Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning

This special issue aims to revisit the concept of “reflexive governance ” and stimulate dialogue among various approaches. The collection of essays should play a prominent role in environmental and sustainability governance. It will consider the concept of reflexivity as a practical-normative concept to design modes of sustainability governance. Rationale At the core of the scholarly literature on reflexive governance lies a conception of reflexivity as self-critical reflection that aims at examining its own assumptions and presuppositions. One strand of the literature has focused on reflexivity as a normative concept, drawing on the sociological theories of the 1980s and 1990s (Beck et al 1994, Giddens 1991). Current interpretations of these theories can be found in the work on transition management (Grin, Rotmans et al. 2010) and sustainability governance (Voß, Bauknecht et al. 2006), working with a distinction between first and second order reflexivity. Furthermore, the concept of reflexive governance has gained much attention in the discussion about learning-based governance (De Schutter and Lenoble 2010), network governance (Rhodes 1997), and multi-level decision-making (Rogowski 2006; Sabel and Zeitlin 2007). In this second strand