Sustaining development: the epistemological challenge of governance

Metaphoric Revolution: in quest of a manifesto for governance through metaphor (Part #4)

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Sustainable development is usually conceived as a problem of instrumentality - namely deploying the available organizational and conceptual resources to achieve what seems appropriate. An earlier paper (2) argues that this approach fails completely to recognize the inherent difficulties in comprehending the instrumental design which is appropriate - and of communicating that comprehension, with all its nuances through the processes of governance.

The following hidden assumptions were listed to illustrate this failure:

• 1. That the mode is inherently better in some absolute sense in that,
  • conversely, the old mode must necessarily be permanently abandoned as historically outmoded;
  • the defects in the new mode will not eventually prove to be as significant as those under the old mode.
• 2. That the new mode is equally appropriate to all societies and to all sub-cultures within those societies, especially if adapted to local contexts and requirements.
• 3. That, if it can be comprehended, represented and discussed within one frame of reference, the mode can nevertheless be of sufficient complexity to respond to the concerns perceived by constituencies preferring other frames of reference.
• 4. That an appropriate new mode can be readily articulated in its entirety, rather than necessarily provoking a set of partial comprehension which people, of whatever level of competence, experience considerable difficulty in integrating/reconciling, even if they are motivated to do so.
• 5. That an appropriate mode can be readily implemented by a consistent pattern of actions, rather than requiring set of seemingly inconsistent and incompatible actions, each favoured or condemned by some different configuration of constituencies.
• 6. That the coherence and integrity of an appropriate mode derives from a hierarchical relationship between its components, as opposed to other possibilities with characteristics such as:
  • configurations of incommensurable conceptual or organizational groupings in which the hierarchical dimension, if any, is secondary or implicit;
  • cyclic phases of emphasis over time;
  • alternation between seemingly opposed or contradictory policy modes.
• 7. That credible articulations of a seemingly attractive approach do not effectively obscure hard realities to which the advocating group may be insensitive (or anxious to avoid discussing in order to further some hidden agenda).
• 8. That any readily devised approach will not necessarily provoke counter-strategies or strategies which exploit the situation created by the implementation of the new approach, undermining it and eventually rendering it ineffective.
• 9. That, during the implementation of the appropriate new mode, it is possible for any given constituency to avoid being trapped into recognizing any necessary practical strategy in either a 'positive' of a 'negative' light, and consequently to be entrained to further or oppose that partial strategy, without consideration of whether such effort is excessive in the light of the contextual mode to which it contributes.
• 10. That the essence of being human, and of human development, involves processes free from ambiguity, paradox and counter-intuitive phases, permitting an appropriate new mode to be articulated in an manner free of such non-rational characteristics.

The remainder of that paper considered the probability that the appropriate global socio-economic mode of organization is necessarily more complex than can be recognized or comprehended within any particular frame of reference - whether conceptual or organizational. The question here is how to describe and handle this epistemological challenge for governance.

The question has been helpfully highlighted by the recent study prepared by Development Alternatives (New Delhi) on 'A transcultural view of sustainable development; the landscape of design' as a contribution to the final deliberations of the World Commission on Environment and Development (12). The study outlines 'transform grammar of design' based on a 'phase space' model using a n-dimensional space to show the evolution of a system (where n is the number of degrees of freedom, or independent variables, needed to describe the system at the level of recursion or aggregation of the model under study). The work draws on recent theoretical advances, including those of Shannon (1962), Ashby (1956), Beer (1979), Prigogine (1985), Zadeh (1965) and de Laet (1985).

It is apparently necessary to 'freeze' any such 'epistemological landscape' into a well-defined model in order to navigate over the landscape. And within the short time scales (and electoral periods) characteristic of the majority of the problems of governance (and the budgetary periods of international organizations) such a landscape may legitimately be considered to be unchanging. Governance can then endeavour to move the social system over the landscape.

The epistemological problem lies in the fact that different constituencies are sensitive to different dimensions of the 'n-dimensional phase space' out of which the model is extracted or abstracted. Consequently the epistemological landscape perceived by one group may be very different from that which is meaningful to another - such that each may be the basis for the strategies and programmes of a different intergovernmental agency. This has the further consequence between agencies of reinforcing incompatibilities, contradictions, competition for resources and even the undermining of one strategy by another - as has been noted on many occasions, and most recently by Maurice Bertrand (5).

It is therefore less fruitful to focus initially on any particular way of viewing the n-dimensional phase space. Rather it would seem more appropriate to consider the epistemological challenge of how to open up any 'window of comprehension' onto such complexity - and how to perceive the relationship between such windows, whether used simultaneously (by different groups) or consecutively.

Before taking the argument further it is necessary to avoid the trap of using the phase space notion itself as a fundamental window. It is a powerful tool but not necessarily convenient for all. 'Complexity' has itself recently attracted attention in its own right (13). 'Chaos' is now a key descriptor for some interesting breakthroughs in mathematics (14). Although it would be incompatible with the theme of this paper to favour any one such description, it is important to recognize the range of attempts to indicate the epistemological attributes at this level of abstraction.

It is somewhat ironic that the earlier Greek philosophers made use of the Greek term 'hyle' (matter) and viewed such matter as fundamentally alive, either in itself or by its participation in the operation of a world soul or some similar principle. Characteristically they did not distinguish between kinds of matter, forces and qualities nor between physical and emotional qualities, making any such distinction with an important degree of ambiguity.

The contemporary epistemological challenge remains one of dealing with a form of 'conceptual hyle' or 'mindstuff' within which the variety of possible models and concepts is implicit and from which they may be explicated, as described by David Bohm (15). This is not to suggest that the 'hyle' is purely conceptual. As contemporary studies of this intimate relationship between consciousness and fundamental understanding in physics are clarifying, there is a matter-consciousness continuum of perhaps greater significance than the space-time continuum. Relevant insights from Eastern philosophies are also increasingly (16,17) noted. The comprehension of features explicated from the 'hyle' is as much constrained by the realities dear to materialists as it is by individual (or collective) ability to formulate appropriate modelsof requisite variety and to communicate them.

The challenge of governance is to enable society to navigate through the 'hyle', avoiding catastrophic disasters in a manner such as to sustain a process of 'development' over the long-term - whatever 'development' is understood to mean in the short-term under different circumstances, within different cultures and at different stages of that process. But since governance is above all constrained by daily practicalities, there is a dramatic problem of ensuring some kind of meaningful epistemological bridge between the multi-dimensional fluidity or ambiguity of the 'hyle' - with all the innovative potential that implies - and the concrete socio-political realities to which it must respond effectively or be called into question.

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