Gardening Alongside Landscaping

Dispatches on Planetary Governance From a Shifting System

Abstract

This commentary draws on a dialogue with three senior United Nations Resident Coordinators to explore what the present moment in global governance looks and feels like from within a shifting multilateral system. It argues that the UN’s current relevance crisis stems from a systematic underinvestment in a complementary and largely invisible capacity: the ability to read soil, tend conditions, and enable what wants to grow locally, rather than deliver what was pre-designed at headquarters. The piece names this capacity “gardening” and positions it as the necessary complement to the institution’s existing “landscaping” functions, not their replacement. In a way, this “gardening capacity” is the at the very essence of the reform process that the institution has been walking since 2017. The commentary surfaces the relational infrastructure already sustaining the UN’s most courageous practitioners, traces the desire lines of governance already emerging in the outer field, and calls for a practice rooted in presencing, trust, and intergenerational thinking, as the animating principle of a transformed multilateral presence in the world. To do so, the article draws predominantly from the three Resident Coordinators’ voices, alongside perspectives from Indigenous ecological knowledge, visual art, jazz improvisation, and awareness-based systems change.