We study why reforms fail to travel - and connect the people who tried with the people who want to try next.
A platform for young people who want to change something where they live, and for the practitioners who have already attempted it somewhere else.
Every year, thousands of young people encounter a story about somewhere that got something right. A city that gave its residents real budgetary power. A country that taught its teenagers to fact-check political claims. A ministry that published every meeting it held.
The story is inspiring. It is also incomplete. What almost never travels with it is the answer to the only question that matters: what had to already be true for this to work?
So the idea gets imported without its foundations - and quietly fails. Research on policy transfer is blunt about this: badly informed transfer is itself a cause of failure, not a neutral act.
Plenty of organisations collect examples of democratic and governance innovation. Very few tell you whether the example applies to you - and almost none tell you where it went wrong.
Every case names the conditions that existed before the reform worked - the literacy levels, the institutional trust, the decades of civic history. Without these, the case is a story. With them, it is evidence.
We document attempts that did not work - not through self-reporting, but through independent research and conversations with the people involved, long after the fact. Nobody has to confess anything. They only have to teach.
Each case is assessed against your context using established policy-transfer methodology - resources, authority, causal complexity, institutional substitutability, value consensus. Openly, with the reasoning visible.
Since 1976, NASA has run a channel for pilots and air traffic controllers to report what went wrong - on behalf of the regulator, but independent of it. Reports are voluntary, confidential and de-identified. Over two million have been filed, and it is one of the reasons flying became as safe as it is.
We are not a reporting system and we cannot offer anyone immunity. But the underlying insight holds: people share what went wrong when sharing costs them nothing, and what surfaces is worth more than any success story. Governance has no equivalent. That is the gap we work in.
Cases are organised by the problem someone is trying to solve, not by the country they came from.
Not everything has to be a national reform. Some of the most transferable cases operate at the scale of a single school, district or town - and those are often the ones a young person can actually start.
Research, preconditions, what went wrong, and an honest assessment of where it would and would not transfer.
Practitioners keep control: they approve what is published, and choose whether to appear by name, anonymously, or by institution only.
A young person with a concrete ambition is connected to someone who has attempted the same thing elsewhere. One person, matched deliberately - not a directory.
Later: workshops and masterclasses on how to actually assess transfer - taught with researchers who study it, for people who intend to do it.
From late school age through young professionals. In politics, business or civil society - anyone intending to build something in their town, region or country.
Senior people who implemented a reform - including the ones that did not work. Their most valuable knowledge is the part nobody publishes.
SDG 4Quality education - non-formal civic and governance learning built on evidence rather than inspiration.
SDG 16Peace, justice and strong institutions - better-informed institutional reform, and fewer imported failures.
SDG 17Partnerships - cross-border knowledge exchange between generations and between countries.
A first look at the case collection - what happened, what it took, and whether it would travel.
A central-government target for every council to run participatory budgeting mostly produced small discretionary grant schemes rather than the budgetary authority Porto Alegre's citizens held.
Read the case →Brazil · Participation & deliberationCitizens directly allocated a share of the city's investment budget through open neighbourhood assemblies, and the model was later copied in more than a thousand cities worldwide.
Read the case →If you have attempted a reform that did not go as planned, if you are researching how policy travels, or if you are young and trying to build something where you live: we would like to hear from you.
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