Reflexive Governance Research Articles

Network governance and reflexivity in fisheries management: a case study of Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT Network governance arrangements, wherein resource users are empowered, are vital for ocean sustainability. These arrangements are critical to implementing innovative practices, particularly those developed to address the negative impacts of top-down management. The adoption of networked governance can foster resource management capacity and equitable decision-making. Research has focused on social ties within networks but has provided a somewhat limited account of how networks evolve to instil novel practices. To implement new practices, networks must engage in reflexive governance. Reflexivity is underpinned by actors’ receptivity to change and network learning. Actors’ receptivity to change relates to whether they acknowledge past failures and how novel management ideas become accepted. Network learning is the degree of change instigated by actors’ reflexive processes. Drawing on the receptivity and network learning theories, and informed by semi-structured interviews, an assessment was conducted on how a fisheries management network in Northern Ireland has reflexively evolved to implement new practices. Findings illustrate that the network has reflexively redesigned how they collaborate, share knowledge, and contribute to policymaking. Demonstrating single– and double-loop learning, these developments have been derived from reflections on the failure of past processes and the instigation of more co-creative processes that benefit all network actors.

Socio-environmental impacts of mineral mining and conflicts in Southern and West Africa: navigating reflexive governance for environmental justice

Socio-environmental impacts of mineral mining and conflicts in Southern and West Africa: navigating reflexive governance for environmental justice

Theorizing reflexivity and transformative change in marine governance

ABSTRACT With multiple blue crises unfolding, momentum exists to develop and implement transformative marine governance approaches towards sustainable use of our oceans. Such approaches will only be transformative when they foster reflexive governance that questions and changes existing values and structures of power and governance. Yet, we lack understanding of how transformative marine governance change relates to reflexivity. This article takes an actor perspective and conceptualises reflexivity through three elements: (1) the trigger that leads to (2) processes of single, double and triple loop learning and reflection, and (3) the capacity to enact change. Building on the duality of structure and agency, we argue that reflexive actors are able to enact transformative change by changing their policy practices and the governance arrangements they are embedded in. These changes can in turn lead to political modernization, i.e. the structural transformation processes within the political domain of society. This will also result in changes across multiple governance arrangements. However, reflexivity is a process both enabled and constrained by existing power and governance structures, and does not happen automatically. We therefore conclude that reflexivity and transformation require deliberation, contestation and the capacity to learn and break through vested interest, discourses and power structures.

Accelerating heat pump diffusion in the UK: emergent tensions and priority areas for change

Abstract Energy efficiency is essential to meeting international carbon reduction ambitions. Shifting how energy services are delivered through the adoption of strategic technologies, like heat pumps for domestic heating, offers one important route to deliver efficiency gains if associated infrastructures, markets, cultures, and practices around broader systems can be transformed as well. Transformative Innovation Policy calls for new, reflexive, multi-actor governance practices capable of guiding such transformative change in particular directions whilst remaining open and responsive to system developments as they unfold. Yet seldom are stakeholders afforded the chance to deliberate on progress towards system transformation and offer insights on what is needed to expediate change. In this paper, we draw on data from three deliberative workshops carried out in 2023 in which experts from across industry, manufacturing, policy and research explored what is required to accelerate the diffusion of heat pumps in the UK. Our findings suggest decision theatres are a promising tool for reflexive evaluation of policy and identify five priority areas for change: (i) fostering a clear narrative, (ii) developing and delivering a coherent, long-term policy, (iii) increasing affordability, (iv) building installer capacity and (v) improving customer journeys. Although individual policies remain important, these priority areas shift the focus from policy instruments to broader considerations about the coherence of policy mixes and strategy for system transformations. Our work affirms how tensions arise in reflexive governance practices and supports the use of decision theatres as a method for exploring their implications in practice.

A balancing act: radicality and capture in institutionalising reflexive governance for urban sustainability transitions

Over the past two decades, urban actors have sought to foster long-lasting change towards sustainability through reflexive governance. Related activities, including transition labs, arenas, experiments, and roadmaps, have been problematised for disparities between using a discourse of transformation and radicality while failing to materialise radical action and succumbing to ‘projectification’ – meaning that the impact of an intervention tends to evaporate after the initial experiment impulse. Enabling a transformative legacy of such interventions requires institutionalising reflexive governance arrangements, i.e. a process of integrating these arrangements as part of the existing institutional set-ups while maintaining ‘radical’ elements. Particularly as the focus in certain urban transitions shifts from emerging and supporting niche practices towards institutionalising new ways of working and breaking down regime structures, it becomes paramount to better understand such processes. Based on a comparative empirical analysis of six European cities, we explore how these cities attempt to institutionalise reflexive governance and take stock of the tensions encountered, particularly to what extent cities manage to safeguard their radical ambitions, or whether these become ‘captured’ in the process. Other highlighted tensions are a focus on internal dynamics, a struggle around voluntary structures and accountability, and a challenge of keeping momentum with new actor constellations while trying to address complexity and uncertainty. We conclude by putting forward three recommendations for how reflexive governance processes may increase their impact: through prioritising institutional embeddedness in and outside of the local authority; creating transparency around how governance arrangements are adjusted and modified throughout the process for accountability; and renewing commitment periodically to ensure continuity and commitment from actors involved.

Developing places for human capabilities

This dissertation develops an understanding towards governing social sustainability goals into area-based urban development projects. It draws on Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach to construct a capability-centered evaluation of how institutionalized governance processes around these projects ultimately affect people’s freedoms to do the things they value in their urban living environment. Presenting case studies from the Netherlands, Sweden and Austria, the approach adopted in this dissertation reveals the unique ways in which different individuals interpret urban social sustainability and convert spatial resources into personal capabilities. The research uncovers the governance elements and institutional conditions around urban development projects that enable or constrain resource-to-capability conversions. It shows that governing social sustainability goals into urban development projects is a balancing act between reflexive governance action on the one hand, and an institutionalization of principles, actor responsibilities, and funding provision on the other hand. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that, to steer towards urban social sustainability, urban development practices can be improved by adopting an approach that is not merely focused on spatial improvements, but takes the equal expansion of human capabilities as its point of departure.

Brace for impacts: Perceived impacts and responses relating to the state of connected and autonomous vehicles in Gothenburg

It is anticipated that Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) will be introduced for public use in the coming decade. Thus, it is important to consider how ready cities are to integrate them into the urban environment. To address this question, this article frames the introduction of CAVs within the context of a socio-technical transition. We use the Drivers, Pressures, State, Impact and Response (DPSIR) framework to identify the impacts and responses of the introduction of CAVs in cities, with a specific emphasis on Gothenburg, Sweden. The results of the DPSIR analysis are then analyzed through the lens of transition management, in which the responses are related to strategical, tactical, operational and reflexive governance strategies. It was found that the reflexive component is likely to be critical for a successful introduction of CAVs in cities, so that policies can be adjusted as the uptake of the technology changes. Many issues that could arise from CAVs, such as increased car traffic and physical barriers to mobility, are already addressed in the City of Gothenburg’s official transportation strategy, but there is room for clearer policy with regard to CAV technology.

Strengthening reflexive governance to achieve the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs

Strengthening reflexive governance to achieve the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs

Co-producing ‘The Future(s) We Want’: How does political imagination translate into democratised knowledge-action models for sustainability transformations?

Democratic societies face the challenge of effecting sustainability transformations, allowing for variously imagined futures and underpinned by a diversity of practices of knowledge production and action. This article investigates how political imagination of sustainable futures informs the ways knowledge and action are understood and linked in sustainability and research policy, and what potential implications this has for democratic transformative change. Empirically, the article analyses the overarching sustainability and research policies in Sweden, focusing on the central documents produced by the government and public research financiers. The analysis shows parallels between the conceptualisations of sustainability and knowledge-action, characterised by linearity, instrumentalisation of knowledge and circumscription of power-sharing spaces for knowledge creation against the background of endorsement of collaborations between academia and society. Such conceptualisations, apart from sending mixed signals to sustainability researchers and practitioners, potentially enable knowledge and action processes driven by impact, competitiveness and atomisation, precluding the exercise of the intrinsic value of democratic knowledge and action practices necessary for reflexive governance of transformations towards sustainability.

The wisdom of crowds for improved disaster resilience: a near-real-time analysis of crowdsourced social media data on the 2021 flood in Germany

Transformative disaster resilience in times of climate change underscores the importance of reflexive governance, facilitation of socio-technical advancement, co-creation of knowledge, and innovative and bottom-up approaches. However, implementing these capacity-building processes by relying on census-based datasets and nomothetic (or top-down) approaches remains challenging for many jurisdictions. Web 2.0 knowledge sharing via online social networks, whereas, provides a unique opportunity and valuable data sources to complement existing approaches, understand dynamics within large communities of individuals, and incorporate collective intelligence into disaster resilience studies. Using Twitter data (passive crowdsourcing) and an online survey, this study draws on the wisdom of crowds and public judgment in near-real-time disaster phases when the flood disaster hit Germany in July 2021. Latent Dirichlet Allocation, an unsupervised machine learning technique for Topic Modeling, was applied to the corpora of two data sources to identify topics associated with different disaster phases. In addition to semantic (textual) analysis, spatiotemporal patterns of online disaster communication were analyzed to determine the contribution patterns associated with the affected areas. Finally, the extracted topics discussed online were compiled into five themes related to disaster resilience capacities (preventive, anticipative, absorptive, adaptive, and transformative). The near-real-time collective sensing approach reflected optimized diversity and a spectrum of people’s experiences and knowledge regarding flooding disasters and highlighted communities’ sociocultural characteristics. This bottom-up approach could be an innovative alternative to traditional participatory techniques of organizing meetings and workshops for situational analysis and timely unfolding of such events at a fraction of the cost to inform disaster resilience initiatives.

Pulp and participation: Assessing the legitimacy of participatory environmental governance in Umkomaas, South Africa

The Sappi Saiccor mill in Umkomaas, KwaZulu Natal (KZN) Province, is a global pulp producer. It is also a major emitter of noxious substances in the heavily polluted and historically marginalised South Durban area. Taking a qualitative, narrative approach, this paper examines Saiccor's legacy of contamination, community opposition to the mill, and responses of state actors responsible for governing industrial risk. Through a conceptual framework combining theories around participatory environmental governance, legitimacy and state capture, the article explores the extent to which measures deployed by/on behalf of the Sappi Saiccor mill to engage with local residents and activists can be considered legitimate. The paper argues that prevalent corporate instrumentalism and a lack of political will continue to undermine the legitimacy of community engagement processes, which remain characterised by mistrust. It concludes the South African state cannot be relied upon to support genuinely inclusive, deliberative, empowering and reflexive governance practices. It is therefore left to organised civil society to force discourse beyond hegemonic, ecologically-modernised, technocentric ideals, and to bring issues of power, agency, and social justice to the fore of public and policy debate. The way might then be paved for strong political leadership committed to transparent, equitable environmental governance processes.

Societal Monitoring and Archiving: Reflexive Governance in the Appraisal of Recovery

Societal Monitoring and Archiving: Reflexive Governance in the Appraisal of Recovery

From Policy Evaluation to Societal Monitoring: Historical Role of the Archiving for the Reflexive Governance in the Recovery of the Great East Japan Earthquake

From Policy Evaluation to Societal Monitoring: Historical Role of the Archiving for the Reflexive Governance in the Recovery of the Great East Japan Earthquake

Participation for just governance of food-system transition

Sustainability transitions governance needs to be inclusive and participatory and the question of justice is crucial for making effective and acceptable changes possible. But how do we ensure adequate participation in governance processes and enable reconciliation between competing goals in relation to sustainability transitions? Transition management highlights the need for participatory and reflexive governance processes to enable sustainability transitions. However, due to participant selection and limitations in chosen approaches, deliberative and participatory forums may have difficulties ensuring justice and legitimacy. A systemic and practice-oriented perspective on deliberation points to the need to widen deliberative activities and analysis on multiple sites, but the connection to transition governance and justice remains weak. In the context of food systems, various movements and networks, such as alternative food networks, food-policy councils, and food-sovereignty movements, work to create a more just and sustainable food system. They form an interesting manifestation for participation in just food governance and can provide new ideas for the development of more equitable governance practices. We analyze studies on civil society participation in food-system transitions to develop understanding of how to improve just transition governance. Based on this investigation, more just sustainability transition governance requires systemic and reflexive deliberation that is also capable of accounting for the role of social movements. There furthermore is a need for institutional arrangements to support this kind of decision making.

Seeds of Transformative Learning: Investigating Past Experiences From Implementing Nature-Based Solutions

Nature-based solutions (NBS) attract a growing interest in research and practice due to their potential to address climate change while improving human health and well-being and safeguarding biodiversity. The integration of the NBS concept in urban governance, however, is still emerging and it faces regulatory, political, financial and cognitive barriers. While the literature acknowledges an increase in NBS experimentation in cities and documents new governance approaches for NBS, academic knowledge on transformative learning to advance the potential of NBS is scarce. This article unpacks enabling and constraining factors for transformative learning through interpretative case study analysis of two NBS projects in Malmö, Sweden: BiodiverCity and EcoCity Augustenborg. To map instances of learning and investigate conditions for transformative learning in NBS implementation, this article draws on the concepts of experimenting, governing and learning and uses an analytical framework resting on three pillars: visionary ideas and strategies; stakeholder participation; and institutional arrangements. The article identifies seeds of transformative learning and argues that cross-boundary collaboration, action-oriented knowledge production, reflexive governance and citizen involvement are key enablers for transformative learning, which requires supporting structures, evaluation, continuity and relational capacities to thrive. To advance the implementation of NBS and increase urban sustainability, transformative learning should be acknowledged as a key strategic component of change. This, however, requires transformative learning to be more seriously considered in research and practice related to nature-based urban transformations.

Learning from crises? The long and winding road of the salmon industry in Chiloé Island, Chile

The rapid development of salmon aquaculture worldwide and the growing criticism of the activity in recent decades have raised doubts about the capacity of the sector to learn from its own crises. In this article, we assess the discursive, behavioral and outcome performance dimensions of the industry to identify actual learning and lessons to be learned. We focus on the case of Chiloé Island, Chile, a global center of salmon production since 1990 that has gone through two severe crises in the last 15 years (2007–2009 ISAV crisis and 2016 red tide crisis). On the basis of a multi-method approach combining qualitative analysis of interviews and statistical data analysis, we observe that the industry has discursively learned the relevance of both self-regulation and the well-being of communities. However, at the behavioral and outcome performance levels, the data show a highly heterogeneous conduct that questions the ability of the sector as a whole to learn from crises. We conclude that detrimental effects for ecosystems and society will increase if learning remains at the level of discourses. Without significant changes in operational practices and market performance there are no real perspectives for the sustainability of the industry. This intensifies when considering the uneven responses to governance mechanisms. The sector needs to adapt its factual performance to sustainable goals and reflexively monitor this process. The first step for achieving this is to produce reliable data to make evidence-based decisions that align the operational dynamics of the entire sector with a more sustainable trajectory in the near future, as well as advancing towards hybrid and more reflexive governance arrangements.

Bio-Ethics and One Health: A Case Study Approach to Building Reflexive Governance.

Surveillance programs supporting the management of One Health issues such as antibiotic resistance are complex systems in themselves. Designing ethical surveillance systems is thus a complex task (retroactive and iterative), yet one that is also complicated to implement and evaluate (e.g., sharing, collaboration, and governance). The governance of health surveillance requires attention to ethical concerns about data and knowledge (e.g., performance, trust, accountability, and transparency) and empowerment ethics, also referred to as a form of responsible self-governance. Ethics in reflexive governance operates as a systematic critical-thinking procedure that aims to define its value: What are the “right” criteria to justify how to govern “good” actions for a “better” future? The objective is to lay the foundations for a methodological framework in empirical bioethics, the rudiments of which have been applied to a case study to building reflexive governance in One Health. This ongoing critical thinking process involves “mapping, framing, and shaping” the dynamics of interests and perspectives that could jeopardize a “better” future. This paper proposes to hybridize methods to combine insights from collective deliberation and expert evaluation through a reflexive governance functioning as a community-based action-ethics methodology. The intention is to empower individuals and associations in a dialogue with society, which operation is carried out using a case study approach on data sharing systems. We based our reasoning on a feasibility study conducted in Québec, Canada (2018–2021), envisioning an antibiotic use surveillance program in animal health for 2023. Using the adaptive cycle and governance techniques and perspectives, we synthesize an alternative governance model rooted in the value of empowerment. The framework, depicted as a new “research and design (R&D)” practice, is linking operation and innovation by bridging the gap between Reflexive, Evaluative, and Deliberative reasonings and by intellectualizing the management of democratizing critical thinking locally (collective ethics) by recognizing its context (social ethics). Drawing on the literature in One Health and sustainable development studies, this article describes how a communitarian and pragmatic approach can broaden the vision of feasibility studies to ease collaboration through public-private-academic partnerships. The result is a process that “reassembles” the One Health paradigm under the perspective of global bioethics to create bridges between the person and the ecosystem through pragmatic ethics.

A Framework for Scaling Urban Transformative Resilience through Utilizing Volunteered Geographic Information

Resilience in the urban context can be described as a continuum of absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities. The need to move toward a sustainable future and bounce forward after any disruption has led recent urban resilience initiatives to engage with the concept of transformative resilience when and where conventional and top-down resilience initiatives are less likely to deliver effective strategies, plans, and implementable actions. Transformative resilience pathways emphasize the importance of reflexive governance, inclusive co-creation of knowledge, innovative and collaborative learning, and self-organizing processes. To support these transformative pathways, considering techno-social co-evolution and digital transformation, using new data sources such as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and crowdsourcing are being promoted. However, a literature review on VGI and transformative resilience reveals that a comprehensive understanding of the complexities and capacities of utilizing VGI for transformative resilience is lacking. Therefore, based on a qualitative content analysis of available resources, this paper explores the key aspects of using VGI for transformative resilience and proposes a comprehensive framework structured around the identified legal, institutional, social, economic, and technical aspects to formalize the process of adopting VGI in transformative resilience initiatives.

Biting the bullet: Addressing the democratic legitimacy of transition management

From early on, reflexive governance approaches have been problematised for lacking explicit consideration of formal governance and decision-making structures. Developed over two decades ago, transition management is not an exception; it has been specifically critiqued for being democratically illegitimate and depoliticising issues. Contributing to these debates, this article develops a legitimacy framework for understanding how transition management practices can be legitimised within liberal democratic structures, while safeguarding their transformative potential, or, ‘radical core’, while navigating innovation capture. This framework guides a comparative analysis of six European cities, who employ transition management practices for developing decarbonisation roadmaps towards 2050. We discuss the emphasis on liberal democratic norms, the fuzziness of practices of participation and the closing down of policy options. We recommend the legitimacy framework to be used as a heuristic for reflexive governance, tool for explicating the conditionality of ‘radicality’ in transition management, and guide for designing accountability governance structures.

Food Safety Governance and Guardianship: The Role of the Private Sector in Addressing the EU Ethylene Oxide Incident

Sesame seeds within the European Union (EU) are classified as foods not of animal origin. Two food safety issues associated with sesame seeds have emerged in recent years, i.e., Salmonella contamination and the presence of ethylene oxide. Fumigation with ethylene oxide to reduce Salmonella in seeds and spices is not approved in the EU, so its presence in sesame seeds from India was a sentinel incident sparking multiple trans-European product recalls between 2020–2021. Following an interpretivist approach, this study utilises academic and grey sources including data from the EU Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) database to inform a critical appraisal of current EU foods not of animal origin legislation and associated governance structures and surveillance programs. This is of particular importance as consumers are encouraged towards plant-based diets. This study shows the importance of collaborative governance utilizing data from company testing and audits as well as official regulatory controls to define the depth and breadth of a given incident in Europe. The development of reflexive governance supported by the newest technology (e.g., blockchain) might be of value in public–private models of food safety governance. This study contributes to the literature on the adoption of risk-based food safety regulation and the associated hybrid public–private models of food safety governance where both regulators and private organizations play a vital role in assuring public health.