boards that oversee financial and social/environmental goals.

• Mission-Locked Structures: Cooperatives, community land trusts, and steward-ownership models that prevent mission drift even if leadership changes.

The biggest challenge? Convincing fiduciary stakeholders that social returns mattered as much as financial ones.* (Maybe something I would like to explore?)

2. Polycentric Governance: Decentralizing Investment Power

Most investments are decided by a small set of institutional gatekeepers.

But polycentric models distribute power, bringing community voices, cooperatives, and public actors into decision-making.

• Participatory grantmaking allows those affected by funding decisions to help shape investments.

• Worker-owned funds ensure employees control capital, rather than external shareholders.

• Coalition-based governance (like Regen Melbourne) aligns businesses, government, and community stakeholders in shared investment strategies.

These models prevent capital from being monopolised, ensuring investments reflect actual needs, not just investor incentives. But how do you maintain coherence when decision-making is distributed? I am unsure where the answer is here, but I believe in created shared principles rather than looking into rigid top-down control.

3. Collaborative Capital Models: Weakening Competition, Strengthening Collective Action

One of the biggest inefficiencies in traditional investing is redundant competition. Where multiple entities fight for capital rather than aligning their resources toward shared systemic goals.

Collaborative capital models shift the logic from competition to coordination by encouraging investment structures that pool funding, share risk, and align incentives.

How it Works in Practice:

• Pooled Investment Vehicles: Rather than competing for funding, multiple stakeholders contribute to a shared capital pool. For example, Fair By Design aligns philanthropy, VC, and advocacy funding to tackle the poverty premium, ensuring investments work in tandem rather than in silos.

• Pre-Competitive Collaboration: In some industries, companies and investors collaborate before competing, jointly funding shared infrastructure or research. This approach is common in climate finance, where rival energy firms co-invest in foundational technology (like battery storage) that benefits the entire sector.

• Cross-Sector Investment Platforms: Instead of fragmented funding, some governments and NGOs set up platforms where philanthropy, public funding, and private investment can co-invest with aligned goals.

By shifting governance toward collaboration instead of fragmentation, these models unlock systemic impact faster; turning financial ecosystems from arenas of competition into cooperative networks of change.

4. Knowledge as Infrastructure: Aligning Without Central Control

The greatest challenge of decentralised governance is coherence. Without a central authority dictating rules, how do independent actors stay aligned? How do you build trust between semi-autonomous nodes?

Maybe an answer here could be knowledge as shared infrastructure. Rather than enforcing top-down control, strong governance frameworks create mechanisms for transparency, learning, and adaptation. (Although I think there are many more ways!)

Key Mechanisms for Trust and Coherence:

• Open Data & Transparency Platforms: When decision-making processes, investment flows, and impact data are openly shared, it builds trust and reduces information asymmetries.

• Community-Led Evaluation Models: Instead of measuring success purely through financial returns, some funds enable communities to co-create impact metrics. The Buen Vivir Fund, a Latin American investment cooperative, uses participatory impact assessments where investors and local communities evaluate success together.

• Distributed Learning Networks: The most effective systemic investments shouldn’t just deploy capital… they should also deploy knowledge.

• Shared Principles Over Centralised Rules: Instead of rigid control, successful polycentric models operate on agreed-upon principles. The Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), for example, provides a guiding framework for cities and organisations to align with planetary and social boundarie. While allowing for localised adaptation.

By treating knowledge-sharing as an essential governance function, these models enable semi-autonomous nodes to coordinate, innovate, and align without losing coherence.

The Usual Half-Way Reflection: The Challenge of Letting Go

I remember sitting in a funding meeting, watching as millions were allocated with just a quickly designed spreadsheet.

“We need to see a return in 18 months,” someone said, closing the discussion.

That was it. No conversation about the communities involved, the systemic barriers, or what long-term success might actually look like.

I have not yet seen the perfect alternative. But I have felt the frustration of working within a financial system that demands short-term certainty from problems that require long-term trust. I have heard funders admit that impact reporting feels like justifying decisions already made, rather than capturing real change. I have seen local councils and charities struggle to fit into rigid funding cycles that do not match the pace of the work.

The challenge is not just redesigning financial models… it seems to me that is about redesigning our relationship with risk, power, and time.

Finance has been built for control. But its future depends on connection and collaboration.

The Path Forward: Redesigning Finance for the Next Century

We are at a turning point. The crises of climate instability, wealth inequality and governance failure demand more than incremental tweaks. They require us to completely rewire how capital flows through our world.

To accelerate this transition:

✅ Policymakers must update fiduciary duty laws to allow for VOI investing.

✅ Investors must embrace long-term, catalytic and blended capital strategies.

✅ Governance structures must move towards polycentric, participatory decision-making.

✅ Communities must reclaim wealth through models that distribute ownership rather than consolidate it.

If finance is the shipwreck, governance is the lighthouse. It is time to change course, not just for the sake of economic resilience, but for the shared future of communities, ecosystems and generations to come.

Sources

• Dark Matter Labs: Four Axes of Capital Allocation Beyond Direct ROI

• TIIP - The Investment Integration Project: Rethinking Capital Allocation for Systemic Change

• Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL): A Model for Social and Planetary Boundaries

• MacArthur Foundation: Catalytic Capital Consortium – Investing with a Transformational Lens

• MIT Sloan Review: Systemic Investing & Long-Term Wealth Stewardship

• Ford Foundation: Mission-Related Investments & Blended Finance

• OECD: Blended Finance for Impact Investing

• UNEP & PRI: Fiduciary Duty in the 21st Century

Case Studies on Alternative Capital Strategies

• Fair By Design: Venture Fund & Advocacy to Reduce the Poverty Premium

• Regen Melbourne: A City-Wide Regenerative Investment Alliance

• ReFED: Data-Driven Capital Allocation for Food Waste Solutions

• Prime Coalition: Catalytic Capital for Climate Innovation

• University Pension Plan (UPP) Canada: Investing in Systemic Resilience

• Wespath Institutional Investments: Systemic Stewardship in Faith-Based Investing

• UN Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance: Global Investor Coalition

Governance & Policy Frameworks for Alternative Capital

• The Impact Management Project: Standardising Impact Metrics

• EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR): Policy for Impact Investment Transparency

• OECD: Policy Guidelines on ESG & Impact Investing

• UNEP: Aligning Asset Management with Systemic Sustainability

This piece is a little less structured.

Recently when I was back in Australia I would watch the tide creep higher each morning.

Not by much, barely noticeable at first. But after a week, the pattern became impossible to ignore. The ocean did not care about the lines we drew between property and public land, between nations and neighbourhoods. Its slow advance was a quiet reminder that borders are human fictions. The forces shaping our futures, climate, technology, migration, pay them no mind.

It is hard not to think about all of this when watching the sea. How do we draw lines of accountability when the forces at play are so fluid? Who decides when everyone is affected, yet no one is truly in control?

These questions have followed me. From local councils wrestling with housing crises in London to coastal communities in Mexico facing the frontlines of climate change. Governance, I realised, is not just about who decides, it is about what futures we believe are possible.

The Illusion of Control in a Fractured World

We live in systems designed for a world that no longer exists. Governance, for the most part, is still imagined as a structure of control, bound by borders, held by institutions, defined by authority. But what happens when the challenges we face do not respect these boundaries?

Climate crises ripple across continents. Digital platforms collapse distance in an instant. Pandemics and migration flows remind us that no region exists in isolation. Yet our governance systems continue to respond with the language of control, borders tightened, power consolidated, decisions delayed.

Control is comforting, but connection is what we need.

When I led a governance discovery process for a Central Government Department in the UK, the issue was not a lack of expertise or intention. The problem was disconnection, between teams, between governance bodies, between trust and decision-making. We designed a trust-based governance model, not just to streamline processes, but to recognise that governance moves at the speed of trust.

This model reduced decision-making delays by 30 percent. Not because new rules were enforced, but because relationships were rebuilt. It was a small step, but what would it mean to apply these lessons beyond a single institution? How do we design trust-based governance at planetary scale?

Futures at the Edge - Three Scenarios for 2050

The future is not something that arrives fully formed. It emerges, shaped by choices, assumptions, and stories we live by. Right now, multiple futures are being written at the edges, by communities, cities, ecosystems. What might governance look like if we follow these threads?

Scenario One: The Fragmented Future

A Future of Borders and Breakdowns

Morning begins with another checkpoint.

In 2050, the city is walled. Rising seas claimed coastal towns a decade ago. Refugees, camp outside the perimeters. Access is controlled by biometric scans, drones patrol the skies.

Mara, an aid worker, navigates endless bureaucratic layers just to get emergency supplies to displaced families. Decisions move slowly, too many signatures, too many interests. Each delay costs lives. Governance here feels brittle, reactive, protectionist, exhausted.

The air is thick with tension. In a fragmented world, governance failed not through absence, but through its refusal to adapt.

Scenario Two: The Networked Future

A Future of Fluid Alliances

The meeting begins as dawn breaks across another time zone.

On a terrace in Nairobi, Dev watches the city stir. The governance collective meets virtually, leaders from Singapore, Sao Paulo, Lagos, and Berlin. They do not represent nations but ecosystems, river basins, coastal zones, urban forests.

The collective is fluid. Alliances form and dissolve based on emergent needs, droughts, migrations, new technologies. Smart contracts on blockchain ensure decisions made today remain accountable tomorrow.

Cities now act like stars in a constellation, connected, adaptive, always learning. Trust is built through transparent processes and fast feedback loops. Governance here feels agile, responsive without losing sight of the whole.

Scenario Three: The Emergent Commons

A Future of Shared Stewardship

There is no single decision-maker here, only the circle.

In Oaxaca, the governance assembly gathers beneath a sprawling ceiba tree. Farmers, data cooperatives, biologists, and elders sit together. Their agenda, deciding how to balance the harvest with the needs of the watershed.

But this is not just a local meeting. Decisions here ripple outward. Data from similar assemblies across Latin America flow into shared digital commons. Watershed management decisions align with planetary climate forecasts. Digital platforms, owned by data cooperatives, facilitate this governance ecosystem.

There are no neat solutions. Governance here is messy, iterative, deeply relational. Decisions emerge slowly, through conflict, consensus, and the hard work of trust-building. Sometimes they get it wrong. But governance here values emergence over efficiency.

It is not perfect. But it feels alive. Flexible. Real.

Perhaps this is the most radical, and yet the most possible, future of all, governance reclaimed not through revolution, but through collective negotiation of shared futures.

A Quick Personal Reflection

In Mexico City, governance plays out in the streets. Informal economies thrive without institutional oversight. Entire markets organise themselves, rules negotiated, disputes settled, systems evolving organically. Power here feels different, negotiated daily, responsive, flexible.

In many coastal places, tourism meets ecology. The island’s entire economy relies on an ecosystem that is slowly eroding. Here, the ocean decides the terms. No council vote can stop the tide. Instead, governance emerges from negotiation, between locals, tourists, ecosystems.

These are not just local stories. They are microcosms of planetary governance. The informal systems that thrive in places like Mexico City hold lessons for formal institutions. The slow, ecological negotiations of places like coastal regions teach us how to govern with the planet, not just over it.

Governance for the future cannot be engineered. It must emerge.

But emergence isn’t easy. Designing governance for planetary futures presents significant challenges for designers, systems thinkers, and policymakers.

Challenge 1: The Persistence of Legacy Systems

Governance structures are slow to change. Bureaucracies resist flexibility, clinging to known hierarchies and processes.

Some ideas to get past it:

• Twin-Track Transformation: Adopt twin-track approaches: maintaining existing functions while prototyping new models in parallel.

• Regulatory Sandboxes: Create experimental governance spaces where new policies can be tested without full institutional commitment.

• Narrative Shifts: Changing governance means shifting mindsets. Storytelling and speculative futures can challenge legacy assumptions.

Challenge 2: Balancing Local Autonomy with Planetary Responsibility

How do we design governance systems that respect local contexts while aligning with planetary imperatives?

Some ideas to get past it:

• Nested Governance Models: Ensure local decisions are informed by planetary considerations.

• Relational Accountability: Build governance on relationships of trust that extend beyond local interests.

• Ecological Jurisprudence: Recognize the rights of ecosystems and future generations in governance processes.

Challenge 3: Designing for Uncertainty and Complexity

Planetary futures are uncertain, with complex systems interacting unpredictably.

Some ideas to get past it:

• Governance in Beta: Treat governance as a living prototype—iterative, adaptable, incomplete.

• Adaptive Feedback Loops: Incorporate continuous learning through real-time data and participatory evaluation.

• Speculative Governance Labs: Establish cross-sector spaces for scenario planning and futures thinking.

Challenge 4: Power and Control — The Inescapable Struggle

Power will always resist change. Control consolidates, often invisibly. Emerging governance models threaten entrenched interests.

Some ideas to get past it:

• Power Mapping: Identify where power is concentrated and who benefits.

• Redistributive Design: Embed mechanisms for power redistribution—rotating leadership roles, community veto rights, participatory budgeting.

• Transparency as Disruption: Radical transparency disrupts the ability of control to consolidate unchallenged.

• Building Power from Below: Empower marginalized voices through co-design and community-led experiments.

Ideas I Can’t Let Go — Experiments (and Ideas) for the Future

Some ideas keep circling back. Concepts I want to understand, experiment with, and see tested. They feel new, provocative, and deeply necessary.

Foundational Practices (The Essentials)

• Shared Principles, Local Flexibility: Co-develop planetary governance principles adaptable to local contexts, guiding values without imposing rigid frameworks.

• Distributed Leadership Networks: Foster networks of leaders across geographies who can steward governance experiments, ecosystems of trust and shared learning.

• Global Learning Infrastructures: Create platforms for knowledge exchange; blending academic insights, indigenous knowledge, and practitioner experiences.

• Translational Governance Practices: Invest in roles and institutions that translate between sectors, disciplines, and cultures; bridging the gaps that stall systemic change.

The Experiments That Keep Me Awake

Polycentric Decision-Making

This I find really interesting and would love to here / think more about it...

The idea that multiple centers of decision-making, across geographies, sectors, and scales, could operate semi-autonomously yet remain aligned through shared principles.

Why it matters:

• It allows for diversity in governance: different solutions tailored to context.

• It prevents single points of failure: no one system holds all the power.

• It’s inherently adaptive: local decisions respond quickly to local needs but remain connected to planetary considerations.

What I’m still thinking about:

• How do you maintain coherence without central control?

• What mechanisms ensure trust between these semi-autonomous nodes?

• How do we design digital infrastructure that supports polycentric governance at planetary scale?

Funding for Collaborative Experimentation

A big question

Emergent governance models won’t materialise without resources. But experimentation requires funders willing to embrace risk, ambiguity, and failure.

Ideas I have seen that could work:

• Planetary Governance Trust Funds: Multinational funding pools dedicated to governance experimentation—especially across the Global South.

• Decentralized Autonomous Organisations (DAOs): Community-owned digital platforms pooling resources for governance projects.

• Failure-Backed Bonds: Financial instruments where investors accept the risk of failure in exchange for high social impact returns if governance experiments succeed.

• Long-Term Investment in Governance R&D: Just as tech invests in speculative innovation, why not governance?

Reflections from the Possible

Perhaps governance for a planetary future is less about new structures but more about new stories.

The future will not be governed by those who cling to control. It will be shaped by those who let go, who design systems of connections, and understand that power is evolving and relational.

We live in a time between the now and the possible. Governance, can hopefully help us navigate that space and get it right (or as right as we can get it).