Kristof van Assche

• Professor (Full) at University of Alberta

Privatisation, as a process that assigns more individual property rights, implies in most cases institutional change. Privatisation might occur on the level of society, when formal laws, but often also informal rules are changing, or it might take place on an organisational level when an asset under an open access regime, a cooperative, or a state-...

Development requires action, adaptation, and transformation of both governance and physical infrastructure. Energy infrastructure unfolds as the infrastructure that facilitates the growth of other infrastructures and development. This paper argues it is critical to examine the complex, non-linear evolution of energy infrastructure and policy alongs...

In this innovative work, Kristof Van Assche, Raoul Beunen and Monica Gruezmacher analyse the challenges and possibilities of sustainability transitions, presenting the dilemmas facing the path to sustainable communities and societies, as well as proposing creative solutions. The authors deploy evolutionary governance theory as a conceptual framing...

In this article, we explore the paradoxical relationship between simulation and dissimulation. We draw on nine contributions to an eponymous virtual special issue of Futures to emphasise that overreliance on simulations or their confusion with research methods is associated with the risk of abetting academic or political dissimulation or immunizati...

This ground-breaking Encyclopedia provides a nuanced overview of the key concepts of urban and regional planning and design. Embracing a broad understanding of planning and design within and beyond the professions, it examines what planners and designers can do in and for a community.

Ocean sustainability initiatives – in research, policy, management and development – will be more effective in delivering comprehensive benefits when they proactively engage with, invest in and use social knowledge. We synthesize five intervention areas for social engagement and collaboration with marine social scientists, and in doing so we appeal...

Liberia's post-war infrastructure projects are characterised by significant delays that confound the present and the future but also occasion multiple possibilities. This paper draws on concepts from evolutionary governance theories and infrastructure planning studies to analyse how actors respond and adapt to the complexity of delayed and incomple...

We analyse the construction of new Nordicities, as in new and guiding discourses for urban development which engage with a Northern location. Spatial planning and place branding are proposed as mutually reinforcing instruments to support the strategic positioning of cities located in northern climes. Planning in such an environment must take on boa...

In this paper, we explore the complex entanglements between ongoing land conflicts and climate shocks, and their implications for risk governance paths and evolution. We focus on ways in which concepts of shock and conflict can be incorporated into social–ecological systems thinking and applied to risk governance practice in a southern cities conte...

We consider the case of the Flemish city of Ypres and its reconstruction after World War I to analyze the legacies of war, as a violent shock to social- ecological systems for the meaning and organization of land. We argue that these legacies can only be understood when considering the multiple meanings of land, including its association with ident...

We present a perspective on combining research methods in policy and governance which starts from an understanding of governance as the result of a double bricolage: an organizational or institutional bricolage, and a bricolage of knowledges and associated methods. We develop a typology of common ways to combine methods in governance, distinguishin...

This paper explores how the concepts of riskscapes and object formation can be incorporated into governance theory to provide an analytical lens for risk governance in the context of a plurality of practices. In this context, the Monrovia Slum Initiative is examined using data from three unplanned settlements. Competing riskscapes are reflected in...

Qualitative research often involves the collection of data from multiple sources, inclusive of the embodied and multisensorial. These differing data sources, that are not language based, pose difficulties for researchers. Often this multimodal data is collected alongside interviews, field notes and other language-based data and then translated into...

We argue a re-appraisal of asset mapping is needed based on revisiting the concept of assets. Asset mapping is useful for inter/trans-disciplinary work involving complex systems: organizations, administrations, governance systems, social-ecological systems, etc. Asset mapping can be an integrative method, allowing a combination of different discipl...

We turn to the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador and its continuous reorganization of governance, its series of shocks, ambitions of reinvention and development to analyze the risks associated with Great Reset-style ambitions. We coin the concept of the local paradox: grand schemes need input from and implementation at a local level an...

The attention to sustainability transformations and related processes of learning, innovation, and adaptation has inspired a growing interest in theories that help to grasp the processes of change in governance. This perspective paper and the Special Issue of which it is part explore how evolutionary perspectives on environmental governance can enr...

This paper introduces the concepts and ideas that frame this special issue on co-evolution in governance, and their implications for policy learning and adaptation. It offers a brief overview of co-evolutionary approaches to governance and their elementary connections with systems theories, post-structuralism, institutionalism, and actor-network th...

This essay introduces and frames the contributions to the special issue on learning and co-evolution in governance. It develops the argument that learning, dark learning and non-learning are necessarily entwined in governance, moreover, entwined in a pattern unique to each governance configuration and path. What can be learned collectively for the...

This Special Issue explores evolutionary perspectives on environmental policy and governance [...]

We argue for embedding land use policy in broader strategies of community development as a way of contributing with long-term success of communities. In analyzing eight case communities in Alberta, Canada, we identified reasons for fragmentation: non-coordination between institutions organizing land use (‘land use tools’), non-coordination between...

Northern regions are still less visible than others. This means that dealing with problems of the North often takes place in the mode of damage control. Drawing on Canadian and Alaskan experiences, we argue that northern communities need integrated resilience strategies for their development and that such strategies need to have the character of lo...

Tbilisi has undergone spectacular changes which can be grasped by the concept of ‘Multiple Transformations’, characteristic of postsocialist cities. Along with the reform of legislative, institutional and social frameworks, an urban or spatial transformation took place. We distinguish different phases of Tbilisi’s urban transformation, discuss the...

Sustainability transitions bring together many different disciplines focussing on the interrelations between the social and the material. The burgeoning field of transition studies is becoming more inter-disciplinary, less normative, less modernist in nature, and more open to both discursive and material dynamics. Social-ecological systems thinking...

Social resilience and ecological resilience are related and distinguished, and the potential of social resilience to enhance resilience of encompassing social-ecological systems is discussed. The value of resilience thinking is recognized, yet social resilience needs to be better understood in its distinctive qualities, while resisting identificati...

p>This paper presents a framework for analysing the different ways in which materiality impacts environmental policy and governance. It draws on notions from the wider literature on materiality and integrates relevant insights into a theory on policy and governance. Building on a key distinction between the material and the discursive dimensions of...

Embracing methodological individualism, the mainstream economic theory of the firm has little to say about the precarious nature of the firm's embeddedness in encompassing socioecological systems. The digital transformation of the theory of the firm can address this gap by deconstructing the standpoint of methodological individualism. In transactio...

We analyse the migration of academic and policy discourses that contributed to (de)legitimise the formation of planning policies in Argentina since the 1950s. We focus on the communicative/collaborative rationality discourses emanating from Anglo-American academic circles that played a role in the revival of the Argentine planning system between 20...

In this paper, we present a framework for the analysis of shock and conflict in social-ecological systems and investigate the implications of this perspective for the understanding of environmental governance, particularly its evolutionary patterns and drivers. We dwell on the distinction between shock and conflict. In mapping the relation between...

This paper explores the concept of adaptive research design, in which topic, theoretical framing, method, and data are in principle open to adaptation during the research process. The main premise is that adaptations in one element of the research process can trigger changes in other elements. Both positive and negative reasons for adaptivity are d...

We develop a novel perspective on the interplay between causes and effects of resource policy (and more generally development strategy) at local level. We do this by deploying a theoretical framework built around both psychoanalytic notions and concepts from governance theory to analyze the evolution and the construction of futures in the Canadian...

We develop a perspective on steering in governance which understands steering as intended path creation. Inspired by evolutionary governance theory, critical management studies and social systems theory, we argue that steering is shaped and limited by co-evolutions, disallowing for any formulaic approach. In order to illuminate the space for steeri...

Based on a detailed study of the return of national-level planning in Argentina as embodied by COFEPLAN, the national planning council, we develop a conceptual framework to analyse the possibilities and limits of steering in governance. We lean on the theoretical apparatus of evolutionary governance theory and use the concepts of goal dependency, i...

Steering has negative connotations nowadays in many discussions on governance, policy, politics and planning. The associations with the modernist state project linger on. At the same time, a rethinking of what is possible by means of policy and planning, what is possible through governance, which forms of change and which pursuits of common goods s...