Last September at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, I left with a conviction I still can’t shake. Delivery isn’t enough. Trust is. In conversation after conversation, the same message came up. We need to deliver faster, at scale, under growing resource constraints.
But beneath the urgency sat a harder question. Even if institutions deliver, will people believe in them? And lately, reading the headlines coming out of Davos and COP, I’ve had the same feeling again. The world is full of pledges, panels and announcements. What feels harder to find is the shared confidence that institutions can still inspire trust in people. This is where collaborative governance feels less like a theory and more like a necessity.
In CPI’s recent piece on collaborative governance, Thamy Pogrebinschi, a leading scholar of democratic innovation, makes a simple but powerful point. Collaboration and participation are not “nice to have." They are increasingly the conditions for rebuilding democratic trust and legitimacy. If democracy is under strain, we can’t respond by doubling down on closed-door decision-making and hoping better implementation will fix it. We need new ways of working that are more participatory, more transparent, and more rooted in shared ownership.
At CPI, we see this come to life through CPI’s Collective, where Fellows and practitioners test collaborative approaches to solve real public challenges. Again and again, the same lesson surfaces. Solving public problems today means building coalitions, holding complexity, and staying in the work long enough to learn what is actually changing outcomes.
Trust grows when institutions show they can listen, share power, and adapt in public. In a world where democratic systems are being tested from every direction, collaborative governance offers a practical path forward. Not by replacing institutions, but by helping them evolve into something people can believe in again.
Ready to explore what collaborative governance can make possible? Get in touch.
🗣️ Storytelling for Systems Change: Developed through a four-year partnership between CPI and Dusseldorp Forum, this website brings together practical tools and insights for storytellers, story-holders and the story-curious, exploring how stories can help shift narratives and unlock systems change.
🤖 AI and social justice in the energy transition: Forum for the Future explores how AI is quickly becoming embedded in energy systems and why it’s essential to consider social justice alongside efficiency.
📊 Measuring more but learning less: This piece in Stanford Social Innovation Review argues that in the social sector, counting outputs too heavily can undermine real learning, urging civil society and funders to invest in deeper evaluation and reflection.
The Centre for Public Impact is a global not-for-profit organisation founded by the Boston Consulting Group. We serve as a learning partner for governments, public servants and the diverse network of changemakers who are leading the charge to reimagine government. We work with them to hold space to collectively make sense of the complex challenges we face and drive meaningful change through learning and experimentation.
