Institute For The Future

Christopher Cabaldon is leading the way in applying futures thinking to democratic systems

During 11 terms as the Mayor of West Sacramento, California, Christopher Cabaldon built the city into a hub of innovation, sustainability, and entrepreneurship. His future-oriented initiatives set new benchmarks in the region, including those dealing with land use, water, air quality, and climate change. In recognition of his visionary leadership, The United States Conference of Mayors (USCM) chose Christopher to lead its Jobs, Education and Workforce Standing Committee for seven years. We are thrilled to announce that Christopher Cabaldon has taken on the role of IFTF’s "Mayor In Residence” where he will work with us in applying futures thinking to adaptive dynamic democratic systems. 

In the following conversation, Christopher talked about his recent work, why he teamed up with IFTF, and what he plans to accomplish during his time at IFTF.

Tell us about your work experience

I just wrapped up a couple of decades as the mayor of my town, West Sacramento, transforming this “other-side-of-the-tracks,” old industrial town at the center of the Sacramento metro region, from being the “city whose name shall not be spoken” into one of the leading cities in the country around innovation and technology, and work and education, in particular. 

You know, in California nearly all mayors are part-time. So I have had a parallel career working in and outside of government, focusing on education policy. I used to run the Higher Education Committee for the State Assembly in the legislature, and then served as Vice-Chancellor of the community college system. I ran a political action outfit in education policy for a group of Silicon Valley billionaires. And I've represented the state as its Interstate Higher Education Commissioner for the last 12 years.

You have a lot of opportunities open to you. What attracted you to IFTF?

I've worked with IFTF a couple of times already. I was first introduced to Jake Dunagan [Director of IFTF's Governance Futures Lab who led the “visions of future cities” project with the USCM] when IFTF came to the US Conference of Mayors' inaugural session at South by Southwest. A group of us were trying to take the nation's mayors in a new direction in terms of thinking about innovation and the role that mayors have—and can have—in the innovation ecosystem. What we discovered was that mayors were not equipped, by and large, to think about innovation outside of what's right in front of you, or a particular funding source, or outside of an election cycle. So IFTF was invited to facilitate futures training  for mayors, and I fell in love with it. I thought Jake and the team did a great job, and mayors were talking about it all year long after. You could see the change in how folks were thinking about imagining the future, about who should and how to imagine the future. We also understood the tensions between democracy and futures thinking—and not futures thinking. I also participated in IFTF’s Ten-Year Forecast on the Future of Trust. 

And when Van Ton-Quinlivan, who is both a friend and a long-time associate of mine, joined as IFTF’s Executive in Residence a few years ago, I remember reaching out to her to say, "That's what I would want to do!"—sort of off the cuff, off the top of my head, because IFTF is a good group. It's a good, smart, practical, but visionary group of people with a set of tools that really resonate with me, but that I didn't know, and I wanted to know better. So when Marina [Gorbis, IFTF's executive director] reached out and said, "would you be interested in joining?" that "me" from a couple of years ago was still on my shoulder saying, "Hey, remember, this was something you really wanted to do!"

You’re a unique addition to IFTF; no one here has had the title of Mayor in Residence before, and you’re going to lead or research in developing tools and resources to help local government leaders tackle some of the most pressing issues facing our cities today. Among the initial projects that you’ll be contributing to are on the future of democracy in a time of rising authoritarianism and disinformation, as well as our College Futures Foundation project, NDI Future of Democracy project, and California 100 project. Can you tell us a little about how you’ll approach these projects?

I want to help to route the way we think about and apply futures thinking to complex adaptive democratic systems. We all tend to idealize them, especially those of us who aren't in democratic institutions. It’s easy to think, "If we gave everybody a voice, wouldn't that be very likely to produce universal basic income, college for all, and healthcare for everyone?" Well, it turns out there's a lot more complexity to individual psychology, collective psychology, and institutions that make it more complicated. There are individuals and forces out there that have less benign intentions, and we've seen evidence of that in the last couple of years at the national scale, for sure. Simply assuming that unleashing the power of the populace will automatically create thoughtful, progressive, caring, belonging-based solutions doesn't work out. Mayors know that already. This is our daily experience—people telling us, "Build more housing but not next door to me." Or "Clean up all the homeless in the city, but by the way, don't arrest anybody and don't build any shelters next door to me." There are these tensions between our present selves as citizens and our future selves as citizens, between collective and individual, and social responsibilities. And the fundamental role of government is, in some sense, a compact where we agree to be forced to do things that we would rather not do to achieve some larger social purpose. The government's not a product in that way. It's not a customer service-oriented business. My job as a mayor is saying, "No, you can't cross the street right now. I know you're in a hurry, but you're gonna have to wait your turn." And you don't want to do that. "I have places to go. I'm late! And why is the government telling me what to do?" Well, it's for the greater good and your greater good, even though in the moment you're like, "Absolutely not. Government's stupid. There's not a car coming right now. Why do we have to stop?" We're experiencing that on a large scale on vaccinations. The lens around democracy is very clean and crisp until you put the humans into it. So it's important to consider futurist approaches to thinking about problems and solutions with that in mind as a way to help our colleagues get even smarter about the prospects for change and avert unintended consequences and unintended threats.

It's going to be great to have you on board, given your real-world experience with governance. To close, could you share a recent book that's captured your attention?

Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution, by Menno Schilthuizen. It's a book about urban speciation and the radical number of new emerging or evolving species in cities. It challenges our regular notions that urbanization is dramatically reducing biodiversity—which it is—but it's also creating an entirely new form of biodiversity right under our noses that we're neither valuing nor really understanding, like the number of different crow species that that now exist that are occupying all these new niches. The book caused me to think and notice things about the city and the rest of life inside the city.

Please join us in welcoming Christopher as IFTF’s Mayor in Residence!