Rethinking governance for a changing world

Much of the current focus on governance deals with the management of individual issues or processes within large established institutions. This approach to governance is being fundamentally disrupted and transformed. Three major factors explain this disruption: 1) the growing scale and complexity of governance challenges where impacts can be global, regional and local simultaneously (think turbulence in the financial markets); 2) the emergence of system-level challenges that defy the jurisdictions or capabilities of institutions (consider the interrelationships involving climate change, the exacerbation of drought or flood conditions and the availability of water supplies for drinking or food production); and 3) the near-instantaneous availability of information to citizens (see the immediate reaction of customers who do not wish to pay higher access fees for banking services).

Read more on Terry's thoughts on governance in his Greenbiz article.