Ontological Excess, Epistemic Partiality, and Operational Limitation in the Governance of Relational Change: A Preliminary Discussion of a Problem Class and Its Research Agenda

Governance theory has developed for fields whose participants can be addressed, whose extent can be represented by a governing party, and whose condition can be altered by that party's action. A class of governance problems satisfies none of these conditions. The relations between human activity and the wider natural and cosmic field are conducted within a field that substantially exceeds what any party represents, that a party alters in portions it cannot describe, and whose affected participants enter no deliberation. This paper constitutes that class and states a research agenda for it. The constitution proceeds in three steps. The conditions defining the class are stated and are grouped by whether each concerns the field, the governing party, or the relation between them. The conditions are then shown to be logically independent, so that the class is distinguished from the fields for which each condition has separately been treated. The traditions presently available are then examined, and for each the paper identifies the single condition the tradition assumes away: precaution assumes identifiable harm, resilience management assumes definable function, adaptive governance assumes learning fast relative to change, earth-system governance assumes a system boundary, and deliberative approaches assume discursive participation. The failure of each tradition on this class is accordingly traceable to a determinate assumption in place of to insufficient development. The paper then reports three results established for the class in companion work, offers them as evidence that the class supports argument, and sets out the questions that remain open, grouped by ontology, observation, operation and termination. The paper closes by stating the criteria by which progress on the agenda would be assessed, and it offers the constituted class, the traceability result and the assessable agenda as its whole contribution.