Steven Graham, a dear friend of mine and an insightful philanthropist who helped establish the Centre for the Future in Melbourne, often speaks of the need for a new mode of leadership; leadership for the greater good. It’s not an entirely original impulse, but the thought of a new model for dealing with the more unfortunate aspects of the human condition has become far more urgent of late.
In spite of that urgency, the pursuit of a re‑imagined mode of leadership has, for decades, been suffocated by a global obsession with administrative hygiene. Since the mid‑20th century, we have witnessed a stealthy abdication in which the messy, soulful arts of statesmanship and diplomacy were traded for the sterile, mechanical surrogate of advanced management. This was not just a cosmetic shift in organisational charts; it was a fundamental mutation of our collective consciousness. We allowed a managerial priesthood to take the altar, using a flattened land banal lexicon of metrics and optimisation while mistaking the map for the territory.
In doing so, we have been running yesterday’s systems a little more efficiently each year, even as those self-same systems accelerate us toward a civilisational precipice.
The Westphalian Ghost in the Machine
Nowhere is this confusion more lethal than in the geopolitical arena. Our current world‑system remains haunted by the Westphalian ghost – a 17th‑century model of sovereign silos attempting to govern 21st‑century metabolic flows. This mismatch generates a paralysis of intent. The nation‑state, as an industrial‑age construct, excels at territorial defence and economic extraction but falters when confronted by the borderless contagions of crises born out of complexity. Is the sovereign state itself becoming an obstacle to human survival? To approach that question, we need to articulate what now constitutes an escalating and highly complex global problematique.
At its core we’re witnessing the collision of two incompatible scales: the sluggish, bureaucratic friction of the nation‑state and the lightning‑fast, interconnected collapse of our biosphere and social cohesion. To navigate this labyrinthine dynamic, we must move beyond the binary chessboards of the Cold War. What I routinely refer to as industrial economism – the predatory, toxic aspect of the neoliberal capitalist paradigm – treats the planet as a warehouse and its inhabitants as mere economic throughput. Within this worldview, geopolitics is reduced to a zero‑sum game of competition and extraction.
To break this spell, incumbent “leaders” – for that is still the unfortunate term we give to those elected to public office – require a profound expansion of contextual intelligence and relational acuity. This involves seeing across the Sinic–Occidental divide not as a clash of civilisations, but as a necessary friction between different ways of knowing and being. Is it possible to integrate Vedic narratives of interconnectedness, or indigenous wisdom from what we casually label the Global South, into a governance structure that values harmony over hegemony? Most government ministers in the West would not have a clue what that even means, such is the paucity of their understanding.
Stewardship as a Social Identity
If we are to dismantle this industrial necrosis, we must first unlearn the “Great Man” myth. As I explored in The Five Literacies of Global Leadership, authority is more a property of the group than a trait of the individual. Drawing on social identity theory, I have argued that leadership is more a collective alchemy in which “leaders” act as a prototypical mirror, reflecting back to the group the values and stories that define who “we” are. When we view leadership through this lens, it ceases to be a positional entitlement and becomes a shared responsibility of stewardship.
This is the heartbeat of renewal starting from the grassroots. In the political sphere, it manifests as a rejection of the “manager‑in‑chief” in favour of what I sometimes think of as the alchemists of the local. These are the stewards who recognise that resilience cannot be parachuted in by a central government but must be grown in the soil of community trust. We see the seeds of this in movements that leverage direct democracy to bypass party duopolies, and in regional experiments that prioritise financial inclusion and social cohesion over extraction. These are not just alternative policies; they are manifestations of a different mindset – one that views the biosphere as our primary sovereign.
Deep Design and the Architecture of Viability
How do we transition from these local sparks of hope to a blaze that can be seen across continents? That requires the application of Deep Design. Most contemporary reform is purely cosmetic – rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Deep Design interrogates the DNA of our social and economic architectures. It asks: what are the underlying be;iefs and assumptions that make our current world‑system so inherently predatory? How is it possible that we keep behaving in the same way when the destruction this model is causing is in plain sight? What is the code embedded in our logic that allows such thinking to persist? If our current financial and governance systems are designed for extraction, might we re‑design them for regeneration?
Applying the literacies of ethical discernment and futures consciousness, Deep Design moves us away from the arrogant “strategic planning” of the industrial era toward more agile forms of strategic navigation or wayfinding – named after the expertise of the ancient Trukese explorers who traversed vast expanses of ocean by relying on ambient intelligence: the cries of birds, the tides, the behaviour of fish shoals, the location of the stars, and the sounds of the waves lapping on the hull of the boat. Navigation acknowledges that the currents are volatile and our maps are incomplete. It focuses on keeping the vessel afloat until our destination manifests on the horizon.
This is stewardship in its most potent sense – not the control of outcomes, but the cultivation of conditions in which life can thrive. It is a far cry from the contemporary habit of hiding behind process and precedent, and even further from the tools and procedures most commonly used by politicians and their bureaucracies today.
The Wager of Re‑Authorship
Perhaps the most heretical suggestion is that we stop asking for “better” leaders, whatever that means, and begin to examine the identities we reward. If leadership reflects who “we” think we are, then crises of leadership may be symptoms of deeper confusions about purpose and belonging. Are we willing to inhabit narratives that extend beyond consumption and control? Can we imagine prosperity without predation?
The post‑war experiment in managerial governance has run its course. It delivered stability for a time, but at the cost of imagination. Reclaiming leadership in politics – whether we call it statesmanship or something yet unnamed – will require us to relinquish comforting certainties. It will ask more of us than voting or protesting. It will demand that we become co‑authors of futures not yet scripted. We must become the architects of a world that works for everyone, moving from the factory of memory to the laboratory of the possible. That, at least, is the wager. Whether we are equal to it remains to be seen.
To understand why this wager feels so improbable, we need to examine the very idea whose failure we are still reluctant to name: leadership itself.
Leadership, Baggage and the Turn to Stewardship
The term leadership is exhausted. It’s been hollowed out by usage, commodified by an entire industry of management consultants, and loaded with so much historical and emotional baggage that, in many cases, it’s now an obstacle to any genuine transformation. We revere it, we train for it, we appoint it, we follow it and we blame it – but rarely do we interrogate what sits beneath it: the worldview that shaped it, the power relations that sustain it, and the psychological cravings that keep us hooked on it.
What if the very idea of leadership, as currently understood and practised, has become incompatible with the survival of complex civilisations, let alone the flourishing of life on Earth? And if that is even remotely plausible, what pattern of human coordination could take its place?
For several decades I worked with governments, corporations, civil society groups and insurgent movements across many cultures. I am still often paraded as a “leadership theorist”. In reality I am far more interested in the dissolution of leadership as an identity and its transmutation into something closer to stewardship – a fundamentally different orientation towards power, responsibility, time and value. Leadership, as we have been taught to enact it, belongs to the industrial era and the empire of the ego. Stewardship belongs to whatever comes after that – if anything does.
This essay is an attempt to prise these two apart. It’s not a call for kinder leaders, or servant leaders, or more ethical leaders, or even more diverse leaders. Those are incremental adjustments to a decaying operating system. I am more interested in whether we are ready to uninstall that system and install something else.
From Chiefdoms to Shareholder Value
In virtually every society, stories about leadership have grown up alongside stories about divinity, property and threat. At various points in human history, authority has been justified by bloodline, by proximity to the sacred, by martial prowess, by technical skill, and more recently by money. When we strip away the myths, most formal leadership has been a device for centralising decision‑making, legitimising inequality, and giving moral cover to organised violence. That is not a moral judgement so much as an observation that can be tracked through royal courts, empires, the colonial project, party politics, corporate governance, and even some religious hierarchies.
Industrial economism – the globalised doctrine that treats economic growth as both means and end – has simply updated the script. The monarch has become the CEO; the divine right has become shareholder value; the flag has become the brand. But the mechanics are familiar. A small cadre claims the right to decide on behalf of the many, drawing on a particular story about value and risk. That story is then embedded in legal codes, management practices, media narratives and, crucially, in our own expectations. We come to believe that progress depends upon “strong leadership”. We ask: who will lead us? We rarely ask: why must we be led in this way at all?
Most contemporary leadership theory still swims in these waters. Even when the vocabulary softens – servant leadership, adaptive leadership, compassionate leadership – the architecture remains: a centre and a periphery, leaders and followers, control and compliance, winners and losers. The leader may be benevolent, but the pyramid stands.
If the aim is to optimise output from a relatively stable system – a factory, an army, a bureaucracy – that architecture can function tolerably well, at least in the short term. The problem is that we are no longer living inside relatively stable systems. We are facing cascading disruptions: climatic, ecological, technological, geopolitical, psychological. We have built an exquisitely interconnected civilisation on an assumption of controllability that is no longer valid, if it ever was. Under such conditions, leadership as control becomes an illusion and, worse, a hazard. The more tightly we cling to it, the more fragile we become.
The Baggage We Refuse to Unpack
When I talk about the “baggage of leadership” I am not referring to the personal insecurities or neuroses of people in charge, although those certainly play a part. I am pointing to four deeper legacies that attach themselves to most leadership cultures, regardless of rhetoric.
The first is domination masquerading as responsibility. Leadership is habitually framed as taking responsibility for others. That sounds noble. But responsibility easily slides into paternalism: “I know what is best for you.” Once this logic is accepted, coercion appears “necessary” for the greater good. History is littered with atrocities justified by this move. Even in everyday organisational life, we see decisions taken about people without them, rationalised as “tough calls”.
The second is the fetish of the individual hero. Stories of leadership gravitate towards singular figures, mostly men: the visionary founder, the reforming president, the genius entrepreneur, the charismatic cleric. Reality, as far as I can tell, is composed of entangled contributions from countless visible and invisible agents. Yet the myth of the hero leader persists because it is narratively convenient and emotionally comforting. It plays neatly into the cult of the individual, allowing us to outsource agency and to blame a person rather than confront a system.
The third is the obsession with scarcity and competition. Industrial economism assumes that value is created through rivalry – firms competing for market share, nations competing for GDP rankings, universities competing for reputation, individuals competing for rankings within organisations. Leadership within this frame warps into the art of winning. In such an environment, collaboration is tolerated only to the extent that it advances competitive advantage. Stewardship of shared conditions – the biosphere, social cohesion, mental health – if it exists at all, becomes secondary, often an afterthought.
The fourth is temporal myopia. Most leaders are rewarded for short time‑horizons: quarterly returns, electoral cycles, campaign wins, media impressions. The longer arc – generations not quarters; ecosystems not products; cultures not campaigns – receives rhetorical respect but little operational attention. This is not because leaders are inherently incapable of long‑term thinking. It is because the system incentivises the opposite. Leadership, under these conditions, is structurally entrained to betray the future.
These four elements – domination, hero worship, competitive scarcity and temporal myopia – journey together. They constitute the cultural luggage we drag from one leadership seminar to the next, rarely opening the suitcase to see what’s inside. They are also deeply embedded in upbringing, education and religion. Children are taught to obey authority before they are invited to exercise discernment. Students are sorted into hierarchies of “talent”. Faith communities are urged to “follow”. By the time those children become adults enrolling in “leadership development programmes”, most of the coding is already in place.
Is it any wonder that, around the world, trust in formal leaders is evaporating? Surveys in many regions show political parties, big business and key institutions languishing near the bottom of trust indices. That loss of confidence is often lamented as a “crisis of leadership”. I read it differently. It might be an early symptom of a civilisation quietly realising that its leadership story has reached a dead end.
Why Reform Is No Longer Enough
When confronted with the failures of leadership, the conventional response is to tweak the model. We tell leaders to be more authentic, transparent, emotionally intelligent, inclusive, diverse. Training industries spring up, selling emotional literacy modules to corporations whose business models remain structurally harmful. We coach executives in mindfulness while their organisations continue to degrade the living conditions of future generations. We appoint “Chief Sustainability Officers” to help companies appear green while core incentives remain tied to extraction and volume.
These adjustments are not totally useless. At a personal level, greater self‑awareness and empathy can reduce harm. Diverse voices can puncture insular groupthink. Yet the deeper pattern remains untouched. We are still moving pieces around within the same game. If leadership is still casually defined as “getting people from here to there”, the crucial question becomes: who defines “here”, who defines “there”, and on what basis?
In most cases, “there” is pre‑defined by the industrial logic: more growth, more throughput, more control, more scale. Sustainability, resilience, inclusion – these are added as constraints around that core objective, not as a re‑framing of value itself. Leadership then becomes the art of reconciling cosmetic virtue with systemic vice.
There is another difficulty. Leadership development programmes frequently focus on skills and mindsets at the level of the individual, ignoring the architecture in which that individual must operate. You can coach a leader to listen, to empathise, to think systemically. But if they return to an institution whose metrics remain fixated on short‑term financial performance, their room for manoeuvre is minimal. They either adapt to the prevailing logic or they leave. In either case, the system wins.
This is why appeals for “better leadership” so often feel hollow. They invite us to personalise what is essentially structural, leaving the pyramid untouched. To break this pattern we need to shift our gaze from the glamorous apex of the pyramid to the ground upon which it stands. Instead of “How can we improve leadership?”, a more potent inquiry is: “What forms of collective responsibility become possible when we no longer organise power as a pyramid at all?” That is where the notion of stewardship enters.
Stewardship: A Different Gravity
I use the word stewardship reluctantly, aware that in some circles it has religious associations or corporate “ESG” connotations that risk blunting its edge. Yet it remains one of the few words that points towards a fundamentally different orientation to power.
If leadership is about directing others, stewardship is about protecting, nurturing and enhancing conditions. The object of attention shifts from followers to relationships; from control over people to care for patterns; from winning in a game to redesigning the game so that life can endure and flourish. The steward does not stand outside or above a system, pulling levers. They are immanent to it, co‑implicated in it. They recognise that every intervention has ripples, many of them invisible or delayed. Hence, instead of the leader’s fondness for spectacle and rapid results, the steward cultivates a more patient, less theatrical sensibility: convening, listening for weak signals, adjusting feedback loops, attending to the health of the whole rather than the triumph of a part.
Stewardship also reconfigures time. While leadership as practised in industrial economism is usually present‑tense and backward‑looking (protecting existing advantages, defending sunk costs), stewardship is inherently transgenerational. It asks: what previous events are unwittingly guiding today’s decisions and what might be the consequences of our responses and new initiatives for people we will never meet, in places we will never see? That is not a sentimental question; it is pragmatic once we accept that our species has acquired planetary‑scale power, whether we like it or not.
Is stewardship then just “ethical leadership” under another name? I am not persuaded, for at least one critical reason. Stewardship undermines the hero narrative. It disperses agency. A steward does not say: “I will lead you.” They say: “We are all entangled in a web of consequences. How do we take care of that web together?” If leadership thrives on visibility and acclaim, stewardship is most effective when it becomes ordinary, distributed, almost invisible – when many people, in many places, adopt the same underlying orientation without needing to proclaim it.
This is why we may need to reject leadership, not just improve or rebrand it. The very word drags us back into the orbit of the hero, the hierarchy, the glamorous centre. When we speak of stewardship, the glamour drains away and responsibility floods in.
Rethinking Power: From Ownership to Custodianship
At the heart of the shift from leadership to stewardship lies a re‑imagining of power. Under industrial economism, power is primarily conceived as ownership and control: control of energy, land, data, capital, labour, narratives. In that context, leadership becomes the craft of gaining, preserving and leveraging those assets.
Stewardship, by contrast, treats power as relational and provisional. Nobody truly “owns” a river, a data network, a child, or an idea. We are temporary custodians of flows that existed before us and will outlast us. The most we can do is to shape how those flows are channelled and to whom they are accessible. Increasingly this is a practical stance. In a hyper‑connected world such as ours, the fiction of isolated ownership is becoming harder to sustain. A company that treats a rainforest as its property to be logged, for instance, may trigger climatic shifts that undermine agriculture half a continent away. A government that hoards strategic resources may provoke conflict that spills across borders. Ownership in this sense is a comforting legal fantasy. Materially, we are all immersed in the same planetary metabolism.
If power is reframed as custodianship, several consequences follow. First, extractive thinking becomes less credible. You cannot sensibly talk about “maximising shareholder returns” if you accept that the capital you manage is inseparable from the living systems and social fabrics upon which those shareholders themselves depend.
Second, the idea of “externalities” begins to dissolve. Under current economic doctrine, harms that do not show up on a firm’s balance sheet are treated as side‑effects. Stewardship rejects that. Spreading costs onto people who did not approve – or creatures who cannot consent – becomes a breach of custodial duty. Any organisation that depends upon such breaches is, by definition, not stewarding.
Third, accountability extends beyond the human and beyond the present. If our actions degrade the capacity of ecosystems to regenerate, erode cultural diversity, ignore the richness of the more‑than‑human world, or diminish the wellbeing of those yet unborn, stewardship would regard that as a misuse of power – even if current laws permit it and markets reward it. This is where existing governance structures are struggling. They were not designed to hold such horizons.
It might sound radical to say that our political and economic systems are structurally incapable of stewardship. Yet if that is even partially true, the task ahead of us is not to humanise those systems but to replace them with new arrangements in which the guardianship of shared conditions – ecological, social, informational and existential – is no longer a decorative slogan but the organising principle of power itself. That demands a politics and a geopolitics in which the primary obligation of those who wield authority is not to maximise national advantage or shareholder gain, but to act as temporary trustees of a living world they did not create and have no right to destroy. Whether we call that stewardship, guardianship or civilisational trusteeship is almost secondary; what matters is the shift from ruling over people to taking responsibility for the consequences of decisions across borders, across generations and across species.
The Industrial Cage and Its Invisible Bars
Most people alive today were schooled, employed and governed within the mental architecture of industrial economism. It taught us that progress equals growth, that competition drives improvement, that markets allocate resources efficiently, that nature is a stock of inputs, and that technology will solve almost any of the problems generated by previous rounds of technology. It taught us to treat the biosphere as a backdrop, communities as labour pools, culture as lifestyle.
Within that architecture, leadership became the art of achieving targets – production quotas, sales numbers, poll ratings – within given constraints. Ethical debates were framed as trade‑offs inside that same box. We argued about the distribution of benefits, rarely disputing the design of the machine generating those benefits.
Stewardship cannot flourish inside this cage. It challenges the bars. It asks: what if the machine itself is incompatible with the continuity of life? What if GDP growth is a misleading indicator of wellbeing? What if efficiency, as currently defined, is simply the speed at which we convert living complexity into dead commodities? What if the technologies we celebrate are, in aggregate, making our civilisation more brittle, not more resilient?
When such questions are raised, they are often brushed aside as fantasy or dismissed as “unrealistic”. Realism, in most policy circles, now means compliance with industrial logic. Stewards are told to stay in their lane – to tinker with corporate social responsibility or to offset emissions while the main engine of extraction roars on.
From where I sit, that kind of realism looks more like denial. It is denial in the precise psychological sense: a refusal to metabolise information that threatens identity. Leaders, especially those feted publicly as successful, are heavily invested in the story that their achievements were meaningful. If that story is punctured in any way – for instance if it turns out that their algorithms fuelled addiction, their logistics chains normalised exploitation, or their infrastructure unlocked irreversible environmental tipping points – what then? Very few are willing to go there.
Stewardship, however, cannot avoid that reckoning. It begins with the admission that much of what passes for leadership has been accelerating the degradation of the conditions we need to endure. That is a brutal insight. It is also the only entry point to a different civilisational story.
From Followers to Co‑Stewards
One of the more insidious legacies of leadership culture is the figure of the follower. The very act of constructing some as leaders implies that others are defined primarily by their willingness to be led and to follow like sheep. Military ranks, organisational diagrams, religious hierarchies – all encode this distinction.
Stewardship undermines that binary. The moment you recognise that your routine decisions – about what to buy, what to invest in, what to design, how to speak, which norms to reinforce – ripple out into wider systems, you are already a steward. The question is not whether you are one, but whether you are any good at it.
In this sense, stewardship is less a role than a disposition. It is an orientation that can be expressed by a parent deciding how to raise a child in a collapsing climate, by an engineer choosing which problems to devote their skills to, by a farmer reshaping practices to restore soil, by a coder refusing to build more addictive interfaces, by an educator redesigning curricula to expand the moral imagination of her students.
Of course, not everyone currently has equal latitude to act. Structural constraints such as poverty, repression, lack of an education, discrimination – narrow the range of options open to many. Yet even under crushingly repressive conditions, informal patterns of care and mutual aid often emerge. People hold together communities under siege, share resources quietly, protect the vulnerable at personal risk. Those acts are not usually labelled as leadership. They are almost always acts of stewardship.
The important shifts are psychological and cultural. If we cease to wait for leaders to save us and recognise ourselves as co‑stewards of shared conditions, our questions as well as our options change. Instead of “Who should be in charge?” we begin to ask “What can we do, from where we stand, to help life endure and thrive?” Institutions then become tools to coordinate stewardship at scale, not pyramids to climb.
These shifts have profound implications for education. They imply that every child, regardless of geography or personal circumstance, should be invited to see themselves not as a future employee in someone else’s industrial script but as a present‑tense co‑author of the society in which they dwell. Their skills – whether scientific, artistic, practical or relational – become instruments for stewardship, not just currency in a job market that may not even exist in a recognisable form in thirty years’ time.
Stewardship in a Technological Storm
We are living through an extraordinary explosion of technological competence. Large language models can now generate text, images and code with startling fluency. Biotechnologies allow the editing of genomes. Surveillance systems track movement, speech and even emotional states. Weapons systems operate with increasing autonomy. Financial algorithms execute millions of transactions per second, moving capital across borders faster than any regulatory apparatus can monitor.
None of these capabilities are inherently malign. Yet they have been developed and deployed almost entirely within the logic of industrial economism: to maximise profit, concentrate advantage, and externalise risk. The result is a suite of tools that amplify existing power asymmetries whilst generating novel forms of fragility and harm.
Take the political economy of data. A handful of corporations now possess detailed behavioural profiles of billions of people. That information is used to shape attention, influence purchasing decisions, and increasingly to sway electoral outcomes. Governments collaborate with these firms, purchasing access or demanding back doors. The rhetoric speaks of “innovation” and “connectivity”. The material reality, however, is a planetary panopticon in which consent has become largely fictional.
If stewardship means anything in this context, it would require those with access to such systems to ask: what long‑term consequences follow from concentrating this much power over human perception and choice? What happens to democratic deliberation when algorithms curate reality for commercial or political advantage? Who benefits, who is harmed, and who gets to decide?
Yet these questions are rarely posed by those building or deploying the new technologies. They are too busy racing competitors, chasing valuations, or complying with national security imperatives. The system rewards speed and scale, not reflection or restraint. In such an environment, stewardship is structurally disadvantaged.
Does this mean we should abandon the concept? Perhaps. Or perhaps it reveals that stewardship cannot function as an individual virtue or corporate programme. It requires a different configuration of power altogether – one in which technological capability is governed not by markets or states alone but by forms of collective deliberation that can hold longer time horizons and broader accountabilities.
What those forms might look like remains an open question. But the current arrangements – where a few CEOs, wealthy technocrats and politicians make choices with planetary ramifications, insulated from the consequences – are plainly incompatible with any meaningful notion of care for shared conditions.
Sovereignty, Competition and Collective Suicide
Let me return to the domain where the language of stewardship feels most inadequate: geopolitics. Here the inherited grammar is one of sovereignty, national interest, strategic advantage and existential threat. States compete for resources, influence and security. Alliances form and fracture. Military buildups are justified as deterrence. Trade is weaponised. Migration is securitised. The biosphere becomes a theatre of rivalry.
Within this frame, calls for stewardship sound naïve at best, treasonous at worst. A government that prioritises the wellbeing of people in other nations, or the integrity of ecosystems beyond its borders, risks being outmanoeuvred by rivals who face no such scruples. The logic is Hobbesian: in a world of competing sovereignties, cooperation is fragile and trust is scarce. The rational strategy is to maximise relative power, even if doing so degrades absolute conditions for everyone.
This is the geopolitical trap, and it is tightening every year. Climate breakdown does not respect borders. Pandemics do not require visas. Financial contagion spreads in milliseconds. Cyber attacks cripple infrastructure across continents. Nuclear arsenals remain poised for launch. Yet the institutional architecture we rely upon to manage these risks – including the United Nations, World Health Organization, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, as well as trade agreements and multilateral treaties – was designed for a world of relatively stable nation‑states with relatively contained externalities. That world no longer exists, if it ever did.
What we face instead is a condition of compulsory interdependence within a system that still valorises competitive advantage. Every state knows that its security depends on planetary stability, yet every state is incentivised to defect from collective agreements if doing so yields a short‑term edge. The result is a kind of slow‑motion tragedy of the commons, played out at civilisational scale.
Can stewardship address this? I am genuinely uncertain. The term carries connotations of care, patience and humility – qualities in short supply among those who command armies, intelligence agencies and nuclear codes. It also implies a degree of trust and shared vulnerability that most regimes are structurally unwilling to entertain. To speak the language of stewardship into this arena, without altering the underlying incentives and mythologies, is to invite it to be neutered and repurposed as public relations.
At that point we run into a deeper pathology, which is not simply a failure of care but the way leadership itself has been engineered in the geopolitical realm.
Leadership as Organised Irresponsibility
Politics is where leadership shows its teeth. Here, the sentimental talk about “servant leaders” and “visionary CEOs” evaporates. Power is naked. Budgets, borders and bodies are on the line. Any language that sounds remotely pastoral – including stewardship – feels anaemic when set against realpolitik, nuclear doctrine and the permanent war economy.
Most contemporary geopolitics rests on a simple, rarely challenged axiom: the primary responsibility of political leaders is to protect and advance the interests of their own state or faction. The term “national interest” performs the same function today as “divine right” did for monarchies: it excuses behaviour that would be regarded as pathological at any other scale. Lying becomes “strategic ambiguity”. Economic strangulation becomes “sanctions policy”. Civilian deaths become “collateral damage”.
In that sense, the modern state system has turned leadership into a sophisticated apparatus for distributing irresponsibility. No single leader ever feels fully accountable for planetary outcomes. Each points to rival states, past treaties, domestic constraints, historical grievance. Yet the aggregate effect of their decisions is a planetary climate in freefall, arms races in multiple domains, and a world order in which a few miscalculations could terminate complex life as we know it.
This is leadership as organised irresponsibility: highly skilled, intensely rational within its own frame, and functionally suicidal at a species level.
If that sounds melodramatic, ask yourself a plain question: what is the endgame of a geopolitical doctrine that still treats endless growth, deterrence by terror, resource hoarding and information warfare as normal? Can that doctrine be patched and updated, or does it need to be retired? From that vantage point, I am not convinced that sprinkling the language of stewardship on this machinery will do anything other than provide a softer soundtrack for the same choreography. Unless we are willing to question the most fundamental tenets of sovereignty, national interest and heroic leadership that structure geopolitics today, “stewardship” will remain a decorative label on an operating system programmed for collective self‑harm.
Sovereignty, Scarcity and the Fiction of “Us”
The most stubborn obstacle is the way we draw circles of belonging. Every political order depends upon an imagined “we”. That constituency might be defined in constitutional terms, ethnic terms, religious terms, or ideological terms. Whatever its basis, this “we” has boundaries, and those outside the line become “they”. Leadership, in the geopolitical sense, is the craft of defending this circle – its territory, its norms, its supplies, its status – against real or imagined threats. Even multilateral institutions were built by and for such entities. They are clubs of competing “we’s”, tasked with negotiating rules of engagement while leaving the basic structure of rival sovereignties untouched.
This might have been workable when our collective power to damage planetary life‑support systems was modest. Now it is lethal. The biosphere does not recognise “us” and “them”. The ocean does not care about mutually assured destruction. Viruses do not stop at immigration checkpoints. Yet most politicians still speak and act as though their ultimate obligation stops at the border, and often not even there – more often at the next election, or the next opinion poll.
Here, the standard defences of leadership ring hollow. We are told that “strong leadership” is needed to navigate complex threats. But the threats are, in large part, the product of how strength is currently defined: the size of arsenals, the depth of capital markets, the reach of intelligence networks, the capacity to coerce. If strength continues to be measured in those terms, no amount of virtuous rhetoric will alter the trajectory.
So we face an uncomfortable possibility. What if the Westphalian notion of sovereignty itself – the carved‑up map of rival states vying for advantage – has become incompatible with a viable planetary civilisation? And if that is even partially true, what comes after it?
I do not pretend to have a neat blueprint. Any suggestion that we can simply dissolve states into one benevolent world government is fantasy, and usually a Western fantasy at that. But to cling to the current arrangement as the pinnacle of political evolution is also fantasy – the sort that ends in rubble.
Stewardship Without Sentimentality
I am also still concerned about the language of stewardship. Words acquire barnacles. Stewardship has become a staple in corporate sustainability reports and philanthropic brochures. It is often used to rebrand business‑as‑usual with a faint halo or to greenwash policies.
In politics and geopolitics the problem is sharper. “Stewardship” can sound like an invitation to be nice in a knife fight. It evokes care, but not strategy; responsibility, but not force. It underplays conflict, and conflict is not going away any time soon. Humans disagree. Values clash. Resources are finite. Predation exists, both in markets and in ministries.
If stewardship is to be of any use here, it must be stripped of sentimentality. It would need to work in the same harsh theatre where sanctions are drafted and drones are launched. It would have to stare down real threats without becoming indistinguishable from the predatory logics it opposes.
Perhaps that moves us closer to another vocabulary entirely – something more akin to guardianship, or custodial realism, or civilisational trusteeship. I genuinely do not know. None of those terms are especially elegant, but they begin to evoke a quality missing from current discourse: a willingness to accept that we exercise power on behalf of worlds we did not create and lives we will not live.
What would it mean for a head of state, a foreign minister, a general, to act not primarily as the defender of a bordered “us” but as a temporary trustee of the conditions that allow any “us” to exist at all?
Power, Force and the Logic of Protection
The industrial worldview taught us to conflate power with domination. To be powerful is to impose one’s will, to bend others to one’s agenda, to take. Under that definition, any talk of care is perceived as weakness.
A different political imagination would distinguish sharply between power and force. Force is the capacity to coerce: armies, police, financial leverage, legal compulsion. Power, in a deeper sense, is the capacity to shape realities: narratives, norms, infrastructures, expectations. Leadership as we practise it today worships force while pretending to exercise power. It is obsessive about control while being strangely blind to the longer arcs it is inscribing into history.
If we were to step away from leadership as domination, and away from stewardship as pious sideline, we would need a form of guardianship that is entirely explicit about when and how force is used – and for whom.
Protection might be the pivot here. Every regime justifies itself in the language of protection: protecting citizens from enemies, protecting markets from collapse, protecting culture from dilution. The question that almost never gets asked is: protection of what, from what, for whom, and at whose expense?
A politics oriented around civilisational guardianship would invert that interrogation. Its primary object of protection would not be a flag, a GDP graph, or an electoral base. It would be the enabling matrix that underpins everything else: stable climate patterns, habitable territories, functioning commons, dense social fabrics, credible shared information spaces. In that context, many activities currently labelled “security” would be reclassified as threats.
Is building more nuclear weapons an act of protection or an act of existential vandalism? Is subsidising fossil fuels a rational defence of national industry or a direct assault on future citizens? Is hoarding vaccines a patriotic duty or a way of prolonging pandemics? These are diagnostic questions that expose the schizophrenia of our current leadership paradigm.
The Missing Word
Because of the temperament of human nature – and our maintenance of expectations that we can still control our environment and each other – I remain unconvinced by the term stewardship but unsure what to use instead. Language is not a cosmetic matter; it sculpts the range of actions we can imagine. Leadership is saturated. Stewardship is at risk of being sentimentalised or captured. Governance has become technocratic. Management is too small. Perhaps we do not yet have a mature word because we have not yet done the civilisational work that would warrant one.
We might be in a transitional epoch – no longer able to believe in the old hero‑leader, not yet able to embody a genuinely post‑predatory political form. In such a liminal space, any label will feel provisional. Maybe that is a strength. A fixed name can harden into a new orthodoxy far too quickly.
Still, we need a placeholder robust enough to interrogate geopolitics without being laughed out of the room. For now, I will stay with stewardship, but only if we load it with several non‑negotiable attributes: strategic acumen, systemic literacy, anticipatory foresight, moral courage, and a willingness to confront one’s own complicity in the very harms one seeks to remedy. If any concept of stewardship cannot look a general, a dictator, a hedge fund titan or a tech oligarch in the eye and demand account, it is simply not worth the breath.
Politics Beyond Left and Right
Part of the difficulty is that our political compass is broken. The left–right axis is a museum piece, yet we still use it as though it can orient us in a world of collapsing ice sheets, runaway AI and financial derivatives. One side calls for markets; the other for states. One venerates freedom; the other justice. Both accept industrial growth as the sacred and unquestionable centre of gravity. Both seek leaders: ideological champions to rally their faction and defeat the enemy camp.
A politics of stewardship or guardianship would not fit this axis. It would be neither left nor right, neither libertarian nor authoritarian in the usual sense. Its organising principle would be the long‑term viability of complex life, not the short‑term satisfaction of particular class interests or cultural identities. This will be deeply unsettling for many, yet I cannot see a dramatically different alternative. Today’s political identities are comforting. They save us from having to rethink everything. But rethinking everything might be precisely what this moment demands.
Geopolitically, that could mean alliances based less on ideology or historical convenience and more on a shared willingness to restrain certain forms of power that are now evidently lethal: unrestricted fossil extraction, autonomous weapons, invasive surveillance, financial speculation detached from real value creation. Whether any existing bloc is ready for that is an open question.
Where Might a Different Logic Emerge?
If 3rd-order change of the kind we’re contemplating is unlikely to originate from the apex of existing hierarchies – and the evidence so far suggests it is – where could a post‑leadership, post‑predatory political logic incubate?
Possibly in cities that recognise their dependence on trans‑local commons: watersheds, air basins, food webs, digital infrastructures. Possibly in networks of indigenous communities whose traditions never fully accepted the separation of humans from land, or politics from ecology. Possibly in new federations such as the BRICS+ community. Possibly in coalitions of so‑called middle powers – states large enough to matter but small enough to know they cannot dominate indefinitely – experimenting with new forms of mutual security that are not premised on perpetual deterrence.
Or perhaps it will emerge from below and across, rather than above: through cross‑border movements of citizens, scientists, artists, municipal leaders, hackers, educators, and small‑scale producers who are simply tired of waiting for presidents and prime ministers to grow up. These are not utopian speculations. Such patterns are already visible, albeit fragmented and under‑resourced.
In all of these embryonic forms I see less interest in “leaders” and more in convenors, translators, navigators, integrators – those who can align diverse interests around the integrity of shared conditions. They might still be called leaders for want of a better word. But what they actually do is closer to high‑stakes custodianship, exercised in the full glare of a system trying to drag them back into the old game.
Rejecting Leadership as Identity
Perhaps, in the end, the most radical move is not linguistic but ontological: to stop treating leadership as an identity at all. The moment someone says “I am a leader” we should be suspicious. Of what exactly? Of the ego’s thirst for status? Of a marketing department’s need for heroes? Of a culture addicted to the fantasy that salvation comes from singular figures, most of whom turn out to be “strong” men?
What if we were to relate to leadership as a transient function – a role that sometimes needs to be played in specific contexts, but that carries no inherent entitlement, and certainly no moral superiority? In such a frame, the collective experience would matter far more than individual charisma. Authority, when needed, would be earned by demonstrated guardianship of shared conditions, not by wealth or the ability to dominate.
Politically, that would mean dismantling much of the theatre we currently mistake for democracy: the gladiatorial contests, the leader‑centric branding, the coverage that treats elections as horse races rather than as moments in a longer civilisational experiment. Geopolitically, it might mean redesigning institutions so that no single office or individual can unilaterally make decisions with irreversible planetary consequences.
Is such a transformation likely? I don’t know. Pragmatism would suggest not. But likelihood is a poor guide in moments where the default trajectory points towards systemic breakdown. The relevant question is not: is it probable? It is: is it necessary, and if so, how might we begin?
Provisional Thoughts on a Different Word
In this essay I have circled around language, perhaps too long. Let me be explicit. Stewardship, as I use it here, is a placeholder for a deeper shift: from ruling over to caring for; from identity to function; from advantage for some to viability for all. If another term emerges that carries this more accurately into political and geopolitical practice – a term that cannot be so easily co‑opted by PR departments and summit declarations – I will gladly adopt it. Until then, I will continue to interrogate leadership, expose its baggage, and use stewardship almost against itself: not as a soothing slogan, but as a disruptive demand. A demand that those who claim to lead prove, in deeds not in speeches, that they are worthy trustees of a living world they did not make and cannot control.
Anything less is just a more polished version of the same old story – and that story has run out of a future.