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114
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Introduction
sociology of politics and governance: studying the intertwining of epistemic, political and aesthetic practices in the shaping of collective orders ("doing governance"),
the construction of translocal spaces of governance knowledge (infrastructures of political agency, informal constitution building)
Current institution
Additional affiliations
March 1999 - August 2009
August 2018 - March 2022
Position
- Visting professor and Head of the Chair of Sociology of Politics and Governance
March 2012 - August 2018
Education
July 2004 - October 2007
October 1996 - March 1997
October 1992 - March 1996
Publications
Publications (114)
Knowing Governance sets out to understand governance through the design and making of its models and instruments. How are new understandings of governance produced in practice, by scientists and policy makers and by the publics with whom they engage? How does politics work through the production of ideas and information that both describe and presc...
Emerging patterns of public engagement in science and technology are at the heart of an ongoing historical transformation of science. It is here that a much debated "new social contract for science" is currently being negotiated in practice. Alternative future constitutions of science and technology are implied in various ways of doing public engag...
We study efforts at promoting deliberative mini-publics as a model of democracy. Our focus is on practices supporting the circulation of know-how for doing mini-publics. In this paper we center on the building of infrastructures for knowledge exchange in and around a network known as Democracy R&D. This is a network of mini-publics practitioners fr...
Are aesthetics and politics really two different things? The book takes a new look at how they intertwine, by turning from theory to practice. Case studies trace how sensory experiences are created and how collective interests are shaped. They investigate how aesthetics and politics are entangled, both in building and disrupting collective orders,...
What happens when practices are transferred from one place to another? This question lurks in the background of competing concepts of social order, modernization and globalization: Does it expand a homogeneous space where the functionality of original practices is reproduced? Or does it mix up any settled orders and create a dynamic space of hetero...
Das Topos von der „Krise der Demokratie“ ist in den zurückliegenden Jahren ubiquitär geworden. Mit der Ausbreitung dieses Postulats ist die Möglichkeit verbunden, zu übersehen, dass Diagnosen von der Krise der Demokratie vor dem Hintergrund eines bestimmten Modells von Demokratie erfolgen, nämlich das liberal-repräsentativen Demokratie. Mit diesem...
In der Herausbildung und Stabilisierung von Demokratieformen verschränken sich epistemische und politische Praktiken: Die Wissenschaft von der Demokratie ist konstitutiv für die Demokratie. Das arbeite ich hier am Beispiel deliberativer Bürgerräte heraus. Hier handelt es sich um ein spezielles Verfahren der Öffentlichkeitsbeteiligung, von dem seine...
Das Buch eröffnet ein neues Forschungsfeld praxeologischer Demokratieforschung. Statt von bestimmten theoretischen Konzeptionen auszugehen, was Demokratie ist oder sein soll, wird untersucht, wie Demokratie praktisch gemacht wird. Wie wird der „demos“ zum Subjekt des Regierens gemacht, als politischer Akteur mit kollektivem Willen und Handlungsmach...
Are aesthetics and politics really two different things? The book takes a new look at how they intertwine, by turning from theory to practice. Case studies trace how sensory experiences are created and how collective interests are shaped. They investigate how aesthetics and politics are entangled, both in building and disrupting collective orders,...
Are aesthetics and politics really two different things? The book takes a new look at how they intertwine, by turning from theory to practice. Case studies trace how sensory experiences are created and how collective interests are shaped. They investigate how aesthetics and politics are entangled, both in building and disrupting collective orders,...
Are aesthetics and politics really two different things? The book takes a new look at how they intertwine, by turning from theory to practice. Case studies trace how sensory experiences are created and how collective interests are shaped. They investigate how aesthetics and politics are entangled, both in building and disrupting collective orders,...
Die Globalisierung ist zur allgegenwärtigen Gewissheit geworden. Doch wie zutreffend ist das Konzept »Globalisierung«, wenn zeitgleich nationale Grenzen gestärkt und transnationale Freihandelszonen ausgeweitet werden, wenn auf unterschiedlichen scales Territorien überwunden und zugleich territoriale Abgrenzungen neu gesetzt werden? Aktuelle Verände...
Der Artikel widmet sich der Forschung zu Innovationen in Politik und Governance, verstanden als die aktive Herstellung und Verbreitung von Neuerungen in der Gestaltung kollektiver Ordnungen. Davon ausgehend zeigen wir zunächst, dass sich in der historischen Rückschau zwei parallele Innovationsdiskurse, einer praxisbezogen und einer analytisch, unte...
Die Globalisierung ist zur allgegenwärtigen Gewissheit geworden. Doch wie zutreffend ist das Konzept »Globalisierung«, wenn zeitgleich nationale Grenzen gestärkt und transnationale Freihandelszonen ausgeweitet werden, wenn auf unterschiedlichen scales Territorien überwunden und zugleich territoriale Abgrenzungen neu gesetzt werden? Aktuelle Verände...
Existing discussions of food democracy focus on people's freedom to choose healthy, sustainable, or otherwise 'good' foods. Such foods are supposed to be unrestrained by oligopolistic structures of food supply, economic inequality, misin-formation, or the misleading lobbying campaigns of the food industry. Our article aims to broaden the discussion...
This is a call for papers for a Workshop on "The fabrication of democracy. Construction sities of performative political representation"
In collaboration with the ICI Berlin (Institute for Cultural Inquiry) the workshop "Sensing Collectives – Aesthetic Political Practices Interwined" will take place on November the 14th-16th. With keynotes by Antoine Hennion (Centre Sociologie d'innovation, Mines Tech) and Sophia Prinz (Berlin University of the Arts and the European University Viadr...
The chapter discusses the politics of experimentation in governance. While experimentation is at the heart of the concept of polycentric governance, it is only weakly developed. A widely held expectation is that polycentric governance enhances innovation and learning for the common good, but this rests on naïve assumptions. The literature either as...
(go here for full text read-only: http://rdcu.be/H7X3)
What do experiments do for governance? Along with pragmatist and performative conceptions, we argue that they do not test already existing conditions of governing, but actively transform such conditions. Experiments help to realize specific models of governance by co-producing collective knowl...
Aus Big Data, der massenhaften Sammlung und Auswertung der vielfältigen Daten, die durch die Digitalisierung aller Lebensbereiche entstehen, erwachsen neue Phänomene, die zentrale politikwissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse und Konzepte infrage stellen und die durch moderne Gesellschaften bewertet und reguliert werden müssen. Ziel dieses Beitrags ist es,...
Reflexivity is tricky. It leads to endless regression. Once one commits to a process of not just doing things without thinking—not submitting to interactions and their dynamics and conforming with outcomes—but instead makes this conduct itself the subject of observation, communication, and new action then there is no escape. This observing, communi...
Im Verkehrssektor sind die Emissionen in den letzten Jahren gestiegen statt gesunken. Schnelle Entscheidungen und innovative Mobilitätskonzepte sind notwendig, damit Städte klimafreundlicher werden können. Haben sich Kommunen aber einmal festgelegt, ist der Umstieg auf einen alternativen Ansatz mitunter schwierig und teuer – es können Pfadabhängigk...
As a new concept in policy analysis, instrument constituencies shed light on the ‘supply side’ of policy-making and thereby fill a gap in our understanding of national and transnational policy dynamics. Policy instruments are not only ‘active’ because they contain scripts for reordering society but also because they gather a constituency comprised...
The chapter discusses the multiplication of layers of reflexivity in the course of innovation processes. And it discusses different framings that are underlying different kinds of reflexivity, such as epistemic and political. This leads to a complex entanglement of different forms of reflexivities, as illustrated for the innovation of 'citizen pane...
Der Beitrag diskutiert die Reflexivität von Innovationen an einem Beispiel aus dem Bereich der
Governance-Innovationen: Die Entwicklung und Verbreitung von „Citizen Panels“ als ein Format der
Öffentlichkeitsbeteiligung. Es werden verschiedene Formen von Reflexivität herausgearbeitet, die im
Innovationsprozess zum Tragen kommen. Dafür werden verschi...
We reconstruct the innovation journey of ‘citizen panels’, as a family of participation methods, over
four decades and across different sites of development and application. A process of aggregation
leads from local practices of designing participatory procedures like the citizens jury, planning
cell, or consensus conference in the 1970s and 198...
Instruments of governance are widely discussed in the policy and governance literature (see reviews in Lascoumes/Le Galès 2007; Howlett 2011). This research distinguishes between the various types of instruments, seeks to explain their effects, and is concerned with processes of choosing and implementing them. Articulating governance in terms of in...
This book is about the making of knowledge about governance and how it shapes political action. In a sense, doing politics has always turned on knowing governance, since political action builds on a certain understanding of what it is to act politically and how to do so effectively. Those seeking power have invariably wanted to know how collective...
Der Beitrag diskutiert die Reflexivität von Innovationen an einem Beispiel aus dem Bereich der Governance-Innovationen: Die Entwicklung und Verbreitung von „Bürgerpanelen“ als ein Format der Öffentlichkeitsbeteiligung. Es werden verschiedene Formen von Reflexivität herausgearbeitet, die im Innovationsprozess zum Tragen kommen. Dafür werden verschie...
A report based on an interactive, anticipatory assessment
of the dynamics of governance instruments,
19 April 2013
In this chapter, I do two things. First, I briefly reconstruct how political participation becomes technologized and argue that there is a modal shift in how constitutions of democracy are built from politics to technoscience. I discuss how this modal shift is accompanied by reflexive engagement practices that counter technoscientific closure and s...
This chapter contributes to the project of investigating the deeper politics of carbon markets by analyzing the processes that are connected with the building up of epistemic authority for defining the superior functionality of emissions trading as a policy instrument. We analyze the ‘pre-history’ of carbon trading with a view to the emergence of t...
The paper analyses the relations between policy studies and public policy. It traces how
they are constitutively entangled. Conceptually, this builds on a notion of performativity
that has been developed in science studies. The performativity of policy studies is
explored in a case study of the innovation journey of “transition management” as a
10...
We offer a perspective on the making of policy instruments over time. This sheds light on the work that goes into articulating and maintaining instruments as both models and implemented policies, and the social formations that arise therefrom. Drawing on a brief case study of the innovation of emissions trading, we show the role of both functional...
A report based on an interactive, anticipatory assessment of the dynamics of governance instruments, 26 April 2013
A report based on an interactive, anticipatory assessment of the dynamics of governance instruments, 19 April 2013.
The interactive and anticipatory assessment exercise on which this report is based was part of a broader research project that focused on the innovation dynamics of governance instruments in the areas of public participation methods, environmental markets and sustainability transition management. By circulating these workshop results, we seek to co...
The interactive and anticipatory assessment exercise on which this report is based was part of a broader research project that focused on the innovation dynamics of governance instruments in the areas of environmental markets, public participation methods and sustainability transition management. By circulating these workshop results, we seek to co...
Verschiedene gesellschaftliche Gruppen haben unterschiedliche Möglichkeiten, ihr jeweiliges Verständnis von Nachhaltigkeit wissenschaftlich zu etablieren. Die Definition von Nachhaltigkeithängt daher davon ab, wer Macht und Ressourcen hat, die entsprechende Ausrichtung von Wissenschaft zu stärken. Bisher ist völlig unklar, wie dieser Deutungskampf...
Verschiedenen gesellschaftliche Gruppen haben unterschiedliche Möglichkeiten, ihr jeweiliges Verständnis von Nachhaltigkeit wissenschaftlich zu etablieren. Die Definition von Nachhaltigkeit hängt davon ab, wer Macht udn Ressourcen hat, die entsprechende Ausrichtung von Wissenschaft zu stärken. Bisher ist völlig unklar, wie dieser Deutungskampf demo...
Verschiedene gesellschaftliche Gruppen haben unterschiedliche Möglichkeiten, ihr jeweiliges Verständnis von Nachhaltigkeit wissenschaftlich zu etablieren. Die Definition von Nachhaltigkeit hängt daher davon ab, wer Macht und Ressourcen hat, die entsprechende Ausrichtung von Wissenschaft zu stärken. Bisher ist völlig unklar, wie dieser Deutungskampf...
Umbrella terms like ‘nanotechnology’ and ‘sustainability research’ have emerged as part of the new regime of Strategic Science. As mediators between science and society they have a dual role. Their overall promise allows resources to be mobilised for new fields which can then be productive in their own right. At the same time, however, they also pu...
The utility sector in industrialised countries is undergoing a process of transformation. Liberalisation and privatisation policies have triggered changes in the social, technological and ecological dimension of the provision of electricity, gas, water and telecommunications. These processes interact in complex ways, bringing about transformation d...
New concepts of governance take account of ambivalence, uncertainty, and distributed power in societal change. They aim for reflexivity regarding the limits of prognostic knowledge and actual control of complex processes of change. Adaptive management and transition management are two examples that evolved from the analysis of social-ecological and...
This article was first published in the Journal Ecology and Society at http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/:
Vos, Jan-Peter; Bornemann, Basil: The politics of reflexive governance: challenges for designing adaptive management and transition management. - In: Ecology and Society : a Journal of Integrative Science for Resilience and Sustainability. - I...
Sustainable development is prompting a re-assessment of innovation and technological change. This review paper contributes three things towards this re-assessment activity. First, it considers how the history of innovation studies for sustainable development can be explained as a process of linking broader analytical frameworks to successively larg...
Long-term policy is enjoying something of a come-back in connection with sustainable development. The current revival tries
to avoid the pitfalls of an earlier generation of positivistic long-range planning and control approaches. Instead, this new
generation of policy design emphasises reflexive governance concepts. These aim at inducing and navig...
This chapter focuses on an innovation process in the realm of regulatory practices and institutions. It deals with the development of new forms of network regulation in electricity systems. This comprises methods and institutional arrangements for the operation of the network infrastructure. A key challenge in liberalized electricity markets is tha...
The electricity system has been innovating itself from the beginning onwards – albeit with a long period of stabilization and incremental growth in between. It is with upcoming crises and impulses from inside and outside that the incumbent system is challenged and that marginal and innovative options (such as renewable technologies, or Combined Cyc...
Innovation is key to achieving a sustainable electricity system. New technologies and behavioral change are needed to bring about radical reductions in carbon emissions, and to enhance energy security for today and the future generations. Also, innovation is a continuous process: it happens every day and builds a future in which coming generations...
Coal is a major pillar of electricity generation worldwide, providing around 40% of total electricity generation (IEA 2006b). Emerging countries like China or India are continuously commissioning new large coal plants in order to meet their massive increases in electricity demand. In Germany, coal and lignite are major domestic energy resources and...
So far we have discussed selected aspects of the electricity system and its transition over time. We surveyed the evolution of the technological, institutional and structural components of today’s electricity system in Germany, and assessed indicators for the diffusion and success of innovation as well as for its path dependency. All of these aspec...
Emissions trading is a comparatively new policy instrument which has recently been introduced to the existing governance structure of electricity systems in Europe. The development of emissions trading thus represents an innovation in its own right, an innovation in governance.
This chapter discusses emissions trading as an innovation in the contex...
Innovation is core to transforming the electricity system towards a sustainable path. In its nature, innovation can be technological, but also institutional, policy-related, behavioral or organizational, to mention just some possible perspectives — and it usually touches upon all of these dimensions at once. Hence innovation is a complex and system...
Innovation is key to achieving a sustainable electricity system. New technologies and organizational changes can bring about more sustainable, climate-friendly electricity structures. Yet the dynamics of innovation are complex, and difficult to shape. This book, written by experts in the field, sets out to explore the dynamics, the drivers and the...
Expectations held by different actor groups are of key importance for the shaping of socio-technical transformation processes. Foresight activities may be interpreted as a means to elicit, aggregate, modulate and contextualize expectations held by different actors. The paper proposes a conceptual framework that allows assessing and reflecting expec...
Micro combined heat and power (micro cogeneration) is the simultaneous generation of heat (or cold) and power on the level
of individual buildings, based on small energy conversion units (below 15 kWel) which are usually fuelled by natural gas or heating oil. The heat is used for space and water heating inside the building,
whilst electricity is us...
Network-bound infrastructure systems as electricity, gas, water and telecommunications are currently undergoing transformations on various levels and dimensions. Liberalization, technological innovations and socio-cultural dynamics are part of this. For analyzing these ongoing transformation dynamics as well as exploring future developments of util...
Sustainable development stirs up debate about the capacities of political steering and governance. The complexity of the task expounds limits of steering in three dimensions: goals, knowledge, and power: Sustainability goals are subject to changing and controversial risk perceptions, values and interests. Moreover, knowledge of the coupled dynamics...
In der Auseinandersetzung mit nachhaltiger Entwicklung kommen gesellschaftliche Steuerungs- und Managementkapazitäten an ihre Grenzen. Nicht nur, dass der radikale Wandel, der mit nachhaltiger Entwicklung verbunden wird, mit politischen Widerständen und institutionellen Beharrungskräften zu tun hat. Darüber hinaus sind das Steuerungsziel selbst, so...
The thesis analyses the role of policy instruments for dynamics of governance, using case studies on ‘emissisons trading’ and ‘network access regulation in the utilities’. It opens by observing a paradox: Policy instruments are criticised for misrepresenting the complex and contested reality of public policy-making by portraying it as technical pro...
Special features of sustainable development as a governance problem are contrasted with a conventional rationalist ideal of steering based on the unambiguous determination of goals, availability of knowledge to predict consequences and concentration of power to implement strategies. This leads into the elaboration of three problem dimensions of ste...
Three fundamental observations on the contemporary debate on governance and steering for sustainable development are outlined. First, sustainable development as a highly normative, yet extremely vague concept inescapably raises issues of governance and political steering. Second, the many contributions, approaching sustainability governance from mu...
This paper analyses the development of a new policy instrument as an innovation process in governance. Using the innovation journey concept to track the process in which ‘emissions trading’ emerges as a novel configuration in environmental governance shows how the policy instrument develops dynamics of its own, partly independently of policy proble...
"Innovations are introduced in the hope that they will have positive impacts on their targets, but also in the certain knowledge that there will be negative and unintended effects as well. In time, these less desired effects may also come to generate innovative and adaptive responses in a continuous, "reflexive" process. This book sets out to analy...
Energy is in flux. There is much talk nowadays about restructuring of markets, reorientation of business strategies, emergence of new technologies, reform of regulatory institutions, reinvention of the customer, or reconfiguration of the socio-technical architecture of energy production and consumption. Fundamental changes are said to be going on o...
The introduction of micro CHP - the simultaneous production of heat and power in an individual building based on small energy conversion units such as Stirling and reciprocating engines or fuel cells - is of increasing political and public interest. A large-scale introduction of micro CHP would radically change the electricity system and turn consu...
First published by Edward Elgar publishing house http://www.e-elgar.co.uk/:
Vos, Jan-Peter ; Kemp, Rene: Sustainability and reflexive governance : introduction. - In: Vos, Jan-Peter ; Bauknecht, Dierk and Kemp, Rene: Reflexive governance for sustainable development. - Cheltenham : Edward Elgar, 2006. - ISBN: 978-1-84542-582-1. - pp. 3–30.
