Why You Need Both Central and Local Public Affairs Processes - Internal Side of Public Affairs (64)

By Alan Hardacre, PhD

Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy

A recurring tension in advocacy, public affairs, and campaigning organisations is the question of structure. As my last post outlined structure is critical - when done in the right way and tailored to your organisation. One of the key questions is should control sit at the centre — with tight governance, shared systems, and standardised ways of working? Or at least how much should sit there. Or should power sit with local markets — flexible, fast-moving teams that can adapt in real time to political and public pressure?

This is often framed as a choice. In reality, it isn’t. It is a balance. You don’t pick between a central process and a local process. You need both — because they exist to solve fundamentally different challenges.

What the Central Public Affairs Structure Is For

The central Public Affairs structure exists to create consistency, resilience, and scale. It is especially important in larger organisations with different business divisions and/or markets - essentially with larger and potentially siloed teams. It also exists to create a clear framework for better internal education, understanding and visibility. This structure, as set out in the Central and Campaign Processes deck I shared a few posts back, defines the Public Affairs non-negotiables:

• shared strategy and objectives

• governance and decision rights

• messaging frameworks and narrative discipline

• data standards, compliance, and risk management

• reusable tools, templates infrastructure, and capability

This is the structure that allows multiple markets to operate without pulling the organisation apart. It prevents duplication, contradiction, and reputational drift. It ensures that learning accumulates rather than disappearing when local market work ends. Without a strong central Public Affairs structure, organisations don’t fail dramatically — they fail quietly. Every new local initiative starts from scratch, creating materials and reports in their own way, institutional memory erodes, and scale becomes impossible to sustain. And friction - there is always friction (between Public Affairs and other functions, within the function on who should do what…and the list goes on).

At the same time the central structure has limits. It is designed for stability and internal governance, not speed. It needs to be right-touch - and adapted to the organisation.

What the Public Affairs Local Structure Is For?

Local Public Affairs structures exist to create momentum, agility and action - and an ability to be tailored to local needs and circumstances (all within the wider framework of course). Local market Public Affairs work is, by definition, time-bound and context-specific. They respond to live political dynamics, opposition behaviour, media cycles, and public sentiment. They test, learn, adapt, and iterate — often under intense time pressure. The local structure prioritises:

• rapid decision-making

• tactical experimentation

• feedback from the real world

• mobilisation and escalation

• short-term wins that build longer-term leverage

  
  

These characteristics are what successful local market or campaign teams need. A local market that moves at the speed of the centre will miss the moment it exists to shape. But local market-led organisations also hit a ceiling.

Without a central structure and framework, local markets can run in too many directions and be reported against in too many different ways. Knowledge isn’t transferred. Capability isn’t built. Each new push repeats the same early mistakes.

The False Choice

When organisations argue about “central vs local”, what they are really experiencing is role confusion. The centre is blamed for being slow when it is asked to behave like a local market. Local markets are blamed for being messy when they are forced to replace missing central systems. This creates a cycle of frustration:

• too much centralisation produces order without impact

• too much decentralisation produces energy without durability and internal visibility

Neither extreme works - and to be honest the balance is not easy to find (and different for each organisation).

The Real Challenge: The Handoff

High-performing Public Affairs functions don’t debate which structures matter more. They design how the two interact. Again, this is a core theme of the Central and Campaign Processes deck from a few posts back:

the centre sets the rails — strategy, standards, guardrails

local markets run on those rails — moving fast without going off course

learning flows back to the centre, strengthening the system for the next campaign

The goal isn’t balance for its own sake. It’s clarity. When the boundary is clear, the centre doesn’t need to micromanage, and local markets don’t need to fight for permission to act.

Why This Matters Now

As organisations grow more complex and operate in faster, more hostile environments, the cost of getting this wrong increases. You can’t scale, deliver and report local Public Affairs without a centre. You can’t win local campaigns without letting them move. The answer isn’t choosing one structure over the other. It’s accepting that impact comes from the tension between them — properly designed, deliberately managed, and continuously refined. That’s why both structures exist. And why neither works on its own.