Council of Europe

Advancing from strategy to practice is challenging, especially when the focus is on multi level governance. It is no simple task to involve many levels of government, public agencies, civil society, voluntary organisations and the business sector. The Council of Europe’s Intercultural Cities programme strives to do just this: to support its members in becoming more inclusive and diverse cities and societies.

Together with the Council of Europe´s Intercultural cities programme we facilitated collaborative and co-creative workshops that put the theory into practice. Using systemic design methods we:

• Established a common understanding of how members view existing levels of governance
• Challenged them to work holistically to solve the challenge
• Experimented with different solutions that target multilevel collaboration and coordination
• And came up with three ‘hub models’ (econsystems) that function in different types of member states.

The output enables members to use concrete ways of working to deliver on the objectives of the programme: redesigning policy, governance structures and strategies to be more inclusive and diverse.

Our reflections:

At Halogen we are proud to have contributed to inclusive governance through systemic design methods. The hub models are just the beginning of solving the challenge, and we see further development and iteration as being crucial to their success. We hope to see a feedback loop from members to the committee that considers the practical application of the hubs, as well as design workshops within the member countries that use the generic hubs to develop models that fit their own state.