Francesca Tanada
Community-based organisations (CBOs) occupy a distinctive role in civil society: rooted locally, member-governed, and sustained by relational, rather than rigid, institutional cohesion. Unlike corporations or public agencies, they operate without strong profit incentives or formal hierarchies to compel participation and therefore rely on engagement as the primary mechanism through which collective identity, direction, and action are maintained. Yet it is precisely because of these structural characteristics that internal organisational challenges emerge, such as volunteer disengagement, coordination failures, institutional memory loss and mission drift. These are not material failures, but rather relational. They emerge from the difficulty of holding together organisations whose members bring different backgrounds, motivations, and ways of making meaning towards a shared purpose.
The central challenge for CBOs is not a lack of intention to participate, but a structural mismatch between conventional governance frameworks that members are familiar with and the relational, emergent nature of community life. Most governance models are imported from institutional and corporate contexts, and having them imposed onto community organisations results in limited room for adaptation to their specific challenges.
This paper proposes an inquiry that draws from systems-oriented design (SOD) concepts as a methodological framework for the exploration of the topic, while utilising social constructionism as its primary philosophical foundation. The paper argues that governance is not merely an imposed structure but a relational pattern that emerges from the quality of interactions within an organisation. This reframes the design question from “What governance model should be implemented?” to “What relational conditions must exist for participatory governance to arise?”
Engagement, in this context, is therefore not treated as a binary outcome but viewed as a key, driving component that travels across a spectrum. It moves from openness towards discovery, through shared understanding and to active co-creation.
The paper contributes to the RSD15 conversation through the pluralistic approach of exploration and practice of participatory governance that is simultaneously diagnostic, participatory and generative.
Keywords: systems-oriented design, participatory governance, community-based organisations, social constructionism, relationality