Governing the «nexus»

Many have flagged that the “nexus” has become a buzzword, and I have found myself working in two different projects that use the word “nexus”, but have quite different focuses, aims and scopes. The first project is a European project funded by the European Commission’s Horizon2020 programme, and is entitled Read more…

Uncertainty beyond the data

How one theorizes uncertainty is central to how uncertainty is analysed. If uncertainty is conceptualised as incomplete knowledge, uncertainty analysis will focus on describing knowledge gaps. If uncertainty is conceptualised as the challenge of predicting the future, uncertainty analysis will focus on describing how present variables may change in the future. In this post, I argue that a theoretical understanding of uncertainty is necessary to guide decision-making, and that the analysis of uncertainty must be theoretically informed and not only solution-oriented.

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Governance in pluralism

What happens to science advice to policy when science speaks with multiple voices? How does pluralism affect the science policy interface? Is pluralism irreducible or can it be governed? In this post, I review three approaches to governance in the context of pluralism.

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The challenge of development in complex adaptive systems

The complexity view is that economic systems are adaptive systems, becoming systems, self-organising systems. Adaptive systems are not as susceptible to planning as machines may be. Complexity may be useful to discuss the challenges of scaling up the actions and innovations of economic agents and firms to economic growth, and the limits of trickle down logics in the context of persistent and growing inequalities in terms of non-linearities between lower level and higher level system components.