Startup Cities Institute: Bringing Startup Culture to Politics
By: Zachary Caceres & Markus Bergström
Zach was covered in garbage flies as he stood on the edge of a cliff over Guatemala City’s central landfill. Hundreds of people, including many children, wander this steamy wasteland scavenging for anything valuable. Gangs murder people every week as they prowl the dump.
Suddenly a trashpicker pulled up in a truck overflowing with garbage. Her name was Miriam. She makes her livelihood with her teenage daughter selling plastic scraps for a dollar or two a day. She told Zach her story: grinding poverty, the constant threat of extortion and murder by organized crime, the shooting of her husband, the sexual assaults on her daughter.
In the middle of this heartbreaking story, her phone rang and she pulled out a smartphone and texted someone. It was something Zach could never forget. Miriam faces ancient human problems of violence and poverty, yet she owns a futuristic technology like a smartphone. Our chance encounter with Miriam seeded a powerful question: What if politics could progress at the pace of technology?
Startup Cities Institute believes that the biggest paradox of today is that we have rapid, constant progress in technologies like phones and computers, but billions of people have no access at all to good law and governance. Even someone as poor as Miriam can get a smartphone. But she can only dream of access to the rule of law, to good infrastructure, to security, to the ability to start a legal business, or to decent education and healthcare. What if governance is just another technology waiting for entrepreneurs to innovate in it? Startup entrepreneurship has brought a smartphone to Miriam—could it also bring her a better community?
Startup Cities Institute is building a platform called Lean Reform to help municipalities improve their governance. Lean Reform uses neighborhoods and municipalities to pilot political reforms before they’re scaled to
the national level. Cities and neighborhoods become like competing community startups. Reforms can be broad with innovations like a different legal system, radical transparency, new social services, or a new police force.
Or reforms can be focused on a specific area like education. New policies are treated as prototypes, not finished products. Mistakes stay local, costs are lower, and municipalities or neighborhoods can adjust a reform until they find something that works well for citizens. With members and partners around the world, SCI is bringing startup culture to politics.