Devolution has become a household word in the UK and a major policy objective of the Andy Burnham administration. It refers to the transfer of power from the central government in Westminster to a nested hierarchy of smaller jurisdictions; from the Scottish Parliament, Senedd Cymru (the Welsh Parliament) and the Northern Ireland Assembly, to combined authorities such as Greater Manchester, where Burnham served as Mayor, and down to local councils. Through devolution, Burnham seeks improvements in every postcode of the UK.
Those with experience in devolution efforts, such as University College London’s Institute of Health Equity and England’s Local Government Association, identify at least three major limiting factors[1]:
1) Lack of a common language: Devolution efforts bring diverse people who live within the jurisdictions together with experts across multiple policy domains, such as economics, education, the environment, and health. Each expert speaks the lingo of their discipline but not the lingo of other disciplines. There is a common language problem to be solved among the experts, before they attempt to communicate with the citizens or the citizens with each other.
2) Matching governmental jurisdictions with the problems that need to be solved: Governmental boundaries are not natural units. Any particular problem to be solved, such as designing a circular economy, improving environmental impacts on health, or addressing social inequities, requires cooperation and coordination among the relevant governmental jurisdictions and stakeholders in a highly contextual fashion.
3) A lack of adaptability: Devolution efforts invariably require change at all scales, from the individual person to institutions that date back centuries. Yet, change is often difficult, even when earnestly desired. Every year, individuals make their new year resolutions and typically fail to keep them. The academic disciplines attempting to address 21st century problems originated in the 19th century and have become fossilized as departments at universities, which become obstacles for transdisciplinary efforts.
There is a path toward addressing these limiting factors. It is called generalized Darwinism (GD) and so far it is largely missing from conversations about devolution in the UK. This essay will introduce GD and show how it can provide a common language, systems of governance that are matched to context, and adaptability to work around obstacles to achieve valued goals.
What is GD?
GD is the study of any process that combines the ingredients of variation, selection, and replication (VSR), resulting in adaptation of the evolving entity to its environment. It is how Darwin and his peers thought about evolution, having little knowledge of the underlying mechanisms. With the advent of Mendelian genetics in the early 20th century, however, the study of evolution became centered on genetic evolution, as if the only way that offspring can resemble their parents is by sharing the same genes. GD is therefore a return to the basics of Darwinian evolution and very new as far as the human-related academic disciplines and their policy applications are concerned[2]. GD is not to be confused with Social Darwinism and is diametrically opposed to it, as I have shown in a companion essay.
VSR processes other than genetic evolution include epigenetic evolution (based on changes in gene expression rather than gene frequency), forms of associative learning found in humans and many other species, and forms of symbolic thought that are distinctively human. VSR processes can be programmed on computers and pervade the current AI revolution.
VSR processes can take place within a single organism as well as across generations. The adaptive component of the immune system is a well-known example; the creation of millions of antibodies (V) and selection (S) and replication (R) of those that bind to antigens. Open-ended learning is the trying out of different behavioral options (V) and selection (S) and retention (R) of those that achieve a given goal such as food acquisition[3]. B.F. Skinner was among the first to appreciate “selection by consequences” as a common denominator linking individual learning, multi-generational cultural evolution, and multi-generational genetic evolution[4].
The most important point to make about GD for this essay is its potential to provide a common language across all academic disciplines and public policy domains, thereby addressing the first limiting factor for devolution efforts listed above. This is something that has already been accomplished for the study of genetic evolution, providing a solid proof of concept that can be extended to the human-related disciplines.
The study of the natural world is divided into at least as many disciplines as the study of the human species. Darwin’s theory of evolution did not replace disciplinary knowledge but provided a unifying conceptual framework for it. In Darwin’s day, this included identity by descent, the geographical distribution of species, the fossil record, the development of organisms from egg to adult, the wonderful contrivances that adapt organisms to their environments, and “the question of questions”--the origin and nature of our species[5].
From the beginning, these topics became unified by the simple recognition of VSR as the main engine of change in living systems. Today, the same toolkit of concepts remains the unifying framework for the biological sciences, despite orders of magnitude more information that requires organization. Biologists take this for granted, but it is very different from the human-related disciplines, which remain an archipelago of islands, each speaking its own separate language.
To illustrate, I will show how the second and third limiting factors listed above can be addressed from a GD perspective. In each case, effective practices evolved on a given “island” of the disciplinary “archipelago” but failed to spread beyond its borders over a period of decades. The contribution of GD is to generalize these practices so they can be seen to apply to all positive change efforts, no matter what the scale or topic domain.
Polycentric Governance
An explicit framework exists for matching systems of governance to the problems that need to be addressed. It is called polycentric governance and it originated in a particular school of thought within the discipline of political science. Its main architects were Vincent and Elinor Ostrom and its main context was the management of common-pool resources. Conventional wisdom held that these resources were always vulnerable to overuse by their members (the famous tragedy of the commons[6]) and that the only solutions were to privatize the resource when possible or impose top-down regulation. By studying common-pool resource groups around the world, Elinor Ostrom showed that some were able to avoid the tragedy of the commons on their own and derived eight “core design principles” for their self-management.
In addition to governance at the scale of single groups, the Ostroms and their colleagues also developed a concept of polycentric governance based on the following principles: 1) Life consists of many spheres of activity; 2) Each sphere has an optimal scale; 3) Good governance requires determining the optimal scale for each activity and appropriately coordinating among the spheres. Importantly, the core design principles for governing interactions among groups are much the same as for governing within-group interactions.
The most influential book on these subjects was Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, published in 1990. She and the “Bloomington School of Political Economy” achieved a degree of fame within the discipline of political science but were largely unknown beyond its borders and beyond the context of common-pool resource groups. Elinor Ostrom achieved wider recognition when she shared the Nobel prize in economics in 2009 but even this was circumscribed. At the time she was almost totally unknown among economists and the principles of polycentric governance are difficult to reconcile with mainstream economic theory[7]. Ask any audience–including an economic audience–who has heard of Elinor Ostrom (much less assimilate the meaning of her work), and you will get only a smattering of hands.
Then, shortly after she received the Nobel prize, the CDPs for single groups and polycentric governance of multiple groups began to be generalized from a GD perspective[8]. They were no longer a particular school of thought within a particular academic discipline, applying to a particular kind of group. They became part of a general theory of functional organization, which can be applied to all human cooperative endeavors, regardless of their scale or specific context.
Returning to devolution efforts in the UK, there is widespread recognition of the need to match governmental jurisdictions and stakeholders with the problems that need to be solved, but very little awareness of Elinor Ostrom or the body of work that she represents. The common language provided by GD can remedy this situation by explicitly applying a polycentric governmental approach to devolution efforts. A good place to start is the book Governing Complexity: Analyzing and Applying Polycentricity, published by Cambridge University Press. An instructive case study is a polycentric system that evolved to create and maintain community-governed greenspaces in racially marginalized neighborhoods in Chicago, USA[9].
Adaptability
Effective methods for helping individuals and groups achieve valued goals have repeatedly arisen on the many islands of the archipelago. They spread to a degree on the basis of their success but then come up against the boundaries of their disciplines, beyond which they are unknown.
One method called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy/Training (ACT, pronounced as one word) recently passed the milestone of being supported by 1500 randomized control trials. People who are highly distressed are said to need therapy but anyone–even the most elite athletes– can benefit from training. The principles of ACT apply across the entire range of current functioning and at the level of organizations in addition to individuals. Indeed, after successful testing in several randomized control trials, the World Health Organization now freely distributes an ACT-based program called Self-Help Plus in 21 different languages because it successfully altered adaptability and mental health outcomes in victims of war, and the WHO concluded it was helpful “for anyone who experiences stress, wherever they live and whatever their circumstances[10].”
ACT involves a dialectic that moves between “inner” thoughts and feelings and “outer” actions. What are the valued goals within a given context (inner) providing the direction that we want to move toward? What are the actions (outer) that will help us get there? What other thoughts and feelings are inside our heads (inner), resulting in actions (outer) that take us away from our valued goals? With this full picture in mind, we can accept the “away” side of our thoughts, feelings and actions and commit to working around them to achieve our valued goals. (Hence the name Acceptance and Commitment Therapy/Training).
ACT and related methods have evolutionary roots in the philosophical tradition of pragmatism and the behaviorism tradition of B.F Skinner, whose appreciation of “selection by consequences” was noted earlier. ACT goes beyond Skinner, however, in its appreciation of symbolic thought as a set of cognitive adaptations that cannot be reduced to operant conditioning. Increasingly, ACT is being framed explicitly as an intentional VSR process that can be applied across all contexts and scales. A good place to start is a special issue of Clinical Psychology Review on integrating evolution and clinical science. One article in this special issue takes seriously the proposition that human groups–when appropriately structured–can be considered organisms in their own right[11].
Returning to devolution efforts in the UK, a perceived need for change, requiring appropriate flexibility in both individuals and organizations, goes without saying. As with polycentric governance, however, there is very little awareness of proven methods such as ACT and why they qualify as general. Ask an audience if anyone has heard of ACT, and you will get only a smattering of hands. Ask an audience if anyone has heard of both ACT (for adaptability) and Ostrom (for polycentric governance) and you are very likely to get no hands.
Providing an Identity for Something that already Exists
To the best of my ability in a short essay, I have attempted to show how GD can address three limiting factors for devolution efforts in the UK: A shared language, polycentric governance, and adaptability. Thankfully, a GD approach to devolution does not require starting from scratch. A sizable number of thinkers and doers in the UK have already adopted a GD perspective. They are not highly visible because they are dispersed among disciplines and policy domains, which can become an asset once they are provided an identity and appropriately mobilized. Even whole societies are in a position to become involved, such as those listed in table 1. It is not an exaggeration to say that GD-informed devolution projects can take place in the immediate future and in any postcode in the UK.
Table 1: Societies in a position to assist GD-informed devolution efforts in the UK
Association for Contextual Behavioral Science
International Society for Ecological Economics
Human Behavior and Evolution Society
International Association for the Study of the Commons
[1] See the 2026 report titled Delivering Health Equity Through English Devolution: Lessons and Opportunities for Place-based Change, which links to other resources.
[2] Wilson, D. S., Madhavan, G., Gelfand, M. J., Hayes, S. C., Atkins, P. W. B., & Colwell, R. R. (2023). Multilevel cultural evolution: From new theory to practical applications. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(16), e2218222120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2218222120
[3] The words replication and retention can be regarded as equivalent with respect to VSR processes.
[4] Skinner, B. F. (1981). Selection by Consequences. Science, 213, 501–504.
[5] Darwin referred to human origins and the nature of our species as “the question of questions”. See William Irvine’s book Apes, Angels, and Victorians: A Joint Biography of Darwin and Huxley (1955) for an entertaining and scholarly account.
[6] Hardin, G. (1968). The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 162, 1243–1248.
[7] Wilson, D. S., & Snower, D. J. (2024). Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Economics I: The Multilevel Paradigm. Economics, 18(1). https://doi.org/10.1515/econ-2022-0070
[8] Wilson, D. S., Ostrom, E., & Cox, M. E. (2013). Generalizing the core design principles for the efficacy of groups. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 90, S21–S32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2012.12.010
[9] DeCaro, D. A., Boamah, E. F., Rudolph, M. A., & Adusei, G. A. (2025). State-reinforced co-provision of community-governed greenspace in racially marginalized neighborhoods: Lessons from Chicago’s innovative NeighborSpace Land Trust and Partnership. Ecology and Society, 30(2). https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-15783-300202
[10] https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240003927
[11] Wilson, D. S., & Coan, J. A. (2021). Groups as Organisms: Implications for Therapy and Training. Clinical Psychology Review, 85, 101987–101987.
About the Author
David Sloan Wilson is President, ProSocial World and SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Departments of Biology and Anthropology, Binghamton University