Governances and Sustainability Dialectics

Taking governance arrangements for sustainability as an example, this chapter shows how a dialectical perspective can help understand what is going on and frame problem-solving in new ways. The external partnership arrangements we considered in Chap. 8 are overseen (led and managed) using governance arrangements of each organisation or network. In this chapter we dig more deeply into governances. As Schattschneider (1975: 71) says, all forms of political organisation have a bias in favour of the exploitation of some kinds of conflict and the suppression of others, because organisation is the mobilisation of bias. Another way of looking at governances is through the lens of trust as Six (2005) does, which invites investigation of personal relations that willingly accept vulnerability to the actions of others. Below, we also explore governance from the viewpoint of stability and change: sufficient stability to deliver reliable services, whilst having sufficient flexibility to respond to external events that demand alterations to governances. One of the big questions in relation to de-carbonising global economic activity is whether market governances or non-market governances offer the most appropriate transition instruments. Posed in this way, the governance issues closely relate to the mutuality boundary discussed in Chaps. 2 and 3 .