European School of Governance, Blog #250922 by Louise McCulloch
Keywords: tending, empathy, understanding, addiction recovery, mother-women, emerging governance, Tamkeen.
This reflection emerged from many dialogues with Dr. Louis Klein, drawing on his background with “systems”, governance and his collaboration with the Tamkeen Community Foundation for Human Development in Morocco. For two years, I also supported Louis in his work as a “mirror to Tamkeen”, including a visit to Morocco, which has informed this reflection. Yet, this reflection is grounded first and foremost in a call to attention from a co-inquiry I am part of with “mother-women” in addiction recovery in Ireland which I will share more about below.
Introduction
Earlier this year a group of “mother-women” [a term by Andrea O’Reilly to highlight that maternal identity brings its own distinct challenges and complexities which are different from those of being a woman alone] in addiction recovery and I launched what might formally be called a report but what we prefer to relate to as a living story (see here). During that co-creation they shared with me that the most important thing they wished for and to be held central was being met with empathy and understanding – of being related to without judgement, being seen and recognised as human. As some of the voices in the living story share, particularly in the section “tending the fire within and among”, the presence or absence of empathy and understanding can shape everything. A discouraging interaction from a professional, or being treated with suspicion rather than care, could leave you feeling worthless, ashamed, and less than human. At the same time, moments of genuine belief or encouragement such as a worker holding hope or a family member noticing change, planted seeds of possibility (particularly key where perhaps you could not see this for your self). These moments were a reminder that empathy and understanding are essential to us as human beings; they are the conditions in which futures can either deepen harm or begin to emerge differently.
Particularly in addiction recovery this is essential. People often assume that addiction recovery is about coming off drugs, but the mother-women have helped me understand that this is only the beginning. As we share in our living story:
“There can be an assumption that addiction recovery is about the absence of substances and once the drugs are gone, the work is done. But as many women shared, this was often only the beginning. Recovery could also be described as the slow work of meeting parts of yourself that were hidden, silenced, or never allowed to emerge. It could be a (re-)encounter with needs, wounds, and hopes that may not have had the safety or support to be named before. It could be sensed as a discovery and a question of who one is when struggle for survival no longer speaks louder than becoming.” (McCulloch, L. et al, 2025: pg39)
This thread in our living story was titled “tending the fire within and among,” honouring what the mother-women described in their experiences of inner work and also the interconnected relational encounters that grounded and shaped everything. A living reminder that empathy, understanding and other relational capacities live and are nurtured both within us and between us.
This brings us to the question at the heart of the mother-women and my co-inquiry and what I am continuing to ponder in this reflection: when empathy and understanding (and other relational capacities) are so essential, how can we tend them? How might we recognise, nurture, and sustain space for empathy and understanding to grow in ourselves, in our relationships, and in the ways we organise life together?
While the dialogues with Louis happened separately to the co-inquiry with the mother-women, I have found them a valuable companion to my own sensemaking and being. To be clear, Louis has not engaged with the mother-women directly nor has he sought to shape the inquiry. Rather the mother-women and I spoke about how I may engage in my own inquiry with other voices that might open further spaces for learning and exploration (an important part of first-person action research practice). The hope here now is that, by introducing Louis’ experiences and insights particularly around his collaboration with Tamkeen, “emerging governance” and “living the future in the present”, that these will act as offerings from his lived experience. They might serve to widen the gaze of our inquiry, especially as our questions begin to reach beyond our core group and into society. Furthermore, serving the mother-women’s call to attention for empathy and understanding, and the living story that continues to unfold.
How Louis’ experiences might widen our gaze: recognising “emerging governance”
Louis’ shares that “emerging governance is an inevitable practice of any social ecosystem”. When I consider governance as something that lives in our everyday relational practices, I hear the mother-women’s call to attention for empathy and understanding as perhaps already speaking about governance, not in the formal sense of rules or systems, but in the way each interaction either nurtures or diminishes our shared humanity. Governance seems to show itself in the smallest moments of daily life: being trusted or doubted, judged or recognised, reduced to a statistic or met with encouragement. Each of these encounter’s shapes what feels possible. A harsh word could close down hope, while a worker holding belief could open a horizon that you can not yet see.
Naming these everyday encounters as governance feels important in terms of the mother-women’s call for empathy and understanding for a number of reasons. Firstly, naming governance does not change what it means to be trusted or doubted, judged or recognised, but naming can shift how such experiences are understood and valued in wider contexts. Perhaps naming or holding governance highlights that these moments are not marginal but central to how we organise life together. Secondly, naming governance perhaps helps us attend differently. We are not only hearing individual accounts of experiences but noticing how each encounter of care, disregard, encouragement, or suspicion enacts or resists ways of organising, distributing power, and sustaining (or eroding) care. This can remind us that relationality is not just personal but political and ethical. Finally, naming these encounters as governance challenges the narrow framing of governance as something that happens only in institutions or policies. It invites us, as citizens, practitioners, and policymakers, to recognise our own role in co-creating the conditions of daily life. Even if we never engage directly with the mother-women, the values we embody in our everyday relating become part of the wider fabric that shapes what is possible and valued in our relating. In this sense, the naming of governance is key for us in society: so that we can carry the mother-women’s insights differently, recognise our shared agency, and begin to tend dominant framings of governance that overlook the significance of lived, relational practices.
Bringing Louis into this reflection is helpful as this is exactly where he situates himself with Tamkeen – inviting us to notice the flow of our daily relating through recognising “emerging governance.” Governance is often imagined as rules, institutions, hierarchies, or formal systems, but Louis reminds us that it is also lived in our relational practices: in the ways we relate, respond, and care for one another. Every small act of care could be called a governance act, a choice that can refuse harm, seed new ways of organising life together, and cultivate the conditions through which we might recognise our shared humanity flourish.
I sense that for Louis this connects directly to his work with the Tamkeen Foundation for Human Development and what they call the mirror of Tamkeen: inviting the noticing of what happens when our relational practices are recognised and nurtured in their being (what already exists) and becoming (the potentiality in what might grow). This is less about designing fixed structures (governance-in-itself the rules and structures that we often think of) and more about co-creating conditions of meaning and care (governance-for-itself, reflexive processes of human sensemaking and ethical situatedness) in which governance can be recognised in the lived interactions of people and communities, like a mirror that shows us something of ourselves in our being and becoming (see more from Louis and Karima Kadaoui’s work with the mirror of Tamkeen here). What we recognise, we can choose to tend or to ignore. In this way, we are also drawn into a meta-process: noticing how our governance practices are themselves emerging moment by moment, shaped by how we listen, respond, and relate in the present. Perhaps living the future in the present whilst asking ourselves a critical question which is: Is what we do an expression of our humanity or not? And perhaps even more, is what we do an expression of the humanity we value – such as love, compassion, empathy, understanding, kindness? This is key as whatever grows out of this is the way of our together being.
In contrast to this understanding of governance existing in our daily interactions, we often think of our governance processes solely as rules, institutions, policies. As such , we focus on what they aim to create while overlooking how they create it. Planning and policy often become ends in themselves, with change deferred, endlessly strategized, and rarely realised while people struggle, suffer, feel unheard, and experience spaces lacking empathy or understanding. Perhaps when we focus so much on trying to make the “right” decision for tomorrow, we can risk missing what is unfolding in people’s daily lives today and the choices we have in each moment. Change is not merely about what we will do, but what we be and become together in each moment, something enacted, a process that takes shape through our interactions and ways of being together, a practice. As Maturana (in The Biology of Love) suggests, we do not passively observe the world but bring forth reality through our participation in it. Governance, then, is not merely a system of structures and policies, but a living practice emerging through relationality, through how we listen, care, and respond to one another in the moment and recognising that we can co-create meta-processes to help us to notice ourselves in this being and becoming.
“Concluding” reflection and beginnings of beginnings
I sense it is important that we do not reduce a living practice to a formula as this could perhaps remove the aliveness and “wildness”, rather perhaps it is helpful to tend it as a living, diffusing “process” that we must sense, recognise and be. In the co-inquiry with the mother-women and I, our living story is helping us sense and recognise moments, offering an expression of what is alive so we might glimpse what wants to grow, and how we might create space to tend it. We sense that the story also extends beyond us. It carries an invitation: by engaging with the living story, others too can notice, reflect, and join in. I feel the mother-women’s and the living story offer us a mirror in this.
Here I also find myself asking: when is the mother-women’s work done? Is it ever done if we need to tend this together? How can we develop our skills together in this living practice? And perhaps there is a pertinent question to ask: What are the ethics of asking those who have been marginalised, judged, disregarded and dismissed to also carry the primary burden of naming, holding, and repairing what has been missing? Perhaps their experiences are a mirror, but the work of change must also be taken up by others – by us. As the dialogues with Louis reminded me, a relationship is only a relationship if both sides engage. Can we own our responsibility and response-ability (our ability to respond differently)?
What I also sense in bringing Louis and Tamkeen into this reflection is a comfort and reassurance: we are not alone in these questions. In other pockets of living practice, others have also stepped into ways of noticing their relating with the hope to nurture love, compassion and human flourishing. They cannot tell us what to do, but their experiences might offer comfort and guidance, a kind of navigation if we choose to walk this path.
Tamkeen characterises this tending of living practice broadly as a “experience-based, relationship-oriented, co-created, co-facilitated process of inquiry, learning, and understanding embedded in epistemic humility, trusting our human potential, trusting our humanity, realising the essentiality and existentiality of love.”
Perhaps what matters is that we do not stand back as spectators, but step in wholeheartedly in living the future in the present and tending the conditions through which the ways of our together being can grow with love, compassion, empathy and understanding.
References:
Klein, L. and Kadaoui, K. (2024) Realising metamorphic transformation in the mirror of Tamkeen: Growing a shared understanding from co-reflected lived experiences, Systems Research and Behavioural Science, (41): 738-749
Klein, L. (2025). Living the future in the present. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/living-future-present-louis-klein-gnqjf/?trackingId=A4J5xi1fq4lmCYpmhh3Gwg%3D%3D
Maturana, H. R., & Verden-Zöller, G. (2008). The origin of humanness in the biology of love, Exeter: Imprint Academic.
McCulloch, L., Griffin, G., Murphy, F., Hunter, D., Flynn, L., Doyle, D., Comiskey, C. and Brady, V. (2025), Mothers in addiction recovery rising: the will and the way, Dublin: Trinity College Dublin, Available at: https://www.tcd.ie/media/tcd/nursing-midwifery/pdfs/Mothers-Rising-Online-final.pdf
O’Reilly, A. (2019). Matricentric Feminism: A Feminism for Mothers. Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, 10(1–2), 13–26.
