Public institutions and governance

Creative Bureaucracy Festival 2026: why the future of public services is about systems, not services

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Claire Dhami

I was fortunate enough to attend the Creative Bureaucracy Festival in Berlin this June, bringing together public servants, leaders and practitioners from across the world who are grappling with the same fundamental challenge: how do we make public services work better for people in increasingly complex and uncertain times.

The festival itself has an interesting origin. It was founded by Charles Landry and others as a provocation. The term ‘creative bureaucracy’ deliberately challenges the stereotype of bureaucracy as rigid, slow and rule bound. Instead, it puts forward a different idea that public institutions, at their best, can be imaginative, humane and capable of solving complex problems.

What began as a provocation has now become a global movement. The festival has grown into a space where thousands of public servants come together each year to share what is actually working in practice, often in spite of system constraints, and to learn from each other.

What struck me most, both from the festival and from our work in the West Midlands, is that the issues we face are remarkably consistent across countries. There is a growing recognition that many of the challenges in public services are not about marginal service gaps. They are about how the system itself is designed.

We have built systems that are logically organised around institutions, but in practice expect people to navigate multiple disconnected pathways. Responsibility is too often passed between organisations, rather than shared. The result is fragmented, transactional experiences, particularly for those with the most complex needs.

This is not a capability problem. It is a design problem.

One of the most powerful shifts discussed at the festival is moving from improving individual services to improving life outcomes. That may sound like a subtle change, but it fundamentally alters how we think about reform.

Instead of asking how to optimise what already exists, we start by asking what people actually need to thrive and then work backwards to shape the system around that. In our own work, this means focusing less on creating new interventions and more on redesigning the pathways between education, health, employment and community support, particularly at the points where people are most at risk of falling through the gaps.

This is where relational public services become essential. When support is organised around trusted relationships and continuity, rather than organisational boundaries and eligibility criteria, the experience for residents changes completely. It becomes earlier, more consistent and more human.

But perhaps the most important insight for me was how we think about innovation.

There is a tendency in the public sector to equate innovation with new programmes or pilots. The festival challenged that directly. A more effective model is to see innovation as a small but deliberate part of the system, around 10 percent of activity, designed to influence the other 90 percent.

The pilots themselves are not the outcome. They may succeed or fail. The real value lies in the learning they generate and whether that learning changes how the system behaves. That means influencing mainstream commissioning, policy decisions and how resources are actually deployed.

This requires discipline. Without a clear link between experimentation and system change, innovation remains interesting but peripheral. With it, innovation becomes a lever for reform.

It also clarifies the role of organisations like the Combined Authority. Our role is not to direct delivery or create new services. It is to influence how the system behaves. That means convening partners, aligning incentives, building shared ownership of outcomes and creating the conditions for change.

At the same time, the festival highlighted a fundamental contradiction that we see locally. We talk about partnership, prevention and place-based working, but continue to fund services in ways that reinforce fragmentation. If we are serious about system outcomes, we have to fund them differently, aligning resources around shared cohorts and goals rather than organisational silos.

The message I took away from Berlin is that the future of public services will not be defined by new initiatives. It will be defined by our ability to redesign systems so that good people are able to do the right thing, consistently.

When we get that right, innovation is no longer something separate. It becomes part of how the system learns, adapts and improves over time. And that is where meaningful, lasting change happens.

Claire Dhami is Head of systems change and inclusion at West Midlands Combined Authority.

When mayors hold the pencil: gerrymandering inside a territorial reform

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Miguel Ângelo Vilela Rodrigues (University of Minho), with Oliver Meza (CIDE) and Carmen Navarro (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

Gerrymandering is usually filed away as an American problem — a decennial ritual of oddly shaped congressional districts and litigation. But the practice does not require an American ballot. It requires only two things: a boundary that has to be redrawn, and a politician with an interest in where the line falls. Territorial reform supplies both, and it does so in countries that would never describe themselves as having a redistricting problem.

Portugal is a case in point. In our recent article in Local Government Studies, we look at the 2013 reform that amalgamated Portuguese sub-municipal units — the freguesias, roughly comparable to parishes — and ask a question that the amalgamation literature has largely left aside: not whether mergers deliver economies of scale or damage local democracy, but who decides which units merge with which, and what they get out of it.

A reform designed to be captured

The reform came out of the 2011 Memorandum of Understanding with the troika. Cutting the number of local entities was one of the commitments made, and central government initially tried to impose specific merger criteria from above. Local government rejected that outright. So the government softened its approach: it kept the targets — urban units to be reduced by 50–55 per cent, rural ones by 25–35 per cent — and handed the map itself to the mayors. Across 278 municipalities, the number of sub-municipal units fell from 4,269 to 3,092.

The design has an unusual feature. The units that had to merge were not the units that decided. Mayors drew the proposals; municipal assemblies approved them. And Portuguese municipal assemblies are hybrid bodies: alongside directly elected members, every sub-municipal president in the jurisdiction sits with a full vote. Sub-municipal presidents are also, in practice, part of a mayor’s electoral machinery — the people who campaign, mobilise and deliver a vote in their own patch.

That makes an amalgamation reform something more than an administrative exercise. Reducing the number of sub-municipal units aligned with the mayor’s party reduces the mayor’s support in the assembly that approves the budget and the investment plan, and thins out the voices in the field who will be needed at the next election. Conversely, a well-drawn map can pack opponents into a single unit or dilute them inside a larger friendly one. The pencil was handed to precisely the actors with most to gain from how it moved.

Vulnerability and feasibility

We modelled the mayor’s decision on two dimensions. The first is vulnerability: does the mayor have a majority of politically aligned sub-municipal units, or not? The second is feasibility: does the mayor command a majority of the elected seats in the municipal assembly, and so the ability to get a map approved without concessions?

Crossing them yields four situations. Where mayors are not vulnerable, redrawing is either irrelevant or indifferent — there is nothing to gain. Where they are vulnerable but lack an assembly majority, redrawing is crucial to survival but has to be negotiated, which means sharing the spoils. Where they are vulnerable and hold the assembly, redrawing is appealing: the incentive and the means coincide.

Using the 2009 sub-municipal election results projected onto the new 2013 map — the only information mayors actually had when drawing it — we then estimated multinomial logit models on all 278 affected municipalities.

The pattern is clear. Across the country, 51 per cent of municipalities ended up with more aligned sub-municipal units after a reform whose entire purpose was to reduce their number. In the appealing quadrant, the odds of an increase in aligned units rise more than nine-fold; in the crucial quadrant, where the map has to survive a coalition, they rise just over four-fold. The gap between the two is itself the finding: opposition parties will not sign off on a map that benefits the incumbent alone, so the gains get shared and diluted. Results hold when we substitute a vote-efficiency measure of the kind used in the US gerrymandering literature.

Why this should interest anyone outside Portugal

Two implications travel. The first is procedural. Structural reform is often delegated downwards on the sensible-sounding grounds that local actors know their own territory. They do — and they also know their own electoral arithmetic. Where the reform reshapes the boundaries that determine who sits in the body that scrutinises the reformer, delegation is not neutral. Anyone currently watching local government reorganisation in England, where boundaries, wards and the composition of new authorities are all in play, may find the logic familiar.

The second is about what happens next. Since 2013 there has been sustained pressure in Portugal to demerge some units, and the initiative for those petitions again rests with mayors. If the same rationality holds, demergers will be permitted where they are politically harmless and blocked where they are not — meaning the same territories get gerrymandered twice.

None of this requires bad faith or illegality. Every map was lawful and approved through proper procedure. That is rather the point: an effective opposition, not a rule about compactness, was the only thing that reliably constrained the outcome.

Miguel Ângelo Vilela Rodrigues is Associate Professor with Habilitation in the Department of Political Science, School of Economics and Management, University of Minho, and a researcher at CICP.

The full article — ‘Gerrymandering to survive: an explanation of the political conditions that shaped mayors’ decisions over an amalgamation process in Portugal’, by Miguel Rodrigues, Oliver Meza and Carmen Navarro — is published in Local Government Studies, 51(5), 993–1015. DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2024.2404104

Do female mayors make local government more transparent? Only when politics lets them

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Bruna Ribeiro (University of Minho), Miguel Rodrigues (University of Minho) and Francisca Tejedo-Romero (University of Castilla-La Mancha)

Why do some municipalities open their books, publish their contracts and document their decisions online, while their neighbours – operating under exactly the same legal framework – remain opaque? Freedom of information laws set a floor, but the striking fact about local government transparency is how much variation survives above that floor. If the law were the whole story, all councils would look alike. They do not.

In our recent article in Local Government Studies, we explore one part of the answer that has attracted growing attention across Europe: who leads. Specifically, we ask whether female leadership changes how much information municipalities actively disclose to their citizens — and whether the political context in which women govern conditions that effect.

Why leadership and gender?

The theoretical case is well established. Research across countries has associated women’s political presence with lower tolerance of corruption, different risk preferences, and a stronger orientation towards accountability. Earlier work on Spanish municipalities found that women’s representation in local councils has a positive influence on transparency levels. But representation on the council and leadership of the executive are different things. Mayors set administrative priorities, control the machinery that produces (or withholds) information, and answer personally for what appears on the municipal website. If gender matters for transparency, the mayor’s office is where we would expect it to show.

Portugal offers an unusually good laboratory. Since 2013, the Municipal Transparency Index (MTI), produced by Transparency International Portugal, has scored all 308 municipalities from 0 to 100 on the information they make available through their official websites. This gives us a consistent, externally produced measure of active disclosure, in a system where women remain a small minority of mayors but where the 2006 Parity Law — recently strengthened from a 33% to a 40% candidate quota — has been steadily reshaping who enters local politics.

What we did

We linked each municipal election to the transparency performance of the government it produced: the mayors and councils elected in 2009 and 2013 were matched to the Municipal Transparency Index scores of 2013 and 2017, across all 308 municipalities. This temporal structure ensures that who governs strictly precedes what gets disclosed. We then tested whether the gender of the mayor is associated with transparency — on its own, and in interaction with two features of the political context: whether the mayor governs with an absolute majority, and whether they belong to a left-wing party. The models control for women’s presence in the council, financial autonomy, unemployment, turnout and population, and the results hold when we exclude Lisbon and Porto and under alternative specifications.

What we found

The headline result is not the one either optimists or sceptics might expect. Female mayors, on their own, have no statistically significant effect on municipal transparency. But the average conceals a striking conditional pattern. Without an absolute majority, female mayors are associated with transparency scores roughly 7.5 points lower on the 0–100 index than their male counterparts. Give them an absolute majority, and the association flips: the interaction adds around 10 points, turning the net effect positive — female-led municipalities with strong political backing outperform male-led ones. There is also suggestive (though weaker) evidence that belonging to a left-wing party partially offsets the negative baseline.

In other words, the question “do women govern more transparently?” is badly posed. The better question is: under what conditions can they? Women in Portuguese town halls are still rare — only about 7% of municipalities had a female mayor in the period we study — and those governing without a majority face weak institutional support that appears to hinder the implementation of transparency measures. Political strength provides the stability, resources and authority to translate leadership values into open governance; without it, being a pioneer is mostly an uphill struggle.

Why this matters beyond Portugal

Three implications travel well beyond the Portuguese case.

First, transparency policy is usually designed as if compliance were a purely administrative matter — build the portal, mandate the disclosure, audit the result. Our findings suggest that who is in office, and the political incentives they face, shape how far councils go beyond the legal minimum. Transparency is a political choice dressed up as an administrative one.

Second, the debate on gender quotas and parity laws tends to focus on descriptive representation — how many women get elected. Our evidence suggests that numbers are not enough. The mere presence of women in leadership does not, by itself, deliver more open government; what matters is whether they hold real power to act. Quotas should therefore go beyond numerical representation and be accompanied by the conditions for women to exercise actual influence — party support, resources, and genuine political authority. Putting women in office without power risks setting them up to underperform against expectations the literature itself created.

Third, for practitioners and transparency campaigners, the lesson is about where to aim. If disclosure responds to political context, then rankings and indices like Portugal’s Municipal Transparency Index are not just measurement tools — they are interventions, changing the reputational payoff of openness for the leaders most sensitive to it.

The bigger research picture

This article is part of a wider research agenda at the Research Centre in Political Science (CICP, University of Minho) on gender and local politics in Southern Europe. Companion studies have examined how women break the political glass ceiling at local level (Governance, 2025) and how voters respond to female candidates in local elections (South European Society and Politics, 2026). Together, they trace the full pipeline — from candidacy, through election, to what changes once women actually govern.

The transparency question sits at the end of that pipeline, and it may be the most consequential part: representation matters not only for who sits in the town hall, but for whether citizens can see what happens inside it.

Bruna Ribeiro recently completed her PhD in Administrative Sciences at the University of Minho (CICP). Miguel Rodrigues is Associate Professor with Habilitation at the School of Economics, Management and Political Science, University of Minho. Francisca Tejedo-Romero is based at the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, University of Castilla-La Mancha.

The full article, “Transparency in local government: exploring the impact of female leadership and political context”, is available in Local Government Studies: https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2025.2612054

When accountability fails to bite: governance, democracy and the 2026 Tower Hamlets elections

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Dr Gulay Icoz, Visiting Research Fellow, Middlesex University London

In theory, the 2026 Tower Hamlets local elections should have been a test of democratic accountability in action. The borough entered election year under active statutory intervention. A Best Value Inspection published in November 2024 had documented serious governance failings under Mayor Lutfur Rahman’s Aspire administration: weak internal controls, a culture of concentrated executive authority, poor transparency, and slow responses to statutory recommendations. A further written ministerial statement in January 2026 confirmed ongoing failures and deteriorating financial governance. In March 2026 — just two months before polling day — the Secretary of State escalated the intervention, granting ministerial envoys enhanced powers to step in directly if the council continued to breach its Best Value Duty.

Then voters went to the polls and Aspire won 33 of 45 council seats. Lutfur Rahman was re-elected as Executive Mayor for a third time. Labour was reduced to five seats — its lowest total in the borough’s history.

I stood as the Labour candidate for Bethnal Green West in those elections. What I observed — during the campaign and in the results — reveals a deeper tension between statutory accountability and community-level democratic legitimacy: one with implications that reach well beyond Tower Hamlets.

The structural picture

The results reveal a distortion that deserves wider attention. Aspire secured 73 per cent of council seats with just over 32 per cent of the vote. Labour and the Green Party each received just under 23 per cent of the vote, yet each won only 11 per cent of seats. In ward after ward, the combined Labour and Green vote exceeded Aspire’s total — yet the block voting system used in multi-member wards — where each voter casts as many votes as there are seats and the top candidates win — converted vote fragmentation into a decisive seat bonus for the incumbent. This is sometimes called plurality block voting, and it rewards coordinated slate-voting, which incumbent parties with strong voter loyalty are structurally better placed to exploit.

The ward-level picture sharpens this further. In Bethnal Green West, Labour entered polling day with an estimated core vote of around 540; Aspire’s coordinated bloc was already three times that size, with split votes running into the thousands. Green candidates who had run no sustained local campaign outpolled every Labour candidate standing — a pattern repeated across wards throughout the borough. The block voting system had no mechanism to reward breadth of engagement or effort: it simply rewarded the most organised and unified voting bloc.

It is worth distinguishing block voting in multi-member wards from single-member first-past-the-post. The coordination premium is structurally higher: a cohesive 32 per cent bloc can sweep three seats simultaneously in a way that would not occur in a series of individual contests. The question this blog is asking is not primarily about proportionality per se, but whether the electoral system can transmit accountability signals when a council is under active statutory intervention for documented governance failure.

This points to a question the electoral systems literature and the local democracy literature have rarely addressed together: when opposition parties are structurally disadvantaged by electoral mechanics, what additional tools does a democratic accountability framework need?

The accountability paradox

A long line of research — from Fiorina’s retrospective voting model through Powell and Whitten’s clarity-of-responsibility framework — establishes that electoral punishment for governance failure is neither automatic nor uniform. Recent scholarship sharpens this further: voters weigh integrity against perceived competence and community delivery (Breitenstein and Hernández, 2024); punishment weakens when opposition is fragmented and alternation unclear (Otjes and Stiers, 2022); and elections are in any case a blunt accountability instrument compared to courts, oversight bodies, and civic challenge (Papadopoulos, 2023). The established literature identifies three conditions that must be met for punishment to occur: voters must have clear information about failure; they must be able to attribute responsibility to the correct actor; and accountability must not be crowded out by competing loyalties or trade-offs. Tower Hamlets 2026 illustrates the failure of all three conditions simultaneously.

Yet the Tower Hamlets case also points to a fourth condition, largely absent from the existing retrospective voting literature: the accountability mechanism itself must be seen as legitimate by the communities it is meant to protect. This is the accountability paradox at the heart of the 2026 result — and it is a contribution that the standard retrospective voting framework is not equipped to capture.

For intervention to function as a democratic corrective, it must be perceived by the electorate — and particularly by the communities most affected by governance failure — as rational, impartial, and operating in their interests. Where that perception fails, intervention becomes politically legible as external imposition, and voting for the incumbent becomes an act of community solidarity rather than an endorsement of governance failure. This dynamic is not accidental: it is actively constructed through political framing, and incumbents with strong identity-based bonds with their electorate are structurally well-placed to construct it.

Recent research on statutory intervention in English local government proposes a five-stage model — crisis revelation, delegitimisation, imposed reforms, capacity building, and restoration — and argues that interventions must be carefully designed to appear rational rather than political if they are to maintain rather than undermine faith in local democracy (Lowther, Joyce and Whiteman, 2025). That model’s second stage — delegitimisation — describes central government’s work to undermine the legitimacy of the council being intervened in. What the Tower Hamlets 2026 election reveals is that delegitimisation can also operate in the opposite direction: the incumbent successfully turned the intervention itself into the object of delegitimisation in the eyes of the electorate, making the accountability mechanism the thing that lacked legitimacy rather than the council it was designed to hold to account.

Conversations on the doorstep revealed the depth of this reframing. Many Aspire supporters had not engaged with the contents of the Best Value report because they had already concluded the report itself was politically motivated — a tool of mainstream parties who disapproved of what Aspire represented rather than a genuine accountability mechanism. More striking still, when specific governance failures were raised — including nepotism and unqualified appointments — some voters had internalised a counter-narrative in which such practices represented community protection rather than misconduct.

It would be reductive to dismiss these perceptions as simply the product of misinformation. Communities with long experience of political marginalisation may have genuine historical grounds for scepticism toward central government intervention, and those experiences shape how accountability claims are received. What the Tower Hamlets case illustrates is the extent to which this pre-existing disposition was mobilised and amplified through deliberate political communication — producing not political apathy but the successful reconstruction of what accountability itself means.

This is not unique to Tower Hamlets. It is a dynamic that researchers of democratic resilience and local governance are increasingly attentive to, and it raises important questions about how accountability mechanisms are designed, communicated, and embedded — questions that are as much about institutional culture and civic trust as they are about statutory frameworks.

Tower Hamlets in context

Tower Hamlets did not stand alone in 2026. The elections produced historic Green gains across inner London — in Hackney, Waltham Forest, Lewisham and Southwark — and a significant realignment of the progressive vote away from Labour. What makes Tower Hamlets distinctive is that this regional realignment intersected with the specific dynamics of the Aspire incumbency, the governance intervention, and the structural incentives of block voting, producing an outcome more disproportionate than anywhere else in the capital.

Understanding whether Tower Hamlets represents an outlier or an advance indicator requires systematic comparison. Several English councils have been subject to statutory intervention in recent years — including Birmingham, Croydon, Slough, Sandwell, and Thurrock — yet the relationship between intervention, governance accountability, and subsequent electoral outcomes has received little comparative attention. Whether the accountability paradox identified here is specific to Tower Hamlets or reflects a broader pattern in how statutory intervention interacts with local political culture is a question that future comparative research must address.

The stakes

What the Tower Hamlets elections confirm, above all, is that democratic resilience is not reducible to electoral outcomes. The borough’s communities — residents navigating overcrowded housing, fractured services, and the cumulative pressures of one of England’s most deprived urban environments — continue to engage, organise, and hold their representatives to account through multiple channels. That engagement, not any single election result, is the foundation on which accountable local governance must ultimately be rebuilt.

What forms of accountability can work when statutory intervention loses legitimacy in the eyes of the very communities it is meant to protect?

Dr Gulay Icoz is a Visiting Research Fellow at Middlesex University London and stood as the Labour candidate for Bethnal Green West in the May 2026 local elections and Former Councillor in Hackney (2006–2014). She researches democratic resilience, local governance, and progressive voter realignment in inner London.

References

Academic sources

Breitenstein, S. and Hernández, E. (2024) ‘Too Crooked to be Good? Trade-offs in the Electoral Punishment of Malfeasance and Corruption’, European Political Science Review. doi:10.1017/S175577392400016X

Fiorina, M.P. (1981) Retrospective Voting in American National Elections. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Lowther, J., Joyce, P. and Whiteman, P. (2025) ‘Intervention 3.0: Designing a Responsive Model for Local Government Support in England’, INLOGOV Blog, 4 November 2025. Available at: https://inlogov.com/2025/11/04/intervention-3-0-designing-a-responsive-model-for-local-government-support-in-england/ [Also published as ‘How not to damage democracy’, Municipal Journal, 16 October 2025.]

Otjes, S. and Stiers, D. (2022) ‘Accountability and alternation: How wholesale and partial alternation condition retrospective voting’, Party Politics, 28(3), pp. 457–467.

Papadopoulos, Y. (2023) Understanding Accountability in Democratic Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Elements in Public Policy).

Powell, G.B. and Whitten, G.D. (1993) ‘A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context’, American Journal of Political Science, 37(2), pp. 391–414.

Government documents

Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (2024) Best Value Inspection Report: London Borough of Tower Hamlets. London: MHCLG. November 2024.

Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (2026) Written Ministerial Statement: Tower Hamlets Best Value Intervention. London: MHCLG. January 2026.

Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (2026) Enhanced Intervention Powers: Tower Hamlets. Ministerial Announcement. March 2026.

From top-down diagnosis to co-design: what youth‑led evidence adds to the Government’s review of Young people and Work

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Sonia Bussu

The government’s Young People and Work interim report presents a stark diagnosis. Nearly one million young people in the UK are not in education, employment or training (NEET), and the problem is structural, longstanding and getting worse. The report describes a system failure spanning education, labour markets, health and welfare, and it concludes that the UK lacks a coherent “participation system” to support transitions into work. It is a powerful diagnosis of a system that no longer supports young people. But it is also striking that much of what the report “discovers” has already been articulated vividly by young people themselves, many times over!

The INSPIRE programme in the West Midlands offers exactly this missing perspective: lived experience. Through participatory research and legislative theatre, a diverse group of young people aged 14–17 from across the region identified specific barriers, staged a play to reflect on these barriers with the community and policymakers, and co‑designed policy proposals to address them. Set alongside the government’s diagnosis, this youth‑led evidence helps move from description of problems to concrete and youth-led solutions.

Structural barriers are visible in lived experience

The government review highlights three major structural issues: reduced entry‑level jobs, fragmented systems and unequal access to support. The INSPIRE young co-creators showed us how they encounter these issues day to day. Their play, You’re Fried! The realities of youth employment, depicts a system where career guidance is rushed and superficial, where broken weblinks and empty words replace meaningful support, where opportunities are inaccessible, in a cycle of “entry‑level” roles that always require prior experience.

You’re Fried! The Realities of Youth Employment
Scene One: “What Should I Do With My Life?” revealed how love, when bound by fear, could become a cage. A young apprentice’s dream was crushed beneath the weight of parental expectations, where university was seen as the only safe route to independence.
Scene Two: “It’s All on You” exposed the hollow machinery of career guidance – rushed advisors offering broken links and empty words, leaving hope behind in the rush to tick boxes.
Scene Three: “Link Not Found” brought a computer to life, its customer-service smile masking the cold indifference of digital systems that fail those who need them most.
Scene Four: “This Isn’t What I Signed Up For” pulled back the curtain on the myth of ‘real-world experience’ – a McDonald’s shift where understaffing and blame replaced training and support.
Scene Five: “It’s Your Fault” returned to the family living room, where systemic failure was rewritten as personal shame, completing a devastating circle.

The government review links NEET risk to socioeconomic background, race, disability and geography. The INSPIRE young people described the same dynamics of discrimination and constrained expectations. Systemic failures are often reframed as individual shortcomings, reflecting a system that assesses young people but does not adequately support them, placing the burden of navigating complexity on individuals.

While employers face uncertainty and capacity constraints, young people also reported the limited support on accessing valuable work placements or apprenticeships, as they suffer from limited training, little supervision and weak protections. In these situations, responsibility again falls on the young person to adapt. The issue is not a lack of motivation from young people, but a lack of fit between systems and the realities young people face. Young people want to work but are navigating fragmented and often inaccessible pathways.

Youth‑led proposals provide concrete solutions

One of the most innovative aspects of the INSPIRE project is its methodology. Legislative theatre allowed young people not just to describe problems, but to stage them, rehearse alternatives, and co-create policy responses. We co‑designed  proposals to improve access to work experience and employment through creative and structured dialogues between young people, policymakers, employers and communities.

Several of these proposals directly address the issues identified in the government review.

1. Earlier and family‑centred career support
The review highlights the importance of early intervention, noting that disadvantage accumulates over time. The INSPIRE young people proposed starting career conversations at primary school level and involving families, recognising that aspirations and knowledge about career pathways are shaped early and collectively.

2. Accessible and community‑based careers guidance
To address fragmentation and inequality in provision, participants proposed delivering career support also through community organisations and the voluntary sector.

3. Reform of work experience and employer engagement
In response to declining entry points into the labour market, young people proposed structured work experience, mentoring and exposure to workplaces through site visits and flexible placement formats. They also highlighted the need to prepare employers to support young people effectively. Working with local schools, we are now co-creating standards for youth‑friendly employers.

4. Cross‑sector coordination
The government review identifies fragmentation across institutions as a core problem.
INSPIRE proposals include the creation of a cross‑sector alliance on youth employment in Birmingham bringing together young people, education, employers, public bodies and community organisations to coordinate action.

5. Youth‑led evaluation and accountability
Young people know best what they need. They proposed mechanisms for evaluating careers services and employer practices, embedding youth perspectives into ongoing policy development. A youth-led evaluation of career and employment support is now being implemented, co-led by Birmingham City Council and the University of Birmingham.

Rethinking policy: from programmes to relationships

A recurring criticism in participation is the lack of follow-through from policymakers. Young participants expressed frustration with commitments that are vague or delayed, or carelessly forgotten, which deeply undermines their trust in institutions.

INSPIRE suggests that the answer is not simply better engagement programmes, but different relationships between institutions and young people, where trust depends on feedback loops, transparent commitments, and long-term engagement rather than one-off consultations. It’s not simply about redesigning systems but redistributing power.

Young people do not need to be fixed or made “work-ready”. They need systems that recognise their knowledge, respond to their realities, and involve them as partners in shaping policy that affects them.

Sonia researches and teaches public policy. Her main research interests are participatory governance and democratic innovations, and creative and arts-based methods for research and public engagement.

From democratic resilience to systems resilience – Perspectives from the Inaugural Conference of the European Network for Public Administration 2026

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Dr. Elke Loeffler

The European Network for Public Administration (ENPA) is a newly founded independent learned society led by public administration academics for the theoretical and practical improvement of public administration.

I attended its inaugural conference, held at the top University ASE in Bucharest, in my role as co-founding Board Member and co-chair of the ENPA Research Group on Public Participation and Co-Production. There was also a strong representation of UKAPA – the UK Association for Public Administration. This event showcased a number of innovative formats, including a plenary in interview format on democratic resilience and a highly interactive ‘collaborative discussion’ session on systems resilience, as well as providing a highly-valued Conference Buddy Scheme for Doctoral Researchers.

During the conference it became clear that resilience is now a major emerging theme in public management research and practice. For many local councils this concept has so far been mainly used in relation to emergency response and planning. However, the LGA in the UK considers this to be a ‘whole council effort’, going beyond small emergency teams.

Moreover, the discussions at the ENPA Conference revealed that resilience is not just about sudden, extreme emergencies but about creeping crises such as democratic backsliding and and prolonged failures such as delayed access to public healthcare. While robust governance (Ansell, Torfing and Trondal, 2025, Robust Public Governance in a Turbulent Era) – the ability of a system to maintain its operations despite disruption – is important, resilience is more demanding – it is about the capacity for adaptation in the service system to recover to the same or high outcomes after a disturbance – or as a former UK Prime Minister expressed it “building back better”.

The keynote speakers also discussed the need for public administration scholars to strengthen resilience. Don Moynihan from the University of Michigan highlighted that rule-bound public administration and independent academic research often become targets for populist leaders. He suggested that, in times of democratic backsliding, delivering evidence-based descriptions of current situations and contexts may be more effective than sophisticated, time-consuming causal analysis. While not as analytically powerful, making it clear what is actually happening may make a greater impact on public attitudes, and eventually on public policies, than complex modelling. This argument gave rise to considerable debate in the coffee breaks!

The collaborative session in our Research Group demonstrated that local government resilience is not enough – we also need resilient communities, service users and markets. This brings in the potential role of user and community co-production in strengthening systems resilience. For example, Jan Dumkow from the Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg provided a current action-research project involving co-design of an app for and with people with learning disabilities so that service providers would be able to provide tailored information in the case of emergencies.


The ‘whole systems resilience network’ depends on each element in the network of user-community-provider-market resilience being sound and well-balanced with the other elements (Bovaird and Loeffler 2024). The resilience network constitutes a dynamic system, in which each of the stakeholder groups is always looking to learn and to improve, with the consequence that a weak link in the network reduces the overall capability of the system. However, a systematic literature review which I undertook with Sanneke Kuipers (Leiden University) and Marie-Christine Therrien (Ecole Nationale D’Administration Publique, Montreal), on the role of co-production in strengthening resilience in extreme crisis, revealed that user and community involvement is largely absent in current evaluations of crisis interventions. This is cause for concern and highlights the urgent need for more engaged research with local communities and local councils on how to strengthen all links in the whole systems resilience network. INLOGOV is well situated to work with local councils and communities on this issue, given its expertise on co-production and social prescribing.

Dr. Elke Loeffler is an Associate of INLOGOV and Director of Governance International. She undertakes applied research on local public services and has research interests in community co-production and resilience. Elke is Board Member of the European Network of Public Administration, Vice-Chair for Doctoral Research in UKAPA and Chair of the Public & Nonprofit Management Group at EURAM.