LIST OF PANELS

“Amidst Heterarchy: Co-Creation, Coherence and Complementarity in Transnational Policy Regimes (TPRs)” (in-person panel)

                                    
We have experienced an explosion of spaces that go beyond territorial place. Heterarchical rather than hierarchical spaces of intangibles have been generated by telecommunications and information technology. These spaces to a great extent are situated in digital platforms that become more entrenched as sites of sovereign policy-making. Ours is a world in which human interactions are more and more positioned in spaces unfolding in practices that are multi-nodal, multi-layered/ multi-level, multi-scalar, and inter-scalar –- practices of emergent webs transnational reflexive governance. And with these there is set in motion transnational policy regimes (TPRs) beyond ad hoc collaborative tinkering.

The ambiguities and uncertainties of the heterarchies marking our liquid second modernity trigger persisting and recursive transnational practices of policy co-creation and coordination manifested in standard setting. For example, transnational value chains of sustainable ecological and epidemiological performance; transnational standards of dispute resolution; threshold indicators; sensor verifiers; ratcheting labor standards; benchmarking; quality and equity standards; and an emphasis on “best practices.”

Transnational policy regimes emerge at the intersection of informational networks rather than according to the price-signalling of markets or the administrative command and control of nation states. This is not as a delegation of state policy-making, but as a decentered regulatory ordering constituted by interlaced hybrid networks – sometimes referred to as meshworks.

Our objective formulated as a basic composite research question:   

To what extent do TPRs’ co-creation go beyond market-driven or state-driven policy-making?

And to what extent do TPRs bring about co-creation practices of standard setting that show a reflexive awareness of coordination problems and institutional complementarity needs?

This composite research question sets off further questions and a hypothesis:

·         To what extent are TPRs dynamic “going concerns” capable of reflexive change?

·         To what extent do TPR interactions operate at specific scales, between scales, and across scales?

·         To what extent do TPRs achieve policy coherence in often having to regulate collisions caused by respective organizations’ contradictory normative orientations, decision logics and legal approaches?

Hypothesis: The supervenience of Polycontextual Logic combines the need for coordinating heterarchy with a need for coordinating resolution of colliding autonomous subsystemic regime logics. Cf. Warren McCulloch, Gotthard Gunther. Niklas Luhmann and GüntherTeubner.

Scientific Relevance:

*Polycontexturality refers to the complementarity of fragmented rationales/ plural legalities.

  This paper helps to orient the discourse analysis in critical policy research of "reflexive network governance."

   It does so in helping to conceptualize issues of coordination and institutional complementarity terms of the processing of diverse and fragmented modes of respective functional logics of policy-making. 

*Call attention to the emergence of TPR as a persistent and path-dependent phenomena in policy-making practices.

* Extend and refine the concepts of "policy regime/policy constellation".

This panel will only accept onsite presentations.

Ours is a world in which human interactions are more and more positioned in heterarchical spaces unfolding in terms of  multi-nodal, multi-layered/ multi-level, multiscalar and interscalar practices. Seeking papers discussing practices of emergent webs of transnational "reflexive governance."

More specifically how these emergent webs of governance set in motion transnational policy regimes (TPRs) beyond ad hoc collaborative tinkering?  How the ambiguities of heterarchies trigger persisting and recursive transnational practices of policy co-creation and coordination manifest in standard setting:e.g., transnational standards of dispute resolution, transnational value chains of sustainable ecological and epidemiological performance.

Seeking papers that report on (1) to what extent TPRs' co-creation go beyond market-driven or state driven policy-making; (2) to what extent TPRs bring about co-creation practices of standard setting that show a reflexive awareness of coordination problems and institutional complementarity needs; and (3) to what extent do TPRs achieve policy coherence in often having  to regulate collisions caused by respective organizations' contradictory normative orientations, decsion logics and legal approaches.