How to design future governance

Three principles to guide governance design beyond modern society and liberal democracy.

Although I have formerly developed an attempt at a comprehensive and general theory of governance — one that would be usable to diagnose the failures of human coordination across all social units (from tribes to organizations to states and beyond) — this article focuses specifically upon “the future of governance”, what I have come to call its protopian forms.

Governance is, in many ways, the most important question of all. In societies that are well-governed, people do well (as far as that’s possible in a world full of challenges).

In this article, I skip the wider and more universal framework for analyzing and diagnosing governance, moving directly to “the vision itself”: the more desirable forms of governance that may become possible only under the best societal conditions.

Let us briefly note: I am not presenting a certain system of governance that I believe is the best for all societies, in all situations. Rather, I am presenting a certain future “attractor point” of governance that I believe is possible (and desirable) to achieve if and when other problems have been dealt with to a sufficient degree: inefficient bureaucracy, failing monopolies of violence, lacking legitimacy, fragmented collective identity, short-circuited informational feedback cycles, coerced distortions of public discourse, and so forth — all of the classical problems of governance. In my earlier attempt at a “general theory of governance” I outlined eight fundamental, but highly abstracted, social functions, and argued that the problems of governance that we see in the world, across the board, come down to imbalances between how these eight principles play out (and I am grateful to One Project for having made this work possible).

So, needless to say, the “protopian” form of governance is not to be “implemented” in Afghanistan on Tuesday. Protopian governance is to be cultivated by agents sensitive to the limitations inherent to any reform and the risks involved.

I shall thus summarize the future of governance in three design principles. By “design principle” I basically mean a feature of a governance system, but — again —…