We live in an age of fragmented knowledge and resource.

Knowing where to start, who to start it with , and mobilising the required resources to achieve it, seems difficult.

The latest post from Chris Bolton asks a powerful question: Have we lost our ability to do big, ambitious, and truly local things as communities?

He recounts the construction of Grwyne Fawr Reservoir, a monumental engineering feat completed in the Black Mountains in South Wales over a century ago. It was built by and for the community, a project so ambitious it required a temporary “Tin Town” to house 400 workers and their families, complete with a school, hospital, and police station. To get materials to the remote site, they built a twelve-mile narrow-gauge railway that was considered illegal and impossible by authorities, yet they did it anyway. The project was a testament to a kind of collective power that seems unimaginable today.  

He points out that these sort of projects were not that rare in South Wales at the time and that “there are examples on literally every street corner where people got together to build chapels, clubs and institutes – some of them enormous and built by subscription”.

Chris suggests that this capacity is still embedded in our “collective indigenous memory,” and I believe he’s right. The problem isn’t that we have forgotten how to cooperate; it’s that the very world that made those acts possible has been dismantled and remade.

So , what have we lost and how can we rediscover it?

First and foremost it’s important to note that these were not business ventures or startups in the conventional sense; there were acts of economic and social resistance that demonstrated a community’s power to control its own destiny.  

Historically, communities frequently served as the primary, and often only, engine for generating solutions, driven by their direct needs and local context.

Innovations spread through direct observation, apprenticeship, and a strong sense of reciprocity and collective action within a defined geographic and social group. Decisions were made quickly because the people experiencing the problem were also the innovators and implementers.

The shift from a world of physical constraints to a world of systemic constraints means that while a community can conceive of an innovative solution quickly, it often gets crushed by the invisible weight of red tape and legal risk.

These modern constraints don’t just slow down projects; they fundamentally filter out grassroots initiatives that lack specialised legal or financial expertise.

Systemic Effects: How Red Tape Kills Innovation

The excessive bureaucratic process has three major systemic effects on community innovation

The compliance effect: For a community group (often volunteers), the time spent on compliance is time taken away from the actual innovative work. The process of filling out duplicate forms, attending multiple meetings, and waiting months for approval is a severe drain on their passion and enthusiasm.

The Standardisation/Legitimisation Trap: In the past, a local solution was considered successful if it worked for that community. Today, a solution must often be recognised by, and conform to, a centralised authority to be considered legitimate or fair.

The centralisation of risk aversion: ️ Modern institutions—banks, local governments, and partners—are heavily incentivised to avoid all possible legal risk, making them extremely hesitant to support non-standard, grassroots projects. Any public-facing community innovation (a shared bike library, a communal workshop, a local energy micro-grid) introduces the risk of accident.

Modern leaders are trained to follow the rulebook and fear setting a new, unauthorised precedent. When presented with a truly novel community solution—something not covered by existing regulations—the safest and easiest answer for the official is almost always “no” or “delay.” This preference for inertia is a massive constraint on bottom-up change.

The systemic effect is a bottleneck at the point of implementation: the sheer friction of the centralised system acts as a powerful invisible filter, ensuring that only ideas with significant corporate backing, legal muscle, or long-term funding can survive the journey from concept to reality.

Over years we have layered over more and more rules and process and burdened the system with huge amounts of governance that simply did not exist 100 years ago.

Amro Alkado describes for us the concept of governance debt as “a kind of debt not measured in money, but in complexity. It is the cost a system incurs when it borrows capacity from the future to stay functional in the present. Each time a process is duplicated rather than streamlined, each time a policy is layered on without retiring what came before, the system takes on debt. “

Importantly Amro says:

“The burden is often heaviest on those who didn’t create it and who may be most willing to fix it.”

And this is where the hope comes in. As Chris Bolton describes there are many of examples of modern , community led innovations that have negotiated this system.

We have not lost our ability to do big, ambitious, and truly local things as communities.

However, the system has constrained the ability for local innovation by drawing resources , power and control to the centre. If you’re part of publicly focused services you are part of that same system.

The future requires us not to dismantle the system but to remake it.

We can no longer afford to let the most pressing, immediate problems be ignored because the solutions crafted by the community are too small, too localised, or too legally inconvenient for our massive, centralised institutions.

If we want to move beyond systemic stagnation and unleash the potential of grassroots ingenuity, we must radically redefine success: it’s not just about what scales nationally, but what sustains locally. This means tearing down the invisible fences of red tape, , and intentionally building a new governance model that is porous, place-based, and inherently decentralised.

Only when we prioritise local influence and enable citizens to be both the problem-definers and the solution-builders will we rediscover the collective momentum that has driven us this far.

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash