Reflexive Governance: exploring the concept and assessing its critical potential

Panel Chairs:

Sabine Weiland, Catholic University Louvain, Belgium,sabine.weiland@uclouvain.be

 Abstract:

This panel aims to revisit the concept of "reflexive governance" and stimulate dialogue among various approaches. The concept of "reflexive governance" has gained much attention in the discussion about science policy (Wynne 1993), network governance (Rhodes 1997), sustainability governance (Voß, Bauknecht and Kemp 2006), and multi-level decision-making (Lenoble 2005; Rogowski 2006).

Dedeurwaerdere (2009) distinguishes between reflexive governance as design problem where rules for reflexive learning are created within a given normative framework (a case of first order learning), and a normative perspective which aims at reflexive capacity-building that finally leads to new design rules (a case of second order learning). The latter, normative aspect resonates with conceptual developments in the field of environmental democracy (Fischer 2003) and interpretive policy analysis (Fischer and Forester 1993), in particular an interest in procedural arrangements that encourage the re-framing of policy discourses in order to overcome intractable controversies (Rein and Schön 1993; Laws and Rein 2003). Reflexive capacity-building is also at the core of an understanding of reflexive governance as "a mode of steering that encourages actors to scrutinize and reconsider their underlying assumptions, institutional arrangements and practices" (Hendriks and Grin 2007).

These accounts suggest that reflexive governance occurs where institutional and procedural arrangements involve actors from various levels of governance and/or various epistemic backgrounds

• in an effort to reflect on and possibly adapt their cognitive and normative beliefs
• in ways that take into account and acknowledge alternative understandings of the problems
• in an attempt to integrate multiple approaches to problem solution.

From this emerges an understanding of "reflexivity" as a normative-practical concept that circumscribes a mode of governance that helps to overcome structurally embedded ignorance of specialised organisations and institutions with regard to the external effects of their own operations. It is not only consideration of the effects of societal routines and practices must be improved (moving from unreflectedness to reflectiveness), but also reflexive arrangements are needed to encourage participants to gain a reflexive stance toward the construction of governance objects through the operational schemes of observation, thereby moving toward reflexivity.