Cooperating Differently: Collaborative Governance and Subsidiarity

The President of the 79th session of the UN General Assembly asked me to speak in person in New York as part of the special conference on Harmony with Nature and Well-Being.

• Read here the text of my speech for this session of the UN General Assembly – Harmony with Nature and Well-Being.,
• Below you will find a summary of everything I was able to address during these 3 hours, specifically on the topics of collaborative governance and bio-inspired organizational management.

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Since 2001, with the release of my book *Les idées du Vivant*, I have had the opportunity to practice and deploy dozens of bio-inspired organizations, both in the corporate sector, non-profits, NGOs, and governance structures.

However, during this intervention on April 22, I focused on certain specific aspects.

Towards Distributed and Co-Responsible Decision-Making

The crises our societies are facing are also crises of governance. Faced with the growing complexity of the world, hierarchical and top-down models are revealing their limits: slow, poorly adaptive, and not very inclusive.

Collaborative governance offers an alternative: distributing decision-making power, promoting co-responsibility, and drawing inspiration from living ecosystems to strengthen collective resilience and relevance.

This approach is based on a fundamental principle: subsidiarity, which states that each level of decision-making should primarily handle what it alone can effectively resolve, and that within each of these levels, skills and capacities should be expanded to as many as possible to ensure long-term maintenance. This approach balances proximity, agility, and overall coherence, providing resilience and robustness.

Drawing Inspiration from Nature for Governance

Nature offers a myriad of organizational models:

• The nervous system distributes information and adapts responses in real time,
• The immune system decentralizes detection and reaction to disruptions,
• Ant colonies regulate their activities through weak signals, without a leader,
• Ecosystems self-regulate through multiple, interdependent relationships,
• and so on... (hormones, fractals, etc. are all winning sources of inspiration).

These living structures demonstrate that it is possible to govern without rigid centralization, but rather through a coordinated distribution of skills, with multiple roles, feedback loops, and distributed collective intelligence.

In these models, the role of facilitation replaces the function of domination. Facilitators, like catalysts in a chemical reaction or relay cells in a biological network, support the emergence of strong consensus rather than deciding on behalf of others.

Governance for Learning and Managing Complexity

Our current systems tend to prefer the complicated over the complex: multiplying rules, organizational charts, and reports. While the complicated can be tedious, it is predictable. Complexity, however, is less easy to control but much more fertile.

Training citizens, elected officials, and public agents to manage complexity rather than just the complicated enables us to face uncertainty, integrate divergent perspectives, and foster the emergence of new solutions.

This is a genuine challenge in political and social education: building cooperation skills increases the capacity of collectives to endure.

The Role of Science and Mediation

Science has a crucial role to play in supporting participatory public policies: data production, complex systems modeling, multi-criteria evaluation, and support for consultation.

Combined with participatory facilitation tools, stakeholder mapping, or citizen deliberation, they become powerful levers for producing robust, acceptable, and well-informed decisions.

Examples of Distributed Governance

• Citizen climate assemblies (France, United Kingdom) illustrate the possibility of involving randomly selected citizens, experts, and facilitators to produce bold proposals,
• Participatory budgets in many cities (Porto Alegre, Grenoble, Maputo) concretely redistribute power,
• Cooperatives governed by sociocracy integrate decision circles, double links, and consent, combining efficiency and inclusion.

Key Messages

• Collaborative governance is a major lever for stability, adaptability, and collective creativity.
• Subsidiarity prevents excessive centralization and values local skills.
• Sciences can enrich participatory processes and public policies through mediation, modeling, and shared evaluation.
• Facilitators replace leaders in a dynamic of strong consensus.
• Drawing inspiration from nature allows us to imagine stable, adaptable, and more resilient collectives.

Interventions by Mr. Thomas EGLI on April 22, 2025, in New York

Link to the UN web TV, April 22 session (you can watch in French or English by adjusting the audio)

Suggested Bibliography

• Elinor Ostrom (1990), *Governing the Commons*
• Thomas Egli (2001), *Les idées du Vivant*
• Frédéric Laloux (2014), *Reinventing Organizations*
• Bruno Latour (2021), *Où suis-je ?*
• CNDP (2020), *La concertation en actes*