Transforming Fiduciary Decision-Making to Reduce Governance Risk
One of the most overlooked strategies to address global challenges is reducing the sources of governance risk in settings that are most responsible for driving the most intractable threats to humanity.
Virtually every global threat can be traced back to significant failures of fiduciary decision-making in identifiable governance settings, particularly in public and corporate contexts. Our focus is therefore on finding strategies and developing tools that enhance fiduciary decision-making processes, especially in legal, political and economic contexts, where the greatest risks to humanity are to be found.
By developing innovative approaches to governance that rebalance the complex forces acting upon key decision-makers, we can unlock new solutions to enhance human well-being and safeguard our shared future.
In a Nutshell
The future of humanity is threatened by an unprecedented range of cascading risks, from state failure and armed conflict to climate change and loss of biodiversity.
Degraded societal and planetary systems reduce humanity’s capacity to solve urgent global problems.
All these risks are the product of human decision-making and so in theory, all can be solved by human decision-making.
The question is therefore whether humanity can achieve sufficient unity of purpose and acquire much-needed decision-making tools to make the right choices in time.
The Challenge
Our Approach
Impact
We address decision-making through training programmes that combine ethics, fiduciary responsibility and procedural fairness.
These programmes promote decision-making that is structured, accountable, evidence-based, ethical, inclusive and aligned with policies that protect the long term public interest.
This approach provides a powerful framework to understand and challenge forms of governance risk, establishing a gold standard and directing a spotlight on the negative forces acting upon decision-makers that produce poor outcomes.
Because fiduciary decision-making is so pervasive and is so instrumental in directing action, modest generic improvements in decision-making practices can have disproportionately beneficial effects.
We draw on experiences in the field that have demonstrated dramatic short and long term impacts.
Better administration, allocation of resources and service delivery
Improved policy formation
Balanced and forward thinking economic development
Fairness and justice in the workplace
Reduced uncertainty and conflict
Increased motivation, morale and productivity
Shrinking opportunities for corruption
Greater progress toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals
Humane and sustainably productive societies
What is meant by
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Armed conflict and displacement of populations
Climate change
Poor pandemic responses
State capture and State failure
Economic policies that ratchet up the divide between rich and poor
First nuclear weapon use, intentional, accidental or false flag
Cycles of disinformation causing political polarisation
Artificial intelligence indifferent to human values
High level of dependence on vulnerable infrastructures
Cascading and interactive effects of multiple risks
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State capture through the use of force and intimidation of citizens
Regulatory capture through lobbying and political donations
Kleptocracy and corrupt practices
Destruction or incremental erosion of protective institutions (see below)
Deception as a tool of governance
Deliberate under-resourcing of public institutions to weaken them
Inefficient cost externalisation through short-termism and the lateral transfer to citizens of costs, liabilities, risks and burdens
Political parties that are internally unaccountable and undemocratic
Wealth transfer and concentration passed off as wealth creation in highly extractive economies
Abuse of monopoly positions
Such risks are products of conflicts of interest and other perverse incentives.
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These institutions distribute responsibilities and govern the exercise of power through established mechanisms tested and refined over time. These include:
Separation of powers
The rule of law
Human rights and correlative obligations of duty-bearers
Mechanisms for citizens to choose those who represent them and to be included in policy-making
Independent media capable of scrutinising and disseminating news and informed commentary on public affairs
Learning and research ecosystems that use coherent, non-politicised processes to acquire, validate, curate and share knowledge.