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In this paper we link contemporary thinking on craft and craftsmanship to concepts in community development. Craft is contrasted with popular development dogmas such as innovation, planning and the...

In this paper, we explore the consequences of a flat ontology for planning theory and practice through the lens of Evolutionary Governance Theory (EGT). We present a perspective in which the ontological hierarchies assumed in planning and beyond are left behind, but also one that allows for understanding how hierarchies and binaries can emerge from and within governance and specifically planning. From this perspective, planning is conceptualised as a web of interrelated social-material systems underpinning the coordination of policies and practices affecting spatial organisation. Within this web, different planning perspectives and planning practices co-exist and co-evolve, partly in relation to the wider governance contexts of which they are part. We explore and deepen our understanding of the consequences of flat ontology by focussing on the interrelations between power and knowledge and the varied effects of materiality on planning and governance, as materiality can play roles ranging from latent infrastructure to main triggers of change. We conclude our paper by assessing the consequences for the positionality of planning in society, stressing the need for more reflexive and adaptive forms of planning and governance, and reflecting on what such forms of planning could look like. We argue that despite the abstract nature of discussions on ontology in and of planning, the conceptual shifts that result from thinking in terms of flat ontologies can significantly affect planning practices as it can inspire new ways of observing and organising.

In this thematic issue we pursue the idea that comparative studies of planning systems are utterly useful for gaining a deeper understanding of learning processes and learning capacity in spatial planning systems. In contemporary planning systems the pressures towards learning and continuous self-transformation are high. On the one hand more and more planning is needed in terms of integration of expertise, policy, local knowledge, and response to long term environmental challenges, while on the other hand the value of planning systems is increasingly questioned and many places witness an erosion of planning institutions. The issue brings together a diversity of contributions that explore different forms of comparative learning and their value for any attempt at reorganization, adaptation and improvement of planning systems.

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 theory, and explores how they are connected to co-evolution in governance. Co-evolutionary approaches differ from other influential understandings of knowledge and learning in policy and governance. It furthermore presents a typology of learning in governance and systematically discusses how each type is affected by patterns of coevolution in governance.

CONTEXT Women who seek abortion care beyond the first trimester of gestation are often in a vulnerable socioeconomic position with limited social support, and in Belgium, the details of their circumstances are insufficiently understood. A better understanding of this group is essential to a critical evaluation of Belgian abortion policy, which restricts abortions on request after the first trimester. METHODS Anonymized patient records were collected between 2013 and 2016 from LUNA centers, which are non‐hospital‐based abortion clinics in Flanders. Logistic regression analyses were used to identify associations between women's characteristics and whether they presented within or beyond the legal limit, which was 13 weeks and 1 day at the time of the study. RESULTS A total of 28,741 women requested an abortion, and 972 individuals (3.4%) presented beyond the legal limit; 29% of these latter women were unable to receive abortion care as a result of the mandatory six‐day waiting period. Characteristics positively associated with presenting beyond the limit, instead of beforehand, were being younger than 20, as opposed to 20–24 (odds ratio, 1.7); receiving a primary, lower secondary, upper secondary or special‐needs education, rather than a higher education (1.8–3.1); being unemployed, rather than employed (1.3); and holding Belgian rather than a foreign nationality (0.8). Being accompanied by someone to the LUNA center (0.8), having irregularly (0.6) or regularly used contraceptives (0.7), and having ever had an abortion (0.8) were negatively associated with presenting beyond, rather than before, the limit. CONCLUSIONS A fuller consideration of patients’ characteristics when evaluating Belgian abortion policy is needed to ensure that the needs and rights of socioeconomically vulnerable women are addressed.

The paper explores the implications of Ludwig von Bertalanffy's general systems theory for the current debates on the nature of organizational transparency as an element of good governance. If transparency implies the exchange of information, then it may be taken, at a metaphorical level, to constitute a dimension of metabolism theorized by Bertalanffy's open systems model. Yet, the model likewise lays bare some of the limits of transparency idea. Bertalanffy's work on the nature of emergent properties, his critique of the stimulus–response scheme, and his perspectivistic account of the systemic perception of the environment all point in the direction of the impossibility of full transparency. Later systems‐theoretic work on operational closure and self‐referentiality has reinforced and even radicalized these insights, which are shown to resonate with some of the key arguments in the contemporary economics, sociology of knowledge, and business ethics.

This special issue analyses and reflects on relations between long term perspectives and strategies in governance. While dismissing high modernist planning and acknowledging constraints to long-term policies, the different contributions in this volume, each in their own way, contend that strategy is necessary to face the challenges of our times. The fifteen articles highlight different aspects of the possibilities of and limits to strategy in governance, to turn long-term perspectives into strategy and strategy into reality. They all examine how long- term perspectives and issues are constituted by different governance practices and emerge in rather different policy contexts, which points to the need to better understand the diverse interplay between strategy, long-term perspectives and patterns of policy integration. Furthermore, the contributions emphasize how long-range governance requires careful attention to issues of temporality, the management of uncertainty and the interplay between the short term and the long term.

This paper presents a novel framework for analyzing the formation and effects of strategies in environmental governance. It combines elements of management studies, strategy as practice thinking, social systems theory and evolutionary governance theory. It starts from the notion that governance and its constitutive elements are constantly evolving and that the formation of strategies and the effect strategies produce should be understood as elements of these ongoing dynamics. Strategy is analyzed in its institutional and narrative dimensions. The concept of reality effects is introduced to grasp the various ways in which discursive and material changes can be linked to strategy and to show that the identification of strategies can result from prior intention as well as a posteriori ascription. The observation of reality effects can enhance reality effects, and so does the observation of strategy. Different modes and levels of observation bring in different strategic potentialities: observation of self, of the governance context, and of the external environment. The paper synthesizes these ideas into a framework that conceptualizes strategies as productive fictions that require constant adaptation. They never entirely work out as expected or hoped for, yet these productive fictions are necessary and effective parts of planning and steering efforts.

We express our sincere thanks to all those who submitted comments on our article and to the editors of AJOB for allowing us to comment in reply.Boggio and Ho’s (2018) comment is centered on the “hu...

We investigate the linkages between speculation and resilience in resource-based communities (boomtowns) susceptible to economic swings (boom/bust) and reflect on the actual and possible roles of spatial planning to stabilize communities under conditions of boom, bust and speculation. We use a nested case study method, where the Western Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia are investigated more in detail through semi-structured interviews (N = 145) in 12 case communities. We argue that spatial planning must be understood broadly to discern its effects on community resiliency, with resiliency understood as the coordination of spatial organization. Planning, then, is crucial at two stages of development: in the choice of a settlement model and afterwards in the spatial embodiment of that model. We further highlight the importance of expectations and managing expectations in understanding and re-thinking the linkages between speculation and resilience, and the importance of associated ideologies in risk assessment and conceptualizations of resilience.

Purpose Ethiopia operates a large agricultural extension service system. However, access to extension-related knowledge, technologies and agricultural inputs is unequally distributed among smallholder farmers. Social learning is widely practiced by most farmers to cope with this unequal distribution though its practices have hardly been documented in passing on knowledge of agriculture and rural development or embedding it into the local system of knowledge production, transfer and use. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to identify the different methods of social learning, as well as their contribution to the adoption and diffusion of technologies within Ethiopia’s smallholder agricultural setting. Design/methodology/approach A mixed methods approach was used, comprising farmer and expert interviews, focus group discussions, informal individual discussions and key informant interviews. The data were documented, coded and later analyzed using SPSS and ATLAS.ti. Findings The findings showed that 55 per cent of the farmers in the studied areas fully relied on social, community-level learning to adopt agricultural technologies, while 35 per cent of them relied on social learning only partly. Farmers acquired knowledge through social networks by means of communication, observation, collective labor groups, public meetings, socio-cultural events and group socialization. Informal institutions such as iddir, debo and dado, helped farmers learn, adopt and diffuse technologies. Originality/value This study used the concept of epistemic oppression by Dotson (2014) as a conceptual framework to examine farmers’ access to extension services and to analyze how informal institutions serve as workplace learning for the smallholder farmers. The authors suggest community-level social learning serves as a coping mechanism against the prevailing limitations of the formal extension system, and at the same time, it guards against the deepening of social, political and epistemic inequalities that are inherent to the knowledge system.

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 mining community of the Crowsnest Pass, Alberta. It is argued that the growth and decline of mining created social identities and governance features which severely hamper the articulation of alternative futures. The case study highlights the importance of collective trauma, both stemming from rapid development and decline, in the understanding of fantasy as it plays out in evolving governance, the understanding of replayed scenarios of hope and disillusion. The case analysis contributes to the broader discussion of path dependencies in community development by multiplying the potential effects of key events in the development of the community, beyond effects on conscious collective memory, beyond institutional structures and processes. Freud's foundational idea of nachtragligkeit, the potential of events to steer development in a direction but also to resurface much later in the manner of symptoms limiting reflexivity and adaptation, is thus given a translation at community level, with special implications for resource communities and policies.

The authors reflect on recent experiences at UN-Habitat and other international organizations to rethink the roles of planning towards larger development goals and to reform planning systems in places most in need of them. They consider the difficulties but ultimate necessity to learn from a variety of contexts and experiences to articulate general orientations for planning and planning reform which can partly transcend context. Within the variety of planning experiences, and the experiences of lack of planning, one can discern principles which can be applied in many contexts, yet those include principles of contextualization and learning. Comparative learning underpins the attempts at finding general principles, and the local application of those principles further triggers processes of learning, including comparative learning. Local and grassroots planning capacity building is vital to locally apply and contextualize international planning guidelines.

In 2012, a new and promising gene manipulation technique, CRISPR-Cas9, was announced that seems likely to be a foundational technique in health care and agriculture. However, patents have been granted. As with other technological developments, there are concerns of social justice regarding inequalities in access. Given the technologies' "foundational" nature and societal impact, it is vital for such concerns to be translated into workable recommendations for policymakers and legislators. Colin Farrelly has proposed a moral justification for the use of patents to speed up the arrival of technology by encouraging innovation and investment. While sympathetic to his argument, this article highlights a number of problems. By examining the role of patents in CRISPR and in two previous foundational technologies, we make some recommendations for realistic and workable guidelines for patenting and licensing.

We address the question why social identities associated with resource extraction can survive the extraction itself, a question which is highly relevant for devising strategies for economic diversification and community reinvention in many communities. The case of As Pontes, in Galicia, Spain, where a rural community transformed into a power house of coal mining and electricity production, as part of state-led development schemes, is highly instructive, as it reveals the importance of state planning and a central actor which structured social, political and economic life, and created identities which could not easily be dislodged. We deploy notions from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of practice to analyze the persistence of identities and associated hopes for an impossible return to the past, giving central place to the idea of symbolic violence, i.e. the internalization of categories, identities and relations initially promoted by a coalition of actors benefiting from this order of the social field.

Based on biological insights, Ludwig von Bertalanffy coined general systems theory (GST) and later expanded his perspective, exploring what GST could mean for other disciplines and other types of systems. We make a case for the relevance, or rather, the importance, of GST for coming to a new understanding of the resilience of social‐ecological systems and the possible forms of adaptive governance that might increase such resilience. After analyzing the conceptual structure of the resilience paradigm and of GST, we identify concepts in resilience thinking where GST provides new confirmation or modifies the perspective: complexity, evolution, self‐organization, and adaptation. We discuss post‐Bertalanffy developments in the interdisciplinary and twinned fields of systems theory and complexity studies that can provide bridging concepts between GST and resilience thinking. In conclusion, we emphasize the need for both cognitive and institutional resilience to foster adaptive governance. We highlight the management of couplings between systems and the switching between forms of understanding and forms of organization, where self‐organization and more centralized forms of steering can alternate and combine.

This research note is a rejoinder to Steve Wallis' commentary on our paper "The limits of transparency: a systems theory view" (Valentinov, Verschraegen, van Assche, 2019)

We develop a social systems theory perspective on Central Asian post-Socialist transition, placing particular emphasis on the coordination problems in transboundary water governance. The extensive Soviet water-energy infrastructure around the Amudarya and Syrdarya rivers required coordination, but this could no longer be politically secured after the 1991 Soviet disintegration. According to the social systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, coordination problems are generally endemic to any modern regime of functional differentiation. We show that each Central Asia state had to tackle substantial internal adaptation problems, which were rendered even more formidable by the need for transboundary coordination. We further demonstrate how the new riparian states offer a complex picture of several forms of differentiation, where functional differentiation is in some ways reinforced by the new national boundaries and the collapse of Soviet planning. We identify possible sources of flexibility, opening up avenues toward adaptation and enhanced coordination across boundaries.

In a changing and often unpredictable globalized world, planning theory is core to understanding how planning and its practices both function and evolve. As illustrated in The Routledge Hand-book of Planning Theory, planning and its many roles have changed profoundly over the recent decades; so have the theories, both critical and explanatory, about its practices, values and knowledges. The handbook presents key contemporary themes in planning theory through the views of some of the most innovative thinkers in planning. The Routledge Handbook of Planning Theory includes a chapter on Evolutionary Governance Theory. The chapters analyses the presence, the origins and the potential of co- evolutionary perspectives in planning theory. It pay particular attention to Evolutionary Governance Theory, as a comprehensive perspective on co- evolution in spatial planning and governance. The co- evolutionary approach to planning presents a middle ground between (social) engineering ap-proaches on the one hand and theories completely disqualifying planning and steering on the other. Both ends of the spectrum have often been criticized for respectively overestimating the steering possibilities of governments and the organizing capacities of markets. Planning theory embedded in governance theory can help to analyse and understand a particular governance context, to delineate the possibilities and limits of planning in that context, and to determine which planning efforts are most likely to have a positive impact. In a co-evolutionary perspec-tive, context as such, and governance context in particular, are never fixed, never stable: all elements and structures are continuously influencing each other. The co-evolutionary perspective as developed in EGT opens up planning theory for a series of relevant concepts from different disciplines, relevant for the analysis of current and potential forms of planning in a community, while conversely giving theories and practices of planning a firm place within governance. The chapters shows how a co-evolutionary perspective is a very useful lens for both analysis and change, for the development of new planning perspectives or for the deliberate circumvention of a current planning system

19 July 2009. A barn burns down in a small Dutch town. Afterwards, this invisible and insignificant ‘barn’ became widely known as ‘Barrack 57’. The destruction triggered attention and led to the barn’s association with a Nazi Second World War transit camp and with Anne Frank. Its material destruction made this barn/barrack both present and absent in various networks. We use the case of Barrack 57 to study the interplay between presence/absence and non-existence of objects in these networks, an exercise which connects to and contributes to the development of constructivist perspectives on object formation in heritage studies. Our analysis of presence/absence and non-existence therefore is based on different concepts developed in actor network theory and Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems. Of particular importance is Luhmann’s distinction between first- and second-order observation. We argue that heritage objects themselves are the result of different enactments of (non) human properties in various relational configurations. With this view, a new task for critical heritage scholars emerges. Understanding the dynamics of presence/absence and non-existence of heritage objects in different networks deepens insight into the broader issues of the formation of heritage objects and their delineating technologies and the policies of normalisation and naturalisation.

Through the analysis of the semiotics of place, history and self in the writings of Sigurd Olson (1899–1982), a reflection on his impact on American conservation and a development of his ideas towards a practicable approach to environmental policy, planning and design, we revisit the importance of narrative for these disciplines. Writing enabled Olson to discover meaning in nature and in life, to create an audience that could help in conservation and to develop ideas for environmental policy and planning that can still be relevant. Olson's investigations and his biography offer insights in the enabling and limiting effects of narrative dynamics on attempts to care for the environment.

The aim of this contribution is to present a conceptual framework with potential application across the interdisciplinary field of border studies. This framework should embrace interdisciplinarity and the contextual nature of borders. Based on the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, it elaborates an understanding of borders as being related to a dynamic process of social bordering/bounding processes that involves spatial, social, and conceptual boundaries. By introducing the notion of ‘empirical boundary’, our framework aspires to bridge the gap between (radical) constructivist theorising and the analysis of physical realities involved in the (re)production of boundaries.

We identify four choice dimensions that determine the configuration and evolution of governance: formal-informal institutions, network-central steering, local-scientific knowledge and representation-participation. Choices on one dimension affect choices on the other dimensions, which naturally leads to historical dependency. We integrate these insights in a model of governance evolution that revolves around actor/institution configurations and power/knowledge configurations. In a case study of ice fishing villages on Minnesota's Lake Mille Lacs, we investigate one specific set of couplings between the choice dimensions. As we can study the local ice fishing tradition from its very beginning, the evolutionary paths of technology and institutions provide insights into how choices were made along the different dimensions and how they interacted. The case study illustrates how to apply the model, but also contributes to its further development as it draws attention to possible extensions: concepts of scale and identity. peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=cjep20 ispartof: Journal of Environmental Planning and Management vol:57 issue:8 pages:1122-1144 status: published

In this paper, we present a conceptual framework extending Foucaultian insights on the relations between power and knowledge to link up with current insights into studies of natural resource management (NRM) and more broadly environmental studies. We classify discourses in NRM according to understandings of social–ecological systems and argue that grasping those larger contexts can push NRM in a different direction, forming a base for more informed and inclusive decision-making. We then reconstruct the importance of materiality, the physical world, for the functioning of NRM within social–ecological systems. The concept of livelihoods is added to our developing Foucaultian frame, as material/discursive entwinements which structure responses of many stakeholders in NRM. Finally, we present an expansion of Foucaultian NRM into adaptive governance thinking as a logical outcome of basic insights into power/knowledge, developed and contextualized in current NRM and its critical analyses

In this paper we reflect on the relationship between planning and law. We analyse the Dutch interpretation and implementation of the European Union Habitats and Birds Directives by investigating the practices of delineation of protected areas. These directives provide a legislative framework for the designation of protected sites as well as for decision making about social and economic activities that might have negative effects on the conservation objectives. The formal boundaries of the protected area can have legal, political, and economic consequences and are therefore the subject of much debate. Using Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory, we analyse the debates concerning delineation and the potential for planning to reduce tensions and balance interests. It is argued that the irreducible differences between the economic, political, and legal perspectives, in combination with the Dutch path of a legalistic interpretation of EU directives, have produced a situation in which the role of planning is reduced and new forms of planning are hard to implement. Keywords: planning, law, natural resource management, Natura 2000, autopoiesis

In this paper, we highlight the changing developmental patterns and planning strategies for the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, from late communism till the present day. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, interviews, analysis of documents and plans, we reconstruct the change of course from Soviet planning to fragmentation of plans and policies. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow, Moscow actors and Moscow knowledge disappeared behind the horizon. New actors and new knowledge were introduced in the planning and design system. Most notably, architects-turned-developers introduced Western architectural forms and development practices. Foreign advisors and Western-educated Georgians gave weight to Western economic visions of transition. With the Georgian leadership, as well as with the audience at large, attitudes towards planning are very ambiguous, disputing the relevance of government intervention in spatial development, at the same time cherishing certain results of Soviet planning or planning as such. ...

In this article, we advance the idea that any form of spatial planning aiming at preservation of places, landscapes or landscape character has to resist the temptation to target such preservation directly. Rather, a careful study and management of place identity, as the discursive figuration of place images and narratives in the community, has to craft a persuasive planning narrative that has a better chance to coordinate stakeholders and integrate policies. We argue that such endeavor can benefit greatly from an integration with place branding strategies, strategies that have become more inclusive and governance-oriented themselves, and that often include similar concepts of narrative analysis, stakeholder involvement, and a combination of asset creation, asset protection and asset promotion. A sensitive study of place identity, signification of place and a precise reconstruction of the history of governance and planning in an area are prerequisites for such a strategy. We illustrate this by means of three case studies – Tuscany, Minnesota and Missouri – areas marked by different assets, different planning histories and options, and different perspectives for branding.

Review of Stockholm: The Making of a Metropolis by Thomas Hall with contribution by Martin Rorby, 2009

This article investigates the process of social forgetting by relating it to the disintegration of social and spatial networks. Looking at the case of Sulina, a small town on the eastern edge of the Romanian Danube Delta, we analyze how the unraveling of networks caused a process of social forgetting with margin-specific features, a fundamental restructuring of social memory and social identities. An important focus of our investigation is the connection between social memory and spatial planning, as a coordinated effort to look forwards. While forgetting as such is seen as a positive process, constitutive of memory, its local characteristics can create problems, for example, for cooperation and planning. Theoretically, this article adopts a systems theoretical framework, incorporating notions derived from anthropology and geography. Social memory is defined as a continuous process of selection, carried out in various specialized subsystems. Concepts of social identity and network are found to be essential in a localized analysis of social memory. Concluding, we argue that local characteristics of social memory can impede the articulation of viable spatial planning strategies.

In this article, we argue that Niklas Luhmann has a lot to offer present-day planning theory. Until now, planning theory has been engaged with Luhmann's work only minimally. Convinced of its potential, we want to show how Luhmann's systems theory offers fresh insight into both limits and possibilities of planning in contemporary society. We argue that Luhmann's understanding of society as functionally differentiated into self-referentially closed subsystems (politics, economy, law, science, etc.) creates space for a complex and subtle analysis of planning practice. In particular, we look at the role of planning within an autopoietic account of society, and its ability to steer other social subsystems. Planning is seen as the form of steering aiming to coordinate processes of spatial organization, therefore an activity dealing with steering problems. We illustrate key concepts of the systems theory in brief analyses of planning situations and interpret these situations using the systems theoretical framework. The analyses center around the questions of planning's steering capacity and the role of the planner, thus creating linkages with mainstream discussions in planning theory.

In this article we investigate the value and utility of Machiavelli's work for Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM). We made a selection of five topics derived from literature on NRM and CBNRM: (1) Law and Policy, (2) Justice, (3) Participation, (4) Transparency, and (5) Leadership and management. We use Machiavelli's work to analyze these topics and embed the results in a narrative intended to lead into the final conclusions, where the overarching theme of natural resource management for the common good is considered. Machiavelli's focus on practical realities produces new, sometimes unsettling, insights. We conclude that this focus helps to understand the development and performance of management regimes and their consequences and that institutional design should be seen as an ongoing process, which requires a constant adaptation of these institutions.

In this chapter, we position ourselves succinctly in the vast literature on cosmopolitanism, which is recently linked to discussions of globalization, seen as something new, but which has a history of its own, as a concept, a figure, a set of practices, an epithet for places and communities. We acknowledge the practical importance in politics and moral life of continuing the discussions about diversity in a world of new mobilities, connections and coexistences, but for our present purposes take a distance from normative stances and plan to investigate cosmopolitan places as communities believing in a special relationship between themselves and the larger world, a relationship which affects the linkages between past, present and future locally and which in the final analysis is always a local product.

In this chapter we outline the basic assumptions and concepts structuring the book, clarifying that cosmopolitanism for us is necessarily a local construct, making sense of circulating narratives at other scales, linking with larger networks, and reinterpreting self, past, present and future in a manner that allows for a persuasive narrative of pre-figuration or eminent representation of what will be eminent globally. We emphasize that our theory has to address narratives and networks in multi-level governance, that it has to understand that only what can be interpreted, coordinated, acted upon locally can materialize, and that the theory has to discern the various functions of cosmopolitan narratives in a community.

In this chapter, we dwell on some of the more ambiguous and fluid phenomena in identity construction and place making encountered in Sulina, phenomena rendering the conceptualization of local cosmopolitanism more complex, because of the blurring of boundaries implied. We discuss migration and the way its renders fluid identities, of people and places, yet offers new sources of reinvention as well. Identity is then looked at through the prism of performance, and finally we discuss the impact of vanished groups and vanished places, because people left, or because the particular perspective of an assimilated group disappeared, while places can disappear literally, or from the narrative horizon of the community. Such absences can make reinvention in narrative easier, especially narratives about a cosmopolitan past, and attempts to reorient oneself to those narratives in the present.

In this chapter, we stay with Sulina but bring together the lines of inquiry on narrative and on networks. More broadly, we investigate the limits but also forms of agency of networks, physical landscapes, and other agents of the Real in narrative construction and reconstruction. We discuss the links between past, present and future that are affected by these influences, relevant when considering issues of policy and planning. The links between remembering, envisioning futures, and ongoing coordination of collective decision-making are very visible in local cosmopolitanism, and they differ according to the relation between narratives and networks.

In this chapter, we discuss several narrative dynamics central to the functioning of local cosmopolitanism. We look at the interplay between biographical, autobiographical and place narratives, at the role of consistency and inconsistency in them, and connect this with a reflection on the functioning of social memory. We show that memory needs reproduction, selection, relies on gatekeepers and promoters, and can be instrumentalized within limits. Then we move to a reflection on marginality in Sulina and more broadly the Danube delta, its different meanings and aspects, and its different effects on remembering, on identity construction, and on emerging forms of cosmopolitanism. Shifting boundaries, in spatial, social and conceptual sense, represent both obstacles and enablers in the functioning of local cosmopolitanism, in its local transformations.

In this article, we present a perspective on the interaction between formal and informal institutions in spatial planning in which they transform each other continuously, in processes that can be described and analyzed as ongoing reinterpretations. The effects of configurations and dialectics are often ambiguous, only partially observable, different in different domains and at different times. By means of analyses of key concepts in planning theory and practice, this perspective is illustrated and developed. Finally, we analyze transformation options in planning systems, emphasizing the limits of formal institutions in transforming formal/informal configurations, and stressing the importance of judgment and conflict.

In this chapter we outline the main theoretical sources of EGT-social systems theory, new institutional economics, development economics, and post-structuralism in different versions.

In this paper we analyse the role and reception of poststructuralist perspectives on power in planning since the 1990s, and then ask whether a renewed encounter with the works of poststructuralist theorists Foucault, Deleuze, and Luhmann could add something to the points that were already made. We make a distinction between the power of planning (the impact in society), power in planning (relations between players active in planning), and power on planning (the influence of broader society on the planning system), to refine the analysis of planning/power. It is argued that an interpretation of Deleuze, Luhmann, and Foucault, as thinkers of power in a theoretical framework that is based on the idea of contingency, can help to refine the analysis of power in planning. Planning then can be regarded as a system in other systems, with roles, values, procedures, and materialities in constant transformation, with the results of each operation serving as input for the next one. The different power relations constitute the possibilities, the forms, and the potential impact of planning. Keywords: power, contingency, acting space, governance, evolution

Social learning took place largely outside the sphere of government and spurred substantial technological and institutional innovation. Unique patterns of networks, informal institutions and social learning environments delineate options for social learning that are more likely to succeed, to lead to implementation. The history of social learning on lake Mille Lacs showed that new formal institutions are not necessarily the best sites for social learning, and that forms of innovation and modes of learning cannot be separated. Interdependence and shared goals, and flexibility in role distribution appear as success factors. The diversity of learning sites in a community should not be understood as a problem, as an obstacle to central steering and education by government: it enables the community to adapt and survive.

We investigate the impact of performances of failure in nature conservation by means of a detailed reconstruction of the implementation of European Union conservation directives in the Netherlands. We distinguish performance and performativity, whereby the latter is the reality-effect of discourses affecting policy, and partly the result of deliberate performance. It is argued that the implementation history in the Netherlands reveals that even long-standing traditions of deliberation and spatial planning can be disrupted as an unintended consequence of international policy implementation. What was intended as a tool to promote long-term planning for nature conservation can in effect undermine both nature conservation and long-term planning. Only a high degree of reflexivity in the planning system can diminish the chances of misconceiving the spaces for negotiation and deliberation that are left open by the EU directives. Otherwise, a combination of unexpected events and unreflected routine responses will in all likelihood produce results highly diverging from the initial ambitions.

We present an analytical framework for analyzing the functions of failure and success ascriptions in public administration. The framework incorporates concepts and insights from Michel Foucault, Mieke Bal, and other discourse theorists, enriched with notions derived from Niklas Luhmann's theory of social systems. The Dutch system of spatial planning serves as a context to investigate the rhetorical functions, performance, discursive configurations, and consequences of success and failure. Two cases nested in the Dutch context are used to elaborate on the performance and performativity of success and failure. We discuss the performance of success and failure in terms of productive competition between discourses and organizations, and emphasize the self-reinforcing nature of success and failure ascriptions in the creation of developmental pathways of the governance system.