Today I am releasing the Highlight Booklet from a new work, The Third Era: Reframing the Futures of Constitutional Governance. It looks at the the various forces that collectively are shaping the futures of governance and it suggests ways of conceptualizing both governance and the processes we use to design our systems of governance.
From an examination of the many forces that drive political change, we can anticipate that the futures of governance will not be determined solely by the experiences and preferences of the West. While many of our modern patterns of governance emerge out of the West, the new era we have entered is a global one in which the challenges faced by peoples in regions such as Asia and Africa will have as much, if not more, relevance for political innovation as those faced by communities in the West.
Nor will the futures of governance be shaped primarily by a single approach to addressing political and social challenges. The design of governance systems was once the purview of constitutional lawyers and scholars. Today, individuals from professions as wide ranging as political science, urban design, and data analytics are attempting to apply their perspectives to understanding and improving governance. Part of The Third Era’s message is the value and importance of integrating these various perspectives in order to reconceptualize the art of designing constitutional governance systems.
The governance systems that we will come to live in will not emerge in a vacuum. They will emerge as integral parts of a global political landscape and indeed will co-evolve with that landscape. They will be the result of a turbulent confluence of forces: individual innovation, competitions for power, and the reactions that preserve the status quo. To usefully anticipate the variety of forms that future governance systems might take requires an examination of the many forces driving political change.
The Third Era sits at the intersection of both political science, concerned with issues like government and the state, and futures studies, using different frameworks to understand and anticipate change. It will be an ever-evolving work, periodically updated with new material and new forecasts as things (and my thinking) continue to evolve.
(cross posted on The Third Era)
