The New Geo-Governance: A Baroque Approach

Chapter 3: Social Learning, Collaborative Governance, and the Strategic State

Chapter 3 Social Learning, Collaborative Governance, and the Strategic State "Anchor newsolutions in stand-alone principles" A. J.MacEachen Introduction Coordination failures and crippling disconcertation in the learning economy are an important source of inefficiency and lack of progressivity. They cannot be eliminated by the conventional panoply of nation-state policy instruments based on fence-keeping, centralization, and redistribution. It requires a new governance, focused on enabling effective social learning. Wemust develop the required new instruments by effecting a significantrefraining of the vocation of the state—away from tinkering with static resource allocation and redistribution, and toward a significant involvement in fostering dynamic Schumpeterian efficiency, by inventing new ways of enhancing the collective learning power of the socio-economy as a collaborative venture. We must also find ways to fully engage the private and civic sectors as partners with the state in genuinely innovative collaboration. How can this be done in line with the broad directions defined in the last chapters? In this chapter, I suggest that two major challenges must be met. First, one must probe the foundation of social learning to be able to intervene effectively in making it dynamic; second, one must also better understand the foundation of collaborative e-governance in order to be able to ensure that the pattern of assets, skills, and capabilities are in place. 53 The New Geo-Governance Social learning: process, organization, and public philosophy Collective intelligence is defined by Pierre Levy as "une intelligencepartout distribute, sans cesse valorisee, coordonnee en temps reel, qui aboutit a une mobilisation effective des competences" (Levy 1994:29). Such intelligence is continuously producing new knowledge and sharing it with all the partners, for its mainpurpose is social learning and the effective mobilization and coordination of the continually growing competencies of all the partners. (a) Catalyzing the social learning process To catalyze social learning, one must have some view about the ways in which collective intelligence works, and be in a position to intervene to remove any obstacles likely to hinder social learning. In an effort to identify the major obstacles to social learning (and therefore to guide the process architecture interventions), Max Boisot has suggested a simple mapping ofthe social learning cycle in a three-dimensional space—an expanded information space—which identifies an organizational system in terms of the degree of abstraction, codification, and diffusion of the informationflowswithin it. (See Figure 4.) This three-dimensional space defines three continua: the farther away from the origin on the vertical axis, the more the information is codified (i.e., the more its form is clarified, stylized, and simplified); the farther away from the origin laterally eastward, the morewidelythe information is diffused and shared; and the farther away from the origin laterally westward, the more abstract the information is (i.e., the more general the categories in use) (Boisot 1995). The social learning cycle is presented in two phases with three steps in each phase: phase I emphasizes the cognitive dimensions of the cycle, phase II the diffusion of the new information. In phase I, learning begins with some scanning of the environment, and of the concrete information widely diffused and known, in order to detect anomalies and paradoxes. Following this first step, one is led in step 2to stylize the problem (p) posed by the anomalies and paradoxes in a language of problem solution; the third step of phase I purports to generalize the solution found to the more specific issue to a broader family of problems through a process of abstraction (at). In phase II, the new knowledge is diffused (d) to a larger community of persons or groups in step 4. Then there is a process of absorption (ar) of this new knowledge by the population, and its assimilation so as to become part of the tacit stock of knowledge in step 5. In step 6, the new knowledge is not only absorbed, but has an impact (i) on the concrete practices and artefacts of the group or community. In Figure 4, onemay identify the different blockages throughthe learning cycle. In phase I, cognitive dissonance in (s) may prevent the anomalies from being 54 Social Learning, Collaborative Governance, and the Strategic State Figure 4: Learning cycle and potential blockages Source: Max Boisot 1995:237,190. noted, epistemic inhibitions of all sorts in (p) may stop the process of translation into a language of problem solution, and blockages preventing the generalization of the...