Lateral Network Governance

The author of this article goes beyond acknowledging networks as a governance mode to elaborate on the actual forms of governance that convey legitimate and acceptable coordination. He advances the concept of lateral network governance in the empirical context of organized networks, in which organizations pool resources and join their interests in the pursuit of common goals. To solve the puzzle of having independent equals commit themselves to coordinating their actions, the author aims to overcome the traditional dualism between formal and informal mechanisms of governance. Instead, he conceives lateral network governance as a structure for the legitimate delegation of decision-making. He develops a social network analytic approach to assessing the relational distribution of legitimacy. With his empirical analysis of two case studies of inter-firm network organizations, he illustrates the degree to which the actual legitimacy distribution diverges from formal governance authority. Lateral network governance has practical implications for inter-organizational networks and network managers.

Knowledge of Governance as Knowledge for Governance: Spatialized Techniques of Neutralization

The term governance often evokes processes of negotiation and collaboration between civil society, private sector, and state actors. Yet, governance processes also involve a contest of ideas in efforts to legitimate state-backed decision making. Drawing on empirical cases of coastal property developments in South Australia, this chapter investigates how key actors in land-use governance—such as developers, planners, politicians, and scientists—reflexively deploy “techniques of neutralization” to deflect critiques and manage opposition to contentious new developments. The author explores how these techniques draw on particular spatial metaphors and images to suggest that, somewhat ironically, a tacit meta technique is to neutralize the projected environmental risks to coastal space through narratives of time. By outlining these everyday techniques of neutralization, the author argues that such routines are a form of knowledge of governance—knowing what can be said and ways of speaking within governance processes—that is in turn a form of knowledge for governance.

The Remapping of Forest Governance: From Shareholder to Stakeholder

Resource conflicts are widespread features of contemporary globalization. In forestry-related resource peripheries, such as British Columbia (BC), various societal stakeholders are demanding a reform of resource uses away from industrial priorities towards more ecological and cultural ones. Forest conflicts represent institutional clashes that lead to new forms of governance based on new inventories, resource maps, science, and zoning. The authors of this paper analyze the remapping of forest resources in BC as part of broader paradigmatic transformations of society and economy from shareholder to stakeholder models of resource governance, i.e. as a shift in policy-making from hierarchical control by governments and markets to more diffuse, democratic forms of governance. This process is accompanied by institutional innovation and thickening that still need to be assessed for their effectiveness. Whether stakeholder remapping can be certified as good governance remains a context-dependent empirical question.

The Atmosphere of Democracy: Knowledge and Political Action

The leading scientists debating climate change increasingly view the relationship between knowledge and governance as an “inconvenient democracy.” On the one hand, the discrepancy between the knowledge of climate change and citizens’ commitments to behavioral changes amounts to the diagnosis of an “inconvenient mind”; on the other hand, the inertia of policies to capture progress in knowledge leads to the diagnosis of “inconvenient institutions.” The sense of political ineffectiveness felt especially among climate scientists provokes a strong disenchantment with democratic governance. As a result, some scientists propose that political action based on principles of democratic governance be abandoned. In my article, I argue that such a view is mistaken.

Networks as Facilitators of Innovation in Technology-Based Industries: The Case of Flat Glass

In this chapter, I question the extent to which the networks of the flat glass industry facilitated innovation in the past and continue to do so now. So far, students of technology-based industries have focused their attention on a number of high-technology industries including, for example, biotechnology. Since the manufacturing and secondary processing of flat glass require the application of a degree of technological expertise, the flat glass industry is also considered a technology-based industry, though not a high-technology industry in the sense that biotechnology is. This particularity of the industry enables me not only to provide a reasonably complete account of the extent to which the networks of the flat glass industry facilitate innovation, but also to explore whether or not we need a different sort of network thinking for this particular industry—different from the thinking that the students of high-technology industries subscribe to as they study, for example, biotechnology.

Nurturing Adaptive Governance Through Environmental Monitoring: People, Practices, Politics in the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Region, South Africa

Adaptive governance is an approach that can potentially help societies navigate uncertainty, change, and surprise, as well as issues that span sectors and scales. In this chapter, we use this concept to refer to flexible and learning-based collaborations and decision-making processes involving both state and non-state actors, with the aim to adaptively negotiate and coordinate management of social-ecological issues. We identify critical questions in the adaptive governance literature and provide an empirical contribution to these. We draw on a case study of the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Region in South Africa, focusing on the people, practices, and politics involved with adaptive governance in the Global South. Our findings illustrate that the practices of generating knowledge, sharing information, collaborating, and responding to change are shaped by the navigation of tensions between diverse values, norms, and routines. A lens of people, practices, and politics highlights adaptive governance as situated and involving agency, meaning, and creativity.

Experimentalist Systems in Manufacturing Multinationals: Recursivity and Continuous Learning Through Destabilization

This chapter explores manufacturing MNC governance practices under conditions of uncertainty. It shows that organized recursivity in knowledge flow and practice (“experimentalism”) can diffuse learning and innovation throughout the MNC. Three sorts of obstacles, however, are common: hierarchical insulation, stakeholder exclusion, and inadequate empowerment resources for participants. These obstacles exist not only ex ante, as firms attempt to construct formal experimentalist systems; they also are continually regenerated by the experimentalist dynamics themselves. In order to avoid disruption of recursive flow, MNCs are developing an array of destabilization mechanisms to undermine obstacles and reconstitute the deliberative experimentalist learning process.

Risk Governance: From Knowledge to Regulatory Action

Risk governance is used to refer to a body of scholarly ideas and concepts for collective decision making involving uncertain consequences of events or actions. The risk governance concept developed by the International Risk Governance Council in Geneva provides guidance for constructing comprehensive assessment and management strategies to cope with risk. Its crafters integrate three types of scientific input: classic, curiosity-driven research; strategic, goal-oriented research: and catalytic, process-related investigations. In this paper, I demonstrate how these three knowledge pools can assist risk assessors and managers to improve their understanding of complex risk situations.

The Governance of Global Innovation Systems: Putting Knowledge in Context

Technological innovation increasingly depends on multiscalar actor networks and institutions. However, the developers of many conceptual frameworks explaining innovation success have paid only limited attention to this new reality, due to their focus on regions and countries as agents that shape innovation governance and as containers that provide institutional conditions for innovation success. In particular, innovation systems literature has been criticized in this respect. In the present chapter, we refer to the recently formulated Global Innovation Systems approach, which enables researchers to capture the emergence of system resources across spatial scales. With this framework, we emphasize that beyond the focus on knowledge generation processes, a better understanding of valuation processes is necessary to guide governance structures for generating new technologies and products. This is particularly true for sectors that are oriented towards confronting grand challenges, such as cleantech industries.

Knowledge and Governance: Can Systemic Risk in Financial Markets Be Managed? The Case of the Euro Crisis

The crystallization of systemic risk in financial markets occurs when financial actors collectively (if unwillingly) bring on a major financial crisis through the withholding of credit and asset fire sales. The management and prevention of such calamities is our focus. We introduce the tools of political science, especially governance and institutional analysis, to help us probe the key dynamics at work. We then show that where appropriate knowledge and governance arrangements can be put in place, collective action may be arranged to help prevent the crystallization of systemic risk. We use the euro crisis to help illustrate our arguments.