If you look at the United Kingdom and Switzerland, it would be easy to conclude that the two countries have very little in common when it comes to localism.

On one side is Britain, a country that abandoned localism to increasingly concentrate decision making in London over the last 100 years. Recent shifts in thinking has seen the process begin to reverse, but this is only at the policy formulation stage, with very little actual devolution to be seen on the ground.

On the other is Switzerland, a country that did not devolve power to local government so much as see the communes and cantons cede a limited range of powers to the Federal tier of government.

Having travelled from London to Bern, the different approaches are palpable in the architecture and layout of the respective capitals. The grand government buildings in Bern blend and flow into the rest of the city, whereas the even more impressive Westminster and ministerial surrounds appear to be the crescendo of the British capital.

Yet there is a commonality between Britain’s fledgling devolution and Switzerland’s bottom-up governance structure, and that is they both vest responsibility for communities in the people who live there.

In Switzerland it is left to communes to decide how to collaborate on matters like shared infrastructure and social services with little handholding from central government. Of course mistakes and missteps happen from time to time, but it is viewed through the lens of learning from others’ mistakes and emulating their successes.

In Britain, attempts to unblock the planning logjam by letting local communities determine their own local plans have produced promising results. Of those communities who opted to take part in these neighbourhood plans, 90% of them agreed to increase the amount of future housing above the target level set by central government. The catalyst for change seems to be that people in these communities were confronted with the trade-offs from their decisions.

It would be overly simplistic to suggest New Zealand emulate these policies immediately. We have yet to see the results that devolution produces in the UK and whether Swiss localism can be duplicated elsewhere. Still, it would be refreshing to see future policy that gets adult results by treating people as such.

Jason Krupp is currently overseas on a research trip for his upcoming localism report. Watch his video diaries here.