The Collaborative Governance Transition Journey
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Our Collaborative Governance transition journey is based upon the Circular Design process developed by Ellen MacArthur Foundation and IDEO. Accordingly, our own journey frames and develops governance-related activities and experiments across four main design stages:
Understand: inquiring and interrogating the status quo and opening up to new possibilities.
Define: scoping out core challenges and opportunities and identifying core principles and rationale for a portfolio-based intervention strategy.
Make: developing a set of possibilities and experiments across a circular and regenerative city transition plan.
Release: implementing solutions to test viability and gathering learning for further development and scaling up.
The journey is articulated based on the REFLOW Governance Framework. It starts with investigating and interrogating the local contexts and exploring opportunities and drivers for circularity, as a fundamental step to develop a collaborative vision (Understand); it continues with scoping out key challenges and opportunities and with the identification of core levers that may be addressed and that may form the constituents of a first portfolio (Define); it further develops the portfolio (Make), defining and designing a core set of activities and experiments (operations), and then enters in an implementation phase during which such activities and experiments are concretely tested and observed in terms of first results and outcomes (Release).
Activities and experiments may reflect different levers (see Section Portfolio Approach), and not governance per se; the intent behind this journey is to foster reflection and learning on possible ways to govern the transition at scale on the one hand, while also allowing the development of small-scale governance experiments on the other hand.
The spiral in the diagram (Figure 3) essentially describes the process of going through the three infrastructuring layers as an open-ended process, adopting an iterative approach that enriches and improves the portfolio of activities and experiments at every iteration, also expanding the level and scope of collaboration over time - onboarding new actors, deploying new activities for different audiences and allowing new initiatives to emerge from the bottom and contribute to a holistic transition. There are no strict boundaries between phases, nor are they strictly linear: as an iterative process, it consists of many loops, in order to testing and iteratively improving interventions to meet complex, changing needs.
As we will see in Part 3 of this document, every phase is intended to be supported via specific activities and realization of specific tools and resources to accommodate different knowledge and learning needs; yet, activities and tools in a specific phase may also fit in other phases. In this perspective, the actual journey will be the result of a co-design process that will actively call the REFLOW pilot partners in giving full shape and content to the activities envisaged in this Toolkit.
