Systems

Systems are the framework's replacement for territorial administration, and the comparison to ministries is offered to make the unfamiliar part visible. A ministry belongs to a state and covers a territory. A system covers a common area of work, health, transportation or housing, and has no territory at all, which is why systems can overlap and cooperate rather than dividing anything between them. A person may be in many systems at once and each is defined by the work rather than by who belongs. The two levels are where the governance design does its work. The global level acts as an epistemic community of ideas, gathering expertise from everywhere without acquiring authority anywhere, and the local level controls acceptance and rejection of ideas and their implementation, which keeps the decision with those affected. That split is the whole answer to the oligarchy problem stated in operational form, since knowledge scales globally while authority stays local. It also answers the objection Marsh raises to representative democracy, that representatives are elected by land mass rather than by system, since a system is exactly what a decision belongs to and a land mass is not. The user group supplies the constituency at the local level, being everyone affected by an action and nobody who is not, and knowledge bridges carry the global expertise into terms the user group can audit.

Functionalism in international relations, particularly David Mitrany's version, argued that cooperation should be organized around technical functions rather than territory, which is remarkably close to Marsh's proposal and was advanced in the 1940s for similar reasons. Polycentric governance, following Ostrom, describes multiple overlapping decision centres. Sectoral and industrial governance arrangements exist in practice. Marsh's addition is the explicit level split, since specifying that the global level holds knowledge without authority and the local level holds authority over acceptance is a design constraint that functionalist proposals generally leave to be worked out.