A couple of months ago, I was on a field visit for a review of a large-scale, government-led poverty reduction programme. Learning from the local team how they navigate a complex and multi-partners service delivery initiative made me think of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the concept of entropy.
The Second Law: why systems naturally decay
The Second Law is an irreversible rule of our universe. It states that in any closed (or isolated) system, entropy—which measures disorder, randomness, and the progressive loss of energy available to do useful work—always increases. Left alone, things naturally stops working as entropy reaches its peak.
Consider for example a star. It shines because it actively fights the equilibrium of the vacuum in the universe, fueling nuclear fusion to stay alive. It thrives as a dynamic, open system. But when its fuel eventually runs out and the energy flow stops; it collapses, and ultimately goes cold. A hot cup of coffee does the same; left alone, its heat disperses until its temperature is indistinguishable from the room. In thermodynamics, maximum entropy is the state where energy stops flowing and transformation ends.
Public delivery systems are no different. If the fuel of leadership, resources, policy decisions, and operational coordination stops, the system naturally slides toward an equilibrium of stagnation and high entropy. For social development or poverty alleviation programmes, this happens when there flow of inputs into he systems have stopped and the momentum required to reach and lift poor households into long-term self-sufficiency slows down and eventually stops.
The causes of this systemic entropy manifests in different ways. Bureaucratic red tape and misallocated funding and financial support; siloed agencies that don’t communicate, leading to inefficiencies and with poor households falling through the cracks; rigid programming that defaults to passive compliance rather than active transformation; and/or data and evidence gaps that leave policy makers driving blind.
Holistic livelihood support interventions—for example combining cash support, asset transfers, and capacity development—are essentially tools designed to fight this systemic entropy. They keep the public delivery system open by constantly importing new energy in the form of funding, localised design and programming and coaching, real-time data, and adaptive management.
The entropy trap and way to overcome it
During my field visit, I witnessed a classic example of systemic entropy—and how to overcome it.
The programme was executing a livestock distribution to a group of selected vulnerable households. On paper, the process was beautifully designed: an international financial institution provided capital to the central government, a specialised international NGO managed the logistics of the procurement, distribution, and technical support of the livestocks.
In the weeks before the handover of the animals, the system hit a wall.
The ministerial regulations required recipients to own a specific acreage of land. This was an impossible barrier for the recipients, who for the most part did not own a sufficiently large parcel of land. Suddenly, institutional entropy set in. The existing regulations and the equity goals of the programme were actively cancelling each other out, resulting in a regulatory stall. The livestock distribution was paused, risking a reduction in the programme’s ultimate impact on the households’ livelihood.
A local leader acted as the system’s catalyst. He broke the stalemate by negotiating a compromise: the most vulnerable families were granted a localised policy exception, while the at the same time livestock was distributed through a parallel track to households owning the required parcel of land.
Leadership, in this case, didn’t just resolve a conflict; it brought new energy into the system and moved it back to a lower entropy open and functioning system.
Monitoring the system via an entropy lens
In thermodynamics, maximum entropy means total equilibrium—which is essentially a dead system. It is the state where all energy flows stop and stagnation takes over.
Therefore, the true goal of a governance system is to maintain low entropy. It does this by ensuring a constant, flow of energy—new data, fresh funding, active leadership, and feedback loops—to prevent the system from settling into stagnation.
To understand if a complex public service delivery system is actively maintaining this low-entropy flow or slowly succumbing to systemic stalling, we can use at a few possible indicators of how the system operates:
Sensing and feedback loops: In a low-entropy system, field data and information from the ground are actively sensed and fed back to decision-makers in real-time. In a high-entropy system, communication is one-way and top-down; leadership remains blind to field friction until it is too late.
Testing and experimentation: Low entropy means the system encourages safe-to-fail experimentation and iterative testing on the ground to solve problems. High entropy results in rigid risk-aversion, where teams default to passive compliance and fear trying new approaches.
Learning agility and adaptations: A low-entropy system processes mistakes and unexpected barriers as valuable data to rapidly adjust policies and budgets. A stalling, high-entropy system hides failures, sticks to rigid timelines, and repeats the same mistakes under the guise of following procedure.
Continuous improvement: In a low-entropy system, there is a restless drive to optimise processes, remove administrative friction, and improve service delivery. In a high-entropy system, the internal metabolism drops; energy is consumed by bureaucratic self-preservation rather than creating value for the public.
Countering systemic decay
If the indicators above show that a system is beginning to stall, how do we actively counter that decay? As the laws of thermodynamics remind us, every system naturally moves towards high entropy, equilibrium, and ultimate stalling unless external energy is applied. Left alone, decay is the default.
Countering this inevitable slide requires us to treat public delivery systems as open, dynamic ecosystems rather than static machines. In my observation over the years, this can be managed through three operational principles:
Openness to information: A system closed to data, information, and other types of evidence is blind. By gathering real-time insights from frontline workers, leadership can spot frictions that can stall the system early and act upon them.
Injecting external energy: Public bureaucracies tend to default to the status quo. Partnering with external technical partners can inject fresh perspectives and ideas that keep the energy flow high (and entropy low).
Localized leadership as a key force: Centralised policies provide essential structure, but local administrators provide the localised energy and contextual knowledge required to overcome bureaucratic gridlock on the ground.
Conclusions
Participating in this recent programme review made me realise that when we talk about sustainability in public administration, we may fall into a trap. We tend to view a sustainable system as something that is established once and then remains exactly the same over time. But through the lens of thermodynamics, we can see that this definition is actually dangerous. Trying to keep a system completely static risks closing it off from external energy flows, which inevitably increases its entropy and leads to stagnation.
The ultimate takeaway for me from this field trip is that true sustainability is not about reaching a fixed state of equilibrium.
Instead, real sustainability requires an open system that constantly evolves and adapts to keep its entropy low. As I observed during the review, it must continuously intake financial resources, fresh skills, and localised data, constantly adjusting with the help of evidence and the experiences of those working on the front lines.
As always, please let me know what you think.
Photo credit: Arnaldo Pellini