M. Duineveld

Evolutionary Governance Theory

1 Introduction.- Part I: Governance as Evolution.- 2 Theoretical Sources of EGT.- 3 Foundational Concepts.- Part II: Building Blocks for Evolutionary Governance Theory.- 4 Evolutionary Paths.- 5 Seeing, Making & Distribution Things.- 6 The Power of Stories.- 7 Governance Paths and Reality Effects.- Part III: Applying EGT.- 8 Governance and Its Categories.- 9 Overview of the EGT Model.- 10 Policy Formulation & EGT: Making Governance Work.- Literature.

Delineating locals: Transformations of knowledge/power and the governance of the Danube delta

In this paper, we adopt a Foucauldian perspective on power/knowledge interactions to investigate the evolution and implementation of policy for the Romanian Danube delta. We argue that a better understanding of the potential for citizen participation in environmental governance can be obtained from a careful analysis of the pathways of emergence, enactment and implementation of policies affecting an area. Policies are seen as temporary conceptual structures coordinating knowledge and power, in constant transmutation because of the confrontation with other power/knowledge configurations. For the Danube delta, it is argued that policies originating at various levels of government co-create a ‘local’ that is scrutinized, silenced, exoticized, subjugated and marginalized. Finally, we investigate the implications of this and similar processes of delineation of actors for participatory natural resource governance.

Co-evolutions of planning and design: Risks and benefits of design perspectives in planning systems:

We develop an evolutionary perspective on spatial planning to investigate the potential contributions of design approaches to the coordination of spatial organization. After a re-articulation of the concepts of planning and design in this perspective, we distinguish six essential features of the planning/design dialectics in a community. These aspects ought to be understood when evaluating the risks and benefits of design perspectives in a planning system, and the potential for re-positioning design in planning. It is argued that relying on the rhetoric of any single actor or any single tradition of reflection on planning and design is deceptive, whereas the collective experience of learning and adaptation with actors and disciplines expands the scope of understanding and the pallet of possible adaptations.

Formal/Informal Dialectics and the Self-Transformation of Spatial Planning Systems An Exploration

In this article, we present a perspective on the interaction between formal and informal institutions in spatial planning in which they transform each other continuously, in processes that can be described and analyzed as ongoing reinterpretations. The effects of configurations and dialectics are often ambiguous, only partially observable, different in different domains and at different times. By means of analyses of key concepts in planning theory and practice, this perspective is illustrated and developed. Finally, we analyze transformation options in planning systems, emphasizing the limits of formal institutions in transforming formal/informal configurations, and stressing the importance of judgment and conflict.

The Power of Tulips: Constructing Nature and Heritage in a Contested Landscape

In this paper we analyse the successful local/regional opposition to a proposed new town north of the Dutch city Leiden in terms of pathways, sites and techniques of object formation. In the struggle over spatial plans and policies, new objects are constructed and played out. In some cases, the new objects became institutionalized and codified future development in the region. We focus on the strategic role of the construction of heritage and nature in the planning process, concepts utilized by opponents of the urban plans. Revisiting Foucaults concepts of power/knowledge and discourse, we present a detailed analysis of the process of emergence, solidifying and institutional embedding of new forms of heritage and nature as new discursive objects. We argue that such a retour à Foucault is important, allowing for an elucidation of object formation, still understudied in planning and governance studies.

Divergence and convergence in policy meanings of European environmental policies: the case of the birds and habitats directives

The link between European environmental policies and spatial planning and decision-making in Member States is complicated and the subject of much debate among students of the European Union and the processes of Europeanization. This paper focus on policy meaning, and analyses the mechanisms of divergence and convergence that are at work in planning and decision-making practices in which the Birds and Habitats Directives are implemented. While many of the mechanisms are unconscious and unintentional and thus cannot be affected, others can be used intentional and strategically during the formulation and implementation of the policies.

Power and contingency in planning

In this paper we analyse the role and reception of poststructuralist perspectives on power in planning since the 1990s, and then ask whether a renewed encounter with the works of poststructuralist theorists Foucault, Deleuze, and Luhmann could add something to the points that were already made. We make a distinction between the power of planning (the impact in society), power in planning (relations between players active in planning), and power on planning (the influence of broader society on the planning system), to refine the analysis of planning/power. It is argued that an interpretation of Deleuze, Luhmann, and Foucault, as thinkers of power in a theoretical framework that is based on the idea of contingency, can help to refine the analysis of power in planning. Planning then can be regarded as a system in other systems, with roles, values, procedures, and materialities in constant transformation, with the results of each operation serving as input for the next one. The different power relations constitute the possibilities, the forms, and the potential impact of planning.

Power/knowledge and natural resource management: Foucaultian foundations in the analysis of adaptive governance

ABSTRACT In this paper, we present a conceptual framework extending Foucaultian insights on the relations between power and knowledge to link up with current insights into studies of natural resource management (NRM) and more broadly environmental studies. We classify discourses in NRM according to understandings of social–ecological systems and argue that grasping those larger contexts can push NRM in a different direction, forming a base for more informed and inclusive decision-making. We then reconstruct the importance of materiality, the physical world, for the functioning of NRM within social–ecological systems. The concept of livelihoods is added to our developing Foucaultian frame, as material/discursive entwinements which structure responses of many stakeholders in NRM. Finally, we present an expansion of Foucaultian NRM into adaptive governance thinking as a logical outcome of basic insights into power/knowledge, developed and contextualized in current NRM and its critical analyses

Absence/presence and the ontological politics of heritage: the case of Barrack 57

19 July 2009. A barn burns down in a small Dutch town. Afterwards, this invisible and insignificant ‘barn’ became widely known as ‘Barrack 57’. The destruction triggered attention and led to the barn’s association with a Nazi Second World War transit camp and with Anne Frank. Its material destruction made this barn/barrack both present and absent in various networks. We use the case of Barrack 57 to study the interplay between presence/absence and non-existence of objects in these networks, an exercise which connects to and contributes to the development of constructivist perspectives on object formation in heritage studies. Our analysis of presence/absence and non-existence therefore is based on different concepts developed in actor network theory and Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems. Of particular importance is Luhmann’s distinction between first- and second-order observation. We argue that heritage objects themselves are the result of different enactments of (non) human properties in various relational configurations. With this view, a new task for critical heritage scholars emerges. Understanding the dynamics of presence/absence and non-existence of heritage objects in different networks deepens insight into the broader issues of the formation of heritage objects and their delineating technologies and the policies of normalisation and naturalisation.

The good, the bad and the self-referential: heritage planning and the productivity of difference

Heritage planning, as an integrated approach to dealing with traces of the past in the ongoing organisation of the landscape, must be a trans-disciplinary endeavour. Bridging differences between scientific disciplines, as well as sciences and the law, administration, politics and economy, is a continuous challenge. We argue that Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory, with its sophisticated understanding of society as an evolving population of social systems, is very useful in understanding the value and difficulty of trespassing boundaries in heritage planning, and in understanding the value of conflict and cultivated difference in the planning process. We reflect on the mechanisms of self-reference and self-reproduction that are at play within the scientific disciplines addressing ‘heritage’, and analyse similar mechanisms within planning administrations. These mechanisms are not in essence negative; they are necessary for the production of the kind of knowledge that is specific for the system or organisation. However, in planning, some form of coordination of interests and types of knowledge is seen as desirable. We argue for an approach to heritage planning that avoids self-reference in the planning system as a whole, while accepting and cherishing the self-reference of the actors.