Editor's Note (Must Stand Up; From Social Mission to Institutional Distortion)

The increasing complexity of public issues and the plurality of influential actors in the field of governance have made the transition from traditional and centralized models of public administration an inevitable necessity. Relying on the theory of "Network Governance" and its key concepts such as stakeholder participation, consensus building, interdependence, and trans-governance, this article analyzes the relationship between "social capacity" and "institutional capacity" in the governance system of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The fundamental issue of the research is the significant gap between the high capacity of social participation of Iranian society and the inadequacy of the capacity of coordinating and consensus-building institutions; a phenomenon known in the governance literature as "Institutional Distortion." Using an analytical-critical approach and relying on his own lived experience, the author interprets the widespread and unique presence of the Iranian people in recent social events, especially after the martyrdom of the Supreme Leader of the Revolution, as a manifestation of "social mission" and the slogan "must rise" as a strategic call to recreate the governance paradigm. The findings are organized into eight analytical axes: the necessity of developing consensus-building capacities, managing intra-discursive plurality and safeguarding national unity, the ethic of service and the primacy of mission over responsibility, explaining the relationship between advice, consultation, and obedience in Islamic governance, transitioning from informal networks of influence to institution-based governance, preventing participatory fatigue, building elite capacity through the "Mother of Governance Think Tank" project, and recreating the governance paradigm to address the imbalance of social-institutional capacity. The article concludes that the main challenge of governance in Iran is not the lack of social participation, but the weakness in converting this capital into sustainable institutional capacity, and the solution to confronting institutional distortion is not to adapt social capacity to existing institutions, but to reconstruct and upgrade institutions in line with the participation-oriented ideals of the Islamic Revolution. In this regard, the formation of a "High Commission for Reforming the Structure of the Public Administration System" is proposed with a cross-sectoral and cross-power approach; a mechanism that can elevate religious democracy from the level of an ideal to an institutionalized and lived experience and pave the way for the realization of a model of Islamic, popular, and inspiring governance.