Governing Together reimagines governance as something built with and for relationships – an approach that shifts how we understand our place in the world, how we relate to one another, and how we design, decide, and act across divides.
Today’s problems aren’t just technical – they’re deeply social, psychological, cultural, ethical, and relational. Tackling climate transitions, housing shortages, or public health crises requires us to work together across departments, sectors, industries, and communities. But that kind of collaboration doesn’t happen without trust, humility, shared understanding, and the belief that change is both necessary and possible. And right now, many people don’t feel or trust that possibility.
Systems change is hard – for the simple reason that systems are good at resisting change and staying exactly as they are. It has never been more important to understand what drives our support for – or resistance to – collective action, and to rebuild trust as a critical infrastructure. That’s why we’re developing Governing Together, a new body of work at Dark Matter Labs exploring the everyday foundations of collective action, across divides.
Our first publication looks at trust as a critical infrastructure and examines the conditions and foundations of trust-building, exploring how human behaviour is shaped, how mindsets and attitudes form, and how motivation and willingness to act are fostered and sustained in both the informal and formal spaces of everyday life.
Even when local governments invest in quality participatory processes – like citizens’ assemblies or town halls – people don’t show up as blank slates. Their motivations, frustrations, hopes, and beliefs about what’s possible are already shaped both by their lived experiences and by the people they trust: family members, colleagues, neighbours, and online communities.
Our worldviews are formed long before we enter the room – not only by the one-way messages we absorb through media, schools, and institutions, but also, critically, by how these messages are interpreted and internalised through everyday dialogue within our informal social environments. Conversations with friends, family, and peers help frame how we understand the world and shape our sense of what is acceptable, normal, possible, or worth caring about. These subtle but powerful processes – what we call Everyday Politics – are a critical, underexplored tool for local governments to understand how beliefs and motivations are formed. If we want formal participation to be meaningful, we need to take seriously what happens in the everyday.
In this publication, we share key design principles and strategies that local governments and their ecosystems of collaborators can adopt to engage in these critical formal and informal spaces of change. Over a dozen incredible practitioners and thinkers from around the world contributed their thoughts and insights to this publication, which are woven throughout our chapters. Their names are also all listed in ‘The Village’ section of our website. We invite leaders, practitioners, and community organisers to share your stories and practices of building towards collective action, test ideas, services, and tools in your own contexts, and co-create new approaches – together.
Please check out Governing Together's website at governing-together.org
Please get in touch at hello@governing-together.org