What kind of state do we want in the years ahead? In this piece I describe how governments can navigate fiscal pressures, fraught geopolitics and complex challenges. Governments remain relatively resistant to change and innovation, particularly in Europe. This is one crucial reason why they are often mistrusted, seen as incompetent and too slow to respond to new technologies and new tasks. In what follows I suggest some of the elements of a roadmap to reform and the case for an ethos of ‘strength without weight’, using lessons from the most innovative and competent governments around the world.
It’s become a cliché that the world is suffering a “polycrisis” (a series of overlapping crises, from finance to ecology and politics to health) that places huge pressure on governments. The pressures may be nothing like as bad as those of world war or depression. But there’s no doubt that governments feel more stressed and that as technologies change at breakneck speed they are constantly being left behind, not least because business drives innovation far more than in the past (as one example, in 1960 a single government agency, the US Department of Defense, was responsible for a third of all global R&D: now the figure is around 3 per cent). In an era of social media they can easily lose touch with their own citizens, and many recognise that they are stuck with institutional models that are no longer fit for purpose.
Yet the need for government has not diminished: to protect people from risks they cannot handle alone; to provide order; to fix collective problems; and to support their citizens to survive and thrive. Here I suggest a repertoire of methods that governments need in the late 2020s, which I summarise in twelve main themes.
- First, intelligence and its orchestration is now central to the design and workings of governments. Governments have always depended on intelligence. But in the past this was primarily thought about in relation to security: intelligence about external and internal threats. Now governments need to orchestrate intelligence for all their activities, from education and welfare to the environment, and they need to define intelligence broadly to include data, evidence, models, tacit knowledge, foresight, and creativity and innovation – all the means that can help them make better decisions, particularly under conditions of stress and uncertainty. Most of the world’s valuable firms are now based around intelligence. Yet in most governments, intelligence is still relatively marginal, divided by functional departments (health, economy, education and others) and with an overlaying division between specialisms (data, evidence, foresight, statistics and science advice). Instead, intelligence should be a core function, orchestrated both at the centres of government and in a distributed way in departments and agencies: sharing data, evidence and more; tapping into the collective intelligence of the public; and mobilising AI that now makes it far easier to scan, synthesise and design.
- Intelligence then helps to shape and use clear and comprehensive strategic frameworks that describe what government is trying to achieve, wherever possible with explicit goals and milestones. This provides a shape for performance management, budget allocation and for accountability to the public. It may include some very focused priority tasks and some which are broader. Without a clear strategic framework governments risk being driven solely by events. With it they can make the most of data about exactly what’s happening in schools, hospitals and the economy providing constant feedback about how well government is working and where change is needed.
- Rebuilding trust. Trust roughly correlates with peoples’ feeling that they influence decisions. There are now many tools which simultaneously strengthen democracy and the public’s feelings of agency. A critical issue is using the right methods for the right tasks – knowing when and how to consult; when variants of citizens assemblies are most useful (and how best to connect into representative politics and bureaucracy); when formal decision-making power can be devolved (as with participatory budgeting); and when shared diagnosis of a problem, and national conversations, are needed well before attending to possible solutions. Giving citizens choice; visibility on where their money goes; and a repertoire of methods for engagement, from neighbourhood decisions on public spaces to big national issues: all are vital to the workings of a modern state.
- New structures for coordination and action. The structures of government are still too often stuck in vertical silos that were essential in the 19th century but much less useful today when so many critical tasks such as net zero, pandemics or prosperity cut across the silos. Governments need to be able to organise horizontally with ‘whole of government’ methods that include cross-cutting budgets, roles, teams, strategic clusters and partnerships, platforms and digital infrastructures. These need to be fitted to different tasks (what works for economic prosperity will be very different from what works for health, for example). The traditional model of relying on committees is no longer an adequate response. In the future, governments will look more like matrices, with a mix of vertical and horizontal roles, structures and processes.
- Reforming public finance. Money drives much of the behaviour of governments. But the methods of public finance are now often misaligned with governments’ objectives: ill-suited to spending on people, even though most public spending goes to people, not things; too short-termist, in an era of 100 year lives; and lacking data and intelligence to understand impacts. The next generation methods require much more systematic links between money and impact, using investment models and data to track impacts and enable learning.
- Experiment and innovation. In uncertain times governments need to be willing to experiment. Many leaders in the past made this central to their governing philosophy, like Roosevelt in 1930s USA. That means use of experiments wherever possible to test policies before they go to scale; supporting service and social innovations in fields like welfare and care to discover what works and then share the results in easily accessible formats. We need more trial and error, not error and trial (ie unnecessary mistakes followed by inquiries and blame). Much has been learned about how to do this well: how to organise innovation teams, budgets, procurement and commissioning, but this knowledge is repeatedly forgotten.
- Simplicity and efficiency: A key challenge for any bureaucracy is how to reduce complexity, regularly and ruthlessly. Taxes, processes, protocols, contracts, burdens on citizens and businesses all tend to become more complex over time. Each addition of complexity has good arguments in its favour. But their net effect can be disastrous. One of the lessons of the Internet, which is based on quite simple and highly standardized protocols, is that radical simplicity can make it possible for more complexity to be organized a layer higher. Complexity reduction programmes are usually more effective than cost reduction programmes, though these are needed too. The political right has largely captured the case for efficiency. But every progressive should care about making public services and governments as efficient as possible, rooting out duplication, waste and unnecessary bureaucracy. DOGE in the US was a disaster. But no country can afford not to have some process for constantly cutting waste.
- Relational states: Much of what government does is done for the people. But much has to be done with citizens, particularly in education, health and social policy, with shared responsibility for actions and outcomes. That requires a ‘relational state’ approach, with intelligence shared between state and citizen, drawing on lived experience and citizen experience, which implies changes to roles, metrics and accountabilities, and often bigger roles for personal coaches, mentors and guides. This relational stance also needs to guide new combinations of entitlements and responsibilities, contributions and rights, since this balance is vital to ensuring that welfare states are legitimate.
- A new breed of public institutions and mesh thinking: Today’s public institutions look very similar to their equivalents 50 or 100 years ago. To reimagine their forms they need to learn both from history and from the best available methods of the present. The lack of organisational design creativity in the public sector compared to the private sector (which has seen radical innovation in the last two decades, with leading companies based on algorithms, search engines and platforms) has become a major impediment to action in fields ranging from energy transitions to mental health and AI. New institutions will increasingly put intelligence at their core, as well as much more direct engagement with the public. They will learn from businesses that have moved to much flatter structures; to layers of automated decision-making; and using AI to allow parallel processes in place of the slow, serial ones of traditional government. A key design principle will be to use ‘mesh’ approaches that connect many tiers of government, business and civil society into formal partnerships, often with compacts setting out the contributions and responsibilities of each player, shared data and knowledge, and mutual accountability.
- Digital infrastructures: Digital technologies underpin much of what governments now do. The key lesson of recent years is that some standardisation allows for much more flexibility and efficiency, with models like Estonia’s X-road and India’s Digital Public Infrastructures providing common approaches to authentication, data sharing and service design, not just within government but also serving the private sector. These often require central teams to develop and improve underlying modular elements that can be used across the public sector. Platforms can then be used to organise provision of public services as well as cheaper access to commercial goods and services for citizens. One example of what’s needed is personal accounts for citizens that make it possible to lend money for skills or mortgages, secured against future tax commitments.
- Strategy and synthesis: The most vital capability of government is the ability to synthesise – to draw on many forms of intelligence to guide action. That will include both risks (scanning for potential timebombs and crises) and potential opportunities. The inputs will range from science and statistics to public opinion and implementation insights. The key is to have strong capabilities – particularly at the centre – to understand these inputs and synthesise to guide action. But many European governments have lost their strategic capability, as has the European Commission. This means that their time horizons have shrunk and that they struggle to think ahead.
- Skills and capability: Finally, governments, like all organisations, need to pay sustained attention to skills and capacity for decision-makers at every level, including both officials and politicians. There are many gaps in skill, knowledge and mindset that seriously impede governments’ ability to act. Many governments remain dominated by law and economics, deficient in terms of the skills in science, data and technology needed for many of their key tasks, from pandemics and climate change to growth.
Governing well requires aligning the poetry (the big messages and stories), the prose (policies, programmes and laws) and the plumbing (the practical tools that make states work). All need to be rethought in the difficult climate of the 2020s. Europe is a victim of past success – an extraordinary period of stability and growth has entrenched not just institutions but also mindsets, one symptom of which is far less institutional innovation than in other parts of the world. The greatest risk now is that change will come too little and too late.
To guide reform, we need not just plans, roadmaps and pathways, but also an ethos. The ethos for public reform should be ‘strength without weight’: how to create systems and processes that are powerful and effective but light, without the burdensome bureaucracy, law and process that characterized 20th century government but over time has increasingly become a brake.
Sir Geoff Mulgan is a Professor at University College London (UCL), and has worked in city and national government in the UK, Australia and Europe, and as an adviser to over fifty governments around the world. His most recent books are When Science Meets Power and Another World is Possible: how to reignite social and political imagination. He is a co-founder of TIAL, the Institutional Architecture Lab, which works on the design of new public institutions. He has written extensively on specific options for governments on all the topics mentioned in this piece.
