Governance Decision-Making Tool

Effectiveness and Resilience

How can we ensure that our governance system can absorb disruption and respond to changes?

Ensuring the long-term effectiveness of a designated area is dependent on “resilience” – one of the key principles of good governance. It is important to have measures in place to ensure that the governance structure can withstand changes and disruptions.

Examples from the SHAPE project include:

• Having “reserve” members of the board/steering group – that is, people representing similar organisations to those on the board, who will attend meetings if that member is unavailable. This ensures that effective and representative decision-making can still take place in such instances, as well as providing potential replacement board members should existing members choose to step down permanently.

• Regularly reviewing the governance structure to ensure that it continues to be as representative as possible of the diverse interests within the area.