Rebalancing toward the relationships, translation work, and bilingual soft infrastructure that make democratic practice possible.

Across conversations with practitioners, funders, researchers, and colleagues working on democracy, governance and civic space, the same diagnosis keeps surfacing. It’s no longer tentative; it’s becoming a quiet consensus:

We need to rebalance away from technocratic prescriptions and toward supporting the connective, coalition-building work that keeps societies stitched together.

This is not nostalgia for a pre-aid freeze era, nor a push for a new narrative cycle. It is an invitation to see the soft infrastructure and the people—invisible weavers—who maintain civic space in motion and create the conditions for collective agency. Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, for example, observes that civic space is (re)shaped less by visible performance and more by everyday stewardship. 

The challenge is not agreeing on what needs to change.
The challenge is agreeing on how.

That “how” is deeply practical:
If we say the field needs more connective work, what does that actually look like in real systems?
And for donors navigating mandates, cycles, and fiduciary obligations:
How do we make this kind of intelligence and connective work possible within the constraints that actually exist?

These questions animated a paper I recently presented at the University of Pittsburgh on the future of bottom-up aid. I’m working on a final version for publication, but I wanted to share the draft now—because the conversation is moving, and because actors who carry and enable this work have been waiting long enough for the evidence-based discussion to catch up.

My core argument is simple: invisible weavers are already shaping governance. The question is whether our systems take feasible steps to recognize and reinforce them. The good news is that many donors already do fragments of this. By identifying how learning and adaptation actually occur within constraints, we can illuminate how local agency might be interpretable at portfolio-level without flattening it.

Below are three insights on where democracy and civic-space support can practically go next.

1. Civic space’s connective tissue is built through layered coalitions, not singular structures.

Formal coalitions and movements matter. They create legitimacy, visibility, and shared purpose. But as many researchers and practitioners have observed, these structures explain only a fraction of how collective action emerges. Much lives in the small, steady acts of cooperation that rarely appear in official narratives.

This surfaced again last week in a presentation I did for the World Bank’s coalitions-for-reform program: formal coalitions coexist with loose, adaptive networks that cut across organizational spaces and also drive democratic possibility—
the super-connectors who quietly hold spaces together,
the informal alliances that cut across sectors,
the small organizations translating between communities and institutions,

 the people threading different democratic  tools and processes,  

and the trusted intermediaries who ensure no one is acting alone.

Often these barely visible weavers already enable problem-solving in complex and contested contexts—people who can move across organizations, read emerging risks, find someone who knows someone, and sustain collaboration even when formal structures are paused or overwhelmed. They function as accelerants of coherence, stitching together work that would otherwise remain fragmented.

This is where many streams are converging—whether framed as strengthening the “infrastructure of democracy,” building “systems-level capacities. ” The practical entry points are usually right in front of us.

The weavers are not mystical. We do not need to invent them.  

We need to notice their function in the system, learn from their work in the non-extractive ways they value, and reinforce it. 

A recent attempt with a group of Latin American practitioners showed what is possible: drawing on favors from Escuela Latinoamericana de Abogacia Comunitaria and Accountability Lab–Mexico we opened a small invitation and, within weeks, we began slowly to unravel the hank of wool: the wisdom is already there, waiting for spaces that respect it, eager to contribute.

If you trace who keeps a clinic, school, market association, or municipal office connected to its community when politics heat up, you will find these weavers already holding civic space open in the places where people experience and value democracy most directly. 

Yet these weavers rarely appear in conference guest lists, theories of change, evaluation reports, or budgets. They don’t match templates and tired talking points. And because their work often straddles civic and sectoral spaces, they fall outside the neat categories of democracy theories, frameworks, and programming. They get lost in siloed jargon. 

Still, invisible weavers are part of the connective tissue without which no democratic or civic-space future seems possible—because they keep restitching our societies when institutions are stretched thin.

2. The future of democracy support is about translation.

It is tempting to summarize the shift ahead as “trust local actors.” But that framing often keeps the conversation stuck—admired in principle, rarely practiced at scale. In the paper, I took a different route: instead of idealizing long-term, trust-based models or defending the practicalities of short-term, command-and-control ones, I looked at the real practice already happening in between. The most instructive clues live in the quiet translation work beneath the surface.

What I see in the evidence and in conversations is more layered. Donors—including local philanthropists—operate within real mandates, portfolio-level risks, and fiduciary constraints. Invisible weavers, for their part, make do inside a kind of bilingual infrastructure: the connective tissue that translates between formal institutional logics and the adaptive intelligence emerging from communities.

The actionable task for many donor agencies and philanthropic organizations might not be blind deference. It is recognizing the distinct forms of intelligence each side holds—and building mechanisms that allow them to meet on more productive, mutually legible terms. 

Much of this translation already takes place inside aid and philanthropy’s “black box” in ad hoc ways: field coordinators, mid-tier bureaucrats, donor program officers, and (some types of) philanthropy’s own field-stewarding groups and intermediaries quietly move learning across silos despite short cycles and tight budgets. Instead of treating this work as accidental or marginal, or subsuming it into the idea of movements by default, we can see it for what it is: a living part of how democratic and civic space support already works and delivers under pressure. 

Recent AI-powered research validates insights from human evaluators: invisible weavers are key drivers of effectiveness and sustainability: ignore them and “reforms collapse under their own weight”.

When metaphorical translation is resourced, it does several things:

• Protects political intelligence from being overwritten by project logic
• Helps donors fund what is actually working, not what fits the box
• Connects civic-space actors with the frontline systems where citizens encounter the state
• Creates space for portfolio management and learning without demanding institutional reinvention

When this works, sequences of 1–3-year grants accumulate into what functions—within relationships—like a longer  adaptive commitment.  That is muscle memory for adaptation, quietly built through consistent relational practice.

Part of the future of governance support is recognizing this under-the-radar work already embedded in our systems—perhaps we don’t need to imagine it needs to be invented from scratch and we can start by acting more systematically on what stakeholders are learning by doing? 

Stefan Kossoff reflected on a recent convening on the future of governance at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office with over 20 governments, multilateral agencies, and think tanks. One of his key takeaways:  “Innovation doesn’t always have to be “new.” Sometimes, innovation means actually applying the wisdom we already possess”.

Indeed, this kind of innovation could be liberating. 

3. The question is not whether informal connective work can be supported—it already is. The question is whether we choose to make it visible and scalable.

I often hear that donors cannot support weavers and others’  connective work. But that’s not entirely true. It is happening—just hidden in plain sight. My paper is an effort to name the work, evidence, and learn from it. 

Donor staff already rely on a shared set of practices that quietly enable relational work, which co-exists with projects and lives in country dialogue done at its best:

1. a) Judgment-based delegation: trusting staff to make small decisions that protect relationships and political intelligence. 
2. b) Stewardship of institutional memory: informal mentoring, notes passed across handovers, continuity protected in spite of churn.
   c) Strategic relational workarounds: pairing partners, sequencing grants, or stretching timelines when the politics require it. These workarounds are not deviations; they are part of donors’ adaptive integrity—the small, legitimate adjustments that protect relationships and political intelligence under pressure.
   d) Narrative scaffolding and codified translation: quietly documenting patterns, contextual knowledge, and relational signals that don’t fit reporting templates but contribute to results.

What would it mean to bring these into the open and treat them as assets that already stretch dollars further, not hidden exceptions?

A feasible path forward consolidates the argument in actionable principles and a menu of actions for donor agencies  – a practical strategy for building structural resilience. You can read them in the paper.  

I argue that many shifts do not require wholesale reinvention. They require rebalancing portfolios and ways of working: valuing relational work as the medium through which adaptation becomes durable, legitimate, and politically grounded. The task is to make that work visible—and legible—enough to sustain and scale. 

Where this leaves us

If we take this seriously, governance and civic-space support becomes less about ideal experts’ design and more about what societies already generate in the messy-middle, under pressure.

It asks us to rebalance toward:

• Invisible weavers who create the conditions for collective agency
• Coalitions that operate beneath the surface
• Translators who bridge mandates and lived realities
• Recognition that political systems have their own forms of intelligence
• Space for “the small boats” that navigate uncertainty while the big ships turn
• The soft infrastructure, without which institutions cannot function

Much of this relational work lives in civic spaces that are not labeled as such: the school where parents negotiate trust, the market association that coordinates informally with local officials, the groups that build social capital for adaptation, the clinic that becomes a broker during moments of uncertainty. These are not sectors separate from democracy work. They are not spaces where a normative or statistical  “horse race”  between democracy and sectoral work to show relative effectiveness is helpful  —they are civic spaces where invisible weavers and populations operate daily across boundaries. The alternative asks us to rebalance toward invisible weavers who sustain the infrastructure of trust and donor staffers who move between mandates without waiting for certainty to arrive.

Florencia Guerzovich