Description
I presented my paper entitled:Embracing the Contingent Future in Infrastructural Politics
This paper argues that, although concepts such as resilience and adaptive management have in many ways opened up the possibility to reflect upon the complexities of infrastructural politics, their underlying philosophies, lack discipline. By entangling themselves with the classical parts-whole schema, the assumption is often made that the “unity” of the whole - the bringing together of disparate elements into a more integrated whole – symbolises the departure point of the directive for a better future. But the problem here, is that the contingent future, that everything could become something other than what the holistic whole aspires for, prevents the appearance of “better knowledge” from consolidating in the practices of decision-makers. Employing the case of Integrated River Basin Management to illustrate the complexities of infrastructural politics, this paper proposes that Niklas Luhmann’s notion of integration, as a structural constraint upon what is possible, offers an innovative alternative. While this notion of integration may appear deceptively simple, it reveals great complexity, as it enables us to rediscover and reconceptualise why the contingent future is a positive state of the world, in spite of implications of its negativity. Indeed, by employing a process based framework of variation, selection and restabilisation to conceptualise this structurally optimistic worldview, this paper contends that Luhmann’s notion of integration provides the urgently needed theoretical scaffolding to address the neglected question: How might decision-makers fully embrace and openly exhibit the contingent future, and how to do this without relying upon the aspirational ideals of the holistic whole?
| Period | 6 Oct 2017 |
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| Held at | Universiteit Utrecht |