Workshop: Complexity & Governance

OBJECTIVE – The workshop is intended to gather insights from experts and international thinkers on the ways complexity science can serve Governance.

THEME – The broad theme for the Foresight Complexity Workshop is “Complexity and Governance”.

FOCUS – The workshop will focus on the following issues/ questions:

A – Global Governance (real world, complexity, and the need to govern)

• How can complexity science help to foresee and understand emerging phenomena?
• How can global governance be informed by complexity science?
• What can complexity science say about collaboration in general and about international, regional or sub-regional groupings in particular?

B – Sustainability and resilience

• How can complexity science lead to insights that can be used to improve governance practices on a local as well as a regional and global level, with regards to sustainability and resilience?
• Examples that may be useful to consider, and why
• Governance of cultural heritage

C – State-Society Relationship

• How can insights derived from complexity science play a role in understanding the dynamic interactions between resource constraints and society? What are the right questions to ask? How to find the right questions?
• What is the role of governance in addressing such questions?
• What is the meaning of culture with respect to the role of governance? How can that be understood and applied? How does that change the relationship between state and society?

D – Matching governance with complexity

• Limits to hierarchical decision making
• Decision support systems
• Policy making
• The role of expert knowledge