Territorial State Craft

Territorial State Craft is the art of raising human flourishing in a place by modifying the protocols it runs on. A territory is an assembly of such protocols, interwoven with one another over a specific geography and ranging from the most implicitly held to the most strictly policed, so that the procedures which produce a product or reproduce a yearly event count as protocols as much as the maintenance of land records or the regulation of water allowances per farm. A territory thrives for as long as this assembly is continuously renewed, and declines once renewal gives way to neglect. Protocolization is the act of setting up, within organized groups, procedures that run in the background of attention, so that attention can move to the next opportunity for protocolization. Territorial State Craft applies this central act at leverage points across the organizational types of a territory, from the private to the civil to the governmental, in the interest of a broader territorial transformation, and draws for the purpose on design, which reimagines entrenched problems, on policy, which crafts incentives, and on technology, which opens up protocolizations once out of reach. The resulting know-how is an art through which the people of a place continuously raise its ground, feeding its potential for complexification and reaching for fuller forms of flourishing.