The role of governments
The anticipated appointment of Andy Burnham as UK prime minister is the opportune moment for a deeper reflection on the fundamental role of governments and those who lead them.
Within the Labour Party, there appears to be a great deal of optimism about Burnham's capacity to revive the party's prospects and enact substantive national reforms.
However, these expectations are challenged by insights from systems thinking literature, which suggest that systemic constraints often outweigh individual leadership. Leaders, the argument goes, emerge from social conditions - rather than shaping them - and have to plug into a system that is ill-equipped to deal with the complexity of modern governance and unwilling to transform itself in order to do so.
While I agree with this analysis it does beg the question: what is to be done?
The conventional response is to try and make governments better at governing. Improve feedback loops. Create more open communication channels. Devolve more power. Develop cultures of innovation.
The problem I have with these approaches is that they assume the role of government as a neutral fact.
The mere presence of government structures, as we recognise them today, reinforces a specific framework for approaching, defining, and tackling social issues. It assumes that solutions can be offered up—"drill for oil" or "stop the boats", for example—for public approval or rejection. An electoral victory is interpreted as a validation of a party’s initial diagnosis, with the subsequent term serving as a test of their implementation skills until the following election cycle.
This is very unlike how social problems—and society building—actually happen. As Ritter and Webber argued, social problems are ‘wicked’ because they are beyond objective definition and there is no scientific way to determine if they have been ‘fixed’. What we are engaged with during an election is not a genuine process of social diagnosis and sense-making but a reductive game of blame attribution for the unsolveability of complex issues.
The response has to be to embrace complexity, nuance, and difference but this is not what governments are built for. As centralised machines they rely on order, sameness, and predictability. Because they create the frameworks which essentially order our lives, homogeneity and predictability in humans is also preferred. An ideal type of citizen—industrious, socially responsible, enterprising—is established that the public are required to conform to by a mixture of persuasion, proselytising, and the bureaucratic structures that frame and constrain our lives. These processes marginalise and discourage diversity and difference—necessary conditions for social transformation.
This dynamic conflicts with the lived experience of navigating a modern, multifaceted society. As we are increasingly saturated with data and global connectivity, the notion of a monolithic social reality or a single arbiter of truth is becoming untenable. While this fragmentation has triggered anxiety—specifically the fear that relative truths allow disinformation and conspiracy theories to flourish—it highlights a significant shift in how we perceive our shared world.
Indeed, I would argue that the fear prompted by this perceived fragmentation might be somewhat misplaced. The authority commanded by groups and platforms that promote disinformation stems, in part, from the existence of institutions that stubbornly insist upon a solitary version of reality. Such an insistence does more than just breed mistrust; it imposes a weight of expected conformity that almost inevitably sparks a counter-reaction. True shared understanding cannot be dictated from above; it must instead be cultivated through direct encounter, meaningful connection, interpersonal relationships, as well as the acceptance and embodiment of ourselves as social beings with interdependencies and existences beyond our own bodies.
This alters the way we think about social problems. From technical fixes within an assumed paradigm, we recapture our ability to make our own meaning and value. We can ask not only what a policy of ‘stopping the boats’ would do but what problem, need, or want is it actually seeking to address. We might find that the problem and its apparent solution are not as logically connected as first assumed. This is not a process that can be achieved in the short space of an election campaign or even the debate over a Bill before parliament. It takes time, care, and patience - but the fruits are so much richer.
It also shifts the focus from ideal solutions to experimentation, embodiment, and lived experience. This not only reflects the true nature of how society is built and maintained - through the choices, actions, and beliefs of people - but also makes the public the source of information and data on how a social issue is being addressed or a need met. Rather than being told what social reality they live in, people can make it and experience it.
None of this is to say that governments have to be done away with - at least not necessarily. But rather it is an invitation to rethink their role and to think critically about what is being assumed by their existence. As I have been writing this piece, images of governments as delivery partners, information networks, and public platforms for debate and deliberation have been coming to mind. There are likely to be thousands more creative possibilities that can emerge - but only if we embrace the idea that government structures are a choice.
By Matt Hawkins, commonplace.