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.
In the AI Story
Inclusive governance has two operational components. The first is co-design: the collaborative creation of technologies and institutional frameworks drawing on both the innovating society's technical expertise and the receiving society's knowledge of local conditions. The agricultural innovations producing the best outcomes in African contexts were those co-designed with smallholder farming communities, incorporating local knowledge of soil, climate, and crop management. The AI tools that will produce the best outcomes globally will be those designed with input from the communities they are intended to serve — not because local knowledge is superior to technical expertise, but because institutional frameworks must incorporate both forms of knowledge to produce outcomes that are technically sound and contextually appropriate.
The second component is participatory governance — governance structures that provide ongoing voice and influence rather than one-time consultation. The Calestous Juma Executive Dialogue, established by the African Union after his death, exemplifies this approach: it convenes African policymakers, scientists, and community representatives to develop technology governance frameworks calibrated to African conditions rather than imported wholesale from innovating societies. The Continental AI Strategy endorsed by the African Union Executive Council in July 2024 — a direct product of the CJED process — represents exactly the kind of Africa-centric, development-focused approach that Juma's framework prescribes.
Inclusive governance is not the same as consultative theater — stakeholder meetings that generate the appearance of inclusion without affecting substantive decisions. It requires that affected populations have formal authority in the governance process, that their input has meaningful consequences for decisions, and that the structures of accountability enable them to hold the process responsible for outcomes. Without these features, consultation becomes legitimation — providing cover for decisions made without the intelligence the inclusion was supposed to provide.
The practical implications for AI governance are specific. The standard approach convenes technologists, economists, and policymakers. Juma's framework insists this convening is structurally incomplete. The people who must be in the room are the people closest to the costs — displaced workers, affected communities, practitioners whose expertise the technology threatens, developing-world populations who will bear the consequences of governance decisions made in jurisdictions they do not inhabit. The inclusion must be structural, not performative: formal authority, meaningful consequences, genuine accountability. Without these, inclusive governance reduces to the consultative theater that characterizes most contemporary AI governance processes.
Origin
Juma's inclusive governance framework synthesized his decades of work on African agricultural policy with his engagement with the participatory democracy literature (Archon Fung, James Fishkin, Boaventura de Sousa Santos). The synthesis specified the institutional requirements for governance that takes seriously the intelligence affected populations possess.
Key Ideas
Functional, not moral. Inclusion is necessary because affected populations possess intelligence institutional responses require.
Co-design and participation. The framework operates at both the design stage (co-creation) and the ongoing governance stage (participation).
Formal authority required. Inclusive governance requires that affected populations have actual power, not merely the appearance of voice.
Contrast with consultative theater. Most contemporary AI governance processes fall short of inclusive governance's operational requirements.
CJED exemplar. The Calestous Juma Executive Dialogue represents the framework in practice at continental scale.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Calestous Juma, Innovation and Its Enemies, chs. 9-10
- Calestous Juma, The New Harvest, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2015)
- Archon Fung, Empowered Participation (Princeton University Press, 2004)
- African Union, Continental AI Strategy (July 2024)