Reflexive Governance, Public Goods and Sustainability - Conceptual Reflections and Empirical Evidence in Agricultural Policy
The concept of “reflexive governance” has gained much attention in the discussion about sustainability governance, network governance and multi-level decision-making. Through all its different uses, it carries connotations of policy-learning, non-hierarchical decision-making and soft regulation. In this paper I apply the concept to the problem of the provision of “global public goods”. I first argue that the notion of “global public good” requires a thorough consideration of the economic, political and moral communities implied. I then review conceptual contributions to the “reflexive governance” debate which are based on theories of structural differentiation, reflexive modernity, ecological economics and deliberative democracy. As a result, “reflexivity” appears as a normative-practical concept that circumscribes a mode of governance that helps to overcome structurally embedded ignorance of specialised organisations and institutions about the external effects of their own operation. The interest in responsible consideration of long-term and far away causation links “reflexive governance” to sustainability, and in the third part I relate the moral grammar of the sustainability principle to the structural problems exposed in the discussion of reflexive governance. In the final section, I discuss how shifts in the CAP display a move toward “reflexive governance” in order to explore the usefulness of different notions of the concept.
Reflexive Governance for Global Public Goods, MIT Press,
Editors: Eric Brousseau, Tom Dedeurwaerdere, Bernd Siebenhüner
Additional Information
Forthcoming