Evolutionary Governance Theory: Theory and Applications

By Raoul Beunen, Kristof Van Assche and Martijn Duineveld

This volume presents empirical studies and theoretical reflections on Evolutionary Governance Theory (EGT), its most important concepts and their interrelations. As a novel theory of governance, EGT understands governance as radically evolutionary, which implies that all elements of governance are subject to evolution, that these elements co-evolve and that many of them are the product of governance itself. Through this book we learn how communities understand themselves and their environment and why they create the complex structures and processes we analyze as governance paths. Authors from different disciplines develop the EGT framework further and apply it to a wide rage networks of power, governance of agricultural resources etc. The contributors also reflect on the possibilities and limitations of steering, intervention, management and development in a world continuously in flux. It bridges the gap between more fundamental and philosophical accounts of the social sciences and applied studies, offering theoretical advancements as well as practical recommendations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Dec 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9783319122748

Book preview

Part I

Introduction

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Raoul Beunen, Kristof Van Assche and Martijn Duineveld (eds.)Evolutionary Governance Theory10.1007/978-3-319-12274-8_1

1. The Search for Evolutionary Approaches to Governance

Raoul Beunen¹  , Kristof Van Assche²   and Martijn Duineveld³  

(1)

Faculty of Management, Science and Technology, Open University, The Netherlands, Valkenburgerweg, 117, 6419 AT Heerlen, The Netherlands

(2)

Faculty of Extension, Planning, Governance and Development, University of Alberta, Jasper Ave, 10230, Edmonton, AB, Canada, T5J 4P6

(3)

Cultural Geography, Wageningen University, Droevendaalsesteeg, 3, 6708 PB Wageningen, The Netherlands

Raoul Beunen (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Kristof Van Assche

Email: [e-mail]

Martijn Duineveld

Email: [e-mail]

Abstract

Evolutionary Governance Theory is a novel perspective on the way societies, markets and governance evolve. It integrates concepts and insights from various theoretical sources into a new coherent framework. This book aims to explore how this framework can be further developed and how it can be applied to a range of governance issues. This chapter presents a brief introduction into the book and a reading guide that gives an overview of the different contributions.

1.1 Introducing EGT

The scientific attention for governance has strongly increased in the past decades. Governance however, is not something new. Governing has never been a matter of government alone and the often mentioned shift from government to governance does not imply that governments are nowadays no longer playing an important role. Governance changes all the time and it acquires unique forms in each community. Governance evolves. It is not tied to democracies and it does not bring forth a perfect democracy. Good governance cannot be a recipe deduced from theory or a set of best practices empirically observed. Governance observes problems and creates problems. It borrows tools, produces tools, and it contributes to the undermining of these tools. It finds solutions and defines what would count as their success. It absorbs stories of a better future and it assembles new visions. Few theories have envisioned governance this way. Evolutionary Governance Theory (EGT) does (Van Assche et al. 2014). This theoretical framework shows how understanding governance as entirely and continuously restructuring, allows for new understandings of broader changes in society, and new understandings of the spaces for intervention.

The focus of this book is on evolutionary understandings of governance. Governance is broadly conceived as a form of coordination in the taking of collectively binding decisions within a certain community. Governance is never a matter of a few people taking decisions, even if at first sight there is only a king, a pharaoh, a priest, a dictator or a small club of billionaires. There are always other actors who need to comply with rules, who need to understand orders, others who need to cooperate, to advise, to make money. There are always some people with influence and one can always discern some form of coordination between more than one party in decision-making. Communities over time tackled many problems in governance, but in what we call development, they also increased internal complexity and the scope of ambition. As many before us pointed out, policies, plans and laws, as products and tools of governance, often overreach, miss the target, and simply fail. The highly complex entanglement of social, political, economic and ecological problems and the long history of failed attempts to solve these problems demand from us a continuous reflection on the possibilities and limitations of coordinated change.

This book is based on two core assumptions. The first is that any attempt to intervene in governance should start with a thorough understanding of context: the community but also the governance context in which the intervention is expected to materialize and achieve first effects. Both contexts, however are highly dynamic. Especially the governance context itself can change under influence of attempts to analyze it, often reflected in the presence of specialized arena’s used to the presence of studies, assessments, and expert opinions. New policies, plans, laws are always partly anticipated by some, recuperated by others, ignored and distorted in a web of dependencies, where the memories of past glories and failures, the needs of the present and the future, and the conflicting desires in the community and its circles of governance mold the production and implementation of new coordination tools. The analyst is thus faced with a level of unpredictability and uncontrollability that needs to be addressed in the theoretical frameworks aiming to offer explanations for the dynamic context of governance.

The second core assumption is that governance is conceptualized as radically evolutionary. This implies that change does not occur in random patterns. Whether it is comprehensive, minute, ad hoc, gradual, or fast, change in governance is per definition a change in coordination, requiring coordination itself to avoid breakdown. As such it cannot ignore the existing organization of society and governance. Revolutions are possible, as history has shown, but the more successful ones were usually already rooted in society, understood and borrowed existing mechanisms of governance, while the disruptive effects were almost always underestimated. Remaking society starts from society, remaking governance starts from governance. This seemingly conservative element of the theory is counterbalanced by a radical one: nothing is stable and everything changes together.

For EGT, all elements of governance are subject to evolution. Governance needs to be actively and continuously reproduced in order to exist. Changes of particular elements always depend on their interaction with other elements and on their embedding in structures that are the result of same evolutionary process. Actors change, institutions change, knowledge changes, and the objects and subjects of governance are changing as well. The same tools of governance achieve different effects in the same community due to changes in the relation with other tools, with other players, and with an ever changing community and the stories it tells about itself. All these elements co-evolve and many of them are the product of governance itself. Governance can be seen as the emergent outcome of the interactions between all these different elements. It is an emergent order, including, but transcending its diverse elements, producing new elements and transforming itself in this manner.

EGT addresses the role of governments, markets, civil society, networks and individual citizens. None of these has a position that is a priori defined or preferable. EGT does not start from one ideal model of democracy, nor from one preferred form of rule of law, nor from one concept of idealized citizenship, and it does not assume that communities and governance can be redesigned to accommodate or materialize such notions. It starts from the assumption, based on empirical observation carried out in a variety of disciplines, that many acceptable equilibria exist. Many forms of coordination of decision-making, many patterns of actors and institutions, of power and knowledge, and many forms of citizenship, democracy, rule of law, can work, can fit a context, can be found desirable and can be identified with.

EGT can therefore be useful for understanding situations in which the nation state has a dominant position, for situations in which state powers are relatively small and for situations in which older or alternative forms of association (tribes, clans, networks, merchant towns, multinational companies, international organizations) shape governance. It can be helpful to understand observed transitions in governance and to assess transitions deemed desirable. It can frame the analysis of governance in democratic and non-democratic regimes, in various forms of democracy (each pretending to be the only real one), in situations with powerful and ambitious governments and administrations, and places where civil society or markets de facto structure the collective. EGT is open to the analysis of all political entities that are empirically possible. It aspires not to overestimate the role of models of governance, and aspires to discern the actual effects of the narratives, discourses, ideologies underpinning such models in evolving governance. Empirically observable governance should never be conflated with theoretical or political models of governance, as wish, fear and reality should never be confounded. Yet governance also needs such models, as actors in governance are required to articulate identities, goods, values, and desirable futures.

EGT builds upon an existing body of knowledge—see below in this chapter, see the rest of this book, and the first EGT book (Van Assche et al. 2014) for details. It incorporates existing concepts, adds new concepts, and its overall architecture is new (Chap. 2 provides a more comprehensive treatment of its conceptual architecture). EGT starts from a non-essentialist perspective in which everything in governance is considered to be contingent, discursively constructed and subject to evolution. It distances itself from theories assuming that only certain parameters in governance are variable or ought to be variable, from theories stating the existence of one ideal model of governance, positing that as an evolutionary goal, and from theories not seeing change as evolutionary. Evolutionary in EGT means co-evolutionary, with elements changing each other, with the whole and the elements affecting each other. Structures and elements of governance are the result of governance evolution. Evolution creates an openness for change, a specific capacity of observation, but also a set of rigidities in adaptation (see Chap. 2).

This radical evolutionary perspective offers novel linkages between existing theories, such as social systems theory, post-structuralism and institutional economics, but also versions of public administration, currents in environmental studies, schools in political philosophy, management and organization studies, anthropology. We will encounter more examples in the next chapters. These linkages are made productive and specified in EGT, where they contribute to an extension of the conceptual frame helping to explain change, its direction, and the spaces for intervention and redesign.

EGT combines radical constructivism, radical evolutionism, an openness for diverse equilibria in governance evolution, and a theoretical openness, and a willingness to incorporate concepts from any discipline useful for the understanding of coordinated change in communities combine. This led to a new and expanding framework, productive in terms of its ability to incorporate and transform existing concepts, its capacity to engender new insights, and to produce new concepts-as will be illustrated in the next chapters.

1.2 Theories of Governance and Evolution

EGT emerged from a wide variety of empirical studies on four continents. Theoretically, it incorporates elements from a variety of sources and disciplines, but we want to single out three important sources of inspiration: social systems theory, institutional economics and post-structuralism. We refer again to the first EGT book (Van Assche et al. 2014) for more detail, and to Chap. 2, the Glossary and the other chapters in this book.

The term governance itself is often associated with the supposed shift from government to governance, a supposed change in western societies from central steering and expert-driven decision-making to more participatory forms of democracy. EGT would argue that there are always forms of participation, that there was always governance. Somehow, in many places, the balance between representation and participation in democracies is found to be wanting, and a new reflection on governance, on participation is called for. There has been an increasing interest in the inclusion of various actors beyond government in collective decision-making, in the making of policies, plans and laws. Public administration, management, political science, spatial planning, sociology, social work, development studies, community development, environmental studies, applied anthropology are all fields of inquiry, some of them more clearly disciplines than others, where, sometimes in several waves, the call for more participation, more ‘governance’, more engagement, for being more community-based, was heard. Many analyses of participation and the like came rather quickly to normative assessments, or simply started from a supposed lack of participation, a supposed lack of governance, as the root cause of community problems.

If we understand governance and participation as always there, and governance as radically constructivist and evolutionary, then the issues and these theoretical reflections look rather different. Relatively few academic observers have started to develop frameworks for analyzing the changing ways communities address changing circumstances. Evolution for many sounds like a dirty word, because of its association with social Darwinism, or, slightly more benign, with theories of progress, of objectively defined ‘development’, often in western mold, and with colonialist overtones. Without using the word, however, in economics, several schools developed evolutionary perspectives which became more and more constructivist, thus allowing for new links with the existing frameworks of post-structuralism. Elinor Ostrom’s version of institutionalism emphasized the possibility of different sustainable equilibria in resource use for communities, linked to different forms of property, to differently defined property rights. Douglass North and Avner Greif demonstrated in historical and later contemporary cases how actors and institutions co-evolve, and how different institutional arrangements are capable of stabilizing and expanding not only markets, but also of creating unique sets of relations between politics, law and economy. Daron Acemoglu showed how economic development without a rule of law allowing for a measure of participation in the making of laws is very fragile, that de facto an expansive interpretation of rule of law, allowing for different versions, has to be the starting point of any analysis of economic development. Kathleen Thelen brought out the implication that capitalism exist in varieties, each with their own history, their own context in which they were made possible and made sense. William Easterly underlined the importance of informal coordination, of continuous institutional experiment, and of context-specific versions of the rule of law for economic development.

Many attempts to grasp governance evolutions build upon concepts and principles that are developed and shared within a certain discipline, but often ignore potentially productive insights developed in others. We see, for example, that several economists point out the importance of language, information and communication in the evolution of economic systems. Elinor Ostrom for instance argues that our dependence on language to communicate and the inherent ambiguity of language can lead to a number of unconscious processes of rule change as well. Rules are composed of mere word… (Ostrom and Basurto 2011, p. 327). James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen point to the importance of interpretation and re-interpretation of ideas and stories in gradual institutional change (Mahoney and Thelen, 2010). Likewise Douglas North (North 2005) raises a number of questions considered relevant in understanding social change and development: How well do we understand reality? How do beliefs get formed? Whose beliefs matter and how do individual beliefs aggregate into belief systems? How do they change? What is the relationship between beliefs and institutions? (p. 4). All these questions, we believe, can be answered by selectively mining the insights put forward by post-structuralist thinkers.

EGT incorporates insights from these economists (much more than from economists consciously labeling themselves as evolutionary) and rethinks and reconnects them from a radically constructivist and evolutionary perspective. The constructivism brings a rapprochement with post-structuralism, and an ability to see the importance of discourse narratives and ideology in the self-transformation of communities, in the analysis of power relations in governance, and the interactions between knowledge and power (see Chap. 2). Indeed Easterly, North, Acemoglu and others have asserted already the importance of power relations and of stories about self and environment, beyond their distorting character of rational economic relations, rather as co-constitutive of communities and how they do business. The new connections EGT makes with post-structuralist thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jaques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, brings this aspect of community development more clearly into the analysis of economic development. While the same connections, in combination with linkages with public administration and political science, renders it possible to transcend the discussions of economic development, and to speak of evolving governance. Varieties of capitalism should be understood as varieties of democracy or governance, and the co-evolution of actors and institutions observed in economic governance has been observed in governance as such.

In combining these sources, EGT makes them productive for each other in a new unity, and it brings new concepts to the analysis of governance in a coherent way. The constructivist and evolutionist understanding of governance, in which everything can reshape each other over time, makes it possible and necessary to bring new concepts from different intellectual domains into the fold of governance analysis. In the following chapters, it will be demonstrated that the EGT perspective can shed a light on a variety of classic issues in governance, using new conceptual tools.

1.3 Luhmann and EGT

The disciplinary focus of many theories of governance and change can partly be explained by tensions between different paradigms and their embedded ontological and epistemological assumptions, which take either individual human beings, actions or social structures as a starting point. Many debates and controversies revolve around the relations between individuals and society, agency and structure and between psychic and social processes. While some theories consider individuals, humans, or subjects as agents of change, others have pointed to the importance of the cumulative experiences of past generations as discursive structures that shape the course of evolution. The different ontological and epistemological understandings of the world upon which these different paradigms are based, hamper the development of a joint framework, which would require a meta-theoretical perspective on life, cognition, and society.

Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist, argued that a meta-theoretical perspective on life, cognition, and society is possible if neither people nor actions or structures, but communications are taken as the basic elements which constitute a society (Luhmann 1995). He developed a general theory of society as a theory of social systems. Communications make up social systems and society is presented as a set of interacting, observing and co-evolving social systems. They reproduce and evolve their elements and structures based on their elements and structure. Luhmann calls this, following Chilean biologists Varela and Maturana, autopoiesis. Social systems are perspectives, modes of interpretation, transforming themselves starting from ongoing processes of interpretation and reinterpretation of internal and external environments. Humans exist in his theory in two ways, as subjects, created by social systems, and as physic systems able to process meaning, which are a necessary part of the environment of social systems.

Following Luhmann, EGT places governance in the functional domain of politics, and understands it as a mode of communication, self-referential and specialized, specialized in the preparing of collectively binding decision, in the production and use of instruments serving that purpose. Actors are constituted in this specialized communication and coordination takes places in it. Social systems theory has strong affinities with post-structuralism (although Luhmann himself didn’t like to think of it that way), and by itself already offers a strong cohesive framework to connect many of the insights of post-structuralism. For Luhmann and the post-structuralist discourse constitutes the social realm. Actors themselves can be individuals ascribed such role in governance, and in many cases they are organizations (represented maybe by individuals). Again following Luhmann, organizations assigned such role we understand as social systems themselves, as self-referential systems of decision-making. Participation in governance can expand the scope and impact of decision in an organization, can grant an impact on the making of collectively binding decisions in the community.

1.4 Applying EGT

EGT brings insights derived from social systems theory, institutional economics, public administration, post-structuralism, policy studies together around the core ideas of radical evolution and radical constructivism, placing them in a new, coherent, yet still evolving and expanding framework for the analysis of governance. EGT offers new insights for understanding how actors, institutions, and discourses are in a continuous process of co-evolution and co-creation. Governance pathways cannot be but unique in such perspective, and context is everything. Interventions seem to make sense in and have specific effects in specific paths and contexts. In the next chapter, we spell out how these basic insights produce the building blocks of EGT, and how this set of interrelated concepts sheds a new light on the eternal issues of governance.

In the subsequent chapters, reflecting the focus of this volume, various authors contribute to the understanding of governance dynamics by means of EGT. They will apply EGT and explore the implications for theory and policy and the resonance with other theories and empirical situations. As the reader will notice, applying EGT involves critical reflection and it brings about further development of EGT. Several authors observe that many perspectives on governance and governance transitions start from normative and ideological assumptions. EGT offers an alternative for these idealistic perspectives, but also a theory from which their presence and their productive power in evolving communities can be grasped. Referring to such ideologies, and to the web of co-evolving elements in governance, EGT clarifies why certain governance outcomes are conceptualized as a failure and others as a success and how such ascriptions influence the development and implementation of alternative approaches and therewith the path of governance. EGT can help to avoid polarizing discussions, and show the complexity of the middle ground between market and state. The gradual evolution of governance, including the creation of states and markets, has brought prosperity, welfare and quality of life for many communities. Many of the purposeful interventions in and by governance have achieved positive effects, even though these effects do sometimes largely differ from what was once intended. EGT can thus see the middle ground as more than that. It can understand the supposed polarities of market and state as mythologized polarities, and rather than two poles and a middle ground, it can map out and compare pathways of governance, in which market, state and law relate in different ways, in which interventions of different sorts are more or less likely to emerge and have more or less impact.

1.5 Reading Guide

In this book, EGT will be applied to a wide range of topics and issues. The following chapter present empirical studies as well as theoretical reflections on the conceptual framework. The book consists of five parts. Part 1 will after this introduction briefly present the theoretical framework and the most important concepts.

Part 2 elaborates on the configurations of actors and institutions. It explores how the configuration of actors and institutions creates dependencies in governance and therewith rigidities and flexibility in its evolution. The different contributions draw on social systems theory and institutional and development economics, but do so from an EGT perspective. Actors are analyzed as agents of change, but also as constrained in various ways, by other actors, by institutions, by their own understanding of self and others, and by their image as constructed by others.

This part of the book opens with a reflection on the roles of law in planning. Rather than posing an opposition between planning and law (traditional in the spatial planning literature), it demonstrates the different roles of law and their interplay in the evolution of governance. The focus is on spatial planning, which is broadly defined as the coordination of policies and practices affecting spatial organization. Each society or community has a different form of planning, concomitantly different roles of law in planning and governance. The roles of law in planning are explored in four scenario’s, showing that three main roles can be distinguished: law can enable, delimit and codify planning. The way in which these different roles play out and relate to each other hinges on the linkages of law, politics, and economy in society and on the patterns of dependency within the governance evolution. The interplay between these function can make law a brake as well as an accelerator for change and development.

Gert Verschraegen, in his analysis of the evolution of the welfare state, locates its genesis and its steering problems, problems in addressing problems, in the process of functional differentiation and in the history of success of the welfare states. Proven approaches multiply, become less adapted, more costly, and the ongoing specialization and separation of law, politics, economy, science makes it tough to address new social and ecological issues. Modernization has brought numerous benefits, but also created new problems, and an internal complexity which made it harder to deal with them. The welfare state was supposed to address the core issue of inclusivity, inclusivity in a development process observed as fast, disruptive and often unfair. Institutions and actors which evolved in the frame of welfare state governance have different effects. The changing territorial nature of economies and the changing circulation of narratives of identity affect the functionality of welfare states, the coordinative power of institutions and the map of actors. At the same time, the reflexivity developed in the same process of functional differentiation allows for the emergence of discourses calling for more flexible forms of governance.

Nicolas Hayoz explores regional variation in the interplay between formal and informal institutions. Functional differentiation is presented as the necessary background for all kind of other forms of differentiation. The chapter then analyzes the relations between the different forms of differentiation. It shows how networks of clientelism can influence formal structures and become parasites of functional differentiation. He also point to the differences between the presentation of state systems (e.g. democratic, liberal, more or less controlled) and the way in which societies actually function and are organized. Over-regulation and under-enforcement mark many post-Soviet polities, with formal institutions enforced by elites deciding on the selective enforcement of formal rules. Transformation does seem possible, because of the dependence of non-democratic polities on the economic, conceptual and organizational resources of a differentiated world society.

Anna-Katharina Hornidge et al. further explore the layered coexistence and mutual shaping of different forms of differentiation. Drawing on an extensive and detailed study of agricultural resources governance in rural Uzbekistan they show how local actors navigate between functional, segmentary, and hierarchical forms of differentiation. The mobilization of patron-client relationships, a complex system of coercive reciprocity and a trilogy of formal, strategic and discursive practices all reaffirm segmentary and hierarchical forms of differentiation. This makes it difficult to depersonalize governance. These ways of coordination allow for short time survival of some actors, for control of resources by others, but jeopardizes long-term adaptation in governance. Whereas Hayoz demonstrated the necessity of some level of functional differentiation for non-democratic regimes, Hornidge et al. demonstrate that the reliance on and expansion of segmentary and hierarchical forms of differentiation can undermine functional differentiation, and jeopardize the mechanisms of self-transformation (hence adaptation) coming with it.

Poul Kjaer adds a layer to the analysis of evolving governance by clearly introducing multi-level governance as the normal state of affairs. States are too complex internally to rely on one level of decision-making and world society itself is reorganizing all the time, redefining state sovereignty and reshaping governance at lower spatial scales. Kjaer shows how normative orders can stabilize and how stabilization attempts in a multilevel context create productive tensions that further the evolution of governance. He elaborates on the co-evolution between normative orders oriented at nation states and those that emerge in a global context. Organizations functioning globally have to deal with institutional configurations (normative orders) evolved within and adapted to nation states. This multitude of expectations creates frictions on both sides, with adaptation possibly taking place on both sides. The chapter explores the processes of convergence and divergence between scales and sees governance at the trans-national level as a transitional state and stage, often at odds with forms of differentiation marking nation states, in the absence of clear overarching jurisdictions. It discusses five distinct, but overlapping characteristics of trans-normative law that can be observed: inter-contextuality, fragmentation, cognitivization, gradualization, and heterarchy. The future is left open. Signs of a new normative order, resulting from mutual adaptation, are visible, as are highly disruptive effects of the current transitional, partly post-national situation.

Vladislav Valentinov and Nodir Djanibekov illustrate, in their analysis of attempts at trans-boundary water governance in Central Asia, the conundrums of trans-national governance, even when the shared interests seem obvious. A history of centralization, of belonging to one political entity, the USSR, and a similarity in actor/institution configurations does not help. It seems rather to aggravate the mutual distrust and the complexity of calculations. A history of informality inspires the actors to distrust new formalities even more, and a newfound independence, plus invigorated new national elites (new actors), push towards autarky, informality, and a reorganization of formality aiming at national actors and institutions. The authors argue that functional differentiation increased its hold over the new countries, at the expense of older hierarchical differentiation, and that this aggravated the coordination problems already brought about by the creation of new nation states, and has serious implications for the sustainability of these entities.

Part 3 addresses the configuration of power/knowledge. It explores the processes and techniques by which power and knowledge contribute to the transformation of actors, institutions and the discourses, narratives and ideologies they shape and are shaped by. This part starts with a reflection on the contingent nature of governance, presented as the always emerging outcome of recursive power dynamics.

Michael Gunder, in his chapter, pleads for more attention to ideology, desire and fantasy as central drivers in the production of social reality, and therefore in attempts to coordinate action around notions of common goods and shared values. Many issues and debates in governance revolve around the different ideologies that underlie particular approaches to topics of governance or to governance itself. Classic examples include free markets, social engineering, or the blessings direct citizen involvement is expected to bring to participatory governance. Such ideologies can hamper scientific analysis, but at the same time they fuel debate, inspire productive contestation, new insights, and they can become to a large extent performative, create reality effects (see Chap. 2). Gunder shows how fantasy can be a powerful tool in mapping and deconstructing institutions such as plans and policies, and the ideologies on which they are based.

In a profound discussion of Luhmannian concepts and topological thinking, Iulian Barba Lata ferrets out conclusions that can deepen the understanding of object formation in governance. Barba Lata points out that objects form in spaces, in conceptual spaces and material spaces, both the product of observations made in systems, of differences made by observers. Material spaces, as external to the system, can only exist through re-entry, through a reconstruction of the whole in the part, the observing system. The conceptual space a system can create through its operations, the operational space, already predetermines to a degree which objects can be conceived, and which concepts of material space can be formed. Space and object are deeply entwined, as material space exists only as conceptual space and conceptual space contributes to the shaping of objects. Object formation and stabilization, and the competition between discourses and their objects in governance, can be further analyzed through this lens. Power can be analyzed through the rearrangement of conceptual spaces, while these spaces allow more easily for certain rearrangement than others, and this can be another way to conceive of the power/knowledge nexus.

Jean Hillier charts the trajectory of the concept of resilience, evolving from the concept of sustainability. She analyzes the concept of resilience as a Foucauldian dispositif, a meta-configuration of power/knowledge, actors and institutions. Resilience is linked with ideas on the management of risks and uncertainties. It puts forward a certain way of governing, relying on planning for risk management, and simultaneously introduces new forms of expertise, while transforming actors, power relations and institutions. Through these processes a specific understanding of resilience becomes a predetermined end-state which is naturalized. A particular understanding of resilience undermines resilience as it excludes alternative discourses and subjectivities and therewith reduces the adaptive capacity of governance.

Daan Boezeman and Henk-Jan Kooij analyze the evolving governance for climate change adaptation in the Netherlands, focusing on the new concept of ‘urban warming’. The authors demonstrate how path- and interdependencies mark the trajectory of object formation in governance and the gradual modification of governance in the same trajectory, starting from a water-centered adaptation governance, irritated by two heat waves. They show how the Dutch form of multi-level governance, with increasing autonomy for the local level, and a more entrepreneurial role of certain cities, shaped the pathway of object formation and stabilization. The cities of Arnhem and Rotterdam are singled out as particularly important in the formation and governance embedding of the object of ‘urban warming’. While urban warming was quickly naturalized as a matter of fact in both cases, establishing it as a stable matter of concern proved far harder. Boezeman and Kooij argue persuasively that adaptation takes effort, from everyone, and that adapting to something nobody cares for, is a tough nut to crack for governance. Even where governance was able to quickly naturalize the object.

In the final chapter of this section, Guus Dix draws on Foucauldian theory to put forward some future challenges for the development of EGT. In his view, the cautionary side of EGT has been more developed than the search for spaces of action and deliberate change. Dix stresses the presence of the systems theoretical idea of closure in EGT, and finds the theory oscillating between contingency and necessity, the analysis of flux and dependencies, of rigidity and flexibility. As authors, we would say that the book in front of you intends to take up that challenge.

Part 4 presents a number of case studies in which EGT is used to analyze some topical governance issues. This part further substantiates the analytical claims of EGT, by applying it to issues like sustainability, development, and innovation. EGT is deployed to analyze different forms of steering, the involvement of different stakeholders, the implementation of particular institutions and their socio-economic effects. The authors in this section explore the potential and limitations of different forms of governance and put forwards novel ideas for reflexive governance.

Luigi Pellizzoni uses evolutionary governance to reflect on the promises and (dis)illusions of deliberative democracy. Deliberative democracy, as a specific model for governance, has received a lot of attention in both research and in politics and administration. This chapter questions the benign nature of deliberative democracy and the various implementations it can have in different political and administrative traditions. It explores how deliberative democracy both constitutes a different configuration of power/knowledge as well as a shifting configuration of actors and institutions. The chapter presents two contrasting readings of the spread of deliberative democracy in the last decades. This first builds on a ‘governance’ reading and puts forward a positive view of public deliberation in which theory acts as a benchmark or critical compass for practice. The second is a ‘governmentality’ approach that understands the shift to more participative and deliberative forms of governance as part of a growing hegemony of neo-liberalist governance modes, emphasizing individual choice and responsibility, downplaying the entwining of power/knowledge and the possibility to define common goods. EGT then is used to reassess the evolution of discourses on deliberative democracy and look for bridging opportunities. Pellizzoni singles out the particular roles of narratives of success and failure. The chapter shows how proposals for and analyses of deliberative governance rest on criteria and interpretations that can differ per practical and theoretical context, that can become performative to different degrees. EGT is praised and criticized for its normative neutrality, offering possibilities to discern shifting spaces for collective action and social change, yet maybe not reflecting explicitly enough on its substance.

Utkur Djanibekov builds on a set of concepts from ecological economics and EGT to address the difficulties of rural transformation in Uzbekistan, away from unsustainable cotton cultivation, and towards more adaptive governance. He analyzes the difficulties of an experimental program for afforestation of marginal croplands with fast growing trees, and diagnoses a strong set of path and interdependencies, here analyzed as lock-ins, which makes implementation of the program, and a social learning function, contributing to rural transformation, tough. The new program relies on other changes, on not yet existing interdependencies and complementarities for success, while existing interdependencies, aggravated by heavy infrastructure and expertise investments in the past, and power relations further entrenched after independence, make it very hard to transform either power or knowledge, either actors or institutions. New initiatives are unlikely to break the actor/institution configuration stemming from the cotton monopoly, unless the same actors are convinced of their potential. Policy recommendations in this perspective, in line with EGT, are to be understood as recommendations to unlock rural development, to increase adaptive capacity, and to remove obstacles for adaptation. In absence of democratic decision-making, this can still be possible, but bottom-up initiatives assuming a level of local and individual autonomy not present, and a level of institutional transparency and stability not there, are vulnerable and innovations towards sustainability are unlikely to spread in this manner.

Martin Petrick’s contribution explores how an evolutionary perspective can be integrated into game theory. Based on European case studies, often including assessments of EU rural development policies, it puts forward an evolutionary understandings of neo-endogenous rural development. The model captures the interplay between centralized policies for regional development and the internal coordination between actors within the region. It distinguishes between a negative equilibrium of flight and decline, and a positive one of growth and prosperity. Actors are conceived as either mobile or immobile. The model creates a new image of the middle ground between domineering state and absent state, and shows that moving from negative to positive equilibrium is possible, and can be enabled by policy emanating from higher levels, if and only if autonomy in local decision-making is respected, and when the triad of path dependence, interdependence and goal dependence is acknowledged and understood. Shared visions can reconfigure governance and lead to a different path, and interdependence, e.g. between the mobiles and immobiles, each representing different assets for development, can block or enable a move from negative to positive equilibrium. Path dependence asserts itself as the unique set of actors and coordinative trusted institutions in a given locale, and as the unique starting condition. Because initial conditions matter, outcomes cannot be planned or engineered from the outside.

Anastasiya Shtaltovna et al. show, in a case study of Khorezm province in Uzbekistan, how agricultural service organizations are transformed after the collapse of the USSR and the independence of Uzbekistan. Shtaltovna et al. look carefully at three agricultural service organizations, their evolution, and pay close attention to the functioning and meaning of accounting. Evolving accounting practices and problems reflect problems in the reproduction of the organizations and broader changes in economic organization and in governance. Management of individual organizations becomes virtually impossible because they are expected to be autonomous and self-financing, yet still tied to old demands. The semantics of ‘business’ and the dependencies of rural governance produce interesting hybrids of governance forms, where the lacking autonomy of organizations renders functional differentiation problematic, and clashes with notions of ‘development’ (assuming transparent accounting as essential tool) by international organizations and other outside observers (echoing some of the observations made by Poul Kjaer).

Jasper de Vries and Albert Aalvanger explore the co-evolution between identities and institutions in two very different local communities. One case study was carried out in South Africa, the other in the Netherlands. They compare both cases and analyze how and why subjects, actors and institutions change in relation to each other. They show that these elements can be stable for a longer period of time, but also change rapidly with the entrance of new actors, new ideas or if rules and identities are re-negotiated.

Patrick Devlieger analyses the co-evolution of countries through a shared history. In the case of Belgium and the Democratic Republic of Congo a history of colonialism. Devlieger investigates processes of decentralization in both countries, finding that the structural differences are greater than the similarities, but also that goal dependencies can transcend path dependencies, that the envisioning of shared future, a willingness to share and relate futures can create ties strong enough to engender learning. He also suggests that evolutionary governance should take account of the unique legacies of modernism on national, regional and transnational governance, and go beyond the post-modern debunking of modernism and its myths of universality and rationality. As others have observed, these myths can have productive and performative effects, and Devlieger suggest that for EGT analyses of the long term and large scale, the concept of trans-modernity, distinct from post-modernity, can structure the assessment of positive and negative legacies of modernism and modernity. He further argues for the inclusion of the concepts of borders and borderlands in EGT, as spatial concepts and spatial metaphors, as vantage points to study the entwining of material, emotional and conceptual entities and boundaries. If borders are borderlands, identities can be understood in more overlapping and complex manners, and the seeping of identity narratives into governance. Simultaneously, borderlands introduce an inherent ambiguity regarding governance in an immediate way: who is in charge? and how to identify?

Kristof Van Assche et al. investigate how innovation in governance and the stimulation of innovation by means of governance are entwined. The issues of steering and social engineering come to the foreground again, and are linked with a reflection on the nature of ‘innovation’ and the emergence and functioning of innovation discourses in western societies. It is argued that innovation was always there, is less predictable and manageable than usually understood, and that the links between scientific, technical and economic innovation are more complex than is envisioned in innovation discourses. EGT can help to understand the genealogy and impact of innovation discourses, but also to delineate spaces for coordinated reflection on and action towards sorts of innovation possible and desirable for a given community, in a given governance path.

Part 5 wraps up the insights put forward in the previous chapters and takes stock of the lessons learned. It points at future challenges, possible paths of development, and formulates some recommendations for the further implementation of EGT on key topics in governance, development and policy studies.

References

Luhmann N (1995) Social systems. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA

Mahoney J, Thelen K (2010) Explaining institutional change: ambiguity, agency, and power. Cambridge University Press, New York, NY

North DC (2005) Understanding the process of economic change. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ

Ostrom E, Basurto X (2011) Crafting analytical tools to study institutional change. J Inst Econ 7:317–343

Van Assche K, Beunen R, Duineveld M (2014) Evolutionary governance theory: an introduction. Springer, HeidelbergCrossRef

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Raoul Beunen, Kristof Van Assche and Martijn Duineveld (eds.)Evolutionary Governance Theory10.1007/978-3-319-12274-8_2

2. An Overview of EGT’s Main Concepts

Kristof Van Assche¹  , Raoul Beunen²   and Martijn Duineveld³  

(1)

Faculty of Extension, Planning, Governance and Development, University of Alberta, Jasper Ave, 10230, Edmonton, AB, Canada, T5J 4P6

(2)

Faculty of Management, Science and Technology, Open University, The Netherlands, Valkenburgerweg, 117, 6419 AT Heerlen, The Netherlands

(3)

Cultural Geography, Wageningen University, Droevendaalsesteeg, 3, 6708 PB Wageningen, The Netherlands

Kristof Van Assche (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Raoul Beunen

Email: [e-mail]

Martijn Duineveld

Email: [e-mail]

Abstract

This chapter briefly outlines the theoretical framework of Evolutionary Governance Theory. It presents its architecture as well as the most important concepts and their relations. We emphasize the concepts of contingency and co-evolution, which serve as the base of an analysis of co-evolving configurations: actor/institutions, formal/informal, and power/knowledge. We discuss the three dependencies: path dependence, interdependence, and goal dependence and reflect on governance techniques and steering options. For a more detailed overview of EGT we refer to the book: ‘Evolutionary Governance Theory, an introduction’ (Van Assche et al. (Evolutionary governance theory: an introduction. Springer, 2014a)). For a further elaboration on the relations between concepts we also refer to the Glossary chapter at the end of this book.

2.1 Introduction

EGT starts with a broad definition of governance that allows addressing the huge variety in governing practices that can be found all over the world and that have emerged and disappeared in history. Governance is the taking of collectively binding decisions for a community in a community, by governmental and other actors. Governance is thus not reduced to one way of governing, not to a prescriptive formula, and not to something supposedly new. Our definition includes a myriad of state forms, diverse models of democracy and markets, and many possible linkages between public and private parties. Governance includes many actors in shifting relationships. It also includes a great variety of institutions, both formal and informal, that coordinate interactions, transactions and the distribution and use of resources. And it includes the various forms of knowledge and expertise upon which governance practices are based.

EGT draws on an ontology that acknowledges the anti-essentialist and contingent nature of governance. This implies that governance and its elements are mutually defining, while the elements shape each other, in the course of governance histories. Elements and structures are considered to be constituted in governance paths. These paths can be studied from different angles, using concepts such as discourse, narrative, social system, or institution. EGT offers a new way to connect these concepts in a consistent manner, through the binding to a shared goal: the analysis of governance. Governance