Inclusive Governance

Inclusive governance is the institutional design principle that governance structures must provide voice and influence to affected populations, including and especially populations with the least power. The argument is not that inclusion is morally virtuous (though Juma believed it was). The argument is that inclusion is functionally necessary — that institutional responses designed without the intelligence the affected populations possess systematically fail to address the costs the intelligence would have identified. The framework knitters of the English Midlands possessed a form of knowledge about the production process — tacit, embodied, resistant to formal articulation — that no economist, parliamentarian, or factory owner could replicate. Their knowledge was discarded because the policy process had no mechanism for receiving it. The institutional response was designed without it, and the result was decades of immiseration the response was supposed to prevent.