Jan-Peter Voß

The Politics of Reflexive Governance: Challenges for Designing Adaptive Management and Transition Management

This article was first published in the Journal Ecology and Society at http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/: Vos, Jan-Peter; Bornemann, Basil: The politics of reflexive governance: challenges for designing adaptive management and transition management. - In: Ecology and Society : a Journal of Integrative Science for Resilience and Sustainability. - ISSN: 1708-3087 (online). - 16 (2011), 2, art. 9.

Innovation processes in governance: The development of ‘emissions trading’ as a new policy instrument

This paper analyses the development of a new policy instrument as an innovation process in governance. Using the innovation journey concept to track the process in which ‘emissions trading’ emerges as a novel configuration in environmental governance shows how the policy instrument develops dynamics of its own, partly independently of policy problems and goals. These dynamics cut across governance domains, from air pollution policy in the USA to climate policy in the European Union. Interactions across science, policy development and the governance domains in which the instrument is applied prove to be critical for the transition between phases: from options to first developments; to experiments with a prototype; further diffusion; and, finally, the formation of a transnational policy regime. Key factors are openings in existing governance structures, establishment of linkages with contexts of implementation and the generation of momentum through the ‘carbon industry’ as an emerging service economy. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Steering for Sustainable Development: a Typology of Problems and Strategies with respect to Ambivalence, Uncertainty and Distributed Power

Abstract Special features of sustainable development as a governance problem are contrasted with a conventional rationalist ideal of steering based on the unambiguous determination of goals, availability of knowledge to predict consequences and concentration of power to implement strategies. This leads into the elaboration of three problem dimensions of steering for sustainable development: ambivalence of sustainability as a goal, uncertainty of knowledge due to complex interactions between society, technology and nature, and distributed power to shape structural change in society. The problem dimensions are taken as a basis for a typology of steering situations and a review of existing theoretical concepts of steering in society. The paper argues for a differentiated discussion of steering capacities in respect to concrete situations. Along these lines, it presents an approach to match strategies with problems.

Instrument constituencies and the supply side of policy innovation: the social life of emissions trading

We offer a perspective on the making of policy instruments over time. This sheds light on the work that goes into articulating and maintaining instruments as both models and implemented policies, and the social formations that arise therefrom. Drawing on a brief case study of the innovation of emissions trading, we show the role of both functional promises to deliver public-policy outcomes and structural promises concerning new positions for the actors involved. We show how the making of instruments can coincide with the formation of ‘instrument constituencies’, which consist of entangled practices that cultivate an instrument. Constituencies sustain the instrument and are themselves sustained by the instrument as it persists and expands its realm of validity. We conclude that policy instruments can develop social lives of their own with dynamics that should be taken into account by scholars of innovation in governance.

Editorial: Governance for Sustainable Development in the Face of Ambivalence, Uncertainty and Distributed Power: an Introduction

Abstract Three fundamental observations on the contemporary debate on governance and steering for sustainable development are outlined. First, sustainable development as a highly normative, yet extremely vague concept inescapably raises issues of governance and political steering. Second, the many contributions, approaching sustainability governance from multiple angles, have in common that they assume sustainability goals to a certain extent as given. Third, sustainability poses specific challenges to governance that are different from other policy fields. In this context, exiting contributions highlight issues of complexity, uncertainty or ambivalence, albeit in a rather cursory manner. Against this background, a specific approach is introduced, exploring the complexities that arise from limits to rational steering in three dimensions: Sustainability goals are ambivalent in that they are subject to controversies based on heterogeneous perceptions, values and interests of individuals and societal groups. Moreover, the knowledge of the complex dynamics involving society, technology and nature typically remains highly uncertain. Finally, the power to shape structural change in society and technology is distributed across a multitude of actors and societal subsystems. The article concludes by outlining the structure of the present collection of papers and by summarising each contribution.

Innovating public participation methods: Technoscientization and reflexive engagement

We reconstruct the innovation journey of ‘citizen panels’, as a family of participation methods, over four decades and across different sites of development and application. A process of aggregation leads from local practices of designing participatory procedures like the citizens jury, planning cell, or consensus conference in the 1970s and 1980s, to the disembedding and proliferation of procedural formats in the 1990s, and into the trans-local consolidation of participatory practices through laboratory-based expertise since about 2000. Our account highlights a central irony: anti-technocratic engagements with governance gave birth to efforts at establishing technoscientific control over questions of political procedure. But such efforts have been met with various forms of reflexive engagement that draw out implications and turn design questions back into matters of concern. An emerging informal assessment regime for technologies of participation as yet prevents closure on one dominant global design for democracy beyond the state.

Performative policy studies: realizing “transition management”

The paper analyses the relations between policy studies and public policy. It traces how they are constitutively entangled. Conceptually, this builds on a notion of performativity that has been developed in science studies. The performativity of policy studies is explored in a case study of the innovation journey of “transition management” as a model for governing sociotechnical change. The paper shows how practices of knowledge production and policy-making take shape in interaction with the model and how a specialized research field coevolves with political alliances and policy programs. They interact in the process of realizing transition management, both by establishing the model as collective knowledge and by materially enacting it. In this interweaving with public policy, policy studies contribute to creating the reality that they describe. The conclusions discuss “realizing” as a mode of governance.

The concept of instrument constituencies: accounting for dynamics and practices of knowing governance

Abstract As a new concept in policy analysis, instrument constituencies shed light on the ‘supply side’ of policy-making and thereby fill a gap in our understanding of national and transnational policy dynamics. Policy instruments are not only ‘active’ because they contain scripts for reordering society but also because they gather a constituency comprised of practices and actors oriented towards developing, maintaining and expanding a specific instrumental model of governing. Instrument constituencies account for a hitherto neglected form of agency and explain the often-observed paradox that policy solutions sometimes chase policy problems, although the former are meant to emerge as answers to the later. We give an outline of the concept as it has been developed so far, formulate propositions, and discuss linkages with established research traditions in policy studies.

Introduction: Knowing Governance

This book is about the making of knowledge about governance and how it shapes political action. In a sense, doing politics has always turned on knowing governance, since political action builds on a certain understanding of what it is to act politically and how to do so effectively. Those seeking power have invariably wanted to know how collective order can be built and maintained: governing implies knowledge about the world to be governed and the resources available to do so, and about the interests and dispositions of the actors involved. What is more, while knowing governance has always been key to ruling effectively, it is at the same time a principal lever for those who seek to challenge authority. Shared knowledge is a precondition of collective action and of the imagined communities of modern politics, whether nations or social movements or issue-based constituencies.

Realizing Instruments: Performativity in Emissions Trading and Citizen Panels

Instruments of governance are widely discussed in the policy and governance literature (see reviews in Lascoumes/Le Gales 2007; Howlett 2011). This research distinguishes between the various types of instruments, seeks to explain their effects, and is concerned with processes of choosing and implementing them. Articulating governance in terms of instruments has been a major concern of political science since World War II, following Harold Lasswell’s call for a ‘policy science’ (Lerner/Lasswell 1951) and leading to the establishment of ‘policy analysis’ as a research orientation and professional practice.1