Stewardship

Book excerpt: 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.