Governance Through Social Learning

Governance connotes the way an organization, an economy, or a social system co-ordinates and steers itself. Some insist that governing is strictly a top-down process guided by authority and coercion, while others emphasize that it emerges bottom-up through the workings of the free market. This book rejects these simplistic views in favour of a more distributed view of governance based on a mix of coercion, quid pro quo market exchange and reciprocity, on a division of labour among the private, public, and civic sectors, and on the co-evolution of these different integration mechanisms. This book is for both practitioners confronted daily with governance issues and for citizens trying to make sense of the world around them.1. New Patterns of Governance 2. Tackling Wicked Problems 3. Elegant but Not Helpful to Navigation: Social Sciences Research and the Free Trade Debate 4. Science and Technology Policy Under Free Trade 5. A Social Learning Framework for a Wicked Problem: The Case of Energy 6. The Environment-Energy Interface: Social Learning Versus the Invisible Foot 7. Multiculturalism as National Policy 8. Liberal Education as Synecdoche 9. How to Scheme Virtuously: The Role of Public Service Commissions in Meeting the Needs of Changing Societies 10. Granting Councils in Search of Excellence: Dynamic Conservatism Versus Social Learning 11. The Strategic State 12. Betting on Moral Contracts 13. Distributed Governance and Transversal Leadershi