Public Sector Policy Making, Planning and Delivery For the 21st Century

A framework designed not for control, but for collaborative intelligence. Not for top-down direction, but for inclusive learning and adaptive action.

As the UK Government embarks on a 10-Year Health Plan promising decentralisation, digital transformation, and preventative care, questions remain about whether its institutions are capable of delivering such ambitious change.

In a recent essay, Sir Geoff Mulgan - Co-Founder of The Institutional Architecture Lab and Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London - argues that public bodies remain structurally conservative, locked into outdated models that stifle innovation and exclude public participation. This article explores how Participatory Learning Networks (PLNs) offer a transformative alternative.

By focusing on collaborative learning, adaptive governance, and inclusive implementation, PLNs can address the very institutional failures Mulgan identifies.

Through the lens of the Civic Health Academy PLN (currently being established), we examine how this new model can help realise the Health Plan’s goals, not by imposing reform from the top down, but by enabling communities, practitioners, and policymakers to co-create solutions from the ground up.

In doing so, PLNs point the way toward a new generation of public institutions, ones designed not just to deliver policy, but to continuously learn, adapt, and build public trust.

Diagnosing Institutional Failure: A Systemic Problem in Public Policy

In his recent article, Why Institutional Innovation Matters for the Future of Science and Technology, Geoff Mulgan draws attention to a largely overlooked reality: while science and technology continue to advance, the public institutions responsible for funding, regulating, and implementing them remain outdated and unfit for purpose.

This disjuncture, he argues, is not just a quirk of bureaucratic culture. It’s a structural failing with far-reaching consequences for national prosperity, democratic legitimacy, and public trust.

Mulgan focuses his critique on institutions like the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Catapult centres, and the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA). While each was launched in the spirit of renewal, he shows that their underlying models are relics of the 20th century. ARIA was based on the DARPA model from the 1950s; the Catapults on Germany’s Fraunhofer Institutes from the 1940s; and UKRI on century-old research council structures.

In effect, these institutions were “new in name only.” Their form was locked into legacy assumptions about how knowledge flows, how innovation happens, and how public bodies should be structured.

This kind of institutional conservatism, as Mulgan calls it, is not unique to the UK. But its consequences are especially acute here, given the scale of the country’s social and technological challenges. Among them:

• Public Disconnection and Distrust: Only 9% of the UK population believe that publicly funded research and development benefits them directly. That statistic alone signals a catastrophic breakdown in communication, inclusion, and perceived value.

• Declining Innovation Productivity: Across multiple sectors, from pharmaceuticals to advanced manufacturing, the rate of return on R&D is falling. Yet instead of triggering adaptive reforms, this trend is largely ignored in government documents.

• A Failure to Evolve Structure Alongside Purpose: While the challenges facing society have become more complex, fast-changing, and interconnected, public sector organisations remain siloed, hierarchical, and risk-averse.

Mulgan puts the problem plainly:

“There appears to be no centre of expertise on institutional architecture either in government or elsewhere... Instead, we revert to cycles of merging or splitting agencies... which simply recycles old models.”

Nowhere is this critique more relevant than in the health and social care domain. In July 2025, the UK Government launched a 10-Year Health Plan focused on preventative care, digital transformation, and the decentralisation of services into local Neighbourhood Health Centres. The ambitions are commendable, and the need is urgent, yet the institutional form through which these goals are to be delivered remains largely unchallenged.

If the plan is implemented through traditional bureaucratic hierarchies and top-down commissioning models, it may replicate the same patterns of fragmentation, inefficiency, and community disengagement that have plagued NHS reforms for decades. And if public trust continues to erode, even the most well-funded innovation will fail to translate into shared value or long-term system renewal. This is where the institutional imagination Mulgan calls for must be matched by design.

If we are to reimagine the development and delivery of public sector policy in the 21st century, we need new models that go beyond committees, consultancy contracts, and organograms. We need institutions that can think, learn, adapt, and include. This is precisely what Participatory Learning Networks (PLNs) will offer.

Participatory Learning Networks (PLNs): A Framework for Institutional Intelligence

If, as Geoff Mulgan argues, we are suffering from a crisis of outdated institutional architecture, then Participatory Learning Networks (PLNs) will offer a compelling alternative, an emergent institutional form designed not for control, but for collaborative intelligence. Not for top-down direction, but for inclusive learning and adaptive action.

From Pyramids to Networks

Traditional public sector institutions are still built around 20th-century assumptions: that authority flows from the top; that policy can be rolled out like a product; and that the public’s role is largely passive, at best, a recipient of services; at worst, a problem to be managed.

PLNs reject these assumptions entirely. Instead, they are built on the idea that the most effective public institutions of the future will be learning systems, not command-and-control structures.

PLN design will be based on the principle of “power with rather than power over,” on the benefits of “constructive conflict,” and on the need for integrative thinking.” These were ideas advocated by Mary Parker Follet in the early 1900’s.

At their core, PLNs are:

• Decentralised knowledge ecosystems that link people and organisations across public, private, and civic domains.

• Participatory by design, engaging citizens, practitioners, researchers, and decision-makers as equal contributors to problem-solving.

• Learning-oriented, structured to support experimentation, feedback, sense-making, and continuous adaptation.

• Mission-led and purpose-driven, oriented toward solving real-world challenges rather than meeting bureaucratic targets.

PLNs are not just networks in the social media sense, they are learning infrastructures capable of convening diverse perspectives, generating contextual insight, and enabling collective action in complex, fast-changing environments.