This case study shows you the importance of helping diverse forms of life to thrive, by emphasizing the links between all life.
Planetary governance means systems of rules, practices, and processes that aim to support, manage and protect the Earth’s interconnected living systems.
Who was involved
Researchers, educators, strategic designers, policy makers, political strategists, lawyers, scientists, artists, technologists, activists, and field-based practitioners are all involved.
Impact
The initiative addressed common crises, such as climate change and pandemics. By promoting the concept of ‘planetary’ over ‘global’ the project encouraged thinking beyond national borders.
Outcomes
Source
This case study shows you how bringing artists into your policymaking process can have beneficial effects on your policy and policymakers.
They ran a pilot initiative called MANIFEST, which invited 3 UK artists to contribute to policymaking.
Impacts
They found that the artists’ work affected policymaking in a number of ways:
- Promoting policy innovation
- Exposing unnoticed aspects of policymaking
- Uncovering human elements in the policy system
- Allowing for and prompting reflection
- Visualising policy issues, which helped engagement
- Improving the wellbeing of policy professionals and stakeholders
What they learned
Policy professionals were:
- enthusiastic about the chance to see how the artists worked
- inspired to be more creative in their own work
- Interested in using artworks to help make decisions (in consultations, workshops and across government)
The pilot took place in 2023, and they began a second round of
Source
This method can help understand things outside your organisation that could affect your success.
You can use a method like STEEPLE as part of a wider piece of work called strategic foresight.
STEEPLE stands for:
- socio-cultural
- technological
- economic
- environmental
- political
- legal
- ethical
For each category, think of what could go wrong, and what could go well, in big and small ways.
Start off wildly pessimistic. Write down everything from minor hiccups to complete catastrophe.
Then be radically optimistic. Imagine small wins as well as the most outlandishly successful scenarios.
| Socio-cultural | Technological | Economic | Environmental | Political | Legal | Ethical | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pessimistic | |||||||
| Optimistic |
Alternative approaches
If you don’t need to go into as much detail as STEEPLE, you can skip categories you don’t want to consider.
For example, PESTLE misses out the legal and ethical categories. But for inclusive innovation, we think it is important to not to miss out ethics!
Strategic foresight
If you want to do a more detailed analysis of the present and future, then you can use a method called Strategic foresight.
Strategic foresight is a method to help you make:
- informed best guesses about the future
- better decisions about what to do about it
Strategic foresight has 3 main stages, each of which can have multiple steps:
- Understand the landscape and decide on your vision for the future
- Decide what to do and how to do it (interventions and strategies)
- Make a roadmap, and contingency plans for when things go wrong
Further source reading
This method helps you understand which people and organisations you might need to work with to get the best results.
What is a stakeholder map?
A stakeholder map is a diagram of all the groups and people who are involved with, affected by or care about a project.
Whether you are designing a policy, process, service or product, making a stakeholder map is a useful thing to do at the start of a project.
This is especially important for inclusive innovation, as it will help remind you of important groups of people who might traditionally be ignored.
A stakeholder map will help you:
- plan a project
- scope out any research you need to do
- gather existing contacts
- develop new connections
- understand who is involved and how
- spot where you might need extra support
You can make a quick stakeholder map in about 15 to 20 minutes. Or you can take an hour to go into more depth, working collaboratively and allowing more time for discussion.
Setting up
Try to do stakeholder mapping as early as you can in a project. If you have existing research that is up to date and reliable, you can pull from this and do stakeholder mapping on your own.
But if you can, it’s best to invite some of the stakeholders you already know about to make the map with you. Especially people from the kinds of marginalised communities that you want to involve when doing inclusive innovation work.
Set up 3 concentric circles and sticky notes in 3 different colours. This can be in-person with paper, or online using a virtual whiteboard like Mural or Miro.
Label your concentric circles, for example with:
- Centre = Must involve
- Middle ring = Useful to involve
- Outer ring = Nice to involve if possible
Give everyone a brief description of the activity ahead of time, so they can prepare.
See our guidelines on running accessible engagement sessions for tips on making sure nobody is excluded.
Filling in your stakeholder map
Start by clarifying for everyone in the session the question you are trying to answer. This can be as simple as ‘who do we need to speak to during this project?’
For each person, group or organisation you can think of, put a sticky note into one of the circles.
Include people who:
- use the service or product
- are affected by any changes
- you need to keep informed about the project
- make decisions about the project
Use prompts like:
- Which groups should we talk to and why?
- How do they help us meet our project brief?
- How can we make sure we talk to people from diverse backgrounds and with diverse experiences?
Review the map you have created
- Is anyone or anything missing?
- Think about the map from the stakeholders’ perspective. What do you notice?
- Does anything need to be repositioned?
- Are you unsure or making assumptions about which circle you’ve put any of the stakeholders in?
Note any insights or questions that arise and use them to help guide your research.
Next steps
- Think about exactly how you will engage each stakeholder.
- Do they need to be collaborators, consulted, or just kept informed?
- How often do you need to talk to them? Regularly, occasionally, or in one-off events?
- How many people from each group do you need to talk to, to make sure you get a diverse set of views?
- This will all feed into your project and research plans.
The methods and case studies under the theme of Policy and Strategy will lead you to create better, more adaptable policies by helping you:
- find the right policy mix
- learn from what works and what doesn’t
- listen to people’s stories
- use simple and clear language, to make sure ideas are easy for everyone to understand, use and develop together.
- make sure everyone who is affected by a policy or strategy has a say in how it is developed and implemented
Definitions
- Policy is an idea or plan for what you want to do about a subject, issue or problem
- Strategy is a detailed plan for how you are going to achieve your policy aims
- Implementation is putting your strategy into action and delivering on your policy aims
Inclusive Policy and Strategy
Take making a community garden as an example. An inclusive innovation approach would:
- Encourage everyone to contribute ideas or set rules so that the garden is designed in a way that benefits everyone (policy)
- Plan how to grow a thriving, sustainable, resilient and regenerative garden together (strategy)
- Have everyone works together to plant, water, and care for the garden (implementation)
To make this happen, we need to:
- set clear goals and check if we’re meeting them
- listen to diverse voices, including people who are often ignored, and let them help make decisions
- experiment and adapt, learn from mistakes, and keep improving
- measure success by asking questions like:
- Did everyone feel included?
- Did we work well as a team?
- Is what we’ve made sustainable / regenerative?
Inclusive policies think about long-term not just short-term change. For example, community hubs (like local gardening groups or organizations) can help champion ideas and make sure they stick.
Further reading
