Center for Civic Innovation
Chris Paterson, Director

Communities and regions are complex systems containing a wide range of influences coming from many different decisions and activities. Rarely does a single leader, decision-maker, agency or organization control or, acting on their own, achieve community outcomes. More often, an accumulation of decisions across various groups, organizations and individuals affects the direction of community or regional change.

This holds true not only for broader sustainable community development or comprehensive community change initiatives, but also for efforts to address specific community issues. For example, many of our most challenging environmental problems are less the result of easily identifiable causes than the cumulative impact of many decisions made by individual property owners, consumers, commuters and community residents.

These types of issues continue to confound traditional planning and management approaches. Instead, progress toward more desirable futures requires not only greater understanding of the issue among a wider range of community members, but also an enhanced sense of responsibility for helping design proposed solutions and shared accountability for making progress toward desired outcomes. Effective collaborative governance systems:

• Recognize and seek to engage the positive contributions of a broader set of community actors in the long-term vitality of a community;
• More fully inform and are informed by a wide variety of community members; and
• Build the civic capacities of all these constituencies to collaboratively act, learn, and adapt their decisions and actions over time.

Through its own activities and in partnership with other organizations, GMI’s Center for Civic Innovation seeks to foster the development of the following four foundations of an effective collaborative governance system:

1. Broadening the understanding and ownership of an issue and its solutions among community members (individual and organizational);

2. Fostering a culture of inquiry and the creation of systems for performance measurement, community learning and adaptation;

3. Building networks, capacities and institutions for collaborative action across individuals and sectors; and

4. Facilitating formal and informal opportunities for enhancing understanding of the key system drivers and leverage points for change.