Re-energising government
What we see at the edges isn’t just energy — it’s methods we should be using in government
By James Plunkett, Convener at Kinship and FGF Policy Associate
If you talk to people in and around government, you might notice two moods that sit in tension. The first is a pervasive sense that our old methods are struggling, not just because public institutions are over-stretched, but because our tools and mentalities are outmoded. We’re struggling to gain traction on a host of contemporary challenges, from care to biodiversity loss, mental health, and loneliness.
Then there’s a second mood, which is a sense of vitality around the edges of the civic sphere and in pockets of pioneering practice in the public sector. There is so much innovation happening, especially in these tricky domains. This includes an increasingly sophisticated field of relational practice, experiments in deliberative democracy, work revitalising civic and associational life, many flavours of commoning, and people trialling alternative economic models, to give a few examples.
What is most striking, however, is the relationship between these two dynamics. They sometimes feel like two separate systems — one dying, and the other being born — or like two separate groups of people not really in conversation.
Contrast this with what a healthy system could look like. We would celebrate people innovating all around the edges, finding new and better ways to do things, and we would see people in the centre hungrily adopting these methods and supporting them — codifying them, funding them, incorporating them into civil service training, or using them to rewire processes like procurement and commissioning. Over time, this would renew the institutions of government.
Today we’re launching a new project to try to get us closer to this outcome. The initiative is called Governing Human, and it will be delivered in partnership between Kinship Works and The Future Governance Forum (FGF), supported by the Barrow Cadbury Trust. We want to get more precise about the best methods being used around the edges, understand what these methods are useful for and why, and see what it would take to learn from these methods to improve the way we govern.
The project will have three strands and I’ll say more about each below. We’d love feedback to make the work as useful as possible, and we’re open to other partners, so please do share thoughts on social media or reach out.
1. Broken, but in what way?
As our public mood has soured, debates about public sector reform have sometimes got stuck in a scrap over whether ‘the system’ is or isn’t broken. I confess to having prompted some of these arguments myself, using loose language that triggers people. A senior official might respond: ‘The system clearly isn’t broken! Just look at the number of successful operations/maths lessons/passports/prescriptions we’re delivering every day.’
The truth is that the system is broken, but it also isn’t. Which is to say there are clearly aspects of government — methods, mentalities, processes, institutions — that are working well, and in some cases better than ever. Across surprisingly large parts of the state, things are quicker, cheaper, and easier for citizens than they have ever been. And there are also parts of government that are struggling, but for simple reasons — maybe they need a bit more funding, or better leadership, for example.
But then there are aspects of government where it is surely fair to say our old methods are broken, or badly lacking. In these cases it is simply not viable to spend the money that would be needed in order to get good outcomes from today’s system. And even the best leadership cannot fix this. I would name, as examples, the care system, or our response to a society-wide epidemic of mental illness.
Our first goal is to offer a more granular diagnosis about what is and isn’t broken. Is our traditional toolkit failing worse in some domains than in others? What types of work are we struggling with most? And do particular mentalities, mechanisms, or institutions seem to be especially to blame? We want to answer these questions not to point fingers, but to help us see where we most urgently need alternatives.
2. Mapping the energy at the edges
The second goal of the work is to map and begin to codify the energy at the edges. This is the core of the project and it raises some difficult tensions.
The challenge we want to address here is one of legibility. Yes, there’s amazing innovation happening, but it’s hard for senior people in public institutions to see and understand.
There are several reasons for this, which we want to try to address. One is the sheer diversity of practice dispersed across local initiatives, and the lack of clear categories. Another challenge is that alternatives to our traditional bureaucratic tools are often not yet written down, and indeed sometimes people use different language to describe the same methods. Finally, there is a challenge that edge practices don’t tessellate well with the system; for example, the way we do procurement tends to jar with relational practice. So we want to map not just the practices themselves, but also the friction that arises when these ‘edge’ practices interact with more traditional institutions.
We want to keep this stage of the work grounded in specifics. We’ll therefore use a case study of Birmingham and the wider city region. Birmingham has been a centre of institutional innovation since the late nineteenth century, and the city is once again a place of vitality. From Civic Square, to the Birmingham network of anchor institutions, to an active community of alternative economic models. This is the ideal place to try to understand this energy better.
I said this part of the work raises difficult tensions. We are especially mindful of a challenge that is conveyed in the Three Horizons model of systems change. This is the risk that the old system — Horizon 1 — takes the experiments — Horizon 2 — and co-opts them, integrating them into its dying institutions but without really changing. The challenge in this stage of the project will be describing the energy at the edges in a way the system understands, but without distorting or co-opting these practices. As an example, we will need to understand how relational practice can support outcomes we all care about — efficacy, cost, risk, pace, trust — but without pushing these methods into the system’s boxes, and losing what is valuable about them (for example, maybe the way we measure efficiency in big public institutions is itself outdated).
At minimum, we hope this stage of the work will bring these two parts of the system — reformers in the centre of government, and reformers and changemakers working beyond government — into a productive dialogue.
3. Rewiring the system
In the final phase of the work we want to turn to recommendations. Here we will make practical suggestions for how we could bring more ‘edge’ practices into the centre. These recommendations will be aimed at people at all layers of government, from senior Whitehall officials, to local government practitioners.
Partly this stage is about prioritising efforts. Where are the biggest opportunities to learn from and integrate ‘edge’ practices into the repertoire of government? And what are the biggest barriers stopping these practices spreading? For example, should we start with changes to procurement to help value and spread good relational practice? Finally, we want to ask: what is the role of government itself in maturing emergent practices? For example, should government do more to support emergent disciplines, such as by funding Centres of Excellence?
We’ll be kicking off the work in April, running through to a final output in autumn 2026. We are delighted to be working with Barrow Cadbury, whose long-term investment in alternative institutions and economic models makes them an ideal partner; and with FGF, the UK’s leading think tank focused on the ‘how’ of contemporary government. Indeed, this work was sparked partly by energising conversations at a gathering of reformers FGF hosted in autumn 2025 with the Cabinet Office’s Test, Learn, and Grow initiative.
The project complements a range of other initiatives we have underway at Kinship Works and FGF. At Kinship Works, there is The Centre for the Edge, in which we are asking more directly: what would it take to run the centre(s) of government in a way that supports the edges? There is our work mapping communities of public service reformers and the disciplines of civic renewal. And there is our ongoing series of essays in which we’re describing more human alternatives to bureaucracy.
At FGF, their Mission Critical series has been asking how central government can meet the demands of 21st century public service through greater innovation, partnership working and new models of policy design and delivery – and Governing Human will help build on that thinking. FGF has also been pioneering new models of place-based governance through its Impactful Devolution workstream, and is currently exploring how institutions within a place can collaborate effectively towards shared goals through its ongoing Vital Institutions programme.
As always, we’ll work in the open throughout the project and will publish all outputs under Creative Commons licence. If you have thoughts in the meantime, or examples you think we should look at, or if you’d like to explore partnering on this or similar work, feel free to get in touch.