Reimagining Government season 2 episode 2: transcript

Listen to the full episode below or click here:

SFX: President Obama speaking Throughout our history, change has often come slowly. Progress often takes time, but the future rewards those who press on. 

[00:00:11] Adrian Brown: Hello and welcome to Reimagining Government. My name is Adrian Brown and I'm the Executive Director at the Centre for Public Impact. Now planning is something which we all have to do and civil servants across the globe are doing it all the time, trying to think about what's going to happen in the future.

But often when we're thinking about the future, we might be using models or framings that are actually limiting what we think and how we think, and that's going to affect what we do today and what's going to happen in the future. And that's the topic of today's conversation, long-term thinking and how it connects with some of the models we have in our mind about growth, about success and about what the environment is that we want to live in and work in today and in the future.

I'm joined by a colleague of mine who's been speaking to several experts on this topic. Javiera Godoy, who's the Programme Manager at CPI's Global Development Initiative. Welcome, Javiera. It's great to have you with us.

[00:01:04] Javiera Godoy: Thank you so much, Adrian. I'm very happy to be with you today and learning more about long-term strategies with our two amazing guests, Jayne Engle and Gabriela Cabaña for today. 

[00:01:16] Adrian Brown: And Javiera, I know you are in a co-working space. So if we hear a little bit of background noise, that's just people that you're co- working with today. 

[00:01:26] Javiera Godoy: Exactly, that's going to add a bit of realness to our conversation. 

[00:01:33] Adrian Brown: That's right. So today we will explore long-term thinking and how to plan for the future with enough flexibility to adapt to the unexpected. Javiera, I know that you've been thinking about this a lot and speaking to various people through your work. Tell us a bit about this topic and who you've been speaking to. 

[00:01:48] Javiera Godoy: So yes, we've been talking with two really interesting people.

So the first person that we invited to tell us more about long-term thinking is Gabriela Lanya. She's a transdisciplinary scholar, originally trained in sociology and anthropology, and she's also the co-founder of the Activist Movement, Degrowth London, and the Centre for Social Environmental Analysis, CASA in Latin America. 

[00:02:14] Gabriela Cabaña: I've been involved in degrowth from an academic perspective, but also in my more activist work. So I have been working together with communities that are organised against infrastructures that are unjust and are affecting the places where they live. I did that during my fieldwork.

So degrowth has also been important in those aspects of my life as a way of opening dialogues that are often very hard to, to have. 

[00:02:36] Javiera Godoy: To Gabriela and to the degrowth people, this looks like an alternative: an alternative that can help us to imagine a future world in which we all can live together and we can be respectful of the natural resources that we already have, a way in which we can apply long-term thinking as a confluence of different ways of thinking, acting, and doing, and different ways of organising.

[00:03:03] Gabriela Cabaña: In my study, what I'm doing right now, I'm interested in studying energy transitions. So I'm interested in seeing different disputes and problems that are coming about in the south of Chile, where I'm from, now in the context of increasing renewable energy infrastructure. And in trying to understand this very complex issue, I realised that degrowth had a very interesting approach and set of principles to see what was going on.

[00:03:24] Javiera Godoy: One thing that Gabriela, uh, shared with us that was very, very key is that why this vision of degrowth is relevant right now, because we've been seeing that the world is not infinite, right? But we're thinking of economic growth as something that has no limits. 

[00:03:43] Gabriela Cabaña: I teach about degrowth and whenever I think about it myself, I like to say that it can refer to three different things.

So first, it is a confluence of different critiques to growth. So this is not the first time it's not just now in the last few years that people have become critical of the idea of an endlessly expanding economy. So this comes from many decades ago and it has very different sources. They all come together in a particular way under degrowth.

It's also a perspective, a proposal. So it's a set of principles that are political that therefore open the way to think about different futures. And in that line, the third thing that degrowth can also be is a way of thinking, organising, and acting politically, and personally. So what does it mean to act in whatever place I am?

In my workplace, maybe I'm part of a social environmental movement, or maybe just in my family. Degrowth can also offer tools for the way we should act.

[00:04:37] Adrian Brown: So, Javiera, talk a little bit about how degrowth can act as a framing for long-term thinking. What are some of the aspects of that way of thinking that would make us think differently about decisions today. 

[00:04:53] Javiera Godoy: Degrowth is, is born from this perspective of the social infrastructures that we have right now in place have been built by a few.

There is a colonial perspective towards them in which some countries benefit from extraction from other countries. Degrowth says if, if we want to plan a world in which we all can live, then there are some changes that need to be done immediately. And most of these changes have to do with those infrastructures that we've set up because they haven't considered everyone, all the voices and all the people and perspectives that are being affected by them.

[00:05:40] Gabriela Cabaña: I always like linking this kind of question to another question that I'm often asked, which is, oh, how viable is degrowth? There is a utopian dimension to degrowth that I think is good in the sense of liberating our imagination, because I think we're living under a very deep crisis of imagination, that we can't think a deep radical systemic change is feasible and that's within our reach as humans.

If you learn a bit of the science, the evidence, if you learn about the different injustices and the fast and dramatic deterioration of the conditions of life all over the planet. Then I ask, is it possible to continue as we are? Is our current system actually feasible and sustainable in the long term?

And the answer is no. Because it's a system that is based on a very irrational assumption, which is that endless economic growth can exist in a finite planet. We have been, for the last few decades, at war with that reality and trying to overcome those limits and having this unhealthy relationship with limits trying to always trespass them to make as if they didn't exist and they're going to say look these limits exist and that's fine if we learn to live within those limits you can actually live well.

Degrowth is a way of pulling the emergency brake in this train that is going so, so fast into destruction and completely changing the terms of the way in which we think about the future and what we actually need. It is, I think, a very solid base for long-term thinking. 

[00:07:08] Adrian Brown: So one important aspect of this way of thinking is the constituents who are part of the conversation, actually.

It's not about a small group of people or experts sort of coming up with a vision for the future or saying, these are the things that we should value. This is how we should organise ourselves. It challenges us to break open those conversations to, particularly to, communities or people that have not been part of them in the past.

[00:07:35] Javiera Godoy: Yes, she also mentioned how important it is for this type of movement or ways of thinking to be embedded within politics. So it's not just about the citizens, but also she called it a crisis of imagination that she and her team has been seeing across different powerholders, decision makers, and public servants, in which we are also tied to short-term thinking results, etc. That is really really hard for us to imagine alternatives and we are being asked to be accountable to too many people if we if we think about municipalities public servants all bring these amazing ideas, but maybe they have just four years to implement it, and maybe it's not enough.

So how can we create spaces in which not only citizens, but also public servants can feel empowered to imagine and reimagine the way in which we create and live within the social infrastructures?

[00:08:41] Gabriela Cabaña: The systems that we have today to provide for the things that we need are failing dramatically in many ways.

So, we can talk about the need to degrow the way in which we clothe ourselves, which follows a very similar logic, you know, for creating clothes that soon become garbage and end up in, in waste dumps. Other things that we are definitely doing the wrong way from a degrowth perspective that we could change is how we deal with our transport systems.

So today we are still envisioning the future of transport as everyone owning a private car, while we should be actually thinking of improving public transport and improving the places we inhabit like cities to be more amenable to slower ways of moving to have more walking cities to use of active mobility like cycling and this, these problems go beyond you know not just like carbon emissions it's about sustainability more widely understood.

We are building what are the impacts of choosing one way of provision over the other. 

[00:09:44] Adrian Brown: So degrowth challenges us to change our, our default assumptions about success looks like what we are striving collectively for and by moving away from more traditional metrics like GDP and GDP growth, particularly, it changes how we think about both the long term and then the near term, given what we're doing today is the precursor to what will happen tomorrow. 

[00:10:14] Gabriela Cabaña: Very important part of this perspective, when I was saying that degrowth is a set of principles and a political perspective, I think it's very important to highlight that it has a very deep anti-colonial view and an anti-colonial understanding of the world.

So, it starts by locating growth in continuity with colonial relations and relations of plunder, in which, you know, this idea of including the global south into the world economy has always been done with disadvantages, conditions, and conditions of reproduced exploitation and marginalisation, and that make very often invisible all the damage that is done in the name of growth.

So degrowth is also about dismantling those structures of oppression and giving more room to global south countries to do whatever they want and not just have to follow the guidelines of policies of growth. So degrowth will always mean something different wherever you're standing. It will be something different here in London than it can be in Chile or any other place.

So there is no one size fits all for this. It's not like a new recipe for everyone to do the same. So I would say yes, there is a strong mandate for global North countries to take the initiative and to be active creators of a more just world, not just you know, sit back and wait for that to happen because they are like important players in all this. 

[00:11:31] Adrian Brown: At the end there Gabriela was saying that degrowth means basically means different things to different people depending on your vantage point.

How does that work in practice? I imagine that could create some confusion if different people are talking about it different ways, how does that, how do you think that works out here? 

[00:11:47] Javiera Godoy: I think that there's something here around positionality for degrowth is really important to acknowledge all kinds of knowledges instead of saying, no, actually degrowth is the way of doing things is more about we're aligning.

So let's just celebrate all types of knowledge and movements and ideas that are already there with their contextual ground. And here, what we're listening to and what we're hearing is basically this acknowledgement that there might not be one solution - and that's okay. But that's something that we have to keep in mind when designing this social infrastructures in the way that we can have, let's say, for example, a general rubric that applies to everything, but we also need something that feels more, more tailored to respond to the specific needs of the communities that we're working with and to celebrate the knowledge and the traditions and customs that are already there in that specific context.

[00:12:45] Adrian Brown: And that feels like perhaps one of the most fundamental challenges that the degrowth agenda offers to traditional, more traditional ways of thinking, which is that we need to embrace this multiplicity of perspectives and recognise, as you just said, that there isn't necessarily or indeed we shouldn't expect there to ever be one answer or one way of thinking or one definitive perspective on what truth is even.

Because there are multiple perspectives and multiple truths and I guess what degrowth is encouraging us to embrace is that that can be liberating and productive rather than what some people who are listening to this might fear, which is that can be, well, that sounds very confusing and chaotic.

So I think that the interesting thing about degrowth is it is an example of a way of thinking that is willing to step into that space, which can feel scary, but is necessary, I suppose, from the degrowth perspective. 

[00:13:49] Gabriela Cabaña: Whatever your capacity is, whatever your role, your profession or your inclinations are, I think degrowth can offer something for you to think about and to incorporate in whatever you're doing.

If you want to get organised, even if it's not in a specific degrowth collective, I do think degrowth can offer very interesting tools to ask questions, to frame problems and to frame solutions. And I hope that you reach out to them because it's a, it's a very interesting and thriving community that I think so far hasn't been co-opted by mainstream thinking and by, you know, the greenwashing of capitalism.

And I hope it remains like that. So it's, uh, I would give an invitation to get involved. in whatever capacity you have. 

[00:14:32] Javiera Godoy: This is my own perspective, but I feel that from what we've learned, uh, with Gabriela, uh, and the degrowth movement is that there is this view of, let's not try to imagine things that are not on our table.

So if we were to cook something, let's see what we have here. So we have this community that has already been doing things, we have this type of knowledge, we have these resources. So there's this piece of land, there are these trees, uh, these people, and let's try to imagine something with whatever we have and not to say, okay, I have this great idea.

So then it means that I have to extract this resource. Let's really, really be clever in identifying these opportunities that we have in front of us. Be respectful, uh, with the planet and the people that we're surrounded by and I would say, like, be really realistic, like, it's funny because this is, this sounds really like an utopia, but I would say that from what we've heard, it feels more like the contrary in the sense of like, the utopia is believing that we can do everything.

The realness here is that if we are very present in whatever we have. Right now in front of us, and we learn how to live with it, and we start bringing more of this culture of care and wellbeing among us, then things will be more easy.

[00:15:55] Adrian Brown: I like it. I was trying to, as you were talking, I was trying to think of, uh, the word.

If it's not a utopia... it's not a dystopia, right? That's the opposite of, uh, utopia, everything great, dystopia, everything's awful. I guess what this is, is that everything's kind of real, uh, realistic. (laughter) Whatever that, someone can, someone can Google what that word is. 

[00:16:16] Gabriela Cabaña: I often get the impression when I speak with people that are in power, that they are still trapped in the epistemic tools that they have, in the cognitive models that they have inherited that are so narrow and are so blind to many of the crises that now are becoming so evident. And I know that trying to change the way in which society works is very scary and it's definitely going to be hard, but the more time we wait, the harder staying as we are is going to be. 

Many people in degrowth often say that degrowth is not really going to be a choice. It's something that we will have to do eventually, and we can choose if that's it's going to be a crash or it's going to be, you know, like a, like a nice landing that we can decide how to do. 

[00:16:59] Adrian Brown: So that was a fantastic first half to this podcast, uh, we'll take a short break in a second, but make sure you stay tuned because after the break we will be talking to Jayne Engle from Dark Matter Labs, who believes that humans are made for long-term thinking and it's actually our systems that are holding us back, so stay tuned.

Adrian Brown: Hi Adrian here, I hope you’re enjoying this episode of Reimagining Government. Whilst I have you, let me tell you about another exciting project we’ve been working on over at the Centre for Public Impact, our storytelling webinars.

At CPI, we believe in the power of stories. Stories help us understand complex ideas, connect us, and allow us to imagine a better future. We support governments and public services to embrace storytelling in their work to connect with communities and build trust, nderstand complex problems, evaluate impact and learn.

That’s why we’re inviting you to join us for a series of two free webinars exploring story work in government.

Our webinars will take place on Wednesday 22nd November and Tuesday 28th November and are an excellent opportunity to learn how stories can be better embraced and listened to in government and public services.

We encourage you and your network to join both events for an enriching experience. To find out more, search for storytelling webinars on www.centreforpublicimpact.org.

[00:18:21] Javiera Godoy: So the second person I spoke to on this journey to understand different long-term strategies was Jayne Engle. 

[00:18:30] Jayne Engle: I'm Jayne Engle, and I am working with Dark Matter Labs, and I'm also Co-Lead of 7Gen Cities, which we’re incubating Dark Matter Labs in partnership with an indigenous organization called the Mi'kmaw Native Friendship Centre, as well as a number of other organisations.

My own background is of European settler descent, and it's very important that I say that because I am not of Indigenous background, and so I want to be very careful to recognise that positionality. I consider myself an ally, an accomplice, and very much, um, on a journey. In fact, this is one of the most important journeys of my life, I would say, um, about learning about truth and reconciliation, and also about what it means to think differently about how we, um, recognise, histories of the past, as well as think about decolonising systems, practices, and mindsets, uh, into the future.

[00:19:31] Adrian Brown: So, 7Gen Cities, so this is thinking, I'm guessing, about 200 years into the future, Javiera, is that right? 

[00:19:37] Javiera Godoy: Yeah, more or less, yes. Now that I'm, I'm doing the math. 

[00:19:40] Jayne Engle: The way we think about and build cities is really not fit for the future we need. And the shifts that are required are more than simply just tweaks in the margins, but our future city regions really need fundamental rethinking, and there are so many traditions and knowledge systems that have a great deal to contribute to that.

[00:20:01] Javiera Godoy: In order to plan for that future to come, we need to learn from the past. We can also take into account traditions, past experiences, other people's cultures, ways of living, doing, thinking, acting, to make sure that that future is sustainable, not for a few, but for everyone.

[00:20:26] Adrian Brown: I've heard of a concept which sounds similar to this called cathedral thinking, which links to this idea that in the past when cathedrals were being constructed, everybody knew that it was going to take longer than one person's lifetime to design and then mostly build that cathedral. So, if you're the architect for the cathedral, you were thinking way beyond your own lifetime, and you would never even see the cathedral, uh, completed.

Uh, so this idea of cathedral thinking seems quite similar to 7th, 7th generation thinking.

[00:21:03] Javiera Godoy: I think there's something here around the concept of being an author. I wouldn't say always, but it's so common. I would say it's like part of our human nature. Working towards something, a goal, like achieving something. And we want results, and we want outputs, and we want outcomes. And we want some sort of recognition for it.

And we also want to see all these results. Not only for 7Gen Cities, but for all term thinking strategies, it is so important to bring more of that humble mindset in which, as you said, as a cathedral, we are all part of it. We're working together as a community to achieve something that we believe in, and we might not see the results, and we might not be the final authors of it.

I would say that for cathedral thinking and seven gen cities, uh, degrowth, there's this concept of bringing a more systemic lens in order to plan for the future. So it's not just about one aspect, one topic, one area of knowledge, but it's just about connecting the dots and making sure that as many people are involved and then, uh, we're patient.

We're not in a rush. We don't work on this culture of urgency because we know that every effort, even if small, is pointing out to something that we believe will be better for the future. 

[00:22:31] Jayne Engle: We know that there are different worlds of possibility intuitively. And we know that they look different in many ways from what we have now.

How we live into those, how we build those collectively, how we cultivate wise collective action is not yet known. Because in many ways, what we have now is a kind of result of collective intelligence, unbound by wisdom. It's sort of this cultivation of wisdom and wise collective action that is so important.

And like I said, that requires long-term thinking. And we have built systems that favour the short term. And so that has caused us to live more with the logics of the short term. But I don't think we need to be limited by that. I think we actually need to transcend that. And we absolutely are capable to transcend that.

Is it easy? No. But is it possible? Absolutely, yes. 

[00:23:27] Adrian Brown: There's a strong connection here between what Gabriela was saying, I think, about the crisis of imagination and what Jayne's talking about here, which is the sort of need for wisdom or more wisdom. Javiera, what do you see as the connection between the sort of crisis of imagination and the need for more wisdom that Jayne is talking about. 

[00:23:41] Javiera Godoy: I would say that Jayne not necessarily agreed with the crisis of imagination. It's really interesting because we're not blaming on people of not being creative enough, but we're saying we haven't been that creative in creating this social infrastructures. So what if we reimagined those so we can actually cultivate spaces for all of us to imagine new futures. An example Jayne gives is of the mayor, so how can mayors apply methods of long-term thinking when they are only in power for a short amount of time?

[00:24:17] Jayne Engle: Mayors are very often some of the most visionary leaders and long-term thinkers. They often face a dilemma because municipalities are also often seen primarily as service delivery agents.

And so, in reality, what can happen is that there is a rational interest for mayors and municipalities to keep expectations of the public low. Because the institutions are built for short term interests, right? They usually only have a few years in office. They need to meet service delivery today. They need to pick up the trash today so that people are happy.

They need to, you know, alleviate suffering today to meet needs that are pressing and so important. At the same time, they very often have this dissonance because they want change for the long term. They're very often not only interested in the short term of their political office, but they actually care deeply about their cities and communities for the long term.

We call this idea Mayors for the Future. And in this new sort of hybrid institution, there would be a mayor. This mayor would be um, elected including by, by younger people. people who, you know, are below the official voting age in most places, for one thing, but then also have this new body govern through a civic assembly, including with representatives of nature, of other species, and of future generations.

There would be then some liberty, so it would be tied to the existing mayor, but also, um, some freedom to move into these accountabilities. So have accountabilities to future generations. And so we think that that kind of hybrid institution is really the kind of thing that's needed for now. In some cases we'll need to build new institutions as well, and in some cases we'll need to transition or build hybrid institutions.

But we see that as one that has, that has tremendous possibility. 

[00:26:14] Adrian Brown: It's great to hear an example from Jayne here of how practically we can actually think about changing the system today. And as she just said, it, it's not necessarily radically overhauling the system, which might still be necessary, but it is doing something by a Mayor for the Future as an example of sort of hacking the system a little sort of tweaking, trying to build in new forms of civic space, I suppose that, uh, they encourage a different way of thinking along the lines of the seventh generation logic 

[00:26:46] Javiera Godoy: When we're talking about this, um, long-term thinking strategies, it might feel a bit radical sometimes. And it's like, okay, so we have to start all over again, right? And Jayne is here basically saying no actually, there are tactics that could shift the way in which we do thing and might be easier than we expect them for them to be. But it's important that we get creative and we get a bit messy in testing and experimenting with this tactics. Otherwise everything will stay the way in which we've been experiencing so far.

[00:27:20] Adrian Brown: I think Jayne has some other examples of how governance could be changed in cities to incorporate some of the seven gen logic. 

[00:27:30] Jayne Engle: So one is changing the accounting rules as needed so that trees and forests are investable assets on balance sheets as well as recognising um, the spillover values of ecosystems, the social infrastructure that's created and so on.

So we, there's actually an opportunity to think about value creation and also value allocation differently. Second is to, in many cases, to decentralise power to cities, to regions, to bio-regions. And in ways that there are overlapping boundaries of jurisdictions. If we actually look at how ecosystems work and even how actually Indigenous boundaries were drawn, we can see that overlapping boundaries for jurisdictions was was more appropriate, right?

Because a river doesn't stop at a, you know, at the boundary of a state and other ecosystems. We also don't want biodiversity to, to stop at boundaries of politics, nor necessarily people in the same way that, that is required currently. A third thing is, um, to set up regulatory experimentation labs so that residents have the agency to cultivate collective action to adaptively learn into the futures we need.

We all need to be humble right now. We all need to recognise that we are moving into futures that none of us fully have the answers to, right? So we need to be testing, building, collaborating together, and compounding the learning of how we do that. And then a fourth thing is creating policies and institutional mechanisms that test alternate forms of organising local governance.

We need a revolution of democracy and education simultaneously. One way to do that is through civic assemblies of sortition. There are also other mechanisms to do that as well, but I think that's one of the ways that we need to do that, and that needs to happen in a way that is accessible to vast numbers of people.

I'd like to share a story of a person who is a kin in this work. Her name is Pam Glode-Desrocher, and she's Executive Director of the Mi'kmaw Native Friendship Centre. She's a woman of Mi'kma'ki background, and a lot of what I've learned that I contribute to in 7Gen Cities, a lot of it has come from working alongside Pam.

And the Friendship Centre is this place of absolutely beautiful love and care that has constructed a whole set of programs and systems that, that serve and help build capabilities with many of the people who are, who are most marginalised in society. Many, many indigenous communities and many others.

What's very hopeful is that, uh, the centre was recently, uh, granted around 50, around 50 million to build a new Friendship Centre, which is, is being planned for Halifax and it's being planned at a very interesting location. So the location is the foot of Citadel Hill, which happens to be the site of first contact with European settlers in this country.

And then a fort was built there, which was a colonial fort. The hill itself was actually built by formerly enslaved people from Jamaica who had come to Nova Scotia and then formed the African Nova Scotian community. So it's of tremendous historic and symbolic value. And now the Friendship Centre officially owns the land at the foot of Citadel Hill where they will build this new Friendship Centre.

It's very much an indigenous way of seeing, to understand that we belong to the land, rather than the land belongs to us. So this notion of what we're calling free land, or self owning land, is something that Pam is trying to build there along with others.

And then she wants to alongside partners like Evergreen to build a regenerative land project as part of that work. And then also that would mean that Indigenous Peoples would have an opportunity to steward that land in perpetuity. And so that's a particular site with a particular possibility, but that kind of thinking and work could be scaled and adapted in other places.

And we think it provides tremendous hope for the kinds of worlds that we can be creating from here. 

[00:32:06] Adrian Brown: If I was to reflect back on both conversations, I'd say that sort of three big messages stand out for me, and then I'd be interested to hear what you think, Javiera. The first is that we need to reframe, uh, away from maybe our traditional ways of thinking about growth and what success looks like for us collectively.

And, and, and that first important step is for us to be willing to, to do that and, and say, actually, we need to reconceptualise the direction we're heading in the long-term vision. And then the second aspect, which Jayne particularly was highlighting there, is we need to be able then to have the courage, I guess, to reimagine what our systems can look like, whether our political systems or our governance systems can look like, in both small and large ways, because we're not going to change everything overnight, but that iterative adaptive experimental approach, you know, it's very much part of this I think.

And then thirdly just having the courage again to try it to take those steps to do something, you know small steps today leading to two bigger things in the future. By doing so that is how we connect this grand vision or these these alternate visions for the future with the practical day to day.

[00:33:18] Javiera Godoy: I really like that Adrian. Absolutely. I absolutely agree - something that stayed with me from everything that we've heard is this need for a planetary mindset. So we're not the only species in the world. We're surrounded by trees, there is the sea, Jayne talks about rivers and how we are thinking of rivers as some sort of like legal asset that makes sense in the world that we're living in, but also how can we bring more of what actually that river means for geography, for communities, into the way that we plan and design cities, settlements, et cetera.

So I think that that thing of having a planetary mindset is really, really important for long-term thinking. There's also this sense of time and patience, being humble, you won't see changes maybe in the next year, uh, maybe you'll have to wait.

Maybe you will never see them and that's fine. That doesn't mean that change is not happening if you cannot see it clearly instantly. And then the other thing that I think is really important for us to remember is the positionality around long-term thinking. 

So there's not just one way of doing things. There are many, many, uh, possibilities. And as you said, Adrian, it's about reimagining this like alternative futures. Um, and there might be thousands of them. And then the big task here is how can we make them all work together? So we make all the people that need to be listened to part of this conversation.

And that then informs long-term practice as well. So I guess that our big task right now is to create an experiment in ways that we can actually bring more of that, of those different knowledges as part of the infrastructures that we need to redesign. 

[00:35:21] Adrian Brown: Thank you, Javiera, for that. And thank you for Being the co-host on, uh, on this episode of Reimagining Government.

It's been a fantastic conversation. I feel like I've learned a lot and thank you to our guests as well, Gabriela and Jayne. 

If you're a public servant or a policymaker, we would like to hear from you. What are your thoughts on the examples of long-term thinking that we discussed today? Have you seen similar practices work in your area. 

Do get in touch. You can tweet us @CPI_Foundation, or you can email us at comms@centreforpublicimpact.org. And also you can let us know what topics we should cover in future episodes. Also, please remember to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform and to let us know your thoughts on this series.

But until next time, I've been Adrian Brown. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.