Over a year-and-a-half since Stormont collapsed, failed attempts between parties at getting the institutions ‘back up and running’ and the odd high-profile political gestures here and there, are we any closer to seeing power-sharing return in Northern Ireland? Due to technical reasons Stormont hasn’t made it into the Guinness Book of Records for surpassing Belgium’s record for the longest period that a western democracy has gone without an elected government (541 days), but it’s a good time to explore how our example of power-sharing compares with others. What’s holding us back – the institutions or politicians? What if Northern Ireland didn’t opt for a power-sharing model in the first instance – what should, or could have, been the alternative? These are just some of the questions the book Mediating Power-Sharing: Devolution and Consociationalism in Deeply Divided Societies seeks to answer and to provide lessons for other similarly divided places. It’s co-authored by Professor Feargal Cochrane, Professor Neophytos Loizides from the University of Kent and Thibaud Bodson from the Free University of Berlin.

Mediating Power-Sharing looks at three case studies, taken in turn in respective chapters: Northern Ireland, the Brussels Capital Region (BCR) and Cyprus. Each are very different in their characteristics, history, geography, and how they emerged from negotiations and peace settlements. However, the authors are confident that power-sharing systems are the correct response to ethnonational conflicts “when properly understood, designed and operated.”

Has power-sharing in Northern Ireland failed because of the institutions at Stormont? The authors argue that to some extent they are limited to the management of conflict – and this is a fair judgement. To move into a truly post-conflict environment, we need what the authors call “a sense of joint enterprise and common purpose.” Since 1998, it’s also fair to write that the promotion of positive incentives to overcome ethnonational divisions has been conspicuously absent. Both institutions and political leaders must play a role.

On the twentieth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, one of the book’s lessons which stuck out for me – one which we’re learning first-hand right now – is that the capacity of political institutions to evolve and reform is critical for their survival – that is, to adapt to unforeseen circumstances and developing political contexts. Who in 1998 could have imagined that the UK would leave the European Union two decades later and the political ramifications a post-Brexit Northern Ireland could cause? As the authors point out, we haven’t even left yet… Interestingly, Brussels and Belgium are cited as good examples of this principle – did you know that Belgium’s constitution has experienced six revisions since 1970? Mediating Power-Sharing serves as a timely reminder that even in Northern Ireland opportunities exist to develop our consociational set-up, for its own good.

Without the capacity to change in conjunction with their political context, we learn how the stillness of power-sharing arrangements can lead to dysfunction and complacency in government as well as to community disillusionment and apathy towards the political system more broadly. Does this situation seem familiar? The aim of this book, then, is to provide a new framework for consociational power-sharing, to consider ways in which these institutions may adapt better to changing political contexts, and assess how the three main cases cited relate to possible institutional reform in other deeply divided societies, such as Bosnia, Syria or Sri Lanka.

Among the three case studies the Northern Ireland model stands out as disincentivising long-term coalition strategy-building over policy issues because – especially with the automatic inclusion of parties into an Executive and the d’Hondt system to select departments to run after Assembly elections – parties have little need to reach policy agreements before taking office. Rather, they may have a greater need to emphasise what divides them than what unites them. Our model is more formalised than those in, say, Belgium or Switzerland. Through various accords since 1998, however, our example does demonstrate that power-sharing can evolve and mutate beyond its original design in response to the changing political context, and via a combination of formal and informal processes. The book argues that reforms can be made within Northern Ireland’s political institutions that can deescalate political tension and promote coalition building, while at the same time recognising and protecting the need for institutional safeguards across the unionist and nationalist divide.

Despite the current problems caused by the Brexit process, poor relations between the DUP and Sinn Féin, and the absence of a functioning devolved Executive, this book serves an important reminder that the benefits consociationalism has delivered to Northern Ireland should not be undervalued. But it argues that to remain viable as a political model, Northern Ireland’s version of consociationalism must adapt to changing political circumstances and become more capable of moving from a survival phase, into a delivery phase, where political consensus is established that builds sufficient trust for the ethnonational safeguards to be allowed to bio-degrade over time. Despite certain ‘Brexit at any cost’ Westminster MPs questioning the continued existence of the Good Friday Agreement, as is pointed out here, today the majority of political parties and those voting for them across the unionist and nationalist spectrum now broadly agree on power-sharing even with an Irish dimension. All parties seem committed in principle to the restoration of devolved government, though differences remain in practice over the terms under which that should happen.

If you want to effectively explore the ins and outs of the Northern Ireland political system and discover ways in which we can move, if/once Stormont is resurrected, move on from the standard political paralysis we’ve become accustomed to here, then pick up this book. It challenges the reader, as well as sets out the critical challenge for divided societies generally: that is, to institutionalise a broadly inclusive, functional and legitimate coalition. To put it another way, it shows how seemingly ungovernable places are, in fact, governable – as long as sensible choices are made along the way.

Mediating Power-Sharing: Devolution and Consociationalism in Deeply Divided Societies was published by Routledge. To find out more information or to purchase the book click here.

Also published on Medium.