- Category F, Creating the conditions
Discipline 15. Infrastructure rewirers
Maturity of support
- 2Codification
- 3Institutions
- 2Training
- 4Communities
- 2Academia
- 2.6Overall, mean of the five
This discipline describes people who redesign public systems – funding, commissioning, contracting, governance, accountability – so that they better support civic work. Rewirers also break down into a number of more specialist sub-disciplines, working on the parts of the bureaucracy that are most hostile to civic work: for example, by shifting to more outcome-based and holistic accountability regimes, or by developing long-term new financing mechanisms, such as place-based social investment and pooled funds. Rewirers are similar in spirit to wranglers, but they focus on changing the system rather than making the best of it.
Examples
- NHS England’s commissioning of A Better Way as learning partner to sixteen integrated care boards working differently on community engagement (2023-24)
- Relational contracting in local authority commissioning, such as the Plymouth Alliance
- Trust-based and flexible grant-making by foundations, codified in IVAR’s Open and Trusting Grant-making commitments
- Place-based investment vehicles and pooled community funds, such as Local Trust’s Big Local
Assessing the supporting architecture
This is an emergent discipline with rapidly coalescing language and an unusually strong community of practice, but little else beside this. Practice communities are the standout feature: annual gatherings such as New Local’s Stronger Things, or the Human Learning Systems practical learning communities run by Collaborate, and peer groups for funders trying to change how they fund, notably IVAR’s Open and Trusting community of practice.
Codification is happening slowly, though mostly focused on specific aspects of the work. There are frameworks – most prominently the human learning systems approach, and Collaborate’s Commissioning with Communities toolkit (2025), which codifies good practice – alongside A Better Way’s eight principles and its Behaviours for a Better Way, and CLES’s five principles of community wealth building. None of these is a full competency framework for the practice of institution wrangling, but they are bringing definition to important aspects of the work. Skill-building tends to happen through practitioner communities, and through a small number of relevant programmes run by universities, such as the Government Outcomes Lab’s Leading Cross-Sector Partnerships Programme at Oxford.
Academic underpinnings are the weakest dimension of support. There are relevant theoretical lineages, running through complexity science, public value and developmental evaluation, but there is little empirical work about the discipline of institutional redesign itself, and no dedicated journal.