In person icon New Perspectives on Reflexive Governance

Abstract

Reflexive Governance has been hailed as an antidote to technocratic policy-making. The concept has been linked to expectations about deliberative democracy, reflexivity, and social learning. Integrating reflection on deep-seated values and developmental imaginaries (Torgerson, Lasswell) into processes of policy-making would be no small feat. But the exact level of the concept requires clarification. On the hand, if conceptualised as institutional arrangement, reflexive governance can be linked to procedural ideas of operational consensus in decentred policy networks. On the other, understood as communicative practice, reflexive governance is linked to ideas about integrating a more encompassing model of justification into the policy process. Ideally, reflexive governance would regularly encompass Fischer’s four levels of judgment: technical verification, situational validation, societal vindication and ideological choice. The papers in this panel explore the concept of reflexive governance from a range of complementary perspectives: values and emotions, boundary objects, policy monitoring and assessment, democracy and social learning, and reciprocity in policy networks. The papers are selected contributions from a special issue in the Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning. The aim of the panel is to reflect on the state of the reflexive governance discussion. The papers contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of argumentation in public policy and engage with some of the most ambitious current attempts to advance both our understanding of the role of argumentation in fragmented governance arrangements, and to integrate more reflexive modes of argumentation into the policy process.

Title	Details
A Tale of 'Fat Cats' and 'Stupid Activists': Contested Values, Governance and Reflexivity in the Brno Railway Station Controversy	View Paper Details
Pigs in the City: Reflective Deliberations on the Boundary Concept of Agroparks in The Netherlands	View Paper Details
Assessment Practices in the Policy and Politics Cycles: A Contribution to Reflexive Governance for Sustainable Development?	View Paper Details
Democracy and Learning in Reflexive Governance – Conceptual and Empirical Reflections for Critical Studies of Sustainable Development	View Paper Details
Les Reciproqueteurs: Post-Regulatory Corporatism	View Paper Details