What if government worked more like nature?

A provocation from an upcoming essay

***Wait for it…

As I’ve alluded to in previous posts, I’m deep in the weeds of a significant body of work with my co-author, Dr. Sam Schikowitz. I cannot say exactly when we will publish, only that we are working together through various life constraints to keep moving forward to the point a first ‘full’ version is ready.

In the meantime, we will share bits and bobs here and there in the hope that it is 1) useful to readers and 2) useful for us is terms of constructively critical feedback.

As is always the case with these things, at some point you’ve got to press go. That doesn’t mean the work is done. It never will be (at least in our lifetimes). It just means we think it’s good enough to really be of its intended service.

With that out of the way, let’s get stuck in.

Here are some excerpts, aligned to the title above (note American English):

The better world many of us imagine feels far from reach. Why? Because the ways we interpret events, explore ideas, make decisions, and coordinate actions remains inadequate. Even when we recognize better ways to address our challenges, we lack the structures and social cohesion to put them into practice. Our inability to develop a thoughtful and shared “understanding of reality”, agree on positive, collective, and scale appropriate actions, and learn together is a meta-problem. And it’s one we must wisely respond to if we hope to move beyond self-imposed catastrophic or existential risks.

In this essay we introduce Eight Universal Practices of Governance as a response to the meta-problem described above. These practices result from observing the adaptive features exhibited in complex systems such as cells, organisms, ecosystems, and human societies. In this work we are not proposing a new theory of complexity. Instead, we describe how the adaptive features that have evolved in these systems can be used to positively inform the governance of human societies, from local neighborhoods to inter-governmental cooperation. And, just as many of these features have proven adaptive in their broader evolutionary context, we hypothesise that by applying The Eight Universal Practices of Governance, we stand a better chance than ever before of attending to what truly matters, and bringing about a better world for all.

Governance vs. Government: A Universal Perspective

We define “governance” as the universal set of processes by which agents navigate complexity and influence their own evolution. Although many people confuse these terms, “government” is not the same as “governance.’'

Government is a formal institutional structure that makes and enforces rules. It emerged as one way to manage the growing demands of larger human populations and more complex societies. Generally ‘the government’ is an entity such as a parliament, monarchy, or council. Governments are typically tasked with running a state or region, and managing defense, infrastructure, education, health, and other collective concerns. They wield authority that is often backed by laws. These laws often provide protections and rights to citizens.

Governance is both broader and deeper. It is not confined to these official structures. Rather it is an underlying set of inter-related processes. Governance processes always include:

• Gathering and interpreting information,

• Managing competing interests or drives,

• Setting norms, rules, or policies (formally or informally),

• Allocating resources like materials, time, attention, or energy,

• Adapting strategies in response to feedback or changing conditions, enabling the ‘agent’ to better fit its ‘arena’.

In this essay we will highlight how this universal set of processes can be better understood and enacted in collaborative human settings for the benefit of all life on this earth.

Upon reading this, do you have any reflections? How about burning questions? I’d love to hear from you.

Please add whatever comes up to the comments.

Adding to this, here’s a note Sam shared just recently than may help better explain why we are taking this approach:

Many of us find it helpful to compare cells in a body with people in a culture. In a multicellular organism, each cell carries out specialized tasks while sharing signals with its neighbors. This cooperation allows the entire body to grow, heal, and adapt with a level of complexity that no single cell could achieve alone. However, if certain cells ignore these signals or start hoarding resources, diseases like cancer can arise, threatening the organism’s health.

A parallel exists in social and cultural settings. Individuals contribute their own talents and knowledge, guided by shared norms that help the group function smoothly. When people respect and reinforce these mutual agreements, as well as reflect on and improve them over time, society becomes more cohesive and innovative. Yet if enough individuals break these norms or exploit others, the whole community may suffer from broken trust, conflict, or unrest. The eight universal practices we discuss in this essay are inspired by these natural patterns of cooperation and adaptive coordination, aiming to channel our collective energies—whether at the local, national, or global scale—into a more resilient and thriving “social organism.”

He shared this with me off the back of some comments we received about why we “go down to the level of cells” when we explain how each of the governance practices work in natural systems.

How do you feel about this analogy? Is it helpful? Does it resonate? How does it map to your understand and experience up to this point?

And finally, for today at least, here’s a section from the very tail end of the rather long essay (as with all the above, very much a WIP):

Modern Government Structures: Shortcomings and Paths to Improvement

Although modern governments have evolved over time, they often struggle to embody the 8 Practices. Issues include:

• Outdated bureaucracies

• Capture by special interests

• Opaque decision-making, to

• Political systems that do not genuinely reflect the public interest.
  

Recognizing these gaps can guide reforms that align institutions with the 8 universal practices.

1. Falling Short on Inclusivity and Engagement: Governments frequently rely on periodic elections with limited forms of direct engagement. Many voices, particularly those of marginalized groups, remain unheard due to voter suppression, inaccessible polling locations, complex registration requirements, or limited language support. Public consultations, when they occur, may be dominated by well-funded interest groups or lobbyists, overshadowing community perspectives. To improve, governments can adopt accessible town halls, online deliberation platforms, community advisory boards, and education campaigns that empower all citizens—not only those with time, money, or connections—to participate meaningfully.

2. Weak Transparency and Accountability Mechanisms: Despite freedom of information acts and open data initiatives, government processes are often too complicated or obscured by jargon and bureaucratic layering. Campaign finance laws may also be weak, allowing corporate and wealthy donors to influence policy “behind the scenes”. The revolving door—where officials move between government agencies and the industries they regulate—erodes trust and blurs accountability lines. To counter these issues, states can simplify disclosures, strengthen lobbying regulations, ensure rigorous auditing and oversight by independent watchdogs, and enforce cooling-off periods so that public servants cannot immediately join the private sector they once regulated. Clear penalties for corruption and conflicts of interest can be implemented to build public confidence in decision-making.

3. Misaligned Decision-Making Scales: Some matters, such as parking rules or community gardens, are best managed locally. While others, like pandemics or climate change, demand regional or global coordination. Yet many current governments centralize authority excessively or, conversely, fragment it so thoroughly that no single entity can address large-scale problems. International bodies often lack enforcement powers or inclusive participation structures. Policymakers can address this by formally distributing powers based on issue complexity, giving local authorities autonomy for everyday matters and strengthening international treaties and institutions to handle cross-border crises.

4. Insufficient Integration of Expertise and Evidence: While experts often advise ministries or legislatures, political considerations, ideological biases, and short-term electoral incentives may override informed guidance. Governments may appoint agency directors or commissions’ leaders without transparent, merit-based processes, leading to patronage or partisan favoritism, rather than care and competence. This disconnect limits the incorporation of robust data, scientific consensus, or cultural expertise into policy. Ensuring open, nonpartisan selection procedures for key roles, institutionalizing independent advisory bodies, and making use of public consultation on proposed regulations can ground decisions more firmly in evidence and community insight.

5. Limited Adaptive Iteration and Stewardship: Inflexible governance structures, shaped by electoral cycles and entrenched interests, limits effective response to feedback or emerging problems. Party systems, often operating more like for-profit corporations than democratic institutions, focus on winning elections rather than continuous improvement or public benefit. Entrenched elites may block reforms to electoral methods, campaign finance, or legislative procedures that would make governance more responsive. Governments can introduce iterative policy reviews, run pilot programs, and sunset outdated laws so that continuous learning and refinement become standard practice. This also involves placing long-term values—such as sustainability and equity—above certain types of immediate gains, even when vested interests push otherwise.

6. Gaps in Ethical Orientation and Long-Term Equity: Short-term economic or political advantages often overshadow moral considerations and intergenerational fairness. Lobbyists and think tanks funded by narrow interests skew policy toward immediate profits, ignoring the long-term harm to communities, ecosystems, or future generations. Governments must reinforce independent ethics commissions, protect whistleblowers, require transparent campaign financing with strict limits, and support a free and critical media. By making ethical training for public servants mandatory and integrating long-term, wide-boundary impact assessments into decision-making, leaders can ensure that ethical principles guide policy, balancing present needs with long term collective well-being.

7. Weak Privacy Protections and Vulnerable Information Flows: In this digital era, data-driven governance can become manipulative if left unregulated. Political parties—often undemocratic in structure and reliant on fundraising from large donors—may collude with tech firms to micro-target voters, spread disinformation, or harvest personal data without consent. Governments must enact strong data protection laws, regulate algorithmic transparency, prohibit mass surveillance without just cause, and encourage ethical design and use of sociotechnical systems. Guaranteeing citizen control over personal information and ensuring open debate on the ethical implications of all sociotechnical development and use can realign technology with human dignity, civic freedom and ecological limits.

8. Underinvestment in Education, Capacity Building, and Civic Literacy: Public education systems often lack civics, ethics, and media literacy components, leaving citizens vulnerable to manipulation and ill-prepared for meaningful engagement. Without understanding their rights, the functioning of institutions, and the moral dimensions of governance, people cannot hold leaders accountable or contribute to collective decisions effectively. States can incorporate civic and moral education into curricula, support lifelong learning, invest in cultural centers and public libraries, and collaborate with civil society to provide opportunities that enhance critical thinking and ethical reasoning. An informed, skillful citizenry is more likely to challenge abuses, propose constructive solutions, and uphold democratic values.

Confronting Systemic Failures: Campaign Finance, Party Structures, and Revolving Doors Campaign finance systems that allow unlimited contributions or “dirty money” distort political priorities and concentrate power in the hands of wealthy donors. Political parties often function like corporate entities focused on electoral victory rather than public service, limiting internal democracy and excluding diverse perspectives. The revolving door between government agencies and the industries they regulate compromises the integrity of policymaking. By reforming campaign finance rules to cap donations, mandate disclosure, and use public funding, governments can reduce undue influence. Encouraging party reforms that ensure internal democracy and transparency, along with strict rules that prevent officials from immediately joining the private sector they once oversaw, rebuilds trust and ensures leadership aligns with the public good (its stated purpose).

Toward Functional Governments

Modern governments need not start over, but they must acknowledge these shortcomings and commit to change. By:

• Strengthening transparency

• Aligning decision-making levels with specific challenges

• Grounding policies in evidence and cultural nuance

• Ensuring continuous learning

• Upholding ethical standards

• Protecting privacy and the integrity of information flows, and

• Investing in education
  
  

Government can evolve in ways that:

• Reflect aspirational goals

• Respect fundamental rights and freedoms

• Support diverse values, and

• Protect ecological limits.

This shift is not a “nice to have”. It's necessary if we are to adapt to life's inevitable change, in ways that have the potential to make life better for the many over the long run.

Some notes:

• We are referring to 8 practices that we cover in significant depth in earlier parts of the essay (we have a section for each practice that covers scope, examples, how to implement at different scales, from the very small to the very large etc.). As a result, I know there’s context missing

• Although we are pretty clear on the crux of the patterns themselves, which adaptive evolutionary features we are drawing inspiration from etc. the naming conventions are draft only right now. One example here is a shift from the current framing of practice 7 towards ‘wise sociotechnical systems’. We’re not set on this shift yet either, but we are moving in that kind of direction

• The work itself (the entire essay if you will) brings together very different experience Sam and I have had over the years, but coheres around a desire we both have to contribute to the ways we might more wisely respond to collective coordination failure. This is a meta-problem that massively affects our ability to adapt and evolve going forward.

Much more could of course be said. But let me leave you with this, a short excerpt I’ve already posted.

The 'functionality' of governance depends on context and scale. A process that appears beneficial at one level can be harmful at a higher level. For example, a single cell's rapid growth can harm or kill the host organism.

Governance is functional when short-term needs are balanced with long term goals. Governance is functional when the ‘parts’ operate in service of both ‘self’ (which is a ‘whole’ in its own right) and ‘whole’.

Dysfunctional governance occurs when processes undermine coherence, justice, resilience, or sustainability. This is true regardless of time scale.

Put differently, governance processes both produce, and result from, synergy. Synergy means ‘parts’ interacting that create a greater ‘whole’. This greater whole can exhibit new phenomena that were not predictable from the parts alone. This is emergence. Functional governance is both synergic and emergent. Functional governance is also negentropic. It leads to an increase in order or coherence.

Dysfunctional governance is antergic. This means parts act in opposition to other parts (antergy is the opposite of synergy). It is also entropic as it lacks or loses order. This erodes relationships and leads to maladaptive phenomena or a malfunctioning whole. Over time, this can result in decay and / or collapse.

Much more could be said about this given the technicality and nuance of such concepts. For the sake of brevity, we will pause it here (please continue in the comments).

*A brief note before concluding this section. Emergence is sometimes thought of as being something close to ‘magic’. We think of emergence as 'actualised potential'. It seems 'magical' only because the potential that actualised was previously unknown to us.

With love as always.