Reflexive governance: exploring the concept and assessing its critical potential for sustainable development. Introduction to the special issue

Abstract

Elaborated in publications on transition management, sustainability governance and deliberative environmental governance, 'reflexive governance' addresses concerns about social-ecological vulnerabilities, flawed conceptualisations of human-nature relations fragmented governance regimes and conditions for a sustainability transition. Key barriers to reflexive government include unavoidable politics; the influence of broader discursive systems that shape actors' strategic interests; and structural and deliberate limitations to the range of admitted epistemological understandings, normative perspectives and material practices. Against this background, the contributions to the special issue provide novel conceptual linkages between reflexive governance and boundary objects, intercultural dialogue, conflict management heuristics, discourse linguistics, theories of the policy cycle and reflexive law, network and learning theories, and Lasswell's 'developmental constructs'. Based on the contributions, we identify five inherent conceptual tensions of reflexive governance: between the openness of horizontal learning processes and the desired direction towards sustainable development; between reflexive governance as a normative or procedural concept; between expected learning orientations and other, strategic orientations; between governance as a precondition for reflexivity and reflexive learning as a precondition for reorganized governance structures; and between reflexivity as an open-ended, evolutionary process and the need to strategically defend the space for reflexivity against powerful groups with an interest in the status quo.

21 years of research for the twenty-first century: revisiting the journal of environmental policy and planning

“…For example, discursive analysis of environmental policy and planning has been an important part of JEPP's profile, with a Special Issue (Feindt & Oels, 2005) reflecting ten years of Maarten Hajer's seminal book (Hajer, 1995) and a follow-up Special Issue on discourse analysis in 2019 (Leipold et al, 2019). As noted above, these include some of the Journal's most cited papers, and other Special Issues on power/knowledge (Van Assche et al, 2017) and on reflexive governance (Feindt & Weiland, 2018) have further added important insights to this field. Another important strand has been critical inquiry into new modes of governance, including multi-level and collaborative governance.…”

“…Critical approaches complement the current more technocratic, institutional and actor-oriented approaches of environmental policy and planning. In addition, they create room to study and contribute to the democratic quality of the environmental governance (see Special Issue, Pickering et al, 2020), for example through reflexive governance (see Special Issue, Feindt & Weiland, 2018) and further development of theoretical thinking about environmental and energy justice (Special Issue in preparation).…”

Rethinking strategy in environmental governance

“…Third, a foregrounding of strategy can clarify possibilities and limits to managing the environment through policy and planning. It can add a more dialectical dimension to the literature on adaptive and reflexive governance (Feindt & Weiland, 2018;Hendriks & Grin, 2007;Torgerson, 2018;Voss et al, 2007), by addressing not just how strategies are formulated and put to work, but also how the identification, observation and labeling of something as a strategy or as effect of a strategy feed back into governance, triggering new strategies and affecting existing ones. Understanding strategy does not directly solve environmental problems but offers insight into the available tools towards solutions of governance problems in general, which can thus unlock new solutions, by removing erroneous assumptions and possibly distorted expectations for existing strategies (cf.…”

Czech postcommunist trouble with participatory governance. Toward an analysis of the cultural agency of policy discourses

“…However, analysing why professional elites' power might still have cultural ascendency in some regions and policy areas has not been accorded much attention in the interpretive agenda. Although some works argue that culture must be accorded importance when conceptualizing participatory governance (Fischer 2009a) and that particular cultural, social, and historical backgrounds must be taken into account (Feindt and Weiland 2018), the concrete operation of cultural agency in discursive practices has not yet been analysed. Social and cultural analyses of participation can been particularly thought provoking when doing this, as they bring an analytic sensitivity to concrete contexts in which practices of citizen empowerment are carried out (Clarke, Hoggett, and Thompson 2006;Blakeley and Evans 2009;Newman 2012;Sullivan, Skelcher, and Sullivan 2002).…”