9th Interpretive Policy Analysis Conference
Governance and Beyond. Knowledge, Technology and Communication in a Globalizing World
When: 3-5 July 2014
Where: Wageningen (the Netherlands)
Organisation: Wageningen University
Description
Practices of policy, governance, and society are profoundly shaped by growing globalization. Knowledge, communication, resources and products flow across different localities and scales, thereby connecting different spaces and the human and non-human actors that inhabit them. Although globalization seems inescapable, its trends, directions and impacts are unevenly distributed and far from clear. Despite ‘the global’ pervading many aspects of daily life, this has by no means resulted in a flat world of free and equal global citizens. Rather, frictions, disparities and inequalities abound. While often great hopes are attached to international governance regimes, global forms of scientific knowledge, large-scale industrial and agricultural technologies, and generic blueprints for socio-economic development and trade, their results in enhancing important objectives, such as dealing with our environment in a sustainable way, or achieving equality, well-being or democratic self-determination, are mixed at best, with successes in some places and failures in others.
These mixed results warranted sustained critical scrutiny of on-going practices in governance, including the roles of knowledge, technology and communication in these. Interpretive approaches are crucial to deepen our understanding of the situated practices in which the global and the local meet, and to create innovative perspectives on what it might mean for policy to ‘do’ knowledge, technology and communication differently and to effectively address the challenges that our globalizing world faces.
Organizers of the 2014 IPA conference invited submissions that engaged the theme, as well as proposals that engaged other aspects of interpretive policy analysis. The conference featured full paper-based panels, roundtables, practice workshops which engaged the conference theme or Interpretive Policy Analysis more generally. Also up to three conference sessions were devoted to methodology workshops. The conference was preceded by a pre-conference course.
Keynote speakers
Silvio Funtowicz
Tania Li
Susan Wright
Organisers
Severine van Bommel
Esther Turnhout
Art Dewulf
Noelle Aarts