If institutions are key tools for solving critical problems and emerging crises at a planetary scale, recent evidence – from Covid to climate change – suggests that we must rethink their design. Departing from static, state-led paradigms shaped by yesterday’s problems, we must recognise the complexity of transnational challenges today and the need for collective action to address them. And we must reimagine institutions that are fit for purpose in this new landscape. Long-lasting, robust institutions depend on factors such as political will, functional processes and an internal culture that enables reform and growth. This is as true now as it was when the institutions that wield power today were created. From San Francisco to Singapore, the Dialogues held as part of the Future of Institutions project have pointed to the need to harness these common truths towards new ends. They have also surfaced another prerequisite for successful, sustainable institutions: contextualising challenges and solutions. This is a welcome complexity. With a plethora of challenges come a plethora of solutions, and the convenings helped match them and create shared understandings.
The Dialogue on how Public Finance Institutions can help tackle challenges, such as climate change, provides a good example of a transnational need with differing country solutions. While nations are considering how best to channel finance towards alternative fuels, the fiscal weight of nations differs. For instance, public finance in the United States, deployed strategically, could potentially have a significant impact on shaping markets to invest in renewable energy. But in Indonesia, where the public sector has less money to spend, attracting private sector or other external funding, such as via development banks, might be more important. Institutionalising these solutions will also differ. In the United States, party politics threatens to stand in the way of a major shift to green energy. Addressing political will may therefore be where the road to institutional change starts. In Indonesia, the challenge may be more technical. Creating well-defined guidelines on what counts as green investment might be what investors need to put funds on the table.
What a particular global challenge may mean may differ from one context to another as well, with knock-on effects on institutional reform. In the Dialogue on intergenerational fairness, for example, one participant pointed out that the age demographics of a country affect what the challenge looks like. In much of Europe, an ageing population skews voting power in favour of the old. In countries like India and Thailand, this is not the case because the population is younger. This is not to say that countries all over the world don’t face intergenerational tensions, but how those tensions manifest looks different. In Thailand, according to one participant, the state itself, rather than an ageing voter base with different values, is seen as the problem; the young prefer to trust the private sector. In contrast, many European solutions to intergenerational fairness see the state as part of the solution, as in Wales which has a Future Generations Commissioner and a framework for testing the generational fairness of new government policy.
The Dialogue on government implementation in complex environments pointed to how shared understandings can forge new models for alliances. In debating better learning models to help calibrate public sector responses, what came through clearly was the need for knowledge and understanding of localised realities, structures, capabilities and culture at every stage of the policy value chain, from development to execution. The pandemic underscored this need. In the Philippines, healthcare promotion policies became less about teaching better behaviours, and more about providing people with tools to make better decisions. In Estonia, adjusting the government’s commitment to transparency in order to avoid public panic made room for agile decision making. In India, organisational capabilities emerged stronger than the process of policymaking itself. In fact, uncontextualised solutions proved to be damaging in certain scenarios, where parachuting best practices based on untested parameters resulted in ill-fitting public policies. Crucially, the fact that some countries at different developmental stages like Japan and Ecuador have begun developing models to harness and institutionalise a more bottom-up approach to governance systems points to a reproducible model for incorporating this understanding.
This focus on processes rather than specific solutions – which can enable stakeholders to arrive at institutions and institutional mechanisms that are appropriate for different political economic realities – was echoed in the Dialogue on one of the pressing concerns of our times: how to govern the data-driven economy in a manner that leads to equitable outcomes. Divides between digital haves and have-nots exist at two levels. Within nations, vulnerable populations have little say in the institutional architecture that governs data ecosystems in which they are often unwitting participants. And across nations, the balance of digital power between developed economies, where dominant platforms are headquartered, and developing economies, from which these platforms extract data, is skewed. The Dialogue surfaced the importance of recognising these divides. Perhaps more importantly, it threw up ideas for a bottom-up approach – much like the Dialogue on government implementation in complex environments – involving non-government stakeholders.
Going into this project, we knew that starting a global conversation around what institutions are needed to tackle the big challenges nations and communities face today, and will in the future, was going to throw up nuance, complexity and diversity. You can’t ask a big question and expect a small answer. However, common, global threads emerged across the Dialogues. And so did connections among stakeholders that will bring the lessons learnt in one part of the world to bear in another.
