Workshop: Institutional imagination @ Innovation Week 2025, Brazil

When nature evolves faster than our institutions, how do we adapt?

Why focus on institutional imagination in the context of climate risk?

Heatwaves intensify, water systems destabilise, and ecosystems shift. Yet, our public institutions remain largely designed for the 20th century. Nature evolves far faster than our organograms, exposing gaps in how we represent, recognise, and respond to ever-changing realities. 

To respond effectively, our institutions need to be reimagined as craftwork: constructs that are able to learn from change rather than be overwhelmed by it, solid without rigidity, light without fragmentation, and adaptive without losing direction.

What you can expect

This workshop, coordinated by TIAL, will take nature’s accelerating pressures as the starting point for institutional innovation. Together, we will explore:

• Why institutions must evolve at the pace of natural change
• Examples of governments tackling extreme heat, water stress, and land-use transitions
• Collective imagination exercises inspired by natural systems — from mycelium networks to coral reefs — to sketch new organisational forms
• A mapping of the competencies and skills needed for future-ready institutional design

Contributors include Christian Bason (Transition Collective), Caio Werneck (TIAL), and Natália Oliveira (TIAL).

Who should join?

Public leaders, policy innovators, government managers, multilateral organisation staff, and civic practitioners interested in building institutions that keep pace with ecological and social transformation.

Important information:

📍 Brasília, Brazil

📅 2 October 2025

The first part of the workshop will be conducted in English, but the rest will be in Portuguese.

As part of Innovation Week 2025, held by Brazil’s National School of Public Administration (ENAP).

What you will get

• A framework for understanding institutional lag versus ecological acceleration
• Insights from governments experimenting with institutional reinvention
• Hands-on exercises to imagine governance models shaped by natural principles
• A skills map for working with institutional design in times of rapid change
• Connection to peers committed to rethinking governance for a turbulent century

How to register

If you are attending Innovation Week, you will receive instructions about how to register to this and other workshops before the event starts.