Ecological reflexivity: characterising an elusive virtue for governance in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

Reflexivity – the capacity of an agent, structure or process to change in the light of reflection on its performance – has attracted widespread support among political theorists as a virtue for environmental governance. Dryzek argues that a distinctively ecological form of reflexivity becomes crucial for governing in the Anthropocene. But there remains a need to clarify the conceptual scope of ecological reflexivity and to ascertain whether it has distinctive analytical value. A new conceptual framework for ecological reflexivity is outlined, comprising three components: recognition, rethinking and response. Through a comparative analysis of reflexivity and four related concepts – adaptive and transformative governance, experimental governance, social learning and anticipatory governance – ecological reflexivity is shown to be especially well equipped to take account of political contestation over the nature and direction of change required to respond to ecological risks.

KEYWORDS:

• Reflexivity
• ecological reflexivity
• reflexive governance
• environmental governance
• Anthropocene
• adaptive governance

Acknowledgments

I am especially grateful to John Dryzek, whose work sparked my interest in ecological reflexivity, and with whom I worked closely on earlier versions of this research. For helpful comments and discussions, I am also grateful to Quinlan Bowman, Carolyn Hendriks, Peter Lawrence, Jeff McGee, Jensen Sass and Ana Tanasoca. Earlier versions were presented at the University of Canberra and the University of Tasmania. The analysis benefited considerably from feedback from two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Earth system refers to the planet understood as a ‘single, […] complex, dynamic entity’ (Schellnhuber 1999, p. C20).

2. I use the term ‘virtue’ here in the broader sense of a normatively desirable quality, rather than in the narrower sense of virtue ethics (on the relevance of virtue ethics for the Anthropocene, see Williston 2015).

3. ‘Ecological’ is understood here to encompass the linked social-ecological systems mentioned earlier.

4. Under this definition reflexivity could also be a characteristic of individual people’s personal lives, but in what follows I mainly discuss reflexivity as it applies to agents and structures (e.g. institutions and systems) associated with governance. Thus, I use the terms ‘reflexivity’ and ‘reflexive governance’ interchangeably.

5. For reasons of space I exclude another related approach – transition management – whose relationship to reflexive governance is discussed in Hendriks and Grin (2007) and Voß and Bornemann (2011).

6. For similar reasons, Dunlop and Radaelli (2013, p. 608) see experimental learning as narrower in scope than reflexive learning.

7. Other concepts of this nature include those that couple a field of inquiry with a thematic (and often normative) orientation towards the environment, such as ecological economics, conservation biology and sustainability science.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [grant number FL140100154].