Seeing the System Together: Political Economy as Civic Infrastructure – Part 2

The Method: How Political Economy Analysis can Rewire Collaborative Sensemaking

In Part 1, I argued that both development actors and systems-innovation labs share a common blind spot: they underuse political economy analysis as a driver of systemic change. Development actors often approach governance reform as a technical exercise, overlooking the relational and political dynamics that shape how systems actually behave. Systems innovators, meanwhile, imagine bold alternatives without grounding their work in the lived politics of the present.

Drawing on my work in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo), I suggested that a political economy analysis, if practiced differently, can become part of the civic infrastructure for systems change. Done well, it can provide a collaborative journey: a way for people inside a system to see it together, make sense of it together, and begin co-creating ways through it together.

This section explores how we have been building such a journey. Rather than conducting a political economy analysis of individuals, we created a process that enables people to view themselves as a system, to examine the patterns and incentives that shape their collective behaviour, and to explore their collaborative capacities to shift those behaviours. This reframing changed not only what we learned but also who owned the learning, and how that learning became the foundation of a more collaborative, relational, and experimental practice.

Why We Had to Work Differently

The conventional approach to political economy analysis, interviews, expert interpretation, and a final report, felt deeply inadequate for the governance challenges in DR Congo. It risked reproducing the very power asymmetries we were trying to understand, while failing to surface the hidden and fluid dynamics that shape public financial management.

In the DR Congo, the financial management system behaves less like a bureaucratic machine and more like a complex social ecosystem: shaped by informal incentives, relationships of dependence and loyalty, structural scarcity, fragile controls, and adaptive workarounds that prevent total collapse. This is not a system that can be understood through desk reviews, segmented interviews, or focus groups. It is held together by patterns of interaction, not formal procedures alone.

To work with such a system, we needed something more than analysis; we needed what Dawna Markova and Angie McArthur call Collaborative Intelligence, the ability of diverse people to think together by integrating their different perspectives, cognitive strengths, and lived experiences into shared insight. Collaborative intelligence treats diversity not as a barrier to understanding, but as the raw material from which deeper understanding emerges.

If we wanted governance reform to function as an infrastructure for civic engagement, something that strengthens relationships, builds collaborative intelligence, and helps people act differently together, then we needed a method that enabled the system’s actors to see the system together.

So, I designed a three-day collective sensemaking workshop, not as another consultation exercise, but as a shared inquiry into how the system really works and where opportunities to shift it might lie.

Designing a Shared Learning Journey

To build this kind of collaborative intelligence, we brought together participants from across the system: provincial ministries, finance officials, civil society organisations, tax administrators, community representatives, and women’s groups. Many had never shared a room before, even though their day-to-day decisions were tightly entangled in the same budgetary ecosystem.

We aim to turn this political economy analysis into a collective practice of seeing the system together. That meant, as Adam Kahane emphasises, creating a space where people could share their lived experiences and connect those experiences in ways that revealed how their realities were interdependent parts of a larger whole. In other words, we needed a process capable of transforming diverse perspectives into shared understanding.

To do this, we combined two complementary methodologies: storytelling as the raw material of analysis, and the Estuarine Framework as the structure that helps people connect and transform their stories into shared systemic insights.

1. The Estuarine Framework as an Analytical Scaffold

Adapted from the work of Dave Snowden, the Esturaine Framework (Figure 1) helped participants view the budget system not as a linear chain of causes and effects, but as an estuary, a shifting interface of flows, constraints, and energies. Together, participants mapped:

· Actors

· Constraints

· Energies

· Directions of change

Engaging participants in this shared cognitive infrastructure gave them a collective way of thinking that reflected their lived experiences.

Figure 1 — Interpretation of the Estuarine Framework

2. Storytelling as the Raw Material of Analysis

Instead of extractive interviews, we used Structured Storytelling, drawing on the Centre for Public Impact’s narrative-based approach to understanding complexity. Participants shared concrete, often emotional examples from their daily experience: moments when funds disappeared, when reforms stalled, when informal norms overrode formal procedures.

Bringing the Two Together

By weaving the openness of storytelling with the structure of the Estuarine Framework, we created a process that allowed people not only to speak across institutional boundaries but also to see that they were not facing isolated problems. They were confronting a shared system, one that consistently produced the patterns and behaviours they had each been experiencing alone.

As participants placed their stories into the Estuarine elements, individual anecdotes transformed into shared patterns, and the hidden infrastructures shaping the budget system began to surface. What emerged was not a disconnected collection of issues, but the early outline of a system seeing itself, the first movement toward genuine collaborative intelligence.

What enabled this shift was how participants began to surface, as Dark Matters Lab puts it, the system’s hidden codes and reveal the informal infrastructures that shape fiscal governance.

What We Found When Surfacing the System’s Hidden Code

With participants sharing and mapping their experiences, a picture emerged of the invisible infrastructures of coordination that structure everyday behaviour: informal authorisations, parallel procedures, tacit expectations, workarounds, and loyalties that operate beneath formal texts.

What came into view was not a list of failures, but a patterned institutional ecosystem, one that made certain actions easier, others nearly impossible, and many entirely predictable.

Three examples illustrate these hidden codes:

1. The Governor’s Parallel Budget Cell

A participant described how the governor’s office had established a parallel “financial cell,” bypassing the formal budget ministry. Budget decisions flowed through trusted personal networks rather than public procedures.

· Constraint: Informal centralisation of authority

· Hidden code: Loyalty networks overriding institutional mandates

· Effect: Opaque budgeting and exclusion of civil society


2. Teachers’ “Return Operations”

School inspectors described opérations retour: unofficial deductions made before funds reach classrooms. These practices persist because they supplement low salaries and because accountability mechanisms rarely reach this level of the system.

· Constraint: Normalised corruption

· Energy: Survival incentives sustaining informal redistribution

· Hidden code: Informal compensation mechanisms substituting for formal pay structures.

 

3. Tax Bills Negotiated in the Street

Tax collectors explained how taxpayers routinely negotiate their tax amounts, supported by parallel ledgers that never enter the formal system. This is not an anomaly; it is an alternative infrastructure of revenue collection.

· Constraint: Manual, discretionary revenue system

· Energy: Mutual incentives to collude

· Hidden code: Discretion as currency; enforcement as negotiation

What We Learnt by Translating the Stories into System Patterns

As these stories accumulated within the shared scaffold, people began to recognise the connective tissue between them. What had previously felt like personal frustrations or isolated incidents now revealed themselves as symptoms of the same underlying system.

Participants moved from individual experience → collective pattern → shared understanding.

This shift from seeing parts to seeing wholes was the essence of collaborative intelligence and the foundation of the civic infrastructure we sought to build.

With the hidden codes now illuminated, we examined the broader patterns they produced. People were no longer describing events; they were beginning to understand the logics that structured them.

Participants worked in mixed groups to translate stories into system patterns within the Estuarine Framework. By comparing experiences across ministries, sectors, and roles, participants could see how the same underlying constraints and incentives manifested differently across the system.

Five leverage points appeared repeatedly across the stories:

1. Diversion of funds and weak oversight

2. Manual and insecure revenue collection

3. Ineffective control mechanisms

4. Absence of expenditure and treasury plans

5. Unreliable taxpayer registries

These were not technical weaknesses; they were institutional structures or relational configurations that the system repeatedly defaulted to. The more participants examined them, the clearer it became that these leverage points were structural, not accidental.

This shift from issues to patterns, and from patterns to system logic, marked another step toward the system seeing itself.

Participants were beginning to perceive the institutional architecture behind their lived experience, not only its symptoms. They were no longer simply telling stories; they were mapping the system’s behavioural DNA.

Why This Matters Beyond DR Congo

What emerged in this process goes far beyond political economy analysis. It points to what systems-change organisations have long recognised: that transformation depends on the quality of the civic infrastructures that enable people to think, learn, and act together.

The significance of this work lies not in the diagnostic findings but in the infrastructure of collaboration that took shape:

· a shared analytical language

· routines for cross-actor sensemaking

· recognition of the informal rules and incentives shaping behaviour

· a network of actors capable of “seeing the system together”

In this sense, political economy is becoming something different from a report or a technical input. It is becoming a platform for collaborative intelligence, a way for people to generate shared insight and discover pathways for moving together through uncertainty.

Looking Ahead

Having surfaced the system’s hidden codes and begun translating lived experience into shared patterns, participants found themselves opening new questions. The next step was to explore whether these patterns linked into wider feedback loops, the dynamics that hold the system in place.

This stage marked the beginning of analysis turning into practice. Governance reform started to resemble a series of civic experiments: tentative, relational, grounded in what people discovered together rather than in predetermined plans. As participants crossed boundaries that had long kept the system fragmented, a different kind of agency began to take shape.

Not the authority to control the system, but the willingness to inquire into it. Not the certainty of a blueprint, but the confidence to experiment into the future, together.

Part 2 has shown how a system can begin to see and make sense of itself.

Part 3 turns to what unfolded next: how shared insight evolved into small experiments, and what these early shifts can reveal about the hidden infrastructures that shape and can reshape the system.