Collective Responsibility in the Cooperative Governance of Climate Change

This paper sets out a proposal for framing collective responsibility as a central element within the cooperative governance of climate change. It begins by reconstructing the analysis of climate change as a Tragedy of the Commons in the economic literature and as a Problem of Many Hands in the ethical literature. Both formalizations are shown to represent dilemmatic situations where an individual has no rational incentive to prevent the climate crisis and no moral requirement to be held responsible for contributing to it. Traditionally both dilemmas have been thought to be solvable only through a vertical structure of decision-making. Where contemporary research in political economy has undergone a “governance revolution”, showing how horizontal networks of public, private, and civil society actors can play an important role in the management of the climate crisis, little research has been carried out in the ethical field on how to secure accountability and responsibility within such a cooperative structure of social agency. Therefore, this paper contributes by individuating some conditions for designing responsible and accountable governance processes in the management of climate change. It concludes by claiming that climate change is addressable only insofar as we transition from a morality based on individual responsibility to a new conception of morality based on our co-responsibility for preventing the climate crisis.

Artificial Intelligence, Responsibility Attribution, and a Relational Justification of Explainability

This paper discusses the problem of responsibility attribution raised by the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. It is assumed that only humans can be responsible agents; yet this alone already raises many issues, which are discussed starting from two Aristotelian conditions for responsibility. Next to the well-known problem of many hands, the issue of “many things” is identified and the temporal dimension is emphasized when it comes to the control condition. Special attention is given to the epistemic condition, which draws attention to the issues of transparency and explainability. In contrast to standard discussions, however, it is then argued that this knowledge problem regarding agents of responsibility is linked to the other side of the responsibility relation: the addressees or “patients” of responsibility, who may demand reasons for actions and decisions made by using AI. Inspired by a relational approach, responsibility as answerability thus offers an important additional, if not primary, justification for explainability based, not on agency, but on patiency.

How to Manage Your Policy Network

Managing policy networks has become a major focus of both scholars and practitioners. The key characteristics of policy networks that shape their management are: trust, diplomacy, and reciprocity. The chapter identifies the conditions under which networks succeed and fail. It discusses four sour laws of network governance: managing the mix, the problem of many hands, the holy grail of coordination, and local ownership. It discusses the challenge of central agencies managing network portfolios, rather than individual networks. It identifies five central dilemmas: top-down versus bottom-up, organizational glue, rules of the game, collaborative leadership, and storytelling. The chapter concludes with five plausible conjectures on how to build and keep a network.

Policy Networks

This chapter reviews literature on policy networks examining descriptive, theoretical, and prescriptive accounts. It identifies three descriptive uses—policy networks as: interest intermediation, interorganizational analysis, and governance. It identifies two theories about policy networks: power-dependence and rational choice. It reviews three approaches to reforming and managing networks: instrumental, interactive, and institutional. It then discusses the central debates and challenges about comparing networks, explaining change, and managing the institutional void. Finally, the chapter identifies four main problems: the mix of governing structures; the problem of many hands; the holy grail of coordination; and steering not rowing. Policy network analysis has become one more locus for the endless debates about how we know what we know in the social sciences.