Reflexive governance can be understood as an emergent encapsulated trust-building corporatism where network participants are neither the state functionaries nor the market entrepreneurs of yesteryear, but network reciproqueteurs (cf. Elinor Ostrom’s reciprocators). The paper argues that this reflexive network governance results in a post-regulatory corporatism -- a more adaptable, less formalized and flexible mode of interest intermediation, policy-making, and policy-implementation than previous modes of corporatist intermediation. It is a corporatism with a sense of reciprocal solidarity. Functional differentiation processes engender “negotiated connected contracts” in re-scaled space in between inter-urban and inter-regional assemblages, a mode of structurally coupling new social partners in the emergent transnational knowledge-based economy. This involves the building of new social capital of network trust-building manifested in the norms of reciprocity and reflexive law constituted as a new mode of protocolism: one associated with the social learning and policy designing necessary for ecological systems’ autopoeisis, resilience and sustainability.
