On shapeshifting monsters and navigating territory: politics and governance during the pandemic

INTRODUCTION

Poetry has become, for me, a distraction from the grim reality of the COVID-19 pandemic. The voyaging poetry of George Seferis, poet, diplomat and Nobel Prize winner, has been particularly comforting. ‘We who had nothing shall teach them serenity,’ concludes the poetry sequence Mythistorema (Poem XXIV), after a literary journey across desolated landscapes facing thirst, abandonment and grief (Seferis, 2016). Seferis meditates on never-ending, unsuccessful epic quests that only bring solace through self-learning and the learning of others.

Seferis’s poetry is an apt reading to counter an academic era overburdened with all kinds of advice. A will to improve (Li, 2007) shapes our academic lives. The boundaries between the professional and the personal have collapsed during the pandemic. Now I feel that a will to improve pervades every aspect of my existence. Rather than optimizing my productivity during a given set of hours, I need to optimize the allocation of time and emotions across the day as I successively take the roles of researcher, mentor, editor, speaker, mother, daughter, friend, lover, and so on. Seferis’s humility in the face of failure reminds me of the unfinished, unsatisfactory journey that we face in both our academic and our private lives.

I re-encountered this thought while reading the articles in this issue of Territory, Politics, Governance. Each article narrates an epic quest to understand what happens when our idealized conceptions of space, the state, and the future encounter the material and social realities of the world. Each article examines in some way the gap between trying to understand the world and trying to change it. Each reveals something of the will to improve that animates the governance of space. Read together, these articles bring us on a journey across the sometimes desolated landscapes of territorial politics.

The articles in this issue explore the contradictions of a world continually changing because of large-scale global transitions (urbanization, industry, energy and land, and biodiversity) and climate change (IPCC, 2018). They also provide insight into the limits of the nation-state in addressing the everyday politics of resources, infrastructures and landscapes. I have separated these articles into two groups. The first focuses on making territories governable. Making territories governable requires practices of legibility, demarcation, ranking and boundary-making. The second explores proposals for reorganizing existing systems of governance at different scales, to respond to the demands of populations and territories. Conflict is a common outcome of reorganization practices. Such conflicts are part of a collective academic journey of which we expect transformations, but whose only promise is a bit of learning.

MAKING TERRITORIES GOVERNABLE

Katherine G. Sammler explores how sea-level rise challenges dominant spatial and/or planar imaginations (Sammler, 2019, in this issue). The average global sea level has risen over 20 cm since the early 19th century. For Sammler, sea-level rise challenges current practices of coastal delimitation. A difference of 2 m in height creates legal ambiguities and opens up political conflicts. In the context of climate change, sea-level rise adds a significant and disruptive vertical dimension to the definition of coastal boundaries, which will influence political futures. Sammler’s work reveals the intricate relations between the geopolitical and the geophysical. The paper speaks to a body of literature rethinking space as volume rather than as area. Graham (2016), for example, has explored the vertical politics of the contemporary city. New work such as Sammler’s extends the geopolitics of verticality to geophysical space (see also Billé, 2020). Inspired by neo-materialist thinking, Sammler reveals that spatial politics hinges on the delimitation of objects in planes and volumes.

Political objects also attract comparison. Andreas Öjehag-Pettersson focuses on rankings as tools to govern space and territories (Öjehag-Pettersson, 2019, in this issue). Such as with other forms of metric power (Beer, 2016), the familiarity of rankings may lead us to overlook their asphyxiating power in our lives. Öjehag-Pettersson argues that, in Swedish regions, ideas of competitiveness have replaced previously prevalent ideas of participation and redistribution. Rankings have facilitated such a shift. The author focuses on the ‘Reglab innovation index’ designed following ideas of resurgent regions. The index served to analyse the realities of competitiveness as they related to different regions, define the elements of development strategies (restricted to components that could be measured with the index) and add legitimacy to a restricted set of development strategies. Öjehag-Pettersson’s analysis shows that calculative devices are themselves performative. The index has been used to compare regions and cities in terms of their relative competitiveness. Territorial comparison reshapes the conceptions of space underpinning future-oriented imaginations and actions.

Performance is also a central idea for Carlos M. Jimenez Agulilar and Ulf Thoene (2019, in this issue), who examine whether local governments play any role in the construction and definition of national boundaries. In practice, actions from multiple state and non-state actors influence the delimitation of boundaries. In the case of the three-country boundary between Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina, local organizations seeking to govern the tourism sector play an essential role in helping to reproduce everyday border environments. Cross-border initiatives also emerge in the frontier between Venezuela and Colombia, despite the tensions between the two countries. Jimenez Aguilar and Thoene’s analysis, however, shows that action at the national level defines local organizations’ possibilities for action, regardless of how the boundary is interpreted, mobilized or activated.

In a recent essay on the Anglo-Gorkha frontier, historian Bernardo Michael (Michael, 2020) explains the vagaries of demarcating a boundary as a line: the border is a line that is never fully there, ever-shifting and disputed. His example shows that the lines that humans draw on the ground always have a history: ‘The ability of a state to render its territories in straight lines is always a question of power,’ Michael writes. These papers all explore how such power hinges on specific performances that enable drawing not only lines but also areas and volumes. These are performances that must be continuously re-enacted because lines, areas and volumes are always somewhat incomplete, relatively undefined and open to contestation. As the biophysical and geophysical world changes at a planetary scale, challenges over boundaries and metrics will intensify.

REORGANIZING GOVERNANCE AT DIFFERENT SCALES

The second group of papers focuses on the forms of organization deployed at different scales to enable territorial operation and the operationalization of the ‘territorial’. Julie Michelle Klinger (Klinger, 2019, in this issue) examines how China accesses coal and rare-earth metals in other central Asia countries. Daniel Béland et al. (2019, in this issue) examine the governance of resources in federal systems. The last two papers examine processes of decentralization and regrouping, whereby states reconfigure subnational governance systems.

Michelle Klinger also explores the kinds of knowledge that support territorial politics. In this case, she focuses on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to facilitate imports of coal and rare metals from central Asian countries. Klinger departs from the assumption that pressure from environmental and social grassroots movements in China has moved the country to seek new resources elsewhere. Extracting resources and territories depends on making space legible and actionable. Mining projects rely on mutual interest discourses. In practice, the combination of a legibility focus and the lack of local oversight result in fragmented landscapes of resource extraction. Projects, in turn, require different forms of legitimization that make the projects possible at the local level. These regulatory and calculative practices provide access to new spaces of resource extraction.

Béland, Segatto and Lecours focus on the politics of distribution when it comes to oil revenues in federal countries. They find that how oil revenue happens shapes interstate relationships, regardless of the fit between the oil revenue distribution model and the systems of federal organization. Even when models for revenue distribution seem similar (e.g., because they presume the centralized ownership of natural resources), the actual procedures of distribution may be radically different. Their paper compares the cases of Brazil and Canada. In their analysis, the distribution of oil revenues appears closely linked to interstate conflicts. Brazil’s federal system presumes a model of redistribution directed by the federal government via cash transfers. Conflicts between resource-rich and resource-poor states are ongoing. Canada’s model assumes provincial/territorial-level independence in the management of non-renewable resources. However, the federal government’s attempts to address fiscal disparities via equalization payments also generate interstate conflicts.

Decentralization, a structural change that enables the transfer of authority away from central governments, remains a powerful governance paradigm. Tessa Talitha et al. (2019, in this issue) critically examine the ups and downs of the process of decentralization in Indonesia. So far, the massive decentralization experiment in Indonesia has had a questionable impact on regional development because of two challenges. First, regional disparity follows the concentration of resources in more affluent islands and regions such as Java. Second, decentralization has fostered a process of spatial fragmentation, mostly because of the proliferation of local governments for reasons that have less to do with improving governance than with achieving parochial political ends. Nevertheless, the authors remain optimistic as the decentralization process has lent greater political purchase to local governments and has enabled greater independence to be proactive in transforming their region.

I am aware that I am reading these articles through the lens of my interests and experience. Still, I detect in almost all of them a tangential engagement with forms of experimental governance. Political scientist Alan Finlayson (Finlayson, 2020) recently criticized the UK’s Tory government for turning their approach to governing into a ‘permanent experiment’, that is: ‘the endless measuring and testing of means for managing and shaping political attitudes’. Experimental governance in the UK is akin to a free pass for the government to carry on delusional policy initiatives and a complete lack of concern for the consequences of failure (Coldicutt, 2020). But governmental experimentalism has many manifestations (Morgan, 2019). In China, policy experimentation is thought to follow a model of ‘experimentation under hierarchy’ (Heilmann, 2008), whereby the central government dreams up policy innovations leaving subnational entities to contend with the vagaries of implementation. Experimental Finland came into being in 2015 as a means to deliver social innovation projects to transform policy-making and governance. The Finish basic income experiment is one of the most well known, but only an example of Finland’s portfolio of public experiments to rethink mobility, public space and public engagement in artificial intelligence. Experimental governance shapeshifts, adapting to different demands and circumstances.

The articles in this issue demonstrate the many faces of experimental governance. For example, Talitha, Firman and Hudalah explain that decentralization in Indonesia encountered challenges not only because of its ambitious reach but also because the Habibie presidency (1998–99) first implemented it without any experience with it. A key aspect of its implementation during the first period was a series of ‘trial-and-error’ regulations. Jimenez Aguilar and Thoene explain that while local governments in Brazil experimented with collaborative approaches to planning, these approaches were rare among their counterparts in Argentina.

The challenge with shapeshifting monsters is the ambiguity of their existence. At the end of John Carpenter’s horror film The Thing (1982), the only two surviving characters, MacReady and Childs, encounter each other. Neither knows if the other is the parasitic ‘thing’ that has led them to destruct their Antarctic base. As he passes a bottle of whiskey to Childs, MacReady has the last word: ‘Why don’t we wait here, see what happens?’ That is what experimental governance feels like. As we sit in a world edging towards collapse, experimentation may offer some answers. Yet, the ambiguity of this shapeshifting monster is also terrifying. Wait and see what happens is, sometimes, the only possible response.

A NOTE OF METHODOLOGIES

One of the aspects I enjoy as an editor of Territory, Politics, Governance is engaging with the variety of methods used by authors in the journal. This journal’s issue includes an enormous variety of qualitative and quantitative methods ranging from, for example, qualitative interviews (Jimenez Aguilar and Thoene) to spatial analysis of national data (Talitha, Firman and Hudalah). Document analysis is a crucial method in most papers. Still, the approaches to documentary analysis are diverse in terms of the sources used and the treatment of the material. Consider, for example, the different approaches to compare regional development strategies within a country (Öjehag-Pettersson), document projects of infrastructure development across countries (Klinger) or analyse legal documents and constitutional provisions (Béland, Segatto and Lecours). This diversity enriches the journal’s debates and opens up multiple possibilities for interdisciplinary dialogue.

Methods also illustrate the complex methodological decisions at the heart of the journal’s discussions. A crucial decision is the scale of the method. Jimenez Aguilar and Thoene, for example, discuss at length their focus on interviewing local organizations against a characterization of national perspectives using background documentation. They raise an important methodological question for the journal: How do we engage with dynamic sets of actors operating in different networks across scales? Other authors do not feel the need to establish such clarifications, but their decisions on the scale of method bound the argument. Documentary evidence related to infrastructure projects in Klinger’s article, for example, reveals cross-country policies on infrastructure, but moves the debate away from the everyday social and environmental movements that motivated the research. There is a need to examine explicitly how the phenomenon under study conditions the methods used. Talitha, Firman and Hudalah, for example, found that the process of decentralization led to a redefinition of administrative boundaries, and this made comparison across time challenging.

Some of these papers also open up questions that push the methodological limits of the discipline, for example, by engaging with neo-material analysis of territorial politics (Sammler). These methodological challenges contribute, in my view, to develop an interdisciplinary point of entry for the development of the ‘arts of noticing’ that Tsing (2015) finds essential for thinking with precarity. As Seferis evokes in Mythistorema, humans’ collective capacity to develop ever more compelling forms of learning is a source of serenity amidst the ruins of capitalism.