The Agreement Accelerator
The Agreement Accelerator is coordination infrastructure designed to increase the rate at which self-governing agreements emerge and persist among actors who cannot be forced to cooperate.
It does this by identifying and working within existing functional sovereignty while strengthening inclusion, shared understanding, and trust.
The Agreement Accelerator is to self-governing agreements what the internet is to communication.
The internet does not create conversations. It provides infrastructure that dramatically lowers the cost of communication. Likewise, the Agreement Accelerator does not create agreements. It provides infrastructure intended to lower the cost of forming and sustaining self-governing agreements.
It adds a layer of coordination infrastructure to a society.
Four Conditions
The model proposes that self-governing agreements are more likely to emerge and persist when four conditions are sufficiently strong:
Functional Sovereignty | Inclusion | Shared Understanding | Trust
How It Operates
Information → Grouping → Agreement → Implementation
1. Information collection and sharing
Every few months, trained interviewers conduct structured interviews with influential actors across the system. Participants assess influence and commitment, describe the system's functional sovereignty, identify important challenges, and describe the reasons those challenges matter.
Influential actors also identify one another. Their aggregated assessments help determine who should be included in subsequent rounds, allowing participation to adapt as the system changes.
The information is anonymized, aggregated, and shared. The information is anonymized, aggregated, and shared with participants. Accelerator staff do not interpret the results for participants.
The result is a recurring, collectively generated picture of the system—produced by the actors within it rather than by outside experts.
2. Insights and grouping
The aggregated information of each round reveals themes of agreement and disagreement about influential actors, sovereignty, challenges, and meaning. Influential actors are able to identify which other organizations they will need to include to address a particular theme.
3. Challenges chosen, agreements negotiated and crafted
When any influential actor wants to initiate discussions to address a challenge, they can request an agreement circle in which Accelerator staff will guide the participants using structured questions derived from Ostrom's design principles. The actors themselves initiate agreement formation.
4. Implementation with support from other participating organizations
Once an agreement is negotiated and participants begin to implement the agreement, the agreement and its implementation status will be shared with all the influential actors as a whole, and with local formal and informal leaders. In this way, agreements can gain broader recognition and support, while successful approaches become visible for adaptation or imitation elsewhere.
Early field experience suggests that initial agreements can begin emerging within months. The model hypothesizes that, as agreements accumulate, they may reinforce one another—increasing durability, expanding participation, deepening alignment, and increasing the rate at which additional agreements form. These compounding effects have not yet been scientifically demonstrated.
Constitutional Principles
The Agreement Accelerator operates under four constitutional principles that deliberately limit the authority of the infrastructure itself.
1. Participation cannot be manipulated for advantage.
No funder, government, participating organization, or Accelerator staff member may control participation to produce a preferred political outcome. Participation and exclusion criteria are transparent and auditable.
2. Shared information cannot be manipulated for advantage.
Information is aggregated, anonymized, and shared transparently. No actor should reshape the shared picture through manipulating the data.
3. Agreements cannot be imposed.
Agreements are formed and implemented by participants. They are not designed, approved, or enforced by an external authority.
4. The Accelerator does not govern the participants.
The Agreement Accelerator provides coordination infrastructure. It does not acquire governing authority over the actors, agreements, or society in which it operates.
Where It Applies
The full Agreement Accelerator is designed for systems large enough that no individual or small team can adequately map and maintain the relevant relationships, information, and agreements.
At smaller scales, many of the same functions can often be performed through simpler and less expensive processes.
Evidence
The Agreement Accelerator emerged through more than a decade of field testing in Indonesia, Syria, Afghanistan, and Liberia. These tests provide preliminary evidence for elements of the model, but they do not constitute a scientific demonstration.
Explore the Evidence.