A time to build

The world is at a critical moment. Urgent crises, political, ecological, and economic 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 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 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.

Governments have always depended on institutions to do their work and protect their citizens. It follows that new tasks and the changing nature of old ones will often require new institutions too. There are intensive pressures on governments, and growing demands for action. How to reduce inequality? How to deal with AI? How to take mental health as seriously as physical health? How to handle rapidly aging populations and to protect democracy? How to give voice to groups who have traditionally been excluded from power, including Indigenous people? How to mobilize capital for new forms of energy, new ways of growing food, and less resource-intensive approaches to human development?

The tyranny of the lack of alternatives

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, recently said; "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."

Many existing public institutions are no longer fit for purpose. Too analogue in the digital era. Too much based on anachronistic, hierarchical Western models.

UNDP's Istanbul Innovation Days (IID) is a platform for exploring new trends, ideas and practices. With Demos Helsinki and The Institutional Architecture Lab (TIAL), we will focus on institutional innovation to address our most insurmountable problems.

Many nations have gone 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 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 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 how important it is to get institutions right. When viewed through an evolutionary lens, institutions can generate what author 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, bringing together the most dynamic innovators.

Building a more resilient world

We are mapping hundreds of examples of innovation, with a focus on security and resilience. These show imagination at work, and how officials and politicians have broken free from the constraints of bureaucracy.

Recent institutional forms tackle issues ranging from 'digital public infrastructure', such as the Unique Identification Authority in India, which provided 1.3 billion people with legal identities and transformed public services.

We have found many that are finding new ways to give voice to people - including Indigenous peoples. And many are being designed to be, able to reshape themselves as challenges change, whether in response to disasters and post-conflict reconstruction or pandemics and economic crises. Others such as South Africa's Commission for Employment Equity and Colombia's Care Blocks focus on social priorities.

When it comes to more emerging, experimental institutional forms we see cities setting up new functions to cater to transversal issues ranging from time and wellbeing to exploration, heat and happiness. Central governments are experimenting with temporary and mission oriented ministries - from the United Arab Emirate's Ministry of Possibilities to the Green Tripartite ministry in Denmar k and the Office for Policy on Loneliness and Isolation in Japan.

Multi-species collaborations offer more institutional possibilities for detecting water pollution and early signals of disasters to reimagine justice systems that reflect our interdependence with nature and which serve and protect non-human species. The world of money is shifting from reinforcing sole focus on growth-based Key Performance Indicators to accounting for and investing in a multitude of factors to advance environmental sustainability and social justice. And from Kenya and South Africa to Argentina we're seeing alternative economic models that are built on solidarity and collective safety.

Many of these cases are organized as 'meshes', cutting across the traditional silos and also linking tiers of government as well as business and civil society. It's an approach which is vital for big systems shifts such as 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 21^st century design;

• The central importance of shared intelligence, 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 more flexible structures that can adapt continuously, rather than relying on traditional pyramid-structured organograms;
• The importance of opening institutions up to more citizen voices;
• The need to connect multiple levels and silos of governance.

This work isn't easy. And the practical options for creating new institutions demand subtlety and attention to political, cultural and economic context.

Laying the foundations for the institutions of the future

We shape our schools, courts, hospitals, regulators and parliaments. And they shape not just what we do, but also how we think.

This moment is a time to build more resilient societies.

The 2025 IID will bring together dozens of innovators and decision makers in Istanbul to share their 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.

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