Why the UNDP’s Istanbul Innovation Days event in 2025 will focus on shaping the next generation of public institutions to provide security in an uncertain world
The world is at a critical moment. Urgent crises – political, ecological, economic and military – are putting huge pressure on governments and societies.
Yet many of the biggest challenges – from regulating AI to managing energy transitions, handling mental health to care and industrial policy – don’t fit well with the inherited mix of ministries, agencies and commissions, public services and regulators nor ways in which they collaborate with and harness insights from different constituents in their societies.
This is particularly true of the new pressures of insecurity – economic threats from surging prices or disruption to supply chains; misinformation and threats to cybersecurity; threats of new pandemics; and threats of war and conflict.
Never before has the demand for resilience and the ability to navigate uncertainty been so critical, requiring institutions to evolve and adapt with agility.
Without updates that enable collaboration, collective intelligence, and greater agility at a societal level, we run the risk of retreat into more siloed self-protection and expanding inequality.
Governments have always depended on institutions to do their work and protect their citizens – to run courts or schools, tax collection or policing, and they have often had to invent new ones for new tasks.
It follows that new tasks & a changing nature of old ones (where policy issues are more interconnected, compounding one another in ways that is difficult to predict & that straddles sectors & disciplines) will often require new institutions too – and that a period of profound transitions is bound to need institutions suited to navigating new challenges.
And so attention is turning to what the next generation of institutions should look like.
Across the world there are intensive pressures on governments, and growing demands for action:
- How to reduce inequality? How to deal with artificial intelligence?
- How to take mental health as seriously as physical health?
- How to handle rapidly ageing populations?
- How to protect democracy?
- How to give voice to groups who have traditionally been excluded from power?
- How to incorporate diverse ways of knowing, including indigenous and traditional knowledge in particular, into improving our understanding of the world?
- How to mobilise capital for new forms of energy, new ways of growing food, and less resource-intensive approaches to human development?
But the options for designing institutions today are very different from a generation ago.
We now have global businesses like Google, TikTok, Amazon, and Alibaba. A generation ago, few imagined companies like Uber and Airbnb, which provide rides and rooms – but own no taxis or hotels. Civil society has also developed new models, such as Wikipedia, Ushahidi, and Buurtzorg, and there are new hybrids like public-private partnerships or BCorps in the domain of institutions that safeguard the public good.
The tyranny of the lack of alternatives
António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General recently said that
We cannot effectively address problems as they are if institutions don’t reflect the world as it is. Instead of solving problems, they risk becoming part of the problem.
But although there are good examples, there has not been enough innovation.
Many existing public institutions are no longer fit for purpose.
They are simply too siloed. Too analogue in the digital era. Too much based on anachronistic Western models. Too hierarchical. Too inflexible to cope with today’s risks. Ultimately, they fail to provide the flexibility, generate more options and agency – and the infrastructure for collaboration – that society needs to face a more complex and uncertain future, together.
UNDP’s Istanbul Innovation Days (IID) is a platform for exploring new trends, ideas and practices in the field of strategic innovation in public & development sectors.
In March next year, the IID – through a partnership with Demos Helsinki & The Institutional Architecture Lab – will focus on institutional innovation as a way to address the most insurmountable problems of our societies and the many threats to security and prosperity.
We know that good institutions have an extraordinary impact.
In the past many nations went through periods of great institution building that set the scene for decades of growth and development. We now need a comparable energy and imagination and a comparable willingness not to be trapped in the models of the past.
The best institutions unlock energy for growth.
The worst condemn nations to stagnation. The best make people feel powerful and listened to. The worst make them feel small and ignored. The best are efficient and effective. The worst are wasteful and incompetent. The best help the collective become more than the sum of individuals’ contributions. The worst waste human potential.
The recent award of the Nobel Prize for Economics to Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson for their work on ‘how institutions are formed and affect prosperity’ has focused attention on just how important it is to get institutions right. When viewed through an evolutionary lens, institutions can generate what Yuen Yuen Ang calls ‘polytunity’ – a multitude of opportunities in face of polycrisis. This is an antidote to Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s maxim that ‘the world remains restless under the yoke of a dictatorship of no alternatives.”
At 2025 IID, we want to get rid of this yoke and to raise ambitions, bringing together the most dynamic innovators and shining a light on the best examples.
And we want to turbocharge thinking about how to better design the next generation of public institutions.
Building a more resilient world: Public Institutions in a New Era
As part of the preparation for the event, we are mapping hundreds of examples of innovation from across the world, with a particular focus on security and resilience.
These show imagination at work, and how officials and politicians have broken free from the constraints of traditional pyramid-models, the box-like organograms familiar in bureaucracies all over the world. They include some, by now, established institutional forms and others that are emerging.
New institutional forms that have evolved over the last few years tackle issues ranging from ‘digital public infrastructure’ models (eg. the Unique Identification Authority (Aadhaar) in India, which oversaw providing 1.3bn people with identities and then transformed both public services and access to finance to platforms around transparency & public procurement like in Brazil and Ukraine) & digital, AI & cybersecurity regulation (from the pioneering Cyberspace Administration in China & AI registries in Singapore to Ghana’s Cybersecurity Authority & Moldova’s Center for Strategic Comms & Combating Disinformation).
Others are transnational, addressing the many governance gaps in relations to global public goods, from geo-engineering to clean air and cybersecurity.
Others focus on social priorities (South Africa’s Commission for Employment Equity and Colombia’s Care Blocks).
We have found many that are finding new ways to give voice to the people – including indigenous peoples. And many are being designed to be flexible and agile, able to reshape themselves as challenges change, whether in response to disasters and post-conflict reconstruction or unpredictable shocks like pandemics and economic crises.
When it comes to more emerging, experimental institutional forms we see cities setting up new functions to cater to transversal issues ranging from time (chief time officers) & well being to exploration, heat and happiness. Central governments are experimenting with temporary & mission oriented ministries – from UAE’s ministry of possibilities to the Green Tripartite ministry in Denmark & Office for Policy on Loneliness and Isolation in Japan.
Multi-species collaborations are emerging to offer more institutional possibilities for detecting water pollution (Poznan city’s work with clams on water management) and early signals of disasters to reimagine justice systems that reflect our interdependence with nature and that serve and protect non-human entities.
The world of money is shifting also – from reinforcing sole focus on growth-based KPIs to accounting for and investing in a multitude of factors with the intention of advancing environmental sustainability and social justice.
And we’re seeing emergence of alternative economic models that evolve (non Western) norms of socio economic progress, are built on solidarity, collective safety and group level mutualistic norms (from Kenya and South Africa to Argentina).
Many of these cases are organised as ‘meshes’ – cutting across the traditional vertical silos, and also linking multiple tiers of government as well as business and civil society – an approach which is vital for big systems shifts – like the ones needed in energy or agriculture. Many are hybrids – combining the public sector with business, civil society and philanthropy.
But these diverse cases already point to some of the emerging themes of 21st century design:
- The central importance of shared intelligence in all its forms, from data to tacit knowledge and citizen insight – and the role of new institutional forms in orchestrating the information for wider use.
- The virtue of flatter more flexible structures that can adapt continuously, rather than relying on traditional pyramid-structured organigrams
- The importance of opening up institutions more to citizen voice and input as a source of valuable contextual knowledge.
- The need to connect multiple levels and silos of governance together in ‘meshes.’
This work isn’t easy. It’s harder to build a new institution than just to implement a policy or programme.
And the practical options for creating new institutions demand subtlety and attention to context – political, cultural and economic.
But the effects can be much greater than any one programme, as testified by past legacies – from the Central Provident Fund and Temasek in Singapore, to Brazil’s Ministry of Social Development and Fight against Hunger to DARPA in the USA and the Development Bank of Southern Africa.
Laying the foundations of the institutions (and societies) of the future
We shape our buildings, but they then shape us. The same is true of institutions.
We shape our schools, courts, hospitals, regulators and parliaments. But they then shape not just what we do, but also how we think.
This moment of crises and transitions is a time to build for more resilient societies. Business as usual is no longer an option.
Rather this is a time to put in place the next generation of public institutions that can help our societies navigate the many pressures they now face – and illuminate better pathways to the future.
The 2025 IID will bring together dozens of innovators and decision makers in Istanbul to share their hands-on experiences that can guide the design of the next generation of public institutions.
Join us in this journey, follow as we share our discoveries in the process, or get in touch to share your own. Express your interest in participating at IID here and we’ll get in touch with you.
