Conclusion: Policy implications

Through Metaphor to a Sustainable Ecology of Development Policies (Part #9)

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(a) recognizing the implicit or explicit metaphors favoured by the factions represented, namely what imagery they use to communicate within their group and with their constituencies;

(b) recognizing the imolicit or explicit metaphors of the policy forum as a whole, namely what imagery is acceptable and how that may relate to that of any subsequent public relations campaign;

(c) encouraging the deliberate selection and design of more powerful metaphors to encode the dynamics of the relations between incompatible perspectives and especially between the factions represented. For if one faction perceives the other as 'sharks', and are perceived by the latter as 'sheep', no amount of rational discussion will overcome the 'ecosystemic' constraints on their harmonious relationship. The same may be said of 'hawks' and 'doves'; both know who 'eats' whom.

Metaphor is widely used to communicate policy options. However it is used simplistically and in a rhetorical manner divorced from the actual written articulation of policy. The metaphors currently favoured do not reflect the exigencies of sustainable development or the dynamics between the advocates of competing policy alternatives. Resources can be usefully devoted to identifying, selecting, designing disseminating and employing more appropriate metaphors in policy contexts. Such a shift in focus should open up new ways of reflecting collectively on the more complex, cyclic and incommensurable perspectives currently lost in the savage interactions between factions. It is such complex perspectives which constitute the real policy challenge.

This suggests that a desirable policy forum design would focus attention on the emergence and movement of policy-relevant metaphors, their relationship (as comprehensible meaningcomplexes) to more conventional forms of information, and their reflection in organizational form. Such stewardship in the governance of a forum opens up new possibilities in the governance of society as a whole:

'The merit of this vision of governance is that it does not call for a radical transformation of institutions -- which is unlikely in the absence of any major catastrophe. Rather it calls for a change in the way of thinking about what is circulated through society's information systems as the triggering force for any action. At present governance in the international community is haunted by a form of collective schizophrenia -- a left-brain preoccupation with 'serious' academic models and administrative programmes versus a right-brain preoccupation with the proclivities of public opinion avid for 'meaningful' action (even if 'sensational'). "This schizophrenic battle between models and metaphors could be reframed by legitimating the metaphoric dimensions, already so vital to any motivation of public opinion, as providing vehicles for models. However, there needs to be a two-way flow from model-to-metaphor and from metaphor-to-model, as in any interesting learning process." (Judge, 1987b)

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