A case study of a community-based research program: The Hawai’i Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities

By Gabriela Campos Fronzaglia, Anne Paulus, Ruth Marie Kondrup, Neslihan Tepehan & Cate de Vreede (for SoFA), and Melanie Willich, Kathe Todd-Brown, Susan Crow, Yurika Suzuki for HiCSC

Introduction

This article explores the ambitious implementation of sociocracy within the Hawaiʻi Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities Program (HiCSC), an initiative funded by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Climate-Smart Commodities Program involving a broad consortium of university academic and community-based organizations across Hawaiʻi. This case study is the product of a small group project by students in Sociocracy For All’s Academy Level 1 program. The content comes from interviews conducted on May 10, 2024 with Dr. Susan Crow and Yurika Suzuki and on May 17, 2024 with Dr. Kathe Todd-Brown, and draft edits by Dr. Melanie Willich. At this time, the HiCSC has been using sociocracy for approximately one year.

This case study delves into the significant learnings and challenges that emerged from integrating sociocracy in such a diverse and dynamic context. It examines how the program adopted sociocracy and implemented it in practice. Additionally, this article sheds light on the complexities of integrating this governance model within the local and academic organizations, including the need to reconfigure both personal and organizational approaches to better align with the sociocratic framework. 

Project Overview and Selection of Sociocratic Governance

Launched in May 2023 with $USD 40 million in funding, the Hawaiʻi Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities Program’s mission is to 

“accelerate the implementation of climate-smart practices centered on Hawaiʻi-based producers and ancestral practitioners who are supported by advocacy, incentives, technical assistance, and market development.”

The HiCSC has a challenging dual mandate: to provide incentives for climate-smart practices to a diverse range of producers and practitioners and enable the development of future incentives by research and developing tools for place- and traditional knowledge-based climate-smart practices. This requires the project to balance long term community benefit and scientific research deliverables with the short term incentives to enable climate-smart agricultural practice adoption on the islands. Additionally, the project involves participants who had never previously worked together, which introduced significant complexity to the collaborative process. 

This federally funded project occurs in the context of a complex political history. As a result, this project is intentionally grounded in equity, reciprocity, and transparency. We call this our Pewa (a rectangular or fishtail patch used for mending wooden bowls) Framework. 

• Equity:  A willingness to understand the nature of the fracture. A willingness to acknowledge the history of dispossession, and a willingness to affirm the value of what was lost.    
• Reciprocity: A willingness to build interventions that address the reason for the fracture, and are built to hold each side equally strong. To identify interventions that recognize historical injustice and ancestral efficacy and then create approaches that work on investments into restorative interventions.
• Transparency: The willingness to be clear and honest in intent and action in a way that is seen by all involved. Pewa are emphasized on the ‘umeke (bowl), not hidden. They show that the carrier is now strong. We do not hide the fact that there was a fracture, but honor our work to mend it.

The HiCSC Program faced the task of selecting an effective governance structure with which to organize itself, distribute the work, and make decisions together. This challenge emerged as the program sought to manage a diverse coalition of stakeholders, including various partner organizations and sub-awardees after funding was secured. Critically here, everyone involved with this project was also housed under a primary organization acting as their employer. While various staff were funded by the grant, funding and associated scopes were established during the proposal phase and subsequently managed by the parent organizations. Participants would need to learn how to integrate and communicate effectively across different expertise and backgrounds. The project would need a clearly structured and dynamic approach to governance in order to support its complexity.  

The leadership of HiCSC formally sits with Dr. Susan Crow (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) as Principal Investigator, and Dr. Melanie Willich (Lynker) as Program Manager. Dr. Todd-Brown was the one to bring sociocracy to the HiCSC during an initial kick-off event of the Stewardship Circle (which consisted of a diverse and interdisciplinary leadership team of university academics, an indigenous scholar, a nonprofit researcher, a federal employee, and an independent contractor). With previous training in the sociocratic governance model, Dr. Todd-Brown saw great potential for this adaptable and comprehensive governance approach for the HiCSC project. With her awareness of and interest in distributed, non-hierarchical governance models and her vision for inclusive and flexible project management, Dr. Crow and the Stewardship Circle welcomed sociocracy at the HiCSC at that initial kick-off event. 

This leadership team saw sociocracy as a tool not only for effective governance, but also as a means to embody the project’s commitment to equivalence and inclusivity. The adoption of sociocracy supported one of the project’s core ethical principles, Pewa Framework — transparency. As a system of distributed power, sociocracy can facilitate the inclusion of junior colleagues (i.e. students and technicians) as well as community partners who may not typically have opportunities to hold decision-making power in very large, multi-institutional grant-funded programs. 

For more about the Hawaiʻi Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities Program, click, visit: https://climatesmarthawaii.org/. 

Implementing the Governance System

In the beginning proposal-formation stage, the Hawaiʻi Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities Program used traditional decision-making and hierarchical organization as is commonplace in academia and large grant writing teams. Only after the project was successfully awarded funding and the initial team was -assembled did the project contemplate using sociocracy. 

Once the program was funded and underway, Dr. Todd-Brown led the project in implementing sociocracy. She had the challenge of educating all the participants about sociocracy, while simultaneously spearheading implementing the governance model, and progressing towards project outcomes. 

An initial step was the formation of the Stewardship Circle, composed of the project’s leaders, some of whom had long-standing relationships with each other, and whose goal was to decide how to govern and organize themselves. One of their first decisions together was to decide to adopt sociocracy. It should be noted at this point that none of the producer and practitioner organizations who were organizing the incentives to agricultural operations were present and were instead represented in the Stewardship team by two close collaborators.

This circle then worked to organize the project’s aims and domains. From this work emerged the organization’s first working circles, the initial department circles in their sociocratic organizational structure:

1. Producer Impact Circle: Concentrated on evaluating the environmental impacts of the program through data collection and analysis, as well as reporting to funders on impact to the community, participants, and environment.
2. Producer Support Circle: Aimed at contracting and onboarding producers and practitioners into the incentives program, ensuring their practices aligned with the climate-smart objectives set by the funder.
3. Kaiāulu (Community) Circle: Develop and coordinate HiCSC’s capacity and competence to build and sustain relationships with agriCULTURAL communities, engage them in HiCSC opportunities, and deliver discovered science, practice and policy recommendations in an equitable, reciprocal and transparent way. 
4. Stewardship Circle (akin to a Mission Circle): Placed the goals and operations of this project in a broader landscape of related Hawaiʻi operations including academic research, non-profit operations, and political initiatives.

From these four initial circles, a full sociocratic organizational structure of interconnected circles was born. The leaders and delegates of these department-level circles formed the General Circle. Sub-circles with specific technical, often heavily operational, aims and domains were also set up, varying in size. Avoiding overlapping aims and domains was a typical challenge faced during this phase. Circles also began creating and filling circle roles. It has been a challenge to form operational roles and associate them with circles in the sociocratic way because of how the various scopes of work and job descriptions were formed during the grant proposal process (before sociocracy was adopted). Thus rather than circles selecting and empowering operational roles, individuals were selected for specific scopes of work and then came together to form circles.

 Hawaii Partnership Programme Circle Structure 

In terms of training for circle members, two distinct approaches were applied: hands-on learning guided by experienced sociocracy practitioners within the organization, and structured training sessions using materials from Sociocracy For All (SoFA). Dr. Todd-Brown led many of the initial circle meetings, facilitating and teaching sociocratic methods to circle members in real time. A governance agreement was drafted over the first 6 months. All members are invited to attend the General Circle as non-decision-making observers to gain an overview of the organization and learn more about sociocratic processes. After about six months, professional support from SoFA was brought in to provide formal training. This offered an external perspective that has helped to validate the project’s selected governance approach. More recently, a governance support circle called “Sociocracy and” was created to function as a community of practice, offering a resource for members to seek guidance, share information, and engage in training based on materials provided by SoFA.

Crucial in the development of HiCSC’s implementation of sociocracy was the formulation of a governance agreement. This guiding document proved essential for maintaining effectiveness within the organization. It has also been an important point of reference for when circles are having challenges. For example, when a circle ceased to focus on its aims and domain and when there were power struggles between members, the governance agreement helped support the organization to bring a resolution to this conflict. 

Despite challenges of the team’s inexperience in sociocracy, the HiCSC Program has implemented a remarkable number of sociocratic practices in its first year of using this approach to governance.  The following is found within the organization:

• Authority is distributed into circles 
• Decisions are made by consent
• Circles are double-linked to their broader circle
• Roles are selected for using the sociocratic selections process
• Circle members speak in rounds
• Aims and Domains are written for circles
• There is a General Circle with leaders and delegates from the department-level circles
• There are circle roles in each circle (e.g. leader, delegate, facilitator, secretary)
• Performance reviews are conducted for people holding roles
• A high degree of transparency exists; circle minutes are viewable by all
• There exists an overarching governance agreement, a policy which details how the governance system operates

The roll out of sociocracy in HiCSC faced several common challenges in the first year, struggling with meeting fatigue, circle size, and role selection. Meeting fatigue was pervasive as participants struggled to learn new administrative protocols (including note taking, proposal formation, and circle updates) while achieving funder-mandated reporting requirements to onboard producers and practitioners. It wasn’t always clear who should be on what circle, resulting in an initial team of 12+ people for one circle. Role selection felt particularly alienating to some members who were uncomfortable asking overstretched colleagues to take on yet another responsibility. While many of these challenges have reduced over time, they are still present across the project at the one year mark. 

Cultural Aspects of Shared Power

The roll out of (sociocracy in) HiCSC regrettably lacked an initial investment of time for relationship-building between the multiple stakeholders, who worked in parallel under coordination of Dr. Crow and a small team of academics during the proposal phase. The community-based organizations who serve as the liaison to the producers and practitioners would typically compete for the same funding opportunities and came together under this collective submission for the first time. Academic researchers were drawn from multiple disciplines with varying levels of experience in community co-production of knowledge. Overall there was a high degree of expertise that was brought to the table by partners but little experience working cohesively as a collective.

Throughout the project, the differences in organizational cultures among the various partner organizations were pronounced, leading to tensions that had to be managed carefully within and across circles. The shared power model of HiCSC governance did not remove the hierarchical governance of the participating organizations who make up HiCSC. Students and advising professors, employees and their line manager, sit on the same circles in HiCSC and this transfers some of the power inequities typically seen in hierarchical organizations.

Cultural insensitivities were particularly evident in sociocratic processes such as role nominations, which received significant pushback in some circles. Participants expressed discomfort with putting other people “on the spot” and were hesitant about the pressures of decision-making and nomination processes, where the capabilities and willingness of individuals were not always clear. 

Furthermore, participants who, within their organization or within traditional hierarchical systems, would typically hold less power found it difficult to voice their opinions in meetings, a behavior perhaps rooted in a history of power-over governance and colonialism. The absence of a centralized decision-making body and executive power roles also led to delays and frustrations, as decisions could take months to finalize, with some circles meeting infrequently or struggling to determine which issues required a decision-making process and by whom.

Despite sociocracy’s aim to empower individuals, not everyone was comfortable or willing to engage in this new governance style. This reluctance was especially true for those who had not actively participated in its selection, yet were expected to use it. Project leaders have reflected about whether more extensive training, consultation, and information before engagement might have fostered better participation and outcomes. There is also a question of how participants’ receptivity to sociocracy was influenced due to historical political context. While the vast majority of participants are located in Hawaiʻi, Dr Todd-Brown and some of the academic team are located on the continental United States.

The leadership roles within the non-hierarchical structure also faced challenges. Some members of the project expected that Dr. Crow, the Principal Investigator, would be more assertive, directive, and present in every (or many) circles. Her efforts to practice more distributed leadership, and empower circles to make decisions, felt unfamiliar and disorienting to some. It became crucial for leaders to demonstrate sociocratic leadership styles effectively, emphasizing empowerment and the ability to handle criticism constructively.

HiCSC’s Reflections on their Implementation of Sociocracy

Integrating sociocratic governance into the logic of a community-based agricultural incentives program was a significant challenge for project leaders, participants, and partners. HiCSC is trailblazing in this regard; they are not aware of any other complex community-based nonprofit – academic institution collaborations who have adopted sociocratic governance.

Dr. Todd-Brown wonders how things might be different now if sociocracy had been adopted from the very start (during proposal-formation), rather than only once the project received funding. It’s possible that a deeper initial understanding of sociocracy and relationship-building across project members would have led to a smoother adoption of the governance agreement and project kickoff. This foundational knowledge might have made the structural aspects of the circles more meaningful and easier to appreciate and adopt.

Challenges in understanding the operational and strategic levels of implementation were significant since they were new to almost all participants. In circles that operated more smoothly, there were often strong facilitation skills to shepherd the process. Members were eager to learn and apply the principles effectively, thereby benefiting from enhanced communication, flow and transparency.

Questions about the ability to break down power hierarchies and integrate the traditional structure of the funding project with the sociocratic circle structure continue to be explored. Efforts to delegate leadership within the circles have been complicated by the structural requirements of the funding, particularly for those in designated leadership roles including the principal investigators and program management team. The people in these roles have experienced the tension between needing to remain accountable for overall project deliverables while endeavoring to distribute power and responsibility broadly across the organization. Dr. Todd-Brown laments that there persists some power dynamics inherent in this academic structure. “We are by no means a pure implementation [of sociocracy]”. HiCSC has a blended governance model that strives to honor partner organizations, funder mandates, and collective values which is under continual improvement. 

Concluding Remarks & Future Directions

The implementation of sociocracy within the Hawaiʻi Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities Program highlights the transformative potential and challenges of adopting a governance model rooted in equity and inclusivity. The degree of implementation of sociocracy after only one year is impressive and has laid a strong foundation of governance processes. As the project progresses, continuing to refine the application of sociocratic principles and practices will be important. Future efforts will focus on enhancing the training and integration of sociocracy to better align with the project’s operational needs and the cultural context of Hawaiʻi. To that end, the project’s PEWA framework that centers HiCSC in equity, transparency, and reciprocity needs to be continually attended to across the project to facilitate continuous relationship building and acknowledgement of historic disruption stemming from continental governance and academic extractivism that affect power dynamics (and perceptions) to this day. Ultimately, shared decision-making will only be truly possible when there is a foundation of trust between all partners. 

Further research and reflection is ongoing to assess the impact of sociocracy on the project’s outcomes. The lessons learned from this innovative endeavor will inform not only future phases of the HiCSC, but also other multi-stakeholder collaborations or community-based research projects seeking to implement sociocracy. The ultimate goal remains to create a governance structure that is as dynamic and resilient as the communities it serves, capable of evolving and responding to both challenges and opportunities.