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A Mundane Comedy is Dominic Kelleher's new book, which will be published in mid 2024. The introduction is available here and further extracts will appear on this site and on social media in the coming months.

This site addresses what's changing, in our own lives, in our organisations, and in wider society. You'll learn about key changes across more than 150 areas, ranging from ageing and time, through nature and animals, to kindness and love...and very much else inbetween.

Halcyon's aim is to help you reflect on how you can better deal with related change in your own life.

What's Changing? - Governance

Governance

 

Please see below selected societal and organisational governance-related change.

 

See also:

 

August 2023

  • Ian Bremmer and Mustafa Suleyman highlighted the challenges that AI presents to traditional governance. Due to its rapid progress and dual-use nature, there’s a need for a novel governance system grounded in principles like agility, inclusivity, and targeted approaches. They proposed three governance bodies: a scientific risk-assessment group, a “Geopolitical Stability Board”, and a third body to bridge the gap between governments and the technology industry. 

 

May 2023

 

July 2021

  • The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated the urgent need for change in the structures and mechanisms of international cooperation. This led to the release of a major synthesis paper -Reflections on building more inclusive global governance - as part of the Inclusive Governance Initiative, which was launched in 2020 to mark Chatham House’s centenary.

 

September 2020

  • EY sponsored the Female FTSE Board Report 2020 which launched at a virtual event. The session was attended by senior business and D&I leaders. The research showed that, while voluntary targets have boosted gender diversity on UK boards, there are still too few women in senior leadership positions, such as CEO and Chair, to drive long-term change.

 

July 2020

  • There are numerous ways boards can assist their organisations address the post pandemic world, but three that EY considers as providing the foundation for the support structure boards must deliver are:
    • Defining – and living – a strong purpose that drives long-term value
    • Instilling a culture of continuous change
    • Developing a future-fit workforce.
  • While these might sound rudimentary, the EY global board risk survey of 500 board directors and CEOs conducted in late 2019, before the pandemic, reveals that boards historically did not consider these as major immediate or short-term concerns, or did not believe it was their responsibility to address them.

 

March 2020

  • Most Americans think that the United Nations is doing "a poor job" of tackling global problems, with 54 percent of adults surveyed giving the multilateral body a weak job assessment. Despite this evaluation, 64% still think the UN should play a significant role in world affairs, according to Gallup.

 

January 2020

  • Ahead of Chatham House's annual London Conference in June 2020, experts in the International Law Programme contributed to the 2019 edition of Chatham House Expert Perspectives. Bringing together ideas for reforming and modernising global governance in critical domains, this collection of essays examined both whether the concept of a ‘rules-based international order’ makes sense in contemporary contexts and what needs to be done to make it fit for purpose.

 

December 2019

 

May 2019

  • Luis Cabrera, author of The Practice of Global Citizenship (2010), analysed the pros and cons of the idea of a world government:
    • In 1945, he noted, it was the virtually instantaneous atomic annihilation of two major Japanese cities by the United States that led academics, prominent politicians, and social activists to call for a strong world government. The choice was clear, Albert Einstein said, as part of his consistent advocacy on the issue: create one world, or face the prospect of having no world at all. Social movements advocating for global integration soon claimed membership in the hundreds of thousands and, by the end of the decade, both houses of the US Congress had held hearings on whether the United Nations should be transformed into a world government. 
    • The heyday ended abruptly, however. With the onset of the Cold War and ensuing popular anti-communist hysteria, world government became linked to presumed Soviet designs for global domination. Few political figures then dared breathe a word about it, and through the 1990s it was pushed mostly to the fringes of serious academia.
    • The renaissance in thinking about world governments can be traced in part to the acceleration of economic globalisation. The 1999 World Trade Organisation protests in Seattle were a watershed moment. More than 50,000 activists converged from around the world, shutting down the city’s central business district and locking the WTO delegates out of their own opening ceremonies. Many in the streets saw the WTO as a shadow global economic government, setting the rules of international trade for most of the world’s countries, but with little direct input from their peoples.
    • Yet even if full world government is never realised, notes a rights-based approach to integration could give us reason to be optimistic. If the ultimate purpose of governing institutions is to promote rights protections, and higher-level institutions can be made to serve this purpose through social and political struggle, then the more world government that emerges, for Cabrera, at least, the better.

 

February 2019

  • The global 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer found that people trust brands and their employers  to respond to societal issues more than governments. 

 

December 2018

  • How will we govern ourselves in future is becoming a more urgent question as so many governments failing to find ways forward, maintain credibility, or even to form a cabinet, noted Forum for the Future. 
  • Technology may offer new ways to bring many more brains into the picture: coders, designers, writers and citizens are using the opensource platform g0v to make policy decisions, while citizens are using similar platforma to decide how to spend public money.

 

November 2018

 

October 2018

 

September 2018

  • Though the UN is not capable of acting as the world’s policeman, Quartz believes that it does still do the vital work of collecting reliable information, conducting investigations, and demanding accountability, raising international scrutiny on violations even when it can’t address them directly. The world’s powers need that scrutiny, though before it loses credibility, the organisation must do a better job of policing itself.
  • The UN's annual General Debate kicks off. Every nation gets the chance to address the UN, and more than 80 heads of state and 44 heads of government are attending this year.
  • Meanwhile, Quartz examined how the UN gets its funding. Nations, however, aren’t the only sponsors of the UN. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given significant amounts of money to the organisation. Over the past three years, the charitable foundation has contributed almost $300 million annually, putting it 25th on the list of highest funders, just after Argentina - read more here.
  • More than 150 new embassies have been established in sub-Saharan Africa since 2010, according to the University of Denver’s Diplomatic Project. While the US still leads the pack with embassies in 48 African nations, Turkey opened up 16 new diplomatic posts and Qatar 12 there in the past eight years, reported GZEROMedia.
  • We see elites as privileged, and undemocratic, and typically up to no good, claimed IAI. Yet elites run our schools and our hospitals, our science research labs and our armed forces. Should we therefore stop seeing 'elite' as a term of abuse and require elites to run our politics and media, or is every elite to be challenged and potentially eradicated?
  • EY warned that as AI and machine learning proliferate, AI technologies are rapidly outpacing the organisational governance and controls that guide their use. External regulators simply can’t keep up, and enterprises are grappling with increasing demands to demonstrate sound and transparent controls that can evolve as quickly as the technology does.
  • Argentine President Mauricio Macri revealed a plan to cut the number of government ministries in the Latin American country by more than half, part of a broader belt-tightening intended to restore investor faith in the country. 

 

July-August 2018

 

June 2018

 

Pre 2018

 

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