After the Pandemic: Experimental Governance and the Foundational Economy

The purpose of this article is to outline the convergence – an intellectual as well as a political convergence – of two concepts that will play a critically important role in fashioning a more inclusive and more sustainable model of development in the post-Covid world. The first concerns the concept of the Foundational Economy, which offers a new lens through which to view and value social and economic activity by highlighting the significance of a range of goods and services that loom large in terms of meeting human needs. The second concerns the concept of Experimental Governance, which offers a multilevel framework in which to understand place-based social innovation, a framework which overcomes the shortcomings of principal-agent models of collective action as well as the binaries associated with top-down versus bottom-up theories of change.