Governance as Conflict

* Article: Governance as Conflict: Constitution of Shared Values Defining Future Margins of Disagreement. by Eric Alston.

URL = https://law.mit.edu/pub/governanceasconflict/release/1

Often viewed as a way to reduce conflict within society, the traditional perception of governance is one that maintains stability with minimal disturbance. This article thoroughly examines new possibilities enabled by using conflict as a tool for institutional decision-making.

Abstract

"Sufficiently shared values lead to a common purpose that constitutes an organization, and this choice of constitutive purpose itself constrains constitutional choice. But collective action costs increase in an organization’s members’ heterogeneity of governance preferences, and are also partly determined by an organization’s constitutive purpose. Given that these costs of collective action are never zero, this makes mechanisms to accommodate conflict optimally present in impersonal governance contexts above a certain scale. Because of this ubiquitous institutional need, a variety of institutional mechanisms to accommodate heterogeneity of governance preferences have emerged in formal organizational governance. These mechanisms can be separated into ex-ante and ex-post solutions that respectively mitigate and resolve conflict among heterogeneous governance preferences. Mitigating and resolving future conflict are therefore both design priorities for collective action organizations, and the animating purposes of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) present both conflict accommodation priorities with positive probability. Just as shared norms and accommodation of future conflict are interlinked and integral inputs to resilient organizational constitutional design in general, they are essential protocol design considerations for DAO designers as the complexity and magnitude of these organizations’ purposes increases alongside their user bases and assets managed."