Of co-creation

Institutional design and policy implementation do not always produce the results that were the reason for their initiation and they never produce only the intended results, but a multitude of consequences, some of which are beneficial to the original goal and some of which are not. The tendency is that the situations grow more complex. The grey wolf policy in Finland is one example. Despite the recent bottom-up institution building and policy implementation (Anon, 2015), the negative surprises tend to appear and bring the problematic situation close to square one again: where the conflict is intense and the wolf protection harder. These setbacks are due to many causes and reasons -- sometimes to problematic managerial actions, interest group reactions or a combination thereof.

Sometimes the situations like this are called wicked. I would rather call them a problematic situation. Friedrich von Hayek (1982, 37) has already reminded us that realisations are always surprising and emerging societal structures, order and results are due to human actions, but not all of them are due to human design. The late Ulrich Beck (2016) was of a similar opinion as he emphasised the role and significance of side-effects in institutional adjustment and in the growth of societies. For him, the governmental goals are, in fact, reactions to the side-effects of previous attempts to control side-effects. This is a peculiar feature of institutional evolution.

This realisation-oriented policy making is slowly gaining ground from transcendental institutionalism. According to Sen (2009, 5-6), the political desire to set institutions right transcendentally has two features: “First, it concentrates its attention on what it identifies as perfect justice, rather than on relative comparisons of justices and injustice… Second, in the search for perfection, transcendental institutionalism concentrates primarily on getting institutions right, and it is not directly focused on the actual societies that would ultimately emerge”.

The realization-orientation principle is close to the pragmatic maxim by Charles S. Peirce (CP5.402): “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object”. Realizations, i.e., effects, do not appear spontaneously, without human intention and design, they appear in complex transactions from within the ecostructure already in place but change due to these very same transactions. Realisations are co-created.

Understood from this view, institutional adjustments and policy designs are what their conceived effects ultimately become - the policies are only as good as their co-created effects. As Sen reminds us, those who focus on realizations and who are engaged in making comparisons from the point of view of real-life consequences are more often interested in identifying and solving practical policy problems leading to these injustices. The realisation-orientation calls for coordinated co-creation of policy designs and implementation.

The idea is not as old as it first seems. In co-construction, people are invited to participate in policy planning, agenda setting and, say, evaluation of ongoing policy processes, but they do not participate in implementation.  In co-production, people take part in data collection, but they do not necessarily participate in any other parts of the knowledge production process, i.e., in defining research problems or in executing analysis and, especially, not in weighting societal policy problems and potential solutions. In co-design, people participate in policy instrument development, but again there are no guarantees that the engagement and collaboration meaningfully extends from the early phase of the policy cycle to any point further. 

These three forms of public involvement may, of course, produce wonderful practical effects but there is one feature that makes them different from the approach of co-creation. The three approaches do not walk the participants all the way to effects; they do not engage people until the intended policy outcomes and emerged side-effects, some of which are mutually valued and some of which may not be.

In his cosmology, Peirce (CP 6.302) introduced three general aspects of change: tychism, synecism and agapism. Tychistic change is spontaneous, being that of absolute chance, of fortuitous variation. A change happens without articulated, planned and preordained purpose. Synecistic change is about continuity, struggle, agreement and mechanical necessity. In our handling, we could say that this is where we find conflict on one hand and partners on the other. The third mode of change is agapism. It is a commitment to the presence and importance of friendship and love. It is evolution by creative love, evolutionary love, or creative symbiosis, as I like to call it.

Creative symbiosis brings new purposes into being, something that synecistic partnership or tychistic interaction do not. Creative symbiosis is a form of change that is essentially teleological and end-directed (Deacon, 2012; Nagel, 2012). It is not spontaneous although ingredients of surprise, spontaneity and emergence are accounted for there and it is not mechanical even though the evolutionary process seems to proceed from one stage to the other. Creative symbiosis re-does and re-negotiates the purpose, working rules and motivation continuously according to perpetually changing environmental interdependencies and functions. The actual enables the possible and the variation in the possible brings in the potential. Stuart Kauffman (2016) calls this sort of co-creation ’the Adjacent Possible’.

The ontological challenge of co-creation is immense. On a more practical level, the approach of co-creation creates and develops participatory means and encourages people to engage in problem definition, action research design, in the execution of the co-creation process and reflective weighing of results and side-effects. Co-creation is not only about policy solutions but also, perhaps more so, about cultural entrepreneurship and value articulation for more critically responsive, fair, and engaging solutions. Co-creation is about realisations, indeed, about taking coordinated co-creative processes all the way to the ends-in-view, to the fulfilled purpose and emerged side-effects.

Co-creation calls for transdisciplinary research and abductive logic of reasoning. Transdisciplinary science is supposed to help policy processes to produce improved practical effects and novel conceptions and theories about the societal and economic processes behind these improved practical effects. The general purpose of transdisciplinary science is to bring about something that is not yet in existence; this is exactly why the transdisciplinary science must often follow the abductive logic of reasoning. Deduction sustains the theoretical core ideals and the assumption of a particular social practice. In a strict sense, deduction does not produce new knowledge: it only may affirm the hypothesis. Induction goes from particulars to generals deriving knowledge from empirical experience based upon a system of handling data. Inductive inference is not, however, necessary inference, as is deduction.

For Peirce (CP 5.189) abduction is a capacity for “the operation of adopting an explanatory hypothesis.” However, abduction is not only about adopting the hypothesis but “it is the only logical operation which introduces a novel idea” (Peirce CP 5.171). As Thomas Alexander (2013, 163) reminded us, abduction is “an imaginative effort of understanding.” Abduction is the logic for co-creation. A commitment to co-creation is simply a quest for critical responsiveness in the face of well-intended but surprising policy realisations (Hiedanpää & Bromley 2016, 236). In such a process, the purpose is to co-create and co-select a reasonable practice. We might also say that this is a pragmatist maxim for democratic creativity (e.g., Gouinlock 1999).

As the perpetuity of wolf problems in Finland have indicated, participatory co-design of policy instruments, co-construction of policies, and co-production of knowledge do not necessarily suffice to untangle a complex problematic situation. The problem may have been that the government, its administration and transdisciplinary wildlife research (our work) have not had the will, skills or resources to walk, critically and adaptively, through the implementation and enforcement of new institutional adjustments and policy designs. As so often happens at the critical, almost securely late stage of implementation, transactions are left to take their own spontaneous course, and the results soon turn to side-effects. However, as is evident, co-creation is easier said than done.

References

Alexander, Thomas (2013) The Human Eros: Eco-Ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Anon (2015) Management plan for the wolf population in Finland. Helsinki: Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.

Beck, Ulrich (2016) The Metamorphosis of the World: How Climate Change is Transforming Our Concept of the World. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Deacon, Terrence (2012) Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Gouinlock, James (1999) Dewey: Creative Intelligence and Emergent Reality. Rosenthal, S.B., Hausman, C.R. and Anderson, T. (Eds.) Classical American Pragmatism. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Hayek von, Friedrich (1982) Law, Legislation and Liberty. London: Routledge. 

Hiedanpää, Juha & Daniel W. Bromley (2016) Environmental Heresies: The Quest for Reasonable. London: Macmillan.

Kauffman, Stuart A. (2016) Humanity in a Creative Universe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nagel, Thomas (2012) Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly Wrong. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Peirce, Charles S. (1934) Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce, 8 vols., C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (vols. 1–6) and A. Burks (vols. 7–8). 8 eds., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sen, Amartya (2009) The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.


Originally: ESEE Newsletter Winter 2016 – Hot Topic
Published online:
http://www.euroecolecon.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/ESEE-Newsletter-WINTER-2016.html

The ESEE at 20

The European Society for Ecological Economics turns 20 this year. The society was established in 1996 at the Paris conference held at Saint Quentin en Yvelines. During this time, the operating environment of ESEE has changed quite dramatically but has simultaneously remained almost the same – we are still tackling the same challenges of biodiversity loss, climate change and problems with planning for natural resource use just as during the years of our infancy. Today, ESEE is old enough, but not too old, to adjust its corporeal and mental habits in order to be capable of living with the change in actor networks, in areas of collective attention and climate of ideas.

I have watched the whole history of ESEE, first from a distance and then from within, as a member of the board since 2013. My ESEE history begins from the moments of its inception. During the academic year 1996-1997, I visited Lancaster University (UK) and worked there with John O’Neill and Alan Holland. In our fortnightly sessions, we discussed environmental history and valuation – or, to be honest, I told them what puzzled me and they discussed it intensively for an hour. What brilliant educative moments those were. (As a side-note, I am still puzzled by the same questions.) It was at one of the special Lancaster meetings that I met Clive Spash for the first time. I was happy to hear about the birth of ESEE: ecological economics being done a little differently than it was by the mother society ISEE, the International Society for Ecological Economics. A few years later, Clive became the second president of ESEE, after the inaugural presidency of Sylvie Faucheux.

Because Clive has always had a different and, I should say, a somewhat more radical, angle on key matters in ecological economics, for the purposes of this editorial, I decided to ask him how he sees ecological economics in Europe these days. This was his answer:

“Ecological economics is a conflicted movement that struggles between being co-opted by mainstream economics and finding its own identity as a radical alternative to the mainstream. In Europe, the greater emphasis on social and political theory, classical institutional economics, applied ethics, philosophy of science and history of thought have all helped maintain a better understanding of the potential of the field to achieve social ecological transformation. However, that potential remains unfulfilled. There remains a tendency towards adopting simplistic ‘solutions’, seeking magic bullet approaches that lack theoretical rigour, and adopting supposedly pragmatic positions that appeal to the dominant neoliberal political system. The European Union that offered potential for progressive environmental policy 20 years ago has become a highly problematic institution pushing undemocratic back room deals such as TTIP, neoliberalisation of environmental policy, financialisation of Nature and the drive for innovation, technology, competition and growth above all else. Ecological economists in Europe today need to be aware of this and do better at supporting and seeking institutional reform.”

Its intellectually broader, critical (Continental, perhaps) and more radical mode of doing ecological economics was the first characteristic that attracted me to ESEE. The society had, and still has, a character of its own. As the above quote witnesses, critical preparedness is still evident in Clive’s thinking at a time when ESEE, as an epistemic community, is moving towards the mainstream. I am wondering whether there is a need or a necessity to turn back to the more radical playing fields of ESEE.

After the global financial meltdown in 2008, neoliberal thinking in the global governance of developmental and environmental issues has only strengthened, and the crisis did not lead to the regulatory revisions the critics had hoped to see. Hand in hand with the recovery from the economic and financial crisis come many concurrent trends – climate change, digitalisation processes and the concept of ecosystem services to mention three – that have supported and contributed to the way in which environmental governance and policy are exercised on the global and regional levels. From the ESEE’s perspective, the challenge of providing meaningful institutional advice and workable policy alternatives is ridiculously large. There are two general ways to go, I think: provide up-to-date economic pricing information about the changes in ecosystem services and other natural values which societal planning and decision-making apparatuses seem to lean on, or become a more critical and reformative economic science again that identifies, designs, experiments and evaluates the ideological and societal alternatives. These two are not necessarily incompatible, but to make them compatible takes some intellectual effort. I think this calls for the root mission of ESEE.

But how does Clive see the future of ecological economics in Europe?

“The only future for ecological economics is to become a critical social science that has firm theoretical foundations in understanding biophysical reality. Adopting mainstream models, valuation approaches and market mechanisms merely relegates the field to being a second rate version of the mainstream that it has always criticised and opposed. Yet being an apologist for mainstream ideas has become a common approach. The idea, pervasive in the journal, that the field should be a form of environmental studies or some sustainability science, that includes anything and everything that has the words environment or sustainability in them, is also the antithesis of creating a field of knowledge.

In the last 20 years the complex of social, ecological and economic problems have not been addressed and there has been a reversal of policies and deconstruction of institutions aimed at controlling the worst excesses of corporate capitalism and the consumer society. The drive for growth, markets and money is worse today, individualisation is greater, inequity has grown, the loss of biodiversity has not been stopped, greenhouse gases have increased relentlessly, innovative new pollutants and substances are spreading, militarisation and securitisation have spread and resource extraction has become more dirty and with higher social and environmental impacts (e.g. fracking). To date ecological economics has clearly not succeeded in addressing these issues in any substantive way and will only be helpful if it avoids becoming another rhetorical device for apologising about why planetary destruction and social injustice are necessary so humans can progress. Unfortunately there are a lot of apologists for the capital accumulating system and the growth machine who claim to be ecological economists and there are many who divorce their personal practice from the actions necessary to avoid the continuation of social, ecological and economic crises. If the ESEE is to succeed it must address these issues.”

I agree that the institutional and socioecological problems Clive lists above are something the ESEE folks should get their hands dirty with in the next twenty years. I am not much of a predictor, but I think that taking the task seriously would entail, in general, more ESEE members, perhaps as dedicated economists, becoming engaged not only in the social psychology of emotion, cultural studies on institutional inertia and the organisational ethnography of administrative routines but also in more reform-orientated inter- and transdisciplinary action research on environmental policy planning, implementation and reception for the sake of making things better.

As we can read in this newsletter, Tim Foxon points in this direction in his Hot Topic. He asks how to encourage institutional investors to reorient their investment portfolios towards low carbon energy. It takes effort and courage to go against the current; to take actions that one’s peers will not take, with or without monetary reward. Hopefully more researchers are asking what the source (and sink) of this courageousness is, first of themselves and then of those whom they study. Let me give another example. György Pataki discusses the same general matter in his Hot Topic. However, he does not focus on business enterprises but on the acts of governmental representatives as part of the IPBES process (Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services). After the policy effort has been taken, biodiversity decline has not halted, and while the meaning and significance of ecosystem services as constituents of socioecological resilience and human wellbeing are becoming clearer due to the IPBES work, governments may grow more hesitant about funding the collective efforts to find and design the conditions of safeguarding the protection of biodiversity and sustainable use of ecosystem services. There is indeed something worth investigating for critical ecological economists in the next 20 years.

ESEE Newsletter Spring 2016 -- Editorial (published online: http://www.euroecolecon.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ESEE-Newsletter-SPRING-2016.html )

The New Rural World: from Crises to Opportunities

The XIII World Congress of Rural Sociology: “The New Rural World: from Crises to Opportunities” was held in Lisbon (Portugal) between 29 July and 4 August 2012. The general theme of the congress was the crisis threatening rural livelihoods and the agri-food system, and emerging paradigms for change. About a thousand students, scholars and researchers contributed to the conference and its working groups.

One highlight was the plenary lecture given by Prof. Sousa Santos from Coimbra University. He discussed knowledge production and “knowledges of struggles” produced as people contest each other’s knowledge and concept of time, which is commonly and popularly taught to lead towards modernisation and globalisation. In addition, the western conception of time implies that the arrow of time proceeds linearly forward and that the core countries of the world system are at the head of progress. According to Prof. Sousa Santos, the western scholarly approaches rest on western worldviews. He stressed that academia would benefit from the use of the indigenous and non-western instruments and alternative approaches to science. Researchers should engage in new kinds of transdisciplinary project.

De Sousa Santos also emphasised “ecology of knowledges” based on indigenous and personal knowledge. Here, for Santos, ecology means an arena where different practices are exercised and hopefully sustainable interactions take place among different entities (people/animal/societies, etc.). The “ecology of knowledges” would allow the pragmatic discussion of alternative criteria of validity and alternative scholarly avenues to policy advice. A good example of this is the difficulty with developing alternative solutions in the European crisis that is currently emerging in many countries. According to Santos, Europe is becoming underdeveloped, partly because of colonial antagonism. Antagonism is still strong in Europe, and hinders the Europeans from perceiving workable solutions to their problems.

De Sousa Santos also encouraged us to apply “a global form of learning” and incorporate the social movements that are emerging in the Fourth World into policy making. For Santos, many indigenous communities and Thmovements are considered non-existent by western scientists. He called this invisibility the “sociology of absences”. If sociology usually gives different critical perspectives to the structures, agencies and functionings of the world, for Santos, sociology represents issues to be constructed against hegemonic social science and upon epistemological presuppositions. It is through this process, when entities of “sociology of absences” start working, that monocultures will be replaced by alternative ecologies.

Indeed, new developments in visibility are taking shape, for instance in Latin America. For the first time, the new constitution in Bolivia has been translated into the country’s indigenous languages. Indigenous people now have an opportunity to become more involved in local politics and influence how relevant knowledge is produced and signified.

Therefore, one might wonder about the applicability of the concept of the “sociology of absences” in Finnish wolf policy. It seems that some of the local views are going unrecognised in the current wolf discourse. The state regulations designed by the dominant state institutions might have hidden the viewpoints of local people and local “ecology of knowledges” within management practices. Hence, it is actually more demanding because the public is expecting to find alternative managerial solutions for the grey wolf issues in south-western Finland.