Northern European Lectures: good governance and getting others to do 'it'

Hi readers. I’m in Oslo at the moment, just coming off a short lecture tour in Northern Europe. One of the talks I gave was at the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research in Amsterdam. The conference was convened as an occasion during which those of us who are carrying out projects related to Shifts in Governance could share knowledge about governance theory, methods, and phenomena. I had planned to talk exclusively about a new paper I have written about the United Nation’s current efforts to assess the status of water governance practices worldwide. Just prior to the talk, though, one of my wonderful mentors, Prof Nico Schulte Nordholt, suggested that I take some time to share with the audience some of the methodological issues that I have encountered and tried to work through in my work, and to describe how this has affected the twists and turns that the research has taken over the last two years. This request presented an interesting opportunity, and I have to say that it really inspired me to put in writing some things that others may find compelling to think about.

The talk went really well, and I wound up sharing some of it during another talk I gave later in the week at the Institute for Development Research in Bonn, Germany http://www.zef.de/. The reactions from the audience there continued to enhance my feelings that there were some neat ideas there. I will surely write this up more formally for a methodology paper of sorts, and will definitely integrate it into my talk at Essex this coming June http://www.apsanet.org/content_47686.cfm . But there’s really no good reason to abstain from sharing it now! In the spirit, then, of celebrating my recent talks (it really is worth celebrating when academic work is inspiring, you know), I want here to share some parts of the text from which I read. I will blog it in 4 excerpt sections, beginning today.

In subsequent posts I will return to a more detailed focus on the UN paper that I had initially intended to discuss during my recent talks. That paper is currently under review so I can’t provide the entire text. Still, I’ll share some of its features since the UN assessment is currently happening and will be discussed during the UN’s commission on sustainable development meetings in New York this coming May.


Excerpt 1 – Vann’s Northern European Lectures, March 2008.
Integrated Water Resources Management - In the web and on the Ground -
– Good Water Governance and Trying to Get Others to Do It

Introduction
Today I have planned to talk to you about some of the research that we have conducted around the UN’s attempt to assess water governance practices on an international scale.
After committing to that topic, I was also asked to discuss the nature of our project and research plan, and how it has unfolded, changed, and remained the same over time. I am happy to do this, because it provides an occasion for us to visit some methodological issues that have ramifications for how we understand governance and how we do governance studies. So while I will touch on some of the features and findings of our studies of the UN governance assessment efforts, I will also touch upon some other themes and materials. Whatever details of the UN study are therefore compromised in today’s discussion can be learnt from my paper on the topic, which is here and available to those of you who are interested. I’m going to present for 40 minutes, then we’ll have 15 minutes or so to take questions. I’m going to describe the research project and the governance themes it addresses, and along the way I’ll visit some specific sub-projects and how they fit within the overall landscape of governance themes we’ve oriented to.

Governance Themes
A central issue driving the NWO shifts programme is that transformation of the capacity, location and performance of the traditional (state-centered) mechanisms of power, responsibility, legitimacy and accountability. The term ‘multilevel’ governance attempts to grasp not only the emergent relations between different government levels
(National, supra- and sub-national), but also the activity of multifarious public and private actors at those various levels as well as their interrelationships. Governance, it has been argued, occurs in networks of both state and societal actors, particularly interest organizations, which form complex policy networks and arrive at decisions through multilevel negotiations rather than via hierarchical command.

With respect to these ideas, the governance program poses a set of questions. First, to what extent are the widely held beliefs about the shift to multilevel governance actually corroborated by empirical evidence, and how unique or new are such shifts? The need is for conceptual clarification and for a better road map of the ways in which the shifts in governance are rendered operational in practice. Second, what are the consequences of the rise of multilevel governance for the governability and efficiency of governing, for the institutions and processes of democracy and for the accountability arrangements that control the exercise of power and prevent its abuse or arbitrary application, and hence for its overall legitimacy.



IWRM as Governance – our project
The focus of our project is “Integrated Water Resources Management’, which we understand as a global effort to shift existing administrative conventions related to water in the direction of the kinds of governance formations I just alluded to. Here there is a focus on altering the centrality of the state as the accountable and responsible provider of administrative services that bear on water. As many of you may know, IWRM has come to be promoted by an increasingly growing network of water governance culture brokers, and it is formalized in both Agenda 21 and in the World Summit on Sustainable Development Plan of Implementation. The Global Water Partnership maintains that 193 countries agreed to this plan of implementation. Such global accords were directed at nation states as signators – states make the commitment to ‘Implement’ IWRM practices in their countries. So IWRM thus serves a standard of conduct to which nation states are in some sense held accountable, even while such standards of conduct represent a movement away from the centrality of the nation state as the actor which controls water management practices in the domestic sphere.

People in this room will know that giving rise to a shift in governance of this sort is no straightforward or mechanical task. And the reason is that although the state is responsible to the international community to give rise to the implementation of IWRM in the domestic sphere, implementation itself consists in practices that are not themselves centralized. So we see a lot of emphasis away from highly prescriptive mandates that would settle in advance what particular shape IWRM implementation would need to take.


And those of you in the room who are familiar with IWRM are probably aware that the movement has met some peculiar obstacles precisely because the specific actions that would give rise to IWRM as a governance form are not explicated with any precision; nor, thus, are any detailed requirements supposed to be replicated the same way in every case of IWRM at the domestic level. Although any instance of IWRM implementation would entail some aspect of the series of anti-traditional governance properties that distance IWRM from centralized modes of administration, heterogeneity is expected and encouraged with respect to which of those properties is reproduced, and indeed what form any such properties would take were they reproduced. That is to say, recognition of impending heterogeneity of the sort that we find within the IWRM movement is somehow embedded in the standard of conduct to which the IWRM movement seeks to give rise. For neo-institutionalists in the room, this differs significantly from incidental forms of ‘loose coupling’, which neo-institutionalists and situated interactionists alike have discovered attend even the most heavy-handed attempts at rationalization and standardization. By contrast, there is nothing incidental “loose coupling” in IWRM implementation; it is rather as if the discovery of neo-institutional theory had itself been internalized and proceduralized.

The situation has led to some anxiety around the ‘vagueness’ of IWRM, and many practitioners have commented upon the need to arrive at more precise definitions of its principles. If only IWRM could be properly defined, folks ‘on the ground’ could get to work doing it, and the international community would be able to recognize whether they were, or not. The situation also leads to some fairly sticky issues of accountability, in the sense that, as a movement which seeks to foster a prospective shift in governance world- wide, while not specifying what such governance conduct would precisely entail, the movement is deeply paradoxical – it is simultaneously both centrist and non-centrist in character.