Les Reciproqueteurs: post-regulatory corporatism

Abstract

ABSTRACTReflexive governance can be understood as an emergent encapsulated trust-building corporatism where network participants are neither state functionaries nor market entrepreneurs but network reciproqueteurs. This paper argues that such reflexive network governance results in a post-regulatory corporatism (PRC)—a more adaptable, less formalized, and flexible mode of interest intermediation, policy-making, and policy-implementation than previous modes of corporatist intermediation. Functional differentiation processes engender ‘negotiated connected contracts' in rescaled space in between inter-regional assemblages, a mode of structurally coupling new social partners in the emergent transnational knowledge-based economy. This involves the building of new social capital of network trust-building manifested in the norms of reciprocity and reflexive law constituted as a new mode of protocolism: one associated with the social learning and policy designing necessary for ecological systems' autopoeisis, resilience, and sustainability. This paper conceptualizes reflexive network governance as protocolism in constellations of PRC and discusses examples from the area of environmental policy-making. PRC is understood as a new mode of negotiated rule-making: as a recursive protocolism of multi-stakeholder social pacts constituted by frame agreements and negotiated connected network contracts.