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The Berggruen Governance Index Project is a collaborative project between the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and the Berggruen Institute. The Index examines the performance of 134 countries in key areas over a 20-year period to advance our understanding of why some countries are better managed and enjoy a higher quality of life than others. To this end, the Index analyzes the relationship between democratic accountability, state capacity, and the provision of goods to serve public needs.

The project emerged from a series of conversations between Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, and Dawn Nakagawa at the Berggruen Institute, and Helmut K. Anheier, then president of the Hertie School in Berlin. The Berggruen Institute supported the preliminary exploration of the feasibility of such a governance index. Based on this work, and the publication of the 2019 Index, the project expanded and moved to the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA.

Helmut K. Anheier serves as Principal Investigator of the project at UCLA, with Dawn Nakagawa as project director for the Berggruen Institute.

The project is guided by a board that includes Nabil Fahmy (American University, Cairo), Mohammed Ibrahim (Mo Ibrahim Foundation), Francis Fukuyama (Stanford), Margaret Levi (Stanford), John Micklethwait (Bloomberg), Gary Segura (UCLA Luskin), Anne-Marie Slaughter (New America), Michael Woolcock (World Bank), and Xue Lan (Tsinghua University).

More information about the project and the 2022 BGI: governance.luskin.ucla.edu

When using the Berggruen Governance Index data, please make sure to include a proper citation or reference to this database: “Anheier, Helmut K. 2022. The 2022 Berggruen Governance Index Data. Berlin and Los Angeles: Hertie School and UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.”

The Berggruen Governance Index Project is a collaborative project between the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and the BI. It examines the performance of 135 countries in key areas over a 20-year period, in order to advance our understanding of why some countries are better managed and enjoy a higher quality of life than others. The Index analyzes the relationship between democratic accountability, state capacity, and the provision of goods to serve public needs.

Renovating Democracy

The 2022 Berggruen Governance Index

The Planetary is an emerging concept in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, and politics that draws attention to the basic fact that human affairs take place on a planet — and the innumerous and complex implications that flow from this realization. To think with and through the Planetary is to acknowledge that human life is inextricably embedded within the biogeochemical ferment of an ever-changing planet — a planet that expands spatially from the Earth’s core to interplanetary space, temporally from nanoseconds to cosmic time scales, and materially from elementary particles to the dark matter of the universe.

This website, the 

, aims to serve as a hub for planetary thinking, connecting disparate communities where theoretical and practical ideas on the Planetary are being developed. A collaboration between the 

 at the Berggruen Institute, the Planetary Portal maps institutions around the world that are working on or within a planetary framework. They include university research centers, independent research institutes, NGOs, and other organizations that approach policy, politics, and philosophy through a planetary lens. It is our hope that representing the many diverse institutions that are working on the Planetary in one place will help visitors visualize the contours of this emerging field, draw connections between the various intellectual ventures, provide basic structure for the nascent category, and further the development of planetary thought, with the aim of developing a viable planetary politics.

The Planetary

Planetary Portal

In response to the steep decline in trust for our government institutions, we must reinvent our concept of democracy and place the citizen at the center of the democratic process. We must ultimately make the government itself a facilitator and platform for citizen’s deliberation.

Building a Citizen’s Democracy takes an expansive view of the institutions, culture, education, and processes that need to evolve in order to create resilient democracies, responsive to the challenges of the Digital Age. We invite people who are thinking of meaningful alternatives to electoral, representative democracy. This includes the study of the tools, institutions, cultural values, education, and beyond to instill a different kind of decision-making process—one that is  deeply informed, and consensus based.

Deliberative Democracy

Whitepaper

Decoding Digital Authoritarianism

Digital technologies’ potential to advance societal wellbeing is well known. How these technologies can be used to constrict freedoms and oppress population groups is less understood—and of growing concern to citizens, political leaders, and states.

Decoding Digital Authoritarianism asks how we can develop a new community of interdisciplinary thinkers around it, to facilitate a more global, inclusive conversation. It seeks to reinterpret traditional foreign policy themes as they relate to digital authoritarianism, including security; economics and finance; media and values; and emerging technologies.

Created by Berggruen Fellow Gabriel Kahan, this program aims to change the way government and society communicates with each other by helping people understand their place within their community, how communities can build a stronger voice, and how governments can become more inclusive and flexible.

Sense LA accomplishes this through gatherings called creative assemblies, drawing on individual experience to facilitate explorations of local issues and their interdependencies. This methodology enables individuals to identify and address problems of mutual interest, and visualize them in ways that facilitate new understandings of the intertwined relationship between individual and collective. The program’s methodology, called PREPARE, was created by artist and researcher Kahan and mechanical engineering professor Alexander Slocum at MIT.

The Sense LA program illustrates the Berggruen Institute’s commitment to creating dialogue and innovative approaches in governance.

A program to creatively harness the power of collective-intelligence through public participation, Sense LA works to build social cohesion and foster dialogue for the betterment of cities and their communities.

Sense LA

Full 2019 Berggruen Governance Index Report

Supplemental Country Case Studies 2019 — Brazil

Supplemental Country Case Studies 2019 — China

Supplemental Country Case Studies 2019 — Italy

Supplemental Country Case Studies 2019 — South Africa

Supplemental Country Case Studies 2019 — United States

 for the 2019 Berggruen Governance Index interactive site which will allow you to explore and compare the 38 countries using visual data.

The 2019 Berggruen Governance Index evaluates countries on the basis of their quality of political governance. To do this, the Index disaggregates governance into three key components: Quality of Democracy (Inputs), Quality of Government (Throughputs), and Quality of Life (Outputs). Through this lens, the Index deepens understanding of the relationship between the democratic feedback, government competence, and the provision of public goods.

The Index evaluates 38 countries, using the three indices composed of 27 sub-indices measured across a 14-year time span between 2004 and 2018. The selected countries  represent about 2/3 of global GDP and 3/4 of the global population.

The top performers are the usual suspects. Western and Northern Europe, Canada and the US, and Australia all fare quite well. The most interesting insights do not come from looking at the overall rankings, but from evaluating the relative position of any given country across the three indices. For example, some countries rank higher on Quality of Life than they do on Quality of Democracy. The explanation for why a country is able to produce better than expected outputs (Q of L), despite meager inputs (Q of D), likely lies in a strong competence among the sub-indices that make up the Quality of Governance. For countries, the Index offers a flexible tool to identify real or potential strengths and weaknesses, and serves as a point of departure for either building on what works, or diagnosing and adjusting what does not.

There is a tacit assumption in the democratic world that high levels of democracy will produce the best Quality of Life, but the Index exposes the actual relationship between those levels and the importance of government competence and capacity. In this way, the Index seeks to catalyze a shift in perspective when it comes to how we think about and measure “good” governance.

When using the Berggruen Governance Index data, please make sure to include a proper citation or reference to this database:
“Anheier, Helmut K. 2019. The 2019 Berggruen Governance Index Data. Berlin and Los Angeles: Hertie School and UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.”

The 2019 Berggruen Governance Index evaluates countries on the basis of their quality of political governance. To do this, the Index breaks down governance into three key components: Quality of Democracy (Inputs), Quality of Government (Throughputs) and Quality of Life (Outputs). By disaggregating governance’s capabilities, the Index deepens understanding of the relationship between democratic feedback, government competence, and the provision of public goods.

The 2019 Berggruen Governance Index

Algorithms that can be trained to “learn,” projects that plan for life beyond Earth, and biotechnologies that push the limits of life are among recent technoscientific developments that conjure new futures. They have also unsettled theories of body, mind, and species.

the two-day workshop in April 2022, unfolded in collaboration with the USC Dornsife Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life. It brought together path-breaking scholars, scientists, and artists to grapple with forms of life that might emerge in the mid-21st century.

Future Humans

What Will Life Become? 

Our Multispecies Constitution Project is a collaboration between the Planetary and Future Humans Themes. Launched in 2023, it entails an innovative exercise—drafting a speculative constitution that includes humans and non-humans as political subjects. We want to create a language that centers multispecies mutualism rather than human exceptionalism, and collective intelligences rather than individualized human knowledge.

Led by Jonathan Blake and Claire Isabel Webb, the Multispecies Constitution Project convenes philosophers, constitutional scholars, scientists, and artists, including BI Fellows, to collaborate across their disciplines. It will reflect the state-of-the-art knowledge on more-than-human ways of being, the design of inclusive and effective political institutions that span the local and the planetary, and methods for listening to and translating more-than-human voices. Animating questions include:

How could a political body represent the planet as a whole?

What sorts of institutions could speak with—rather than for—the trees, the birds, the microbes, and the diverse humans of this planet?

What emerging technologies of translation, including AIs, will help scientists better understand the experiences of non-humans, from sperm whales, to octopuses, to mycelial networks?

The project avoids the debates about the rights of nature hashed out in law and courts. Instead, we consider the question of multispecies 

 through new political institutions and mechanisms. Staging a new system of multispecies governance built upon planetary, rather than anthropocentric, principles, is difficult—even controversial. But it is precisely the aim of the project. We aim to spark acts of unorthodox imagination.

The Multispecies Constitution Project

The Planetary Institutions project gathers practitioners and experts to consider the planetary form and scale for new political institutions designed to govern the unprecedented risks facing life on Earth that confound existing modes of global governance.

Humanity is at a pivotal juncture in its relationship to the planet, confronting new challenges and risks that are fundamentally different from traditional dilemmas of global interdependence and less amenable to conventional efforts by sovereign states to manage them. The advent of concept of “the planetary” is a function of the interplay of broad forces and trends—demographic, technological, economic, ecological, informational, and (geo)political—that have altered humanity’s relationship with Earth systems, as well as the scientific and technological advances that have made us indelibly aware of the changes we have wrought. These developments provide an opportunity to evaluate the failures and successes of international cooperation as it occurs today as well as to reimagine our governance of the planet, considering new institutional formations (and the legitimacy thereof) that might be possible and necessary to confront planetary challenges. This project intends to make use of this opportunity.

Planetary Institutions 

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has revealed new vulnerabilities in global systems, along with new measures of political response. Similarly, climatic changes and growing anxieties over resources such as clean water and air expose fresh terrains for potential disaster and public anxiety. We plan periodic convenings to explore such contemporary problems through critical engagement with "planetary health," a growing field of expertise and activism at the intersection of health and environmental concerns. Planetary health positions human well-being in relation to that of other species and interconnected environments, all framed by a finite, common planetary ground. Following but also departing from earlier formations of international and global health, its proponents concern themselves not only with people, nation states and populations, but also microbial life, animal vectors and zoonotic diseases. As a consequence, questions of milieu and interconnection come to the fore, along with vital infrastructures and equipment.

The project seeks to foster cross-cutting conversations made possible – indeed, necessary – by the historical moment, combining a range of disciplinary frames and methodologies with novel questions about health from a planetary perspective. What forms of ethics and politics emerge around such concerns and efforts to foster care? What scales of space and time, what sense of limits and possibilities do they evoke? Participants include policy makers, historians, social scientists, public health experts, and environmental scientists.

Planetary Health

The Berggruen Institute’s first LA-based initiative, Sense LA, together with organizations throughout Los Angeles, is using its leading-edge community input method to gather and provide formal recommendations for the City of Los Angeles’ General Plan 2040.

By Fall 2020, SenseLA will launch an online interactive community plan and written report for the Wilshire Corridor that will provide community-led recommendations based on information emerging from its various creative assemblies with organizations throughout the area.

The initiative, spearheaded by the Korean American Federation of Los Angeles and former LAFD deputy Chief, Emile Mack, has been adopted by dozens of place-based, religious and cultural organizations throughout the city.

Using Sense LA to gather input for the general plan builds on the concept of participatory planning and leverages people’s creativity and local expertise to build a more comprehensive, inclusive, and dynamic plan for the next twenty years.

Participating organizations as of Spring 2020:

• Korean American Federation of Los Angeles
• Bangladeshi Unity Federation of Los Angeles (BUFLA)
• Search to Involve Phillipino Americans (SIPA)
• Wilshire Center Koreatown Neighborhood Council (WCKNC)
• Rampart Village Neighborhood Council
• Magnolia Community Initiative
• Westlake North Neighborhood Council
• Department of Neighborhood Empowerment
• Information Technology Agency (LA City’s Mayor’s Office)
• State Senator William’s office
• CCNP (Central City Neighborhood Partners
• Islamic Center

Community Recommendations for the City of Los Angeles’ General Plan 2040

Recommendations for City of Los Angeles Master Plan / Wilshire Community Plan

Case Study

COVID-19 Response - Case Studies of Four Countries

The COVID-19 pandemic is a rare crisis that all states are facing simultaneously. Although imperfect—as a result of variations in population, geography, and evolving epidemiology—this test measures not only pandemic preparedness and response but more importantly, state capacity and social resilience. The following report contains four case studies of different countries’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Each report looks at a country’s pre-pandemic preparedness, then presents the strategy that was implemented—including a detailed timeline of action—and an assessment of its performance.

Berggruen Governance Index: COVID Case Studies

Conflicts between the U.S. and China over human rights, technology, and trade are as inexorable as cooperation is imperative for challenges such as pandemics and climate change. A “partnership of rivals” is crucial now. Since 2019, the Berggruen Institute has supported the effort by the California-China Climate Institute to align the cap-and-trade markets that set a price on carbon in California, and the provinces of Hubei and Guangdong. Partners include UCLA, UC Berkeley, and the heads of this initiative—former California Governor Jerry Brown and China’s top climate negotiator Xie Zhenhua.

California China Carbon Market Integration Project

Recommendations for the Civilian Climate Corps - Policy Brief

Original Proposal From Our 2020 Report, “Renewing Democracy in the Digital Age”

Learn more about YES – Youth Environment Service

Youth Roundtable on the Civilian Climate Corps

Shaping Our Future – Proposal for a Civilian Climate Corps Berggruen Institute Future of Democracy Program In Partnership with Stanford University Report

Carbon Capture Athens: A Participatory Photography Workshop for Young People on the Environment and Climate in Athens

With less than a decade left to prevent irreversible climate change and nature loss, now is the time to recognize each one of us has a crucial part to play. Young people are inheriting these crises and will be disproportionately impacted by them. But young people can also play a key role in restoring the natural environment and building climate-resilient communities.

How can we visualize the future – the future we want, and the future we’ll get if we don’t take action? How can young people express their views about the environment, and their aspirations to be agents of change? How can those perspectives be turned into recommendations for meaningful collective action?

To pursue these questions, the Berggruen Institute from the USA, in collaboration with the Athens Democracy Forum and the Mayor of Athens, is hosting ‘Carbon Capture Athens’ – a participatory photography workshop that brings diverse young voices to the table, engaging young activists in a deliberative process around long term environmental action at the personal, local, and national levels. We are inviting young people (ages 18-25) from across Greece to apply for this unique opportunity to influence decision-makers by documenting your concerns and ambitions for the environment and the future you want to create. 

With less than a decade to prevent irreversible climate change and insufficient action on the part of governments, youth must be empowered to protect their communities and foster social justice. Youth-led Civilian Climate Corps would enable direct action to confront the climate crisis; pay youth a living wage for young people’s skills and perspective; ensure investment in protecting communities that are disproportionately affected by rising global temperatures; and foster common culture and purpose when democracy needs it most. By signing this petition, you’re asking your leaders and representatives to commit to creating a fully-funded, youth-led Civilian Climate Corps where you live. We’re inviting people everywhere to join our call for environmental justice, generational recovery, and economic renewal. Add your name. 

YES will activate youth for recovery and resilience.

The clock is ticking on the climate emergency. We have less than a decade to transform the way we live. As the Earth heats up, democratic governments are immobilized; a healthy planet and healthy democracies need rising generations to work together to meet the challenges of the 21st century. YES is a campaign to cultivate grassroots leadership on climate policy by young people, while building broad-based commitments from governments to invest in jobs, national service, and other opportunities for young people to work together, acquire skills and training, and build common purpose and solidarity in protecting our communities from climate change.

The response to the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change reveal flaws in governance that threaten our future. By investing in youth-led efforts to take on climate change, we can:

Restore deliberation and direct feedback to our democratic process

Cultivate a new generation of purpose-driven leadership

Together with young people, community organizations, and governments, we host town hall meetings with elected officials to connect ideas to action as well as organize deliberative assemblies to develop policy recommendations for the design and implementation of youth environment service programs. Join our YES mailing list to get involved or contact us at 

YES is a campaign to build broad-based commitments from governments to invest in jobs, national service, and other opportunities for young people to work together, acquire skills and training, and build common purpose and solidarity in protecting their communities from climate change.


Renewing Democracy in the Digital Age (English)

Renewing Democracy in the Digital Age (French)

Renewing Democracy in the Digital Age (German)

Renewing Democracy in the Digital Age (Spanish)

Our Recommendations for the Civilian Climate Corps - Policy Brief

Original Proposal From Our 2020 Report, "Renewing Democracy in the Digital Age"

Learn More About YES - Youth Environment Service

Launched in September of 2016, the Future of Democracy project host high-level symposia on democratic renewal. The origin of the project emerged from a simple insight: democratic governments had failed to keep pace with—and effectively manage—the rate and global scale of change in their societies and were in need of a significant overhaul to govern effectively in the 21st century.

These convenings have involved structured conversations aimed at both surfacing the challenges and opportunities of current democratic systems as well as imagining and defining pathways of reform. Symposia have taken place in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Portugal with further consultations taking place in France, Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere. Participants have represented nationalities from across Europe, North America, and beyond, and from a broad range of fields including policymakers, technologists, business leaders, journalists, political scientists, sociologists, philosophers, philanthropists, artists, and activists. Public polling and research has also been conducted in key countries in Europe and North America.

The Berggruen Institute‘s Future of Democracy Project consists of three working groups: social cohesion and the public square; a second on social media and democracy; and a third on the redesign of democratic institutions.

• Social Cohesion and the Public Square: The underlying causes of, and cures for, the collapse of social cohesion – including the explosion of identity politics – which once stood behind a politics of consensus (Chaired by Anthony Giddens and Helle Thorning-Schmidt).

• Social Media and Democracy: How can we change the incentives for platforms in order to dampen its negative effects and heal the divisions? How can we harness technology to create a new democratic culture (Chaired by Francis Fukuyama).

• Redesign of Democratic Institutions: Designing new governing practices and institutions that incorporate new means of citizen participation through social networks, with the check and balance of deliberative filters (Chaired by Nathan Gardels and Mario Monti).

The Future of Democracy Project

Fiscal Discipline and Public Investment in Europe

The Berggruen Institute on Governance Activity Report

Berggruen Institute on Governance Council for the Future of Europe

The European Union, with more than 500 million people, is the largest common market on the planet and a model for other regions. European integration has brought to the continent peace and stability, dramatic rises in the standards of living and greater global relevance. It is for the sake of preserving and furthering this historic project that The Council for the Future of Europe believes we must deal boldly with our current challenges.

The Council for the Future of Europe was established in 2011, in the midst of a fiscal and economic crisis that threatened the progress of the union, to promote a common European discourse on how to achieve a strong and more resilient union. The Council aims to inspire confidence amongst European citizens, to influence actors at the highest level without prejudice, and to address the central issues at stake.

To this end, the Council hosted an annual Town Hall (2012-2015) series to foster an ongoing dialogue on how to best address Europe’s most pressing issues, including economic expansion, jobs and opportunities for youth, labor mobility and migration, and expanding democratic foundation of the union.

The Council for the Future of Europe firmly believes that Europe is the solution, not the problem.

Council for the Future of Europe

Between 2011 and 2017 when the project was sunsetted, the 21st Century Council—a group of more than forty former heads of state or government, global thinkers, and tech entrepreneurs—addressed challenges faced by both advanced and emerging countries in an interdependent but fragmenting world. 

The Council advised and met with chairs of the annual G-20 summit and organized regular “Understanding China” meetings with President Xi Jinping and other top leaders in Beijing in 2013, 2015, 2018, and 2019. 

In the wake of the anti-globalization backlash that brought nationalist and populist movements to power in major countries, the Council focused on how to prevent the re-division of the world into hostile geopolitical blocs, and instead, how to harness globalization so that it works for all.

21st Century Council

Think Long Committee Report

The Think Long Committee for California was established in 2010 to address the dysfunctional state of affairs in the world’s 5th largest economy. The group, composed of 13 eminent citizens ranging from Clinton-era economist Laura Tyson to Ron George, the former Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, met for one year of deliberations and delivered a 

 for action going forward. Since that deliberative stage ended, the Committee was reconstituted as a series of working groups and a policy bank geared toward implementation of the original committee’s recommendations.

To that end, along with a coalition of other civic groups ranging from Common Cause to the League of Women Voters, the Think Long Committee passed legislation in 2014, signed by Governor Jerry Brown, to amend the citizen’s ballot initiative process for the first time in 40 years. That reform mandated greater transparency and deliberation for ballot propositions while fostering a process of negotiation between ballot sponsors and the legislature to fix problems and unintended consequences of proposed measures. If agreement is reached, measures can be withdrawn from the ballot and implemented through legislation. This has resulted in landmark minimum wage and digital privacy laws in California.

The Committee also worked with Governor Jerry Brown to design a rainy day reserve fund and ensure its passage into law.

Additionally, the Committee has conducted extensive modeling of California’s economy as the basis for reform that will align the state’s antiquated tax system to the reality of a 21st Century service and information economy.

The aim is to ensure a steady and stable revenue flow for early childhood and public higher education — the key rungs on the ladder of upward mobility for the state’s diverse population. The Committee is working closely with the Governor and legislature on completing this tax reform in the coming years.