Stewardship: Collaborative Decentred Metagovernance and Inquiring Systems

by Ruth Hubbard, Gilles Paquet, Christopher Wilson

Overview

This book is the first in a series of books is designed to define cumulatively the contours of collaborative decentred metagovernance. At this time, there is still no canonical version of this paradigm: it is en émergence. This series intends to be one of many construction sites to experiment with various dimensions of an effective and practical version of this new approach. Metagovernance is the art of combining different forms or styles of governance, experimented with in the private, public and volunteer sectors, to ensure effective coordination when power, resources and information are widely distributed, and the governing is of necessity decentred and collaborative. The series invites conceptual and practical contributions focused on different issue domains, policy fields, causes célébres, functional processes, etc. to the extent that they contribute to sharpening the new apparatus associated with collaborative decentred metagovernance. In the last few decades, there has been a need felt for a more sophisticated understanding of the governing of the private, public and social sectors: for less compartmentalization among sectors that have much in common; and for new conceptual tools to suggest new relevant questions and new ways to carry out the business of governing, by creatively recombining the tools of governance that have proved successful in all these sectors. These efforts have generated experiments that have been sufficiently rich and wide-ranging in the various laboratories of life to warrant efforts to pull together what we know at this stage. This first volume in the series attempts to scope out, in a provisional way, the sort of general terrain we are going to explore. It is not meant to impose boundaries or orthodoxies, but only to loosely identify the horizons and the frontiers, as we perceive them at the time of launching this journey. Horizons and frontiers are to us not ways to limit the inquiries, but rather invitations to all forms of transgression.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780776638638
Publisher:	Les Presses de l'Université d'Ottawa/University of Ottawa Press
Publication date:	08/10/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	153
File size:	370 KB

About the Author

Ruth Hubbard (Author)
Ruth Hubbard is a practitioner, advisor, explorer, and published writer about governance and management challenges, especially in the public and not-for-profit sectors. She served for more than a decade as a federal deputy minister, during the iImplementation of Canada’’s value-added tax (the GST). Later, she was Master of the Royal Canadian Mint and President of the Public Service Commission. She was a senior research fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Centre on Governance and Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. from 2002 to 2017.

Gilles Paquet (Author)
Gilles Paquet (1936–2019), O.C., MRSC, was Professor Emeritus at the Telfer School of Management and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre on Governance of the University of Ottawa. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Royal Society of Arts of London, and served as President of the Royal Society of Canada (2003–2005). He studied at Laval, Queen's (Canada) and at the University of California (Los Angeles) where he was Postdoctoral Fellow in Economics. He taught at Carleton University for almost 20 years before joining the University of Ottawa in 1981. He received honorary doctorates from Queen's, Laval, and Thompson Rivers University, received the Public Service Citation Award of APEX, and was made Honorary Member of l'Association des économistes québécois. He was made Member of the Order of Canada in 1992.

Christopher Wilson (Author)
Christopher Wilson is a senior research fellow at the Center on Governance of the University of Ottawa and a senior consultant on collaborative governance and partnership in the public and voluntary sectors. For over 15 years, Wilson has worked with many public, private, and civic partnerships as a partner and as an evaluator while teaching collaboration and governance at the University.

Table of Contents

Introduction
What is collaborative decentredmetagovernance?
A work in progress
A preview of the contents
Envoi
Chapter 1 – Foundations
A new mindset
Assumptions
Key concepts
Stewardship as process
Automatic pilot and collibration
Putting all this together
Chapter 2 – Inquiring Systems
Introduction
The underlying conceptual framework: sound, but in need of improvement
Inquiring systems as heuristics and affordances
Collaborative decentredmetagovernance as inquiring systems
Stewardship: self-governance, collibration and collaboration
A word of warning
Conclusion
Chapter 3 – Scheming Virtuously
Introduction
Inquiring system as design challenge
Tasks to be tackled
Phases in the crystallization of inquiring systems
The ethical corridor
Conclusion
Chapter 4 – The New Frontier
Introduction
Inquiring systems, social learning and safe-fail mechanisms
Healthcare
Productivity and innovation
Conclusion
Chapter 5 – Metagovernance Review
Introduction
A new basic unit of my analysis
The new cosmology
A framework
Two cases
Lessons learned
Conclusions
Appendix
Conclusion
The power of denial
No need for undue pessimism
Developmental evaluation as a point of entry
The requisite variety and collaboration imperatives
In praise of humility
References