OVERVIEW

The Innovations in Governance program explores new methods of working across traditional jurisdictions and sectors to identify, understand, and address emerging social problems.

Topics include:

• Strategic Management in the Public Sector: Creating “public value propositions” that command legitimacy and support from a variety of stakeholders.
  
• Adaptive Leadership: Anticipating, embracing, and shaping change, and mobilizing the full resources of a community to deal with the problems it faces.
  
• Public Sector Innovation: Developing new operational methods and governance arrangements that can increase the capacity of a society to deal with both emergent and intransigent problems.
  
• Principled Negotiation: Going beyond positional bargaining to build b, resilient relationships with key partners.
  
• Political Innovation: Finding new ways to identify and engage stakeholders in order to better define problems and identify and build support for effective solutions.

The institutions we rely on to solve today’s most pressing problems were built decades ago for a different world. These organizations have done their best in the face of daunting new challenges like AIDS, global warming, shrinking budgets at all levels of government, crumbling infrastructures, access to quality education, the widening gulf between the rich and the poor, sectarian violence, and transnational terrorism. But the fit between the old institutions and emergent problems is increasingly strained, even as old problems continue.

Throughout the world, imaginative leaders are scrambling to find ways to exploit and transform the capacities of old institutions to deal with today’s realities. Their path-breaking efforts are revealing new ways that leaders in public, private, and nonprofit organizations can address new challenges. The new focus does not limit itself to government; instead the concentration is on processes of governance that combine the collective capacities of society’s different sectors and institutions in joint problems-solving initiatives. The skills needed to create these new arrangements are not those used to run traditional top-down organizations; they are the ones social entrepreneurs use to marshal diverse resources beyond their direct control.