Seeing the System Together: Political Economy as Civic Infrastructure - Part 1
Anyone working in peacebuilding, development, or systems innovation knows you can’t shift a system without understanding the norms and power relations that hold it together. We talk about “surfacing invisible structures”, “influencing incentives”, and “being politically smart”. Yet political economy analysis is still poorly practised in development programmes and almost absent from systems innovation labs.
This piece is the first in a three-part series exploring how political economy can be reimagined as a relational, systemic, and collaborative practice for governance reform. Drawing on work in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the series traces a journey from recognising the blind spots that limit both development and systems-innovation fields, to designing a political economy process that helps people see the system together, and finally to the emergence of small, politically realistic experiments that begin to shift that system. Across these three parts, I explore how a PEA can move beyond being a technical report to becoming a form of civic infrastructure — a space where people make sense of complexity, understand power, and begin to act together in new ways.
What if a Political Economy Analysis (PEA) could be more than an analytical tool, instead a process of systemic change?
Anyone working in peacebuilding, development, or systems innovation knows you can’t shift a system without understanding the norms and power relations that hold it together. We talk about “surfacing the invisible structures”, influencing incentives and “being politically smart”. Yet political economy analysis is still poorly practised in development programmes, and largely missing from systems innovation labs.
This oversight matters because political economy, used differently, could strengthen both fields. In this piece, I explore how I tried to turn PEA from a report into a platform for collaborative sensemaking and systemic change in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And why, if you’re designing reforms, labs, pilots, or governance prototypes, grounding your work in political economy is the blind spot you can’t afford to miss.
Political Economy’s Untapped Potential for Systemic Change
Understanding the political economy of a system ought to be one of the most powerful tools we have for influencing societal change. It helps us see the incentives, relationships, power dynamics, and informal rules that hold systems in place, the forces that determine how change happens or doesn’t.
Yet neither the development sector nor the systems-innovation field is using PEA in ways that really help shift systems.
Why Development Actors Struggle with PEA
In the development sector, PEA is often politically constrained. It exposes interests and power structures that can jeopardise relationships, access, or funding, so it gets softened into safer language, “capacity gaps”, “coordination challenges”, “process issues”, instead of naming what’s really going on.
Most organisations are also set up for technical intelligence, not relational intelligence. Real PEA means understanding motivations, decoding informal norms, listening to lived experience, and connecting stories into systemic patterns. But the system rewards tidy indicators and logframe discipline, not the messy work of making sense of power. So, a PEA becomes a product, a checked box.
Why Systems Innovators Avoid Political Economy
Meanwhile, systems-innovation organisations or design labs that reimagine governance, prototype new civic infrastructures, and explore regenerative futures tend to avoid political economy altogether. Their work starts with possibility: imagining alternative institutional forms rather than diagnosing the power dynamics that shape existing ones.
They are fluent in the language of systems, infrastructures, and futures, but the political realities, the incentives, informal rules, and entrenched interests that determine whether new designs can take root often sit outside their frame. Not because power doesn’t matter to them, but because their entry point is design rather than diagnosis.
Two change-making sectors, but neither is engaging power
Despite approaching systemic change from different angles, both sectors share the same blind spot: neither is truly engaging with power. Development actors do undertake political economy, but often in forms too superficial or constrained to illuminate the real dynamics that hold systems in place. Systems innovators, meanwhile, pursue ambitious visions of systemic redesign, but without grounding their work in the lived politics of the present. As a result, even the most imaginative prototypes struggle to take root; they are resisted, absorbed, or quietly reshaped by the incentives and informal structures already governing the system.
As Geoff Mulgan argues in #BigMind, societies do not fail because they lack expertise. They fail because they are unable to connect and mobilise the intelligence that already exists across people, places, and institutions. That insight sits at the heart of my experience in DR Congo. What mattered most was not the data we collected, but the relationships that formed, the shared understanding that emerged, and the moments when people could see the system together rather than in fragmented pieces.
In a context like DRC, this is crucial. Fragile systems aren’t held together by formal structures or policy diagrams; they are sustained by histories, informal agreements, personal loyalties, and deeply embedded incentives. Unless we understand these forces and bring them into the centre of our analysis, we cannot work with them. And when we ignore them, our efforts at systemic change either evaporate on contact or, worse, reinforce the very patterns we hope to transform.
A Different Kind of Political Economy Analysis Is Needed
Political economy analysis cannot be optional. But the way we currently practise it often falls short. In development, PEA is too often sanitised or constrained for political reasons. In systems innovation, it is frequently missing altogether. Both gaps leave our understanding incomplete and our interventions partial.
What we need instead is a different kind of PEA: one that is politically honest, deeply relational, and directly connected to collective redesign. Not PEA as a diagnosis alone. Not designed for imagination alone. But a way of working that brings power and possibility together.
PEA as a platform for systems change in DR Congo
I confronted this oversight directly when I began leading a PEA for a governance reform programme in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A place where reform is not just technically difficult; it is structurally complex. Weak institutions, entrenched hierarchies, competing incentives, low transparency, and the chronic lack of resources creates an environment that resists change at every turn. The system behaves like an adaptive network shaped by history, fear, relationships, and informal authority.
Traditionally, a PEA in such a context is something you conduct: gather intelligence, analyse incentives, map stakeholders, and produce a report that decision-makers can use to guide programme design. A product. A snapshot. An expert view.
But in DRC, that model felt far too narrow, too hierarchical, too extractive, too steeped in the “old power” logic where knowledge is held by the few and delivered downwards to everyone else. It illuminated parts of the system but did nothing to connect the people who actually live and work within it.
I wanted to do it differently.
I wanted this PEA to become a collaborative journey, a way for people inside the system to see it together, make sense of it together, and co-create ways through it together. Not another analysis about them, but a process with them.
I wanted to understand: How do we bring the relational intelligence of political economy and the creativity of systems innovation into the same conversation about change?
In Part 2, I explore how we designed an approach to collaborative sensemaking that transformed the PEA from a report into something more like civic infrastructure.