Age of Smart: Is the State Equipped for Troubled Times?

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ABSTRACT

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A “State as Catalyst”, as proposed in the first paper, needs to address social, emerging, and dynamic complexity with (1) renewed expertise, (2) better creative thinking skills, and (3) by cultivating the motivation of citizens and all stakeholders to contribute to innovative policy solutions. These three key ingredients are required to enable and foster collective intelligence at the community level. A “State as Catalyst” is organised to be in service to this mission. In this paper, we examine whether recent governance developments indicate that such a “catalyst” model is emerging and conclude that while there are many encouraging steps in that direction, they don’t yet form a coherent whole. We will suggest how this could be done in ensuing papers.