Civic leadership in uncivil times: the countervailing force

Diane Kalen-Sukra, MC, CMC was named an LGIU 2026 Top Thinker. She is the author of Lead with Civility: A Handbook for Uncivil Times (2026) and Save Your City: How Toxic Culture Kills Community and What to Do About It (2019), and Founder of Kalen Academy.

England’s May 2026 local elections will be debated for a long time. But one signal embedded in those results deserves more serious attention than it has received: the declining willingness of capable people to stand for local office, and the growing number of those already serving who are considering walking away. 

The LGA’s Debate Not Hate surveys tell a worsening story: 73% of councillors reported abuse or intimidation in 2022, rising to 81% by 2023, with more than one in five receiving a threat of violence by 2024. In October 2025, the LGA, WLGA, COSLA and NILGA issued a rare joint statement warning that threats and abuse “have become more common,” driving some councillors out of public life and deterring others from standing.

This is not a problem confined to the UK. It is an international pattern, and that distinction matters because it points to something systemic: not a wave of unfortunate incidents, but a deteriorating civic culture that, without active countervailing force, will continue to erode the conditions democracy requires to function.

Incivility spreads like a contagion

Writing Save Your City: How Toxic Culture Kills Community and What to Do About It, opened the door to conversations on civility with civic leaders in council chambers, conference halls and classrooms across a range of countries. Despite their different contexts, these civic leaders were, in almost every case, grappling with the same thing. In 2024, I convened the inaugural Global Civility Summit through Kalen Academy, co-hosted with Chris Eddy of Australia’s VLGA. Bringing together nearly 500 civic leaders from the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and beyond, the summit reinforced just how widespread these challenges have become.

The findings were devastating and consistent across every country, varying only by single digits in severity. Eighty-one percent of participants said incivility was disruptive or very disruptive to their ability to govern, and one in five reported that their own families had experienced harassment or threats because of their public roles. The crisis had crossed the threshold from workplace to home. The 2026 Summit confirmed the direction of travel.

As I argued in my National Civic Review essay, incivility anywhere is a threat to civility everywhere. It does not self-correct. It compounds. A hostile meeting that goes unaddressed normalises the behaviour for the next one. A councillor who is attacked and unsupported learns that the institution will not protect them. What was once exceptional becomes expected. What was once shocking becomes unremarkable. And what some once dismissed as “just rudeness” has revealed itself as a governance and democracy risk: incivility undermines decision-making, corrodes trust and weakens institutions from the inside out, eventually leading to the governance paralysis we are seeing in too many communities.

Responding effectively requires working across a full spectrum of action. In Lead with Civility: A Handbook for Uncivil Times, I map this as the Tackling Toxicity to Cultivating Civility Spectrum: from reacting to immediate threats through enforcement and crisis response, to managing incivility through codes of conduct, pledges and training, to the deeper work of leading, embedding civility, empathy and ethics into the cultural DNA of an institution and civic environment.

All three stages matter, and most healthy communities operate across all three simultaneously. Codes of conduct, civility pledges and training programs have their place. The danger lies in treating reaction and compliance as the destination rather than the foundation. Leaders who stay only in reactive or managing mode win battles but lose the war of culture. Sustainable transformation requires moving steadily toward the leading stage, where culture change becomes self-reinforcing rather than dependent on any single person or policy to carry it.

Why civic leaders are the countervailing force

The argument at the heart of my work is that we all have a role to play in civic culture transformation. However, civic leaders carry a disproportionate share of responsibility for the culture of public life, and therefore a disproportionate capacity to change it.

This disproportionality is not rhetorical. It is structural, and it operates across four distinct dimensions. 

1. Through visibility, your tone and conduct set the pattern others copy. Your body language, your silence in the face of contempt, even your off-hand remarks teach people what is and is not acceptable.
2. Through authority, you design the rooms, rules and processes where public life unfolds: how you structure agendas, speaking orders and enforcement determines whether meetings feel like brave spaces for dialogue or arenas for spectacle.
3. Through power, your decisions ripple far beyond any single resident. When you intervene in patterns of bullying or abuse, you change not just one situation but the expectations of everyone watching.
4. And through trust, you are entrusted to translate shared values like dignity and fairness into living standards, not empty slogans. The gap between what you say about respect and what you actually tolerate becomes the real standard people believe.

Taken together, these four dimensions mean that civic leaders at the local level are not merely participants in the cultural environment of their communities. They are its primary architects. This is why, if leaders do not reclaim their role as culture shapers, others will gladly shape it for them: algorithms, outrage entrepreneurs, the profit imperatives of corporate media and those who benefit from division.

This is also where an age-old argument about power becomes newly urgent. The Machiavellian logic, that in a harsh world decency is a liability and civility a constraint for the weak, has never felt more seductive than it does now, when incivility appears to be rewarded. But as Erasmus argued five centuries ago, when leadership is severed from goodness and wisdom, it ceases to be leadership at all. It becomes domination, tyranny dressed in modern clothes. Machiavelli himself offers an unintended warning: Cesare Borgia, his model of effective ruthlessness, died in his early thirties on a foreign battlefield, his power crumbled, rumoured betrayed by his closest allies. Machiavellian wins may seize power in the moment; they do not build the stable, trustworthy governance that endures.

At its core, civility is a courageous, culture-shaping leadership discipline and the most powerful antidote to toxicity available to civic leaders: for those who refuse to surrender public life to contempt, chaos and fear, and who understand that leading with principle equips them to hold the line, protect people and process, make the tough decisions that restore order, and advance the common good. Not the choice between effectiveness and integrity, but their reunion.

The very words tell us why. Civility, from the Latin civis (citizen) and civitas (city, community), speaks to the conduct we owe one another as social beings who live together for the good of the whole. And culture, from cultura, to cultivate, to tend, to care for, is not something that happens to a council or community. It is what we cultivate or fail to. In other words, culture is not fate; culture is what we cultivate.

Civic leaders are the chief gardeners of this shared life. What they tolerate takes root. What they model becomes the pattern others imitate. And in local democracy, the level of government closest to people’s daily lives, that cultivation is both the most consequential and the most accessible form of democratic renewal available to us.

Three practices that turn the cultural tide

Understanding the scale of the responsibility is not the same as being overwhelmed by it. We can and must recover our agency and ability to turn the cultural tide. 

At the core of this work is the Roadmap to Renewing Civic Culture, a proven five-part framework moving from civility as a personal leadership imperative, through culture risk diagnosis, to cultivating spaces where civility can thrive, civic education and embedding compassion in governance. It is designed to be your own personalised civic culture transformation plan: a practical tool for maximising your impact as a leader, assessing where you are, identifying where change is needed, and building a concrete strategy for renewal that you return to and build on over time.

Three practices sit at the centre of this approach and consistently characterise the civic leaders making the most sustained cultural impact, as explored in Lead with Civility:

The first is naming it, clearly and publicly. The leaders who have moved the needle are those willing to define what true civility demands and to hold themselves explicitly to that standard. Civility, rightly understood, is not politeness enforced as conformity. It is courageous civility: compassion applied to public life, candour without cruelty, conviction without contempt. It is the refusal to become what you oppose while remaining fully effective. In a political climate that rewards performative combativeness, that refusal is a genuinely countercultural act and the most powerful signal a civic leader can send.

The second is practising the art of civic intervention. A deliberate, learnable discipline: a principled act, or series of sustained acts, that interrupts a harmful pattern before it escalates. A well-timed procedural ruling, a statement correcting misinformation during a meeting, a memo placed on the public record to ensure future accountability. Not theatrics. Not aggression. A morally anchored response, made with care for people, for process and for the public good. Research on social tipping points suggests that when roughly a quarter of people within a system consistently model a new norm, expectations can shift rapidly across the whole group. Cultural change does not require unanimity. It requires a committed minority who refuse to normalise harassment and intimidation.

The third is investing in civic education and literacy as a continuous, embedded practice. Treating City Hall as civic academy: where every public interaction is an opportunity to model and teach what democratic engagement looks and feels like. This is not an aspiration. Across every jurisdiction where cultural renewal has taken hold, it has been a deliberate strategy. The leaders who understand this do not wait for a crisis to make the case for civility. They build the conditions for it, steadily and consistently, so that when the pressure comes, the culture holds the line. 

The stakes

The fracturing of civic culture is real, international and will not reverse itself. But the evidence from two Global Civility Summits is equally clear: the capacity to push back is already in the room. Where even one person draws a line and intervenes, often quietly but with conviction, the trajectory can change. Others find their voice. Truth finds daylight. Trust, however fragile, begins to be rebuilt.

The most important question facing local government leaders today is not whether civility matters. It is whether they are prepared to lead on it. Not as a soft concern, not as a programme to commission, but as the core work of democratic stewardship that it has always been, and that our moment now urgently demands. In uncivil times, civility is the work.