Adaptive Governance Quotes

He who desires or attempts to reform the government of a state, and wishes to have it accepted ... must at least retain the semblance of the old forms; so that it may seem to the people that there has been no change in the institutions, even though in fact they are entirely different from the old ones.

President Karzai was an accidental president. There was no paradigm for the conditions he faced, because no one could have imagined 9/11. He had to improvise under very difficult conditions to hold this country together.

When people complain to me as they frequently do that laws such as the social Security Act are faulty in certain points, I wonder why they expect them to be anything else for in the case of legislation dealing with entirely new objectives the methods chosen are quite probable to prove faulty when actually in operation. It is one of the cases where one must learn as one goes along and use the experience one acquires to constantly improve on what must be begun purely on theory.

They had to make their own laws in accordance with the necessities of time, and circumstances, the state of affairs, and the experience of judges.

Democracy cannot be static. Whatever is static is dead.

To have prescribed the means by which government should, in all future times, execute its powers would … have been an unwise attempt to provide, by immutable rules, for exigencies which, can best be provided for as they occur.

The course of a great statesman resembles that of navigable rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which men soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking the almost imperceptible slopes of national tendency, yet always aiming at direct advances, always recruited from sources nearer heaven, and sometimes bursting open paths of progress and fruitful human commerce through what seem the eternal barriers of both.

We need to learn to work with political systems that are not perfect instead of taking the view: let's first fix the politics, then we'll fix the rest.

The reality is regulation often lags behind innovation.

There is no school that teaches you how to run a state. You make mistakes, but you learn on the job.

Changing the DNA of a large, multilateral organization such as the United Nations to deal effectively with modern threats is not easy. Indeed, when the United Nations was created in the wake of World War II, threats came almost exclusively from one state carrying out acts of aggression against another.

No government in any country can run on static definitions of economic thinking.

The creative project of self-government - hard and frustrating but necessary - is to produce that political commonwealth that changes over time, that can change sometimes by the minute, if circumstances intervene.

Our policy is very clear: whatever policy will suit the people, whatever policy will suit the circumstances, whatever policy will suit my state.

The most daunting challenges of our times, from climate change to the ageing population, demand an entrepreneurial state unafraid to take a gamble.

In politics a capable ruler must be guided by circumstances, conjectures and conjunctions.

We don't think a sustainable society need be stagnant, boring, uniform, or rigid. It need not be, and probably could not be, centrally controlled or authoritarian. It could be a world that has the time, the resources, and the will to correct its mistakes, to innovate, to preserve the fertility of its planetary ecosystems. It could focus on mindfully increasing quality of life rather than on mindlessly expanding material consumption and the physical capital stock.

The EU must be able to act with the speed and flexibility of a network, not the cumbersome rigidity of a bloc.

Many cities end up putting off things because they want to understand everything. They don't understand that innovating is about starting. Taking care of a city is a process that you start, and then give the population space to respond.

Our constitution, sir, is like a vessel just launched, and lying at the wharf, she is untried, you can hardly discover any one of her properties; it is not known how she will answer her helm, or lay her course; whether she will bear in safety the precious freight to be deposited in her hold. But, in this state, will the prudent merchant attempt alterations? Will he employ two thousand workmen to tear off the planking and take asunder the frame? He certainly will not. Let us gentlemen, fit out our vessel, set up her masts, and expand her sails, and be guided by the experiment in our alterations. If she sails upon an uneven keel, let us right her by adding weight where it is wanting. In this way, we may remedy her defects to the satisfaction of all concerned; but if we proceed now to make alterations, we may deface a beauty, or deform a well proportioned piece of workmanship ... .

Government is not a mechanical but a living thing and must be interpreted in a Darwinian sense …

The federal government needs a strategic approach that includes strong leadership and the ability to manage weather related risks. The challenge of developing such an approach is complex: It must not only encompass all levels of government but must also be developed in a bipartisan manner.

Regulation needs to catch up with innovation.

If there's one thing government needs desperately, it's the ability to quickly try something, pivot when necessary, and build complex systems by starting with simple systems that work and evolving from there, not the other way around.