Future Now
The IFTF Blog
On Governance
Mathias Crawford and I have begun a series on "Futures Thinking" over at GOOD. My first post went up this week--on the need for re-designing our systems of governance to meet the long-term challenges of the 21st Century.
Governance designs are outdated. We have spent the past 200+ years
designing and building governments as we would build clocks. We assume that reality is knowable, predictable, and mechanical. We believe that
powers can be separated and balanced against each other, that
deliberative processes will yield fair laws, and that the common good
can be raised by the self-interested behavior of individuals. Well,
virtually all the physical and biological science of the past two
centuries have chipped away at the worldview that reality can be known
objectively and managed predictably. We live in a chaotic,
unpredictable world that can only be sensed by our limited biological
and technological tools of observation.
The consequences of
these structural dynamics were bad enough when we were just trying to
organize people and resources within bounded geographical regions.
However, the design failings of our governance systems take on
existential scale and global importance in the current Anthropocene
Era—where we are responsible for governing nothing less than “life on
Earth.” The stakes have never been higher, and we need a new way of
thinking about governance if we are to survive and thrive.