Kevin Collins

Deliberation and inclusion: vehicles for increasing trust in UK public governance?

Arguments in favour of participative democratic practices have been promoted stridently in recent years as trust in existing political institutions has receded. These arguments assume the declining ability of elected members to represent increasingly diverse constituencies in a period of rapid change, and a sense of powerlessness among citizens in the face of distant economic and political forces. There have been few attempts to review the available empirical evidence on whether deliberative and inclusionary processes lead to ‘better’ decisions. For the United Kingdom, evidence is limited, except in the land-use planning field, and we argue that in present circumstances their primary role should be to stimulate wider civil engagement as a means of restoring trust. ‘Better’ decisions will then follow. However, barriers to their acceptance remain, not least in the need to create sufficient incentive for citizens to participate and in the requirement that established economic and political interests devote sufficient resources for them to be effective.

Systemic environmental decision making: designing learning systems

Purpose – This paper was written for a special issue of Kybernetes devoted to cybernetics and design. It aims to focus on case studies that are both informed by cybernetic and systems thinking and constitute a form of second‐order design praxis.Design/methodology/approach – The case studies exemplify reflective practice as well as reporting outcomes, in terms of new understandings, from an action research process.Findings – The paper describes what was involved in course design, from a cybernetic perspective, to effect systemic environmental decision making as well as developing and enacting a model for doing systemic inquiry (SI), which enabled situation‐improving actions to be realised in a complex, organisational setting. The paper lays out the theoretical and ethical case for understanding first‐and second‐order designing as a duality rather than a dualism.Research limitations/implications – There is a danger that readers from an alternative epistemological position will judge the paper in terms of kn...

Experimental Discursive Spaces: Policy Processes, Public Participation and the Greater London Authority

The paper seeks to engage with the interrelationships between the newly established Greater London Authority (GLA) as a form of devolved but diffuse city governance and new procedures for encouraging active public engagement in policy-making processes. The scope and conduct of new discursive spaces for engaging Londoners in the early stages of policy-making concerned with sustainable development are the focus of enquiry. The paper draws on published sources and a series of in-depth interviews conducted with officers, advisers and elected members of the GLA. Theories and practices of deliberative democracy provide the basis for assessing to what extent these experimental discursive spaces supported the pursuit of a collaborative approach to decision-making.

Reframing water governance: a multi-perspective study of an over-engineered catchment in China

Climate change, over abstraction, pollution and questionable engineering-based paradigms are contributing to a state of crisis in water governance. This paper reports on preliminary research in Lake Baiyangdian catchment, China, which has the potential to realise more systemic and adaptive forms of water governance through development and use of a method that reframes water catchment management in the form of social learning. A cross-disciplinary research group worked together with multiple-department managers and stakeholder representatives within a purposefully designed ‘learning system’ to create an insipient social learning platform. The results demonstrate the potential to reframe water catchment management in Lake Baiyangdian so as to better address the questions: who should manage the water catchment and what in the catchment should be the focus of managing?

Reframing water governance praxis: Does reflection on metaphors have a role?

Action for adaptation is needed in the face of anthropogenic climate change. The record of adaptation in the field of freshwater governance is poor to date, as it is apparently constrained by operational frameworks. Analyses based on the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor can reveal underlying, often institutionally reified, operational frameworks. We present a desktop metaphor mapping study of one UK and one Australian water management planning document. This mapping demonstrates the potential of metaphor analysis, with further methodological and praxis development, to support the new ways of thinking and acting that are needed to challenge deeply held social and cultural norms of linear, rather than systemic, causality. We suggest that metaphor has the potential to help practitioners expose and examine reified operational frameworks and practices, and to change those that hinder adaptive and systemic praxis.

Designing social learning systems for integrating social sciences into policy processes: Some experiences of water managing.

Intuitively attractive, integration is widely held to be the key to more sustainable forms of natural resource managing. But while there have been many positive initiatives, researchers and policy-makers are under increasing pressure to integrate natural and social sciences with policy. This pressure arises because of the realization of the complexity of environmental situations characterized by uncertainties, interdependencies and multiple stakeholders. Faced with this complexity, new ways of thinking about and enabling social science and policy integration are required. The importance of framing in natural resource managing is discussed before the links between ideas of integration and systems thinking are explored. Social learning and design of social learning systems are introduced as a conceptual and methodological innovation to enable integration. Previous research on water managing is used to explore some practical issues and findings. The chapter concludes with a short commentary on the constraints and opportunities for designing social learning systems.

Stakeholder engagement in water governance as social learning: lessons from practice

ABSTRACT The OECD Principles on Water Governance set out various requirements for stakeholder engagement. Coupled with conceptualizations of social learning, this article asks how we define and enact stakeholder engagement and explores the actual practice of engagement of stakeholders in three fields of water governance. The results suggest that a key consideration is the purpose of the stakeholder engagement, requiring consideration of its ethics, process, roles and expected outcomes. While facilitators cannot be held accountable if stakeholder engagement ‘fails’ in terms of social learning, they are responsible for ensuring that the enabling conditions for social learning are met.

Teaching Environmental Management Competencies Online: Towards "Authentic" Collaboration?

Abstract Environmental Management (EM) is taught in many Higher Education Institutions in the UK. Most this provision is studied full-time on campuses by younger adults preparing themselves for subsequent employment, but not necessarily as environmental managers, and this experience can be very different from the complexities of real-life situations. This formal academic teaching or initial professional development in EM is supported and enhanced by training and continuing professional development from the major EM Institutes in the UK orientated to a set of technical and transferable skills or competencies expected of professional practitioners. In both cases there can be a tendency to focus on the more tractable, technical aspects of EM which are important, but may prove insufficient for EM in practice. What is also necessary, although often excluded, is an appreciation of, and capacity to deal with, the messiness and unpredictability of real world EM situations involving many different actors and stakeholders with multiple perspectives and operating to various agendas. Building on the work of Reeves, Herrington, and Oliver (2002), we argue that EM modules need to include the opportunity to work towards the practice of authentic activities with group collaboration as a key pursuit. This paper reports on a qualitative study of our experiences with a selected sample taken from two on-line undergraduate EM modules for second and third year students (referred to respectively as Modules A and B) at the Open University, UK where online collaboration was a key component. Our tentative findings indicate that on-line collaboration is difficult to ensure as a uniform experience and that lack of uniformity reduces its value as an authentic experience. Whilst it can provide useful additional skills for EM practitioners the experience is uneven in the student body and often requires more time and support to engage with than originally planned.