The Secret to Good Governance? Bringing in Other Sectors
Elected leaders who use their power to convene well can turn our cynicism into hope and our feelings of frustration into action.
During my 40 years working for governors, state legislators, county commissioners and mayors, I have had the up-close experience of seeing an incredible power that many elected leaders possess. It isn’t their decision-making skills or their ability to manage bureaucrats. You’ll find those skills in other leaders as well. What I have seen is much more powerful and much more useful to our communities and to democracy itself.
That power is the power to convene. Elected leaders who use this power well can turn our cynicism into hope and our feelings of frustration into action. When elected leaders bring people from the public, civic, and private sectors together to solve a problem or seize an opportunity in their community, amazing things happen.
Numerous elected officials in Oregon have used this power to make meaningful progress on complex issues:
A county commissioner convened business and civic organizations to get an airport built in Coos Bay.
The local mayor and a Portland businessman co-convened a group that leveraged resources to build a new school after one was destroyed in rural Vernonia.
A state legislator and county commissioner together convened stakeholders that enabled actions that reduced annual flooding in the Tillamook Basin.
A governor got stakeholders working together to increase in-stream flows for fish and for irrigation in eastern Oregon.
A mayor convened business, government, and civic organizations in Eugene which acted together to turn a rock quarry into a wetland and natural area.
On the coast, a county commissioner brought shippers and the fishing industry together with the community to create an official maritime workforce sector in Oregon.
Recently, a convening of the three sectors resulted in the conversion of motels into housing for the homeless and fire refugees through Project Turnkey, creating 19 new shelters in 13 counties comprising 865 new housing units, leading to a 20% increase in the state supply of shelter beds.
Oregon leaders aren’t the only ones using this power. Officials in other places wield as well. Delaware’s governor convened a group who developed a statewide strategy for foster care. Salt Lake City’s mayor addressed the homelessness crisis by bringing the community together to take unified action. California’s governor teamed up with the private and civic sectors to create a social innovation partnership that has spearheaded 44 public-private partnerships totaling more than $4 billion in corporate and philanthropic contributions and engaging more than 1,600 community-based organizations.
We clearly live in polarized times and the idea of people working together to address tough problems might sound a little dreamy. When it comes to tough problems like housing, homelessness, climate change, etc., there are relatively few examples of governments successfully responding to those issues alone. Increasingly we find that in the places which are successfully addressing hard issues elected leaders are using their convening power to forge cross-sector alliances that produce more innovative and long-lasting solutions that better serve society.
When elected leaders fail to tap into their power to convene, governments will likely try to solve problems alone. That’s rarely an approach that leads to success, let alone long-term, transformative change. We should all carry some degree of skepticism when the government or any sector for that matter proposes to go it alone.
Our government was never designed to take on every problem. The complexity of some of the challenges we face today are not ones our country’s founders recognized or could have anticipated. Therefore, the institutions they created were not designed to address them.
We face environmental challenges, social challenges that are overwhelming our safety net system, and a social media that has created new ways of communicating that often fail to serve our democratic ideals. We are living in a time of increasing racial and ethnic diversity and growing awareness of the need to make changes in policies and practices that respect and serve all citizens.
Our government was also not designed to be frozen in time and space. Just as technology companies modernize their operating systems over time, elected leaders must be expected to adjust their powers to modern issues. The founders expected as much. They knew that we would need to reexamine government institutions from time to time to keep them relevant to the needs of its citizens.
It’s time to begin the work of institutional change to modernize the way existing governing systems work and to unleash the full power of convening all sectors of society. Changing existing institutions isn’t going to be easy; it will need to be done through strong advocacy inside the constitutional framework and democratic processes we have inherited, which will take time. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t also take this opportunity to look at how we can create new governance systems that support the efforts of leaders from all sectors to bring our communities together to work on the things they agree are important and can be done right now. Solutions to the challenges we face can be found through new ways of working together, taking advantage of the strengths and innovations that can be found when the public, civic, and private sectors work together.
What if we were able to create and develop a new sector in Oregon that was designed to assist public, civic, and private leaders join together as conveners to help members of their respective communities work together? The place to start is at the local level.
At that level, we need to establish new, on-the-ground systems that will enable and support leaders from across sectors as they work with the community to solve problems. We know what it takes to staff and support these leaders, now we need to build and invest in local systems to do it. By dramatically expanding the mechanisms that get people working together we can begin repairing our social fabric and rebuild confidence in our ability to take action on the things we care about in Oregon.
Greg Wolf is the co-founder of the National Policy Consensus Center, and founded Oregon Solutions, Oregon Consensus, Regional Solutions and County Solutions. He is now the Director of the Oregon iSector.
photo credit: "Oregon Governor's Office" by www78 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
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Greg Wolf is onto something important here. It echoes recent contributions by Angus Duncan and Tim Nesbitt (and others). It is too often overlooked that voting and representation get in the way of true democratic participation, which at the end of the day comes down to one big ongoing conversation. I have long believed that a super power for Portland State University would be developing itself into a powerful convening force in the metropolitan region. Note that on the same day Greg's column appeared, Kevin Frazier extolled the Wisconsin Idea, historically a compact between Wisconsin public universities and the state in which the universities would become active players in solving public problems in exchange for strong support from the state. We should try it.
Greg, great to see you joining The Oregon Way contributors. Like you, I'm a big believer in convening power of the kind you describe. Well said. But there's another, more glib version that we often hear from candidates who say they'll get everyone around the table and not let them leave until they reach agreement. Ugh, no. The convening power you describe is project-based and results-oriented. The other kind is transactional and negotiation-based. Two different dynamics. I think it helps to distinguish the two. What you describe gets results. The other kind is just a version of conflict management involving competing groups.