Newness Against the Grain: Democratic emergence in organisational and professional practice

What is the nature of democratic innovation in a performative culture? The purpose of this chapter is to help answer this question by giving conceptual substance to the notion of democratic emergence as a specific kind of innovation in the context of contemporary governance trends. It is argued that the performative governance which is the product of these trends is not invulnerable to challenge because of deficiencies in the capacity of managerialism and performative governance to improve services, and the creative spaces for agency and initiative created by the valuing of entrepreneurialism and innovation. The chapter draws on existing conceptual work on democratic approaches to school organisation and innovation, relevant literature on entrepreneurialism, and offers a brief insight into an example of democratic innovation in practice

Biocultural Approaches: Opportunities for Building More Inclusive Environmental Governance

A significant portion of the world’s remaining biodiversity and agrobiodiversity is in the hands of local and indigenous communities who tend to be politically marginalised and thus excluded from formal environmental governance schemes. In spite of the growth of interactional approaches to environmental governance, experiences of indigenous and local communities suggest that challenges remain in shifting mindsets and practices away from structured and formal mechanisms to understand and support local environmental governance models that are already delivering significant global environmental outcomes. This paper explores biocultural approaches to environmental governance and conservation through analysing two cases: (i) Indigenous Biocultural Territories and their emphasis on in-situ conservation of biocultural heritage; and (ii) Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas, based on community and activist work on biodiversity conservation across the world. They show that it is possible to create space for locally driven environmental governance while at the same time pursuing interactional and inclusive approaches within national contexts.Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperatio

Knowledge management for self-organised resource allocation

Many open systems, such as networks, distributed computing and socio-technical systems address a common problem of how to define knowledge management processes to structure and guide decision-making, coordination and learning. While participation is an essential and desirable feature of such systems, the amount of information produced by its individual agents can often be overwhelming and intractable. The challenge, thus, is how to organise and process such information, so it is transformed into productive knowledge used for the resolution of collective action problems. To address this problem, we consider a study of classical Athenian democracy which investigates how the governance model of the city-state flourished. The work suggests that exceptional knowledge management, i.e. making information available for socially productive purposes, played a crucial role in sustaining its democracy for nearly 200 years, by creating processes for aggregation, alignment and codification of knowledge. We therefore examine the proposition that some properties of this historical experience can be generalised and applied to computational systems, so we establish a set of design principles intended to make knowledge management processes open, inclusive, transparent and effective in self-governed social technical systems. We operationalise three of these principles in the context of a collective action situation, namely self-organised common-pool resource allocation, exploring four governance problems: (a) how fairness can be perceived; (b) how resources can be distributed; (c) how policies should be enforced and (d) how tyranny can be opposed. By applying this operationalisation of the design principles for knowledge management processes as a complement to institutional approaches to governance, we demonstrate empirically how it can guide solutions that satisfice shared values, distribute power fairly, apply "common sense" in dealing with rule violations, and protect agents against abuse of power. We conclude by arguing that this approach to the design of open systems can provide the foundations for sustainable and democratic self-governance in socio-technical systems.Open Acces

No App is an Island: Collective Action and Sustainable Development Goal-Sensitive Design

The transformation to the Digital Society presents a challenge to engineer ever more complex socio-technical systems in order to address wicked societal problems. Therefore, it is essential that these systems should be engineered with respect not just to conventional functional and non-functional requirements, but also with respect to satisfying qualitative human values, and assessing their impact on global challenges, such as those expressed by the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). In this paper, we present a set of sets of design principles and an associated meta-platform, which focus design of socio-technical systems on the potential interaction of human and artificial intelligence with respect to three aspects: firstly, decision-support with respect to the codification of deep social knowledge; secondly, visualisation of community contribution to successful collective action; and thirdly, systemic improvement with respect to the SDGs through impact assessment and measurement. This methodology, of SDG-Sensitive Design, is illustrated through the design of two collective action apps, one for encouraging plastic re-use and reducing plastic waste, and the other for addressing redistribution of surplus food. However, as with the inter-connectedness of the SDGs, we conclude by arguing that the inter-connectedness of the Digital Society implies that system development cannot be undertaken in isolation from other systems

Understanding community policing

Purpose The purpose of the paper is to explore, in broad terms, how policing needs to be developed in communities today. Approach The approach is normative and analytical, considering the meaning of policing in general, and community policing in particular, and specifying the criteria that such policing has to satisfy in order to be fair and effective in contemporary society. Findings A concept of public self-policing is developed and community policing is then evaluated in the light of this concept. Police officers are understood as street-level bureaucrats, with multiple accountabilities. The ideal relationship between police and public is characterised as a structural coupling between two types of self-organising system. Implications The paper has implications for how policing organisations and governments might develop improved policing strategies in the future. Value of the paper The paper provides a clear, logical summary of thinking about the role of policing, particularly community policing, in today’s society. It offers a novel concept of public self-policing, leading to a new approach to the evaluation of the work of policing organisations

Tapping fresh currents: fostering early-career researchers in transdisciplinary water governance research

Article published in Water AlternativesWater governance is an important, yet complex and contested field. A central challenge for researchers is to engage with multiple understandings and perspectives that can shape water governance, and to move towards more transdisciplinary approaches. These challenges are magnified for early-career researchers (ECRs), and while the need for transdisciplinary approaches and better support for ECRs is increasingly recognised, there remains a lack of understanding of how to achieve this within the wider research community. Thus, this paper investigates through an auto-ethnographic inquiry the practical experiences and challenges faced by a diverse group of ECRs engaging in water governance research. Reflecting on our own endeavours and relevant literature, we identify a range of path-finding experiences and challenges, and explore strategies employed by ECRs to navigate the 'uncharted waters' of evolving career pathways in water governance research. 'Communities of Practice' are identified as a promising opportunity to support ECRs by enhancing opportunities for reflection and learning. Overall, we argue that there is significant merit in enhancing the way in which water governance research is understood, and improving the means by which ECRs are supported to build capability and contribute in this field.Water governance is an important, yet complex and contested field. A central challenge for researchers is to engage with multiple understandings and perspectives that can shape water governance, and to move towards more transdisciplinary approaches. These challenges are magnified for early-career researchers (ECRs), and while the need for transdisciplinary approaches and better support for ECRs is increasingly recognised, there remains a lack of understanding of how to achieve this within the wider research community. Thus, this paper investigates through an auto-ethnographic inquiry the practical experiences and challenges faced by a diverse group of ECRs engaging in water governance research. Reflecting on our own endeavours and relevant literature, we identify a range of path-finding experiences and challenges, and explore strategies employed by ECRs to navigate the 'uncharted waters' of evolving career pathways in water governance research. 'Communities of Practice' are identified as a promising opportunity to support ECRs by enhancing opportunities for reflection and learning. Overall, we argue that there is significant merit in enhancing the way in which water governance research is understood, and improving the means by which ECRs are supported to build capability and contribute in this field.http://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/alldoc/articles/vol6/v6issue2/217-a6-2-14/fil

Tapping Fresh Currents: Fostering Early-Career Researchers in Transdisciplinary Water Governance Research

Water governance is an important, yet complex and contested field. A central challenge for researchers is to engage with multiple understandings and perspectives that can shape water governance, and to move towards more transdisciplinary approaches. These challenges are magnified for early-career researchers (ECRs), and while the need for transdisciplinary approaches and better support for ECRs is increasingly recognised, there remains a lack of understanding of how to achieve this within the wider research community. Thus, this paper investigates through an auto-ethnographic inquiry the practical experiences and challenges faced by a diverse group of ECRs engaging in water governance research. Reflecting on our own endeavours and relevant literature, we identify a range of path-finding experiences and challenges, and explore strategies employed by ECRs to navigate the 'uncharted waters' of evolving career pathways in water governance research. 'Communities of Practice' are identified as a promising opportunity to support ECRs by enhancing opportunities for reflection and learning. Overall, we argue that there is significant merit in enhancing the way in which water governance research is understood, and improving the means by which ECRs are supported to build capability and contribute in this field