The task of governing in the 2020s is unenviable. The word on everyone’s lips this year is “polycrisis”. From war in Ukraine and escalating tensions between China and the U.S. to the climate emergency and global economic headwinds, the macro challenges just seem to keep piling up. And all that is before each government starts to reckon with its own unique problems.

Leaders’ struggles to meet these challenges are feeding a mounting sense of distrust, one that is made worse when those in charge claim to be handling a situation that is clearly out of control. As trust in government declines, it makes the task of governing even harder. To stop this destructive process, a new approach is needed.

Happily, there is a powerful strategy that can both help to address the world’s policy challenges and rebuild trust. What public leaders need to do is involve more of their citizens more deeply in the work of government, investing time, energy, and resources into making participation easier, more meaningful, and more joyful. In doing so, they will not only be able to tap into more diverse ideas and insights to feed policy responses, but they will also bring their citizens closer to the very real difficulties of governing, increasing their understanding and therefore their trust.

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Fighting the Pandemic with the Wisdom of Crowds

When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit, the Government of the Republic of China (Taiwan) named “Three Fs” around which its response would be designed: “Fast, Fun, and Fair.” The ambition was to make the response as much of a team effort across the nation as possible, with a key role for government being to structure the opportunities for citizens to contribute. What followed represents perhaps the best case study of a government involving its citizens in a policy challenge to date.

Data was at the heart of the approach. The Government in Taipei made available as much information as possible from the very beginning, enabling the public to engage in what became known as “participatory self-surveillance” – in other words, making their own informed decisions as to what was safe. By giving citizens information and trusting them to be responsible, Taipei was able to avoid the enforced lockdowns seen in many other countries.

Ministers also used the publicly available data banks as the basis for a series of open source software challenges. Developers were called to create different apps in support of the national effort. These crowdsourced apps accomplished all sorts of vital tasks, from providing accessible information about the spread of infections to managing the distribution of resources such as face masks and medication.

It was not all high-tech, though. The aim was to create opportunities to contribute that would be accessible to everyone. A national telephone hotline was set up, which any citizen could call with their ideas for how the national response might be improved. The best solutions were adopted and celebrated as widely as possible. Among the callers was a six-year-old boy who was concerned that his classmates did not want to wear their regulation-issue pink face masks, and suggested the nation’s baseball team help make them more appealing. Six of the country’s biggest baseball stars joined a televised press conference, resplendent in their pink masks, just a few days later.

The success of these strategies was profound. By the end of April 2021, the country had recorded only nine COVID-19 deaths and fewer than 1,000 cases, despite recording its first confirmed case on 21 January 2020. And it achieved that without ever going into lockdown. Not only did it weather that first shock, but it was later able to spot and control two subsequent outbreaks almost immediately. With the health of citizens secure, the country’s economy was spared the damage done in many other parts of the world. In 2020, it recorded GDP growth of more than 3%, rising to more than 6% in 2021.

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Central Wisdom: All of Us Are Smarter Than Any of Us

It might not be possible for every government to do exactly what the Government in Taipei managed. However, public leaders anywhere can learn from the underlying insight that all of us are smarter than any of us. Every nation’s people provide a deep well of expertise, insight, and creativity that can be enormously powerful when harnessed through a citizen-centred strategy.

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Creative Solutions Across Countries, Cities, and Sectors

Around the world, more and more governments are adopting these principles. Portugal held the world’s first national-level participatory budget in 2018. Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly, first convened in 2016, is now established as an ongoing structure of government. The Brazilian Government has launched Brasil Participativo, a major programme to crowdsource citizens’ priorities.

At the city level, Paris and Brussels both now have permanent Citizens’ Assemblies as part of their governance structures, with randomly selected, demographically representative groups of people guiding policy. Mexico City has crowdsourced a constitution from and for its nine million people. More than 100,000 of Barcelona’s citizens are signed up to an online platform that enables them to vote on citizen-generated proposals for neighbourhood improvements and to take part in participatory budgeting (to the tune of EUR 30m in 2022).

Innovative efforts to unleash the power of citizen participation have not been limited to governance. In the corporate world, as companies have moved from a focus on “shareholder value” to promoting “stakeholder value”, they have sought to involve their customers and communities more deeply. GE, for example, has crowdsourced answers to its biggest challenges. The Body Shop cosmetics brand has introduced a Youth Collective as part of its decision-making structure.

In the non-profit sector, many organisations have re-imagined themselves as enablers of citizen-led movements. The U.K.’s three largest nature conservation organisations recently pooled their resources to enable the creation of the People’s Plan for Nature. By choosing to support concerned citizens, instead of encouraging concerned citizens to support them, these organisations have upended the normal model.

If there is one citizen who stands out in this whole story, it is Kennedy Odede. In 2004, he started out with a football in one of the poorest areas of Nairobi, Kenya. He has since grown his organisation, Shining Hope for Communities, to a scale where it enabled more than two million slum-dwellers to support one another through the pandemic. It even plays host to a nascent World Communities Forum, with ambitions to rival the World Economic Forum at Davos.

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The Principles of Participatory Governance

As a result of studying these examples and more for my book Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us, I have identified three principles that any public leader can use to develop their own citizen-centred approach.

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Principle 1: Purpose

The starting point for any governance practitioner seeking to work with their citizens is to define the shared purpose towards which they want the public to contribute. This is all about questions rather than answers, a significant shift in the conventional role of public leaders.

The Government of the Republic of China (Taiwan), for example, considered the question of how best to respond to COVID-19 openly with its citizens, rather than seeing the only options as being either to impose lockdowns or to pretend there was nothing to worry about. Ireland’s first national Citizens’ Assembly saw the Government refer the historically divisive question of whether to change the nation’s constitutional restrictions on access to abortion to 99 randomly selected citizens, representative of the national population. Together, these citizens reached a recommendation that was then approved by over 66% of the population in a referendum.

The Barcelona city administration decided to open the question of how the city should respond to the climate emergency to its citizens, and was able to produce a world-leading 103-point plan that includes the dramatic bolstering of bike lanes, restrictions on polluting vehicles, expanding urban gardens, installing public solar panels, and incorporating sustainability standards into public contracts. In all these cases and more, the starting point is a purposeful question that people want to help answer.

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Principle 2: Platform

Once the question being put to citizens has been established, the next step is to design the structures and opportunities that will enable them to participate in the hunt for answers. It is important to emphasise that involving citizens is a serious process design challenge. Public leaders need to reimagine themselves as facilitators rather than representatives or servants. They may need to acquire new skills, and they will almost certainly have to put significant effort into the architecture of their citizen participation platforms.

Many are put off the idea of involving citizens in decision-making by fears that are justifiable, but can be overcome by investing properly in the design of the process. One common fear is that only a small number of people will be interested in participating, leading to very narrow engagement. A powerful counter-example is the Better Reykjavik platform, which allows any citizen to propose ideas for how the city could be better.

This has a beautifully simple user experience, some clever design tweaks to discourage trolling, and most importantly a clear contract of power with the city administration whereby there is a commitment to give a public response to the top ideas on a regular basis. As a result, a wide base of the city population has engaged, because they understand clearly how their ideas will be used and so are motivated to get involved rather than leaving it to the “usual suspects” who might otherwise have dominated. Most importantly, hundreds of ideas from the platform have been adopted and implemented.

Another justifiable fear is that these methods and approaches might be co-opted. The fact that activist groups around the world have championed Citizens’ Assemblies, for example, might encourage concerns that public participation programmes could be hijacked and used not to create an open dialogue to answer problems, but to push a specific political or ideological agenda. There are ways of guarding against this. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – not the world’s most radical organisation – has published a series of reports and toolkits reviewing hundreds of deliberative processes from around the world, as well as a comprehensive set of Good Practice Principles.

These principles have been followed closely in examples such as the new permanent assemblies in Paris and Brussels, and France’s recent Citizens’ Assembly on End of Life which deliberated the difficult question of euthanasia. By adhering to the OECD’s advice, these programmes have all produced highly credible and legitimate recommendations. Once again, the problem is not participation per se; it is badly designed participation.

To address one more common concern, there is what I call the “QAnon challenge”. The QAnon conspiracy tells its followers that they need to get involved and play their part in saving the U.S. Is citizen engagement and empowerment really such a good thing when this sort of active citizenship can result in an event such as the January 6 Capitol Riots in Washington, D.C.?

However, instead of undermining the case for citizen participation, the rise of QAnon shows why we need more constructive, authentic, and healthier ways of enabling people to become involved in governance. QAnon thrives on the fact that there are communities that feel, often with some justification, that they have been overlooked and are powerless. Offering genuine, useful forums for people in these communities to make their voices heard reduces the power of those who would seek to misuse this impulse for malign ends.

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Principle 3: Prototype

The third and final principle is all about how to go about transforming systems and processes to put citizens at their heart. There is no Utopian switch that any government or public service leader can flip to reinvent a whole governance operation in the spirit of participation and involvement in an instant. There is not even a single right way to work.

Instead, the best way to begin the citizen engagement process is to start with a specific context or initiative as a prototype or pilot programme and to grow from there. It may be that there are already areas where participatory practice is emerging and that this can be built on. In other contexts, the right approach might be to identify a clearly delineated project or geographical territory in which to initiate a participatory programme.

One of the lessons from case studies around the world is that the momentum behind citizen participation can build rapidly. Once citizen and governance practitioners see that it works, they want more of it. Barcelona’s government began by crowdsourcing a climate strategy. Taipei began its COVID-19 response with a single challenge prize. Both have come a long way from that first step.

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Reversing the Cycle of Distrust

We live in a time when the challenges that governments face are intensifying and proliferating. Those in positions of leadership face a choice – between continuing to pretend that they have all the answers, and inviting the public to share in the process of addressing the big questions that society faces.

Ultimately, I believe that the former strategy will only lead further into a vicious cycle that in many places is already well under way. Governments will struggle to find answers in which their citizens have confidence, and will continue to lose their trust. Citizens will become angrier and more resentful, with some justification. Governments, in turn, will find it harder to open up their operations to citizens, sensing their anger and fearing what might result, also with justification.

By contrast, citizen participation offers a chance to reverse that cycle. Trusting the people can seem daunting. It does take time, money, and effort to design processes to harness the wisdom of citizens safely and effectively. Ultimately, though, it offers the chance to start a new process – one where governments trust the people, the people trust their governments, and all benefit from the creativity and innovation that flow from new ways of making policy.

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once wrote, “If you do not trust the people, you make them untrustworthy.” I prefer to think of it the other way round. Trust the people, and you will make them trustworthy.