Considering question 2, (What interesting or different insight have you gained about governance in your recent research?)I begin with this graph of usage of the term governance that google kindly(?) provides for us.
Something like a contemporary pandemic of usage of “governance” beginning around 1970. But it seems, some immunity began developing amongst the writers of the “lots of books” that google tells us it consults in assembling these figures, as of 2006.
I find the graph rather disconcerting, which for me usually signals to beginning of a new phase of obsessive puzzling. I have been examining what might be called the epistemo-cultural lives of concepts since the 1980s. This curious academic interest began with meeting some odd numbers in Nigerian primary school classrooms. Some people think of what I do as philosophical, but not many philosophers do. I see it as a form of social science.
I had began thinking about this phenomenon of the explosive growth of use of the term “governance’” in the context of a study of the way nature has become a form of economic infrastructure in contemporary Australia. We see this for example in the enthusiasm of many civil servants for concepts like ecosystems services and natural capital.
Unexpectedly this came in handy then when I began thinking about “governance” in the context of puzzling about contemporary public administration of Aboriginal communities, where “governance” usage is certainly of epidemic, if not pandemic, proportions. This is work I do with the GroundUp team of TNI’s Contemporary Indigenous Knowledge and Governance Group.
Using the methodology of the members of the group of blind men feeling quite different parts of an elephant, I linked these two quite disparate contexts of puzzling—governance talk in the context of public administration of nature, and governance talk in the context of public administration of Aboriginal communities. Here’s the speculation that emerged—I offer it as a working imaginary for the puzzled.
I began to speculate that we are in the grip of what might be called the “Good Governance” era of government. With contemporary government as synonymous with expanding the intensity of Australia’s economic activity and good management of the nation’s economic infrastructure, good governance practices are crucial.
It seems Australia’s economic activity and infrastructure is considered to have three elements: the nation’s ‘human capital’—which is where much of the concern for “Good Governance” in Aboriginal communities come in; the nations’ natural capital—which is where concern for ecosystems services comes in; and the nation’s socio-technical infrastructure—gas pipelines and their governance, and school systems and their governance.
I contrast this “Good Governance” era with what might be called the era of exhaustive knowledge and rational policy, which I speculate as beginning at the end of WWII and beginning to falter in Australia in the late 1970s.
Remember I propose this as a working imaginary for the puzzled. It’s a diagram that might be useful…not a knowledge claim.
Other relevant materials: