Earlier this month, the Nobel memorial economics prize(s) awarded to Ostrom and Williamson caused a bit of a stir, and for a variety of remarkable reasons, not the least of which is Ostrom’s career being ostensibly limited to the political sciences. Reflexively hailing the merits of analysis whose influence stretches beyond traditional disciplines over “pure” research may ring superficial, but not because doing so is the conceit of prevailing preferences for multi-(everything). Rather, embracing such a qualitative distinction seems to reinforce ideas that the noumena of human philosophy can be compartmentalized according to some defined range of subjects that must in turn be transcended for the sake of holistic knowledge. By my limited understanding of these things, the governance phenomena that the two recipients have been both witnesses to – and also advocates of – do not raise issues of specialism vice generalism, but rather offer context between and among traditional constructions of knowledge to pursue the fundamental questions: What is, and what can and ought be?
Now, with that preliminary tangent in mind (and out of the way), I’d like to snatch out of context a brief phrase from Ostrom’s “Stockholm whiteboard seminar” which I came to by way of the indispensable Global Dashboard:
We’ve got to have institutions that match the complexity of the systems that are involved. . . Build enough diversity to cope with the diversity of the world . . . so that you don’t try to have a uniform top-down panacea that’s predicted to cure everything and instead of curing it, kills it.
What is being challenged here, it seems, is a certain tendency to think that our interactions with circumstance can somehow be reduced to their purest, most significant form…and then managed in a linear, efficient fashion — by directive — with a minimum of repercussions to be contained. Along such lines, where the reaction of the world, the Other, bears little resemblance to the plan envisioned, missteps were surely made in distilling the essence of the problem and not in the fundamentally misguided premise of the solution.
The orchestration of policy and governance arrangements that refuse to be bounded by existing governmental, organizational, or economic capabilities will increasingly require a certain release, a freedom, from our designs in favor of a willingness, and readiness, to embrace substantive contributions from outside “normal” channels of power for their own sake and on their own merits. When we recognize the need to go “beyond” – beyond the discipline, institution, nation — it is a recognition of the insufficiency of our constructs rather than of the knowledge itself.
