Reflexive governance: exploring the concept and assessing its critical potential for sustainable development. Introduction to the special issue

ABSTRACT

Elaborated in publications on transition management, sustainability governance and deliberative environmental governance, ‘reflexive governance’ addresses concerns about social-ecological vulnerabilities, flawed conceptualisations of human-nature relations fragmented governance regimes and conditions for a sustainability transition. Key barriers to reflexive government include unavoidable politics; the influence of broader discursive systems that shape actors’ strategic interests; and structural and deliberate limitations to the range of admitted epistemological understandings, normative perspectives and material practices. Against this background, the contributions to the special issue provide novel conceptual linkages between reflexive governance and boundary objects, intercultural dialogue, conflict management heuristics, discourse linguistics, theories of the policy cycle and reflexive law, network and learning theories, and Lasswell’s ‘developmental constructs’. Based on the contributions, we identify five inherent conceptual tensions of reflexive governance: between the openness of horizontal learning processes and the desired direction towards sustainable development; between reflexive governance as a normative or procedural concept; between expected learning orientations and other, strategic orientations; between governance as a precondition for reflexivity and reflexive learning as a precondition for reorganized governance structures; and between reflexivity as an open-ended, evolutionary process and the need to strategically defend the space for reflexivity against powerful groups with an interest in the status quo.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainability
• environmental governance
• transition
• institutions
• reflexivity
• policy learning
• participation

1. Introduction

The concept of reflexive governance, which had sporadically emerged during the 1990s, has been significantly developed in scholarly discussions about sustainability governance (Voß, Bauknecht, & Kemp, 2006), sustainability transitions (Kemp & Loorbach, 2006) and resource governance (Dedeurwaerdere, 2005) during the first decade of the twenty-first century. It emerged in a context of mounting evidence that the strategies of the first generations of environmental policy – regulation of dirty industries, market and coordinative instruments (Jordan, Wurzel, & Zito, 2003), environmental policy integration (Lenschow, 2002) and stakeholder participation (Feindt & Newig, 2005) – had not effected a significant and lasting reduction in environmental pollution, resource depletion and destruction of eco-systems. There was a sense among many observers that the basic institutions of capitalist market economies and democratic consumer societies had folded environmental policies into overarching patterns of action that structurally constrained the environmental governance capabilities. While most polities had developed a set of institutions and policies that qualify as a fully developed environmental state (Bäckstrand & Kronsell, 2015; Duit, Feindt, & Meadowcroft, 2016; Mol & Buttel, 2002), its effectiveness has been limited by a variety of structural factors. These range from entrenched consumer routines (Shove, 2004) to structural limits of the nation state (Jänicke, 2006; Mol, 2016) which emerge from the capitalist logic of open markets and a competitive international order (Duit et al., 2016).

Against this background, the concept of reflexive governance suggested a change in perspective in the analysis and design of environmental policy and planning. Firstly, drawing on discussions of ‘reflexive modernization’ (Beck, Giddens, & Lash, 1994), the attention has shifted from the optimization of policy instrumentation and the tactical exploitation of given institutional frameworks to the mechanisms through which institutions are transformed in response to novel challenges, in particular the large-scale detrimental effects of environmental pollution and ecological degradation. A second important influence was a conception of reflexivity as self-critical reflection that aims at examining its own assumptions and presuppositions (Stirling, 2006) and the effects of different problem conceptualisations on ‘opening up’ or ‘closing down’ the policy space (Stirling, 2008). Thirdly, the concept of reflexive governance has gained much attention in the discussion about learning-based governance (De Schutter & Lenoble, 2010), network governance (Rhodes, 1997), and multi-level decision-making (Sabel & Zeitlin, 2007). In this context, reflexivity denotes a mode of governance where cognitive procedures are designed to create feedback on multiple regulatory frameworks in order to influence actors’ beliefs and norms. In reflexive governance, cognitive and normative beliefs complement political-administrative hierarchy and economic incentives as mechanisms for coordination. Associating reflexivity with governance, the term ‘reflexive governance’ insinuates that transformational societal and institutional change in response to environmental pollution and ecological degradation could be the object of governance.

The concept of reflexive governance has been mainly elaborated in three distinct but related strands of the environmental governance literature: the work on transition management (Grin, Rotmans, & Schot, 2010; Jhagroe & Loorbach, 2015), sustainability governance (Newig, Voß, & Monstadt, 2007; Voß et al., 2006) and deliberative democracy for environmental governance (Dryzek & Pickering, 2017). Applications of the concept can be found across a broad range of environmental and sustainability issue areas, with four areas standing out: First, discussions about knowledge governance (Gerritsen, Stuiver, & Termeer, 2013), e.g. global environmental expertise in bodies like the IPCC and the IPBES (Beck et al., 2014); second, collaborative water and flood risk governance (Mees, Alexander, Gralepois, Matczak, & Mees, 2018; Westling, Sharp, Rychlewski, & Carrozza, 2014); third, transboundary marine spatial planning (Boström, Grönholm, & Hassler, 2016; van Tatenhove, 2017); and fourth, food security (Sonnino, Lozano Torres, & Schneider, 2014), food chain governance (Kirwan, Maye, & Brunori, 2017) and the transition of agriculture and food systems (Feindt, 2012; Feindt et al., 2008; Marsden, 2013).

While the notion of reflexivity and reflexive governance clearly reverberated with many scholars of environmental governance, the precise meaning of the concept is far from settled. This special issue therefore aims to revisit the concept of reflexive governance and to stimulate dialogue among various approaches. It contains eight contributions selected from responses to an open call for papers. The collection comprises theoretical and empirical papers that explore the achievements and potential of reflexive governance as an analytical, critical and normative-prescriptive concept. The overall objective of all papers is to study, design and improve reflexivity in governance arrangements for sustainable development.

In the remaining part of this introduction to the special issue, we first reflect on the origins of the concept of reflexive governance in the context of environmental governance and sustainability studies with a view to clarifying our understanding of the concept. We then briefly review some key challenges to reflexive governance. This is followed by a reflection on the contributions to this special issue. We conclude with deliberations about inherent tensions in the concept of reflexive governance as an analytical and normative-pragmatic concept. We expect that these tensions will significantly shape the future research and practice of reflexive governance.

2. The emergence of reflexive governance

The notion of reflexive governance first appears in academic publications in the 1990s. At this time, the term was linked to very different theoretical traditions. Early mentioning of the concept can be found in contributions about European governance (Jachtenfuchs, 1995), critical surveillance studies (Hewson, 1994) or the Foucauldian analysis of a child welfare regime (Ashenden, 1996). Earlier studies on ‘reflexive law’ (Teubner & Willke, 1984) also draw on Luhmann’s systems theory. A common theme is that the term ‘reflexive governance’ is used to characterize governance arrangements where either institutions allow for a reflexive adaptation of rules and procedures or where the governed have some capability to affect the construction of the objects of governance. In a parallel development in political theory, the concept of ‘reflexive democracy’ was introduced to describe a trend towards problematizing and democratizing the institutional rules, categories and construction of governance objects in democratic decision-making (Schmalz-Bruns, 1995). Scholars of British governance used the concept to describe the reflexive interaction between different elements or levels of governance (Considine, 2000). In the German discussion, ‘reflexive institutions’ were seen as part of institutional reforms towards sustainable development (Minsch, Feindt, Meister, Schneidewind, & Schulz, 1998). Hence, around the millennium, ‘reflexive governance’ was present in the academic literature but in different usages and conceptually open.

The concept of reflexive governance was adopted in studies of environmental and sustainability governance in response to disappointment with the limited effectiveness of both, regulatory approaches to environmental policy in the 1970s and 1980s as well as the more market and incentive-based ‘new’ instruments of environmental governance (Jordan et al., 2003). These experiences suggested that environmental concerns could be included in political institutions and decision-making procedures, but remained relatively marginal and far from the mainstream envisioned by theories of ecological modernization (Jänicke, 2008; Mol & Sonnenfeld, 2000) and environmental policy integration (Lenschow, 2002).

The frustration with the limited effectiveness of environmental policies reverberated with an increasing interest in the structural and temporal dimension of institutional change. In political science, historical institutionalists developed an evolutionary concept of institutional change that emphasized path dependency (Hall & Soskice, 2001; Pierson, 2000) and context-specific constellations (Thelen, 1999), but also the importance of social learning (Hall, 1993). Path dependency, however, confines institutional change, although the degree of constraint and the constraining conditions are highly context dependent (Streeck & Thelen, 2005; Thelen & Mahoney, 2010).

These observations resonated with conclusions from the emerging literature on environmental policy discourse which found that environmental issues were often constructed in ways that promoted policy prescriptions which fit well into existing patterns of policy (Griggs & Howarth, 2017; Hajer, 1995; Hajer & Versteeg, 2005). Clearly, environmental policy was not exempt from power relations which are embedded in dominant, if not hegemonic discourses (Feindt & Oels, 2005) and discursive practices that reproduce unequal power relations (Carvalho, Pinto-Coelho, & Seixas, 2016). Historical institutionalists similarly emphasized the importance of ideational frameworks or policy paradigms in explaining policy change and inertia (Hall, 1993; Pierson, 1993). And discursive institutionalists conceptualized policy change as the articulation and institutionalization of new policy ideas (Schmidt, 2010), thereby accentuating the ideational element of institutional and policy change. More recently, this perspective has been more explicitly linked to discussions about ideational power, which can be exerted, inter alia, through the institutionalization of policy ideas which then forces even opponents to use and adopt cognitive and normative patterns that may play to their disadvantage (Carstensen & Schmidt, 2016).

Despite these overlapping interests, the literature on reflexive governance differs from institutionalist approaches in three important regards:

• First, treatment of ideas: The institutionalist literature tends to treat ideas as resources at the disposal of strategic actors, and less as part of a contingent ontology of social and political processes. As a consequence, historical and discursive institutionalists, despite emphasizing the importance of ideas in explaining institutional change and stability, have not been engaged with concepts of reflexivity.

• Second, temporal orientation: While historical institutionalists look for explanations for current policies and politics on the basis of past developments, the concept of reflexive governance is linked to a more forward-looking, future-oriented research agenda. Discontented with the limited changes towards more environmentally friendly policies and practices, sustainability scholars take an explicitly normative and prescriptive perspective and call for a ‘sustainability transition’ (Kates & Parris, 2003) or a ‘great transition’ (Raskin et al., 2002). The new research agenda that favored the adoption of the concept of reflexive governance was interested not only in understanding the conditions for transformational change, but conceptualized the transition towards more sustainable social-ecological systems as an object of governance (Smith, Stirling, & Berkhout, 2005).

• Third, an explicitly spatial dimension: Since the turn of the century, an important strand in the environmental governance literature emphasized the spatial dimension of governance and started to focus on mismatches between transboundary and often global environmental flows and the limited spatial reach of the nation state (Mol, Spaargaren, & Buttel, 2006). Particular aspects of this problem emerge from telecoupling, i.e. interregional connectedness (Lenschow, Newig, & Challies, 2016), or the spatial situation of environmental resources outside the reach of any nation state, as in the high seas (van Tatenhove, 2016).

The notion of reflexivity that shapes much of the reflexive governance literature is rooted in discussions about the underlying conditions of stability of entire sets of basic societal institutions, such as liberal market economy, individualized labor markets and consumer culture, often associated with (high) modernity (Giddens, 1990). In his theory of ‘reflexive modernity’, Ulrich Beck suggested that the success of ‘modern’ institutions creates ‘meta-change’, often at global scale, which then acts back upon the institutions (Beck, 1992). Here, ‘reflexivity’ first of all means self-confronting, acting upon oneself. For Beck, reflexive modernization, or what he calls ‘second modernity’, ‘means self-confrontation with the effects of risk society that cannot be dealt with and assimilated in the system of industrial society – as measured by the latter’s institutionalized standards’ (Beck, 1994, p. 6). The risks that emerge from socio-ecological change – from nuclear disasters to climate change and food security – become potential drivers of fundamental societal and institutional change. In this context, the concept of ‘reflexive modernization’ (Beck, 1994) denotes a more strategic approach to social change towards a ‘second modernity’ (Beck & Grande, 2010). Importantly, the notion of ‘second modernity’ was proposed by Beck and his collaborators to emphasize that we are witnessing ‘no clear break with the basic principles of modernity but rather a transformation of basic institutions of modernity such as the nation-state and the nuclear family’ (Beck & Lau, 2005), in contrast to theories of post-modernity that have stated otherwise.

In this broader theoretical context, the concept of ‘reflexive governance’ was mainly adopted by scholars with an interest in environmental policy and sustainability as it allows to address various motivations: a concern about the viability of institutions in the face of environmental pollution, resource depletion and ecological degradations that require reflexivity on the ecological preconditions of social development and institutional stability; increasing doubts about the adequacy of the social categories that shape social-ecological relations and environmental governance; tensions between spatially overlapping, entangled or incomplete governance regimes; and a constructive, future-oriented interest in the conditions for a sustainability transition.

After occasional occurrence of the term between 1995 and 2005, mostly in connection with collaborative planning (Janssens & van Tatenhove, 2000; Phelps & Tewdwr-Jones, 2000) and associative democracy (Hoekema, 2001), the first more elaborate and widely cited treatments were published in 2005 (Dedeurwaerdere, 2005; van der Meer, Visser, & Wilthagen, 2005). This was followed by the agenda-setting edited volume by Voß et al. (2006), which effectively linked the concept of reflexive governance to questions of sustainable development. Starting from the assumption that sustainable development requires different and novel forms of governance, the volume sets out to explore the implications for the governance of modern society. The authors argue that the systemic and long-term nature of sustainability problems requires governance arrangements that take into account the interconnectedness and complexity of a broad range of issues. In this sense, reflexive governance goes beyond linear management of clearly defined and structured problems and focuses on modes of sustainability problem treatment, hence on the processes and types of strategies to be applied in the search for remedies. The ultimate aim is to organize the collective search for integrated solutions to bring about more robust paths of societal development.

Dedeurwaerdere (2009) distinguishes between reflexive governance as design problem where rules for reflexive learning are created within a given normative framework (a case of first order learning), and a normative perspective which aims at reflexive capacity-building that finally leads to new design rules (a case of second order learning). The latter, normative aspect resonates with conceptual developments in the field of environmental democracy (Fischer, 2003) and interpretive policy analysis (Fischer & Forester, 1993), in particular an interest in procedural arrangements that encourage the re-framing of policy discourses in order to overcome intractable controversies (Laws & Rein, 2003; Rein & Schön, 1993). Reflexive capacity-building is also at the core of an understanding of reflexive governance as ‘a mode of steering that encourages actors to scrutinize and reconsider their underlying assumptions, institutional arrangements and practices’ (Hendriks, Dryzek, & Hunold, 2007).

These accounts suggest that reflexive governance occurs

• where institutional and procedural arrangements involve actors from various levels of governance and/or various epistemic backgrounds and practical contexts,

• in an effort to reflect on and possibly adapt their cognitive and normative beliefs,

• in ways that take into account and acknowledge alternative understandings of the problems,

• in an attempt to integrate multiple approaches to problem solution.

From this emerges an understanding of ‘reflexivity’ as a normative-practical concept that circumscribes a mode of governance that helps to overcome structurally embedded ignorance of specialized organizations and institutions with regard to the external effects of their own operations. It is not only consideration of the effects of societal routines and practices that must be improved, but reflexive arrangements are also needed to encourage participants to gain a reflexive stance toward the construction of governance objects through operational schemes of observation and feedback mechanisms, thereby moving toward reflexivity.

In this context, it is important to be precise about the meaning of the term ‘reflexivity’, which needs to be distinguished from ‘reflectiveness’ (Stirling, 2006). The main difference between the notions is that ‘reflexivity’ refers to the social and political dimensions of governance, whereas ‘reflection’ or ‘reflectiveness’ refers to the cognitive dimension of these processes. A governance mode can be called reflected if attention is paid to an encompassing set of attributes of the object, i.e. the object of governance is fully represented. A governance mode can be called reflexive if it includes the perspectives, values and norms of a variety of actors, which in turn has consequences for the interventions of the governance system. More specifically, these governance processes itself can become the object of the shaping strategies. This conceptual differentiation allows us to clarify the relation between the social/political and cognitive dimension of governance. It enables an analysis of the relation between the social setting, the cognitive representation and the learning outcomes of a specific governance arrangement. A related and useful distinction is between first and second order reflexivity. While first order reflexivity refers to the adaptation to unintended side effects of modernization, second order reflexivity entails a meta-reflection of structures and conditions that produce those side effects (Stirling, 2006).

As an analytical concept, reflexive governance requires a simultaneous consideration of two interconnected issues: First, structural analysis, which includes analysis of institutions and governance settings, and second, an investigation of how governance and institutional rules influence the normative and cognitive orientations of actors, and hence enable or impede learning. As a normative-prescriptive program, reflexive governance is based on the assumption that reflexive mechanisms could improve both legitimacy and efficiency of governance if they manage to involve all the concerned actors in a collective learning process. Various governance arrangements have been discussed regarding their contribution to reflexivity production from both, analytical and normative perspectives. They have in common that they rely neither on hierarchical forms of regulation nor on coordination through markets. Reflexive governance is then understood as a kind of ‘third way’ theoretical framework seeking to remedy the shortcomings of the market and of command-and-control regulation (Lenoble & Maesschalck, 2010). The overall question is which governance arrangements do promote effective learning processes towards more sustainable societal development.

3. Barriers to reflexive governance

Most contributions to the sustainability governance literature understand reflexive governance as part of transformational change of society that is conceptualized as a sustainable development pathway. Transformation towards such a path would require not only technological innovations, but also novel practices and organizational innovations to address the complexities of contemporary sustainability problems (Grin et al., 2010). Sustainability transformations, in particular, have been defined as long-term and fundamental processes of change through which established socio-technical systems shift to more sustainable modes of production and consumption (Rotmans, Kemp, & van Asselt, 2001). These transformations also require fundamental change in values and modifications of the social order, including the routines of everyday life (Shove & Walker, 2010; Walker & Shove, 2007). Reflexive governance is expected to be helpful and necessary to achieve such transformational change.

Transition management (Loorbach, 2010; Rotmans et al., 2001) is a case in point. The concept refers to the governance of structural changes in which the evolution of a societal subsystem or an entire society is nudged towards sustainability. The normative perspective on transitions is combined with a more analytical multi-phase and multi-level perspective in which change is based on interaction between innovations and a combination of visioning exercises and learning through experiments (Kemp & Loorbach, 2006). Transition management, as Kemp and colleagues put it, is explicitly presented as a ‘model of reflexive governance’ that combines ‘advantages of incremental politics with those of planning’ to address ‘six problems of steering: ambivalence about goals, uncertainty about cause-effect relations, distributed power of control, political myopia, determination of short-term steps for long-term change and the danger of lock-in to new systems’ (Kemp, Rotmans, & Loorbach, 2007).

Trivial barriers to reflexive governance are the absence of a problem perception that would require a transition, lack of interest in societal change, or an understanding of the governance problems as not requiring a reflexive approach. However, if serious attempts are made to establish reflexive governance, a key challenge is that deliberative and reflexive fora cannot be insulated from broader struggles for power and domination. Sustainability transitions create their own politics (Smith & Stirling, 2010). Empirical studies on transition management found that ‘reflexive governance […] situates sites of reflexivity within a broader discursive system composed of multiple arenas, actors and forms of political communication’ (Hendriks & Grin, 2007). This entangles the involved actors in constant struggles as they ‘try to reconcile the demands of reflexivity (being open, self-critical and creative) with the demands of their existing political world (closed preferences, agenda driven, control)’ (Hendriks & Grin, 2007). Furthermore, ‘established players’ tend to dominate the agenda and the process (Kemp et al., 2007). The dominant, management-oriented approaches to transitions imply that ‘conflict and asymmetric power relations, as well as the embedding of processes within broader political contexts, are neglected’ (Voß & Bornemann, 2011). Stirling (2014, p. 1) elaborates that escaping ‘the diverse ways in which incumbent concentrations of power close down technological trajectories’ requires ‘more distributed and relational forms of social reflexivity’ that enable the ‘“opening up” of ways in which technological trajectories are: epistemologically understood; normatively appreciated; and ontologically performed in practice.’ Confirming Stirling’s concerns, recent assessments find that transition management depoliticises the relation between transition initiatives and existing regimes, limits citizens to their role as consumers and ‘gives a voice to a privileged group of business, policy and civil society actors’ (Kenis, Bono, & Mathijs, 2016). Creating spaces where alternative understandings of systemic problems can be meaningfully discussed is often difficult (Marsden, 2013). Even where reflexive governance arrangements reach out to citizens, participation is often dominated by the more educated and wealthy (Sonnino et al., 2014).

Often overlooked, the materialities of infrastructures and everyday practices that are the object of sustainability transitions also embody contingent power relations: ‘the politics of materiality is located at the interface between governing regimes and practices on the one hand, and socio-material arrangements on the other hand’ and ‘located at dispersed geographies and everyday social practices’ (Avelino, Grin, Pel, & Jhagroe, 2016, p. 559). Also the expert outlooks and visions that often provide orientation to transition processes are shaped by entrenched power relations and often display a status quo bias (Gaede & Meadowcroft, 2016). More generally, environmental impact assessments and strategic environmental assessments that were heralded as avenues towards more reflexive governance tend to be used in rather instrumental ways, rendering governance situations more reflective at best and rarely reflexive (Hertin, 2016). And even novel transboundary governance arrangements like those for regional seas, while displaying many characteristics of reflexive governance and often successfully creating reflectiveness, rarely achieve a situation where participants question the rules of their own normative and epistemological systems of reference (van Tatenhove, 2017).

While the various structural limitations to social change and learning should not be conflated into issues of structural and institutional power throughout, a focus on structurally entrenched bias that needs to be addressed in reflexive governance arrangements provides a useful focus to discuss the contributions to this special issue. Full reflexivity requires to accept and ‘open up’ the contingency of plural understandings, norms and material practices. How do the papers in this collection address this question, and what are their findings?

4. Reflecting on the contributions to this special issue

The first four papers analyse specific and deliberate attempts at creating reflexive governance situations.

Tamara Metze and Sabine van Zuydam (2018) make a highly original contribution by linking the notion of reflexive governance with the literature on boundary objects. In their case study from the Netherlands, the concept of a sustainable agricultural production park served as a boundary object – combining ontological stability with interpretive flexibility – that enabled a broad range of actors to engage in deliberations about diverging understandings of environmental and animal friendly agriculture. Based on a newspaper frame analysis and a content analysis of ten deliberative sessions with stakeholders, the authors find that the introduction of an innovative boundary crossing concept enabled frame-reflective conversations if supported by facilitation and credible governmental support.

Iokiñe Rodríguez, Bjørn Sletto, Bibiana Bilbao, Isabelle Sánchez-Rose, and Alejandra Leal (2018) present one of the first case studies of reflexive governance in a non-Western context. Based on three participatory research projects about wildfire management in the Gran Sabana in Canaima National Park, Venezuela, the paper demonstrates how facilitated dialogue about different meanings of nature did empower indigenous people to engage in intercultural dialogue with other groups. This enabled a critical reflection within the community about their conflicting views of fire under conditions of fundamental cultural change. Beyond the case, the paper demonstrates how the management of natural resources can be entangled with often conflicting cultural identities, creating potential conflicts if not addressed in a reflexive mode.

With a view to reflexive capacity-building among actors, Manuel Gottschick (2018) presents an analytical framework to analyse and assess degrees of reflexivity in local governance networks, building on the multi-level perspective on transitions and conflict management heuristics. Based on participant observations, he compares two facilitated regional governance networks in Northern Germany that addressed issues of water management and long-term climate adaptation. The findings identify manifold informal processes of cognitive, normative and social ‘closing down’. Meanwhile, network reflexivity could be enhanced through the application of techniques, such as systemic scenario building or the analysis of path dependencies, and deliberate interventions to open up the range of socially permitted perspectives and to create more inclusive formats and arenas.

Anna Durnova (2018), in the French tradition of discourse linguistics, develops a reflexive analysis of policy conflict to analyse the decade-long struggle over the Brno railway station as a key conflict over sustainability in the Czech Republic. The analysis of in-depth interviews finds that the justifications presented by the opposing camps refer to contested notions of legitimate knowledge and modes of governance and are often linked to ‘reflexive emotions’ in response to values experienced in the community. While the actual political process displayed little reflexivity, the reflexive analysis suggests that the controversy failed to address underlying cognitive, normative and relational controversies and thereby blocked the possibility for policy learning and mutual recognition.

The remaining four papers take a more structural perspective on reflexive governance. James Meadowcroft and Reinhard Steurer (2018) analyse how different types of sustainability assessments – monitoring, policy evaluation, formal audit, peer review, and specialist reporting – affect the policy cycle and the electoral politics cycle. While the systematic assessments provide feedback through all stages of the policy cycle, their policy relevance is limited by politicians’ overriding concerns with the electoral cycle. Sustainability assessments are perceived as one voice among many and scientific evidence has to compete with ‘other kinds of evidence representing alternative rationalities and priorities’. Still, the authors see merit in the potential of systematic assessment practices ‘to furnish ammunition to state and non-state actors interested in securing change’. Hence, while systematic policy assessment can potentially enhance the reflectiveness and even reflexivity of a policy situation, they are not a sufficient condition for policy reflexivity in themselves.

Richard Weiner (2018) makes an original contribution by linking reflexive governance to theories of, inter alia, functional differentiation, reflexive law, corporatism and French political theory. He conceptualizes reflexive network governance as ‘post-regulatory corporatism’, often at sub-national levels, that relies on trust-building and protocols for iterative negotiations to enable re-regulation in response to novel societal challenges. In this vision, reflexivity is necessitated by overlapping regulatory regimes in transnational global capitalism which create an ‘inter-contextual space’ for network governance and the need for ‘inter- and poly-contextual deliberation’. Networks based on self-reinforcing reciprocity norms enable the emergence of ‘negotiated connected contracts’ and the coupling of multiple social partners in novel constellations. Weiner discusses various examples of sub- and transnational public-private norm-setting to illustrate how reflexive network governance as ‘protocolism’ can contribute to sustainable development.

Kathleen McNutt and Jeremy Rayner (2018) create a novel link between theories of reflexive governance and policy network theory. They focus on the claim that networked governance enables reflexive learning as a steering mechanism that in turn facilitates adaptation to rapidly changing policy contexts. Their case study of the Canadian agricultural biotechnology policy network suggests that the network structure determines the dominant type of learning. Importantly, the inevitable ‘political struggle for nodality or central place in networks and the ensuing distribution of opportunities for bridging and bonding activities’ impedes ‘higher order reflexive learning’. Moreover, networks with strong ties are unlikely to facilitate reflexivity that might threaten relationships, while networks with weak ties might enable reflexivity but are less likely to create strong bonds based on trust and shared values. The paper suggests that a full account of the politics of reflexive governance must include attention to the ‘politics of networks and network management’, and that ‘constrained reflexivity’ might be a more realistic expectation in the world of public policy than unrestricted reflexivity and horizontal learning.

Douglas Torgerson (2018) links the concept of reflexive governance to the American pragmatist tradition, in particular John Dewey’s call for ‘reflective choice’ and Harold D. Lasswell’s interest in promoting critical reflexivity and creativity in problem solving. He relates two of Lasswell’s methodological concepts to current debates about reflexivity and sustainable development: ‘contextual mapping’, a self-critical inquiry into ‘threats and temptations’ as ‘surreptitious barriers to rationality’, and the critical elaboration of alternative ‘developmental constructs’ (images of the future). Using the ‘disruptive interventions’ of Rachel Carson and Amory Lovins as examples, Torgerson emphasizes the importance of a public sphere that can challenge oligarchic tendencies in the state and the corporate sector and their ‘industrialist presuppositions’ about the human capacity to control nature. Capturing the cognitive, normative and ontological concerns of reflexive governance in the need to imagine alternative futures, Torgerson states: ‘The quest for sustainability involves a historical reversal in expectations about the future’.

The eight contributions to this special issue help us to clarify five inherent tensions in the concept of reflexive governance, which we explain in the following, final section.

5. Perspectives: reflexive governance and sustainable development – five inherent tensions

Reflexive governance refers to the intentional effort to shape a societal transformation towards sustainability by deliberately employing interactions between manifold actors, overlapping regulatory contexts and interacting spheres of production and consumption. It either implies encouraging reflection about societal circumstances in order to reassess practices and adjust initiatives. Or it is necessitated by overlapping regulatory spheres, ambiguous perceptions and conflicting norms. Reflexive governance is therefore an ambitious endeavor. In the remaining part of the paper, we discuss some of the inherent tensions of the concept of reflexive governance for sustainable development.

First, the proposed actor-learning nexus in reflexive governance appears anything but straightforward. In many, if not most accounts of reflexive governance, actor-centred processes of reflection are a primary concern (Gottschick, 2018; Metze & Van Zuydam, 2018). Sometimes the learning processes are also pitched at the level of the community (Rodríguez et al., 2018), the network (McNutt & Rayner, 2018) or the political system (Meadowcroft & Steurer, 2018). Governance for sustainable development implies conscious reflection about the past, present and future, including the critical interrogation of assumptions about the nature of societal progress and the plausibility and desirability of alternative futures (Torgerson, 2018). In reflexive governance settings, interactions are deliberately shaped to enable the development of knowledge, novel perspectives and a shared understanding of the common interest that transcends contingent particular interests (Lenoble & Maesschalck, 2010). Actors are supposed to learn horizontally from these reflection processes. While this can be described as a ‘learning-by-doing’ approach, in which actors set off on a collective journey rather than working towards a predefined end goal, the question arises which kind of learning outcomes this will produce and whether it will involve progress towards sustainable development. As a governance strategy for sustainable development, reflexive governance is therefore entangled in a tension between the open-ended nature of horizontal, democratic deliberation and the normative orientation towards (strong) sustainability. This tension cannot be simply papered over by the assumption that insight into ecological or moral necessities will persuade reflexive deliberators to adapt more sustainable policies, technologies and lifestyles.

A second tension that is also displayed by most contributions to this special issue is between reflexive governance as a normative or procedural concept. The facilitated processes described by Metze and Van Zuydam (2018), Rodríguez et al. (2018) and Gottschick (2018) navigate this tension in different ways. Durnova’s (2018) reflexive analysis betrays normatively grounded frustration with a policy process that creates neither reflexivity nor a shared understanding of sustainability. Meadowcroft and Steurer (2018) do not conceal their disappointment with the limited effectiveness of systematic sustainability assessments, while Torgerson (2018) clearly advocates the elaboration of alternative futures in a democratic public sphere. A related debate are the recent discussions on social experimentation (Hildén, Jordan, & Huitema, 2017; Huitema, Jordan, Munaretto, & Hildén, 2018; Sengers, Wieczorek, & Raven, 2016; Sabel & Zeitlin, 2010) which is seen as a strategy to plant seeds of change that may induce broader societal transformations. Experiments are designed to provide learning opportunities and to find new solutions to current problems of unsustainability. Whereas the array of experimentation types is wide, some experiments are specifically geared towards the advancement of a sustainability transformation. These are characterized by an open-ended trial-and-error process that aims at experiential learning in order to deal with societal challenges. In the absence of a viable and agreed blueprint for a sustainable society, the search process has to deal with a situation of complexity and uncertainty in which both the shape of a sustainable society (target knowledge) as well as the trajectory towards it (transformation knowledge) must be formulated (Weiland, Bleicher, Polzin, Rauschmayer, & Rode, 2017). Similarly, reflexive governance processes, if designed around notions of horizontal learning, cannot presuppose normative ideas about the societal objectives to be eventually achieved, but will include debates about what society should be like and how to transform it.

A third conceptual tension arises about the preconditions of the learning processes in reflexive governance. What capabilities and motivations do actors need in order to be able to engage in in-depth learning and reflection processes that require the questioning of their own interests and preferences? Learning can be enabled through the provision of boundary objects (Metze & Van Zuydam, 2018), participatory modeling and other analytical techniques (Gottschick, 2018), intercultural facilitation (Rodríguez et al., 2018), elaboration of imagined futures (Torgerson, 2018) or protocols that enable the constant negotiation of connected contracts (Weiner, 2018). But it is hampered by perceived needs to maintain close networks (Gottschick, 2018; McNutt & Rayner, 2018) or defend polarized policy positions (Durnova, 2018). Whether participants must be intrinsically motivated to take a ‘reflexive turn’ on their own worldviews or whether this can be induced from the outside, e.g. by institutional design, is widely debated (for a detailed discussion see Lenoble & Maesschalck, 2010). In any case, inequalities of information, power imbalances, or the lack of access to networks must be addressed to avoid that supposedly reflexive governance arrangements merely elaborate the assumptions, norms and practices that support the status quo.

A fourth tension regards the trajectory towards establishing structures of reflexive governance. Is governance a precondition for reflexivity, or is reflexive learning a precondition to establish and reorganize governance structures? Stirling’s (2006) definition of reflexivity suggests a reciprocal relation between governance structure and governance object, hence learning processes and governance settings are mutually contingent. Many contributions to reflexive governance emphasize the dynamic processes of adaption to new knowledge and strategic reorientation, without fully addressing the question how undesirable new path dependencies can be avoided and desirable path dependencies be created. Are there key actors involved, like government or state agencies that set the framework conditions and steer the process? If so, how would such powerful actors ensure full reflexivity? Or will reflexive governance emerge through a more evolutionary process? If so, would this evolution set off in niches by pioneer actors with visionary ideas before spreading out to broader society? Or would it be the evolutionary, post-regulatory corporatism described by Weiner (2018)? It seems reasonable to assume that these developments would take place in multi-level and polycentric environments in which changes happen simultaneously in different places or on multiple levels, and that the interplay of different developments is crucial. Yet, which instance or actor would be capable of supervising or steering the overall process?

In fact, as Torgerson (2018), Meadowcroft and Steurer (2018) and McNutt and Rayner (2018) remind us, such a steering institution would probably be interested in constrained reflexivity at best, and more concerned with the maintenance of oligarchic power, electoral advantage and network capital. This also implies that the outcome of these complex, multi-level and polycentric processes will be evolutionary, but also contested. The contributions to this special issue are helpful to understand a fifth inherent tension in the concept of reflexive governance: On the one hand, reflexivity as horizontal learning requires open-ended and evolutionary processes and we cannot assume that these processes produce reflexive outcomes on purpose or intentionally. Reflexivity and sustainability are here envisioned as the result of an interplay of multiple decisions and developments in various places. On the other hand, the social space that enables reflexivity as a driver of structural change will always be contested and infringed by those with an interest in the status quo. In this sense, reflexive governance is a highly political and most likely a contested concept that rather fits notions of strategy than evolution.

By triangulating reflexive governance with a range of related theories and concepts, in combination with in-depth empirical case analysis, the papers included in this special issue have made a significant contribution towards clarifying the critical potential of reflexive governance for sustainable development. We hope that the insights presented in this collection will stimulate further research and help to better understand and improve reflexive policy and practice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Peter H. Feindt is Professor of Agricultural and Food Policy at Humboldt University at Berlin. He received his Ph.D. in Social and Economic Sciences from Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg. He subsequently worked as a senior researcher at the University of Hamburg, as Senior Lecturer/Reader at Cardiff University and as Professor and Chair of the Strategic Communication Group at Wageningen University. His research interests include a broad range of issues in agricultural and food policy, in particular links to environmental policy and sustainability transitions, environmental and technology conflicts, public participation and conflict management, policy discourse and narratives, and inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration.

Sabine Weiland is Associate Professor of Political Science at Lille Catholic University, affiliated with the European School of Political and Social Sciences (ESPOL). She is the Director of the ESPOL-LAB research centre. Sabine holds a Ph.D. in social sciences from the University of Göttingen, Germany. She participated in various German, European and international research projects in the field of environmental governance, policy assessment, and science–policy interface. Before her current appointment she worked at the University of Hamburg, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig, Free University Berlin, Catholic University Louvain, and IDDRI/Sciences-Po Paris. Her current research focuses on issues of food politics with a view on sustainability governance and transformation.