---
title: "Mandate clarity"
description: "The meta-protocol governing how functional responsibilities within Fabric are defined, held, and reviewed"
url: "/mandate-clarity/"
tags: [protocol, decisions]
readingPathPosition: 26
---

# Mandate clarity

Part of the [Collective decision-making](/collective-decision-making.md) area.

Mandate Clarity is a meta-protocol: it does not itself assign a functional responsibility, but governs *how* functional responsibilities – mandates – are defined, held, and reviewed across the network. A mandate is a specific agreement through which a node accepts accountability for a bounded area of work and decision-making on behalf of the network. Mandates can be held by:

- **Individuals** fulfilling roles (e.g. a facilitator, a steward, a logbook keeper).
- **Groups** governing a shared domain – a [circle](/circles-are-a-basic-unit-of-shared-governance.md) where the full decision-making cluster is adopted, or a working group or team with lighter governance.
- **Independent organisations** accepting responsibility for a function within the network (the "core network" in Fabric's topology).

Adopting this protocol is therefore different from adopting most other protocols. You can adopt [Consent-as-default](/consent-as-default.md) without holding any mandate – you simply agree to use consent when shared decisions arise. But adopting Mandate Clarity means committing to hold a specific functional responsibility *and* to hold it in a particular way: transparently, by consent, with periodic review and power-examination. This is what constitutes the network area that corresponds to Fabric as an organisation – roles, circles, working groups, and independent member organisations that carry defined responsibilities.

**Accord.** The adopting node articulates what it is responsible for and empowered to decide – its mandate – and makes this legible to the rest of the network. A mandate description includes: the primary need or driver the mandate exists to address, its key responsibilities, the boundaries of its autonomy (its domain), the resources allocated to it, and a review date with evaluation criteria. When one node's decision affects another's mandate, the affected node is consulted. Mandates are set by [consent](/consent-as-default.md), and changing a mandate requires re-engaging those affected.

**Ritual.** Image-based strategy sensing: at the start of a mandate process, participants select images based on somatic response rather than analytical judgment, then explore the collective pattern. This bypasses the analytical filtering that tends to reproduce existing narratives and accesses pre-verbal, body-based knowing about what a group's mandate actually *is* – not just what it says on paper.

**Critique & Contemplation.** Periodically, each node adopting this protocol examines its mandate in relation to power: Has its domain become a site of accumulation? Who benefits from the current boundaries? Whose work falls through the gaps between mandates?

## Sources

- Mandate description elements adapted from domain description template in Bockelbrink, Priest & David (2019), *Sociocracy 3.0 – A Practical Guide*
- Image-based strategy sensing adapted from the needs phase in Storch & Krause (2017), *Selbstmanagement – ressourcenorientiert*

## In this vault

- Previous: [Consent-as-default](/consent-as-default.md)
- Next: [Open decision records](/open-decision-records.md)
- Referenced by: [Circles are a basic unit of shared governance](/circles-are-a-basic-unit-of-shared-governance.md), [Collective decision-making](/collective-decision-making.md), [Design for scale](/design-for-scale.md), [Protocols](/protocols.md), [Protocols are multi-scale creativity systems](/protocols-are-multi-scale-creativity-systems.md)