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This paper presents a general overview of the process of the democratisation of cultural policy in Lithuania by exploring explicit arguments about democratisation in debates and policy documents in Lithuania (1988Lithuania ( -2011. At the early stage of transformation (1988)(1989)(1990)(1991)(1992), democratisation was envisaged as the administrative decentralisation of political institutions, particularly the Ministry of Culture, and as the introduction of democratic principles, such as freedom of speech and cultural self-regulation. More substantial meanings of democratisation were articulated in debates about ethnic diversity and social equality. The study reveals tensions between the values of high culture and pop culture and the unitary notion of Lithuanian national ethnic culture and the cultures of national minorities. At a later stage, the salience of the ethnic dimension decreased when the democratisation of cultural policy was conceptualised in relation to the knowledge economy, which required revision of the early postSoviet confrontation between culture and its economic use.

This article analyzes the development of Soviet scientific future studies after World War II, arguing that the field's theory and methods undermined the certainty of the communist future and laid the foundations for a new Soviet governmentality that acknowledged the intrinsic uncertainty of future development. The emphasis on uncertainty—but also the need for more data that could freely circulate between different branches of government and hence more transparency (glasnost')—called for radical revisions to Soviet notions of effective governance. Whereas some used future studies to criticize the actual practices of Soviet economic planning, others used this new type of expertise to extend personal influence and accumulate organizational power. Both cases, however, made it clear that Soviet governance had to accommodate the shift toward new constellations of power/knowledge in which scientific experts would play an ever-increasing role in shaping policy with regard to a fundamentally uncertain future.

This article introduces non-Western policy sciences into the burgeoning field of the intellectual history of Earth system governmentality, a field that studies the ideas, institutions and material systems that enable action at the global scale. It outlines the rise of debates on the idea of the governability of the global biosphere in late Soviet Russia (1970s–1980s), focusing particularly on the extension of Vladimir Vernadskii's famous theory of the biosphere and its governance (the stage of the noosphere) into computer modeling and systems analysis. As a result, a new notion of governance as guidance through milieu arose to conceptualize global governance of the biosphere. This conceptual innovation was part of Soviet scientists’ attempt to liberalize the centrally commanded Soviet governmental system.