Governance Through Social Learning

Jeffrey J. Cormier, Ph.D., specializes in Canadian society at McGill
University.

Gilles Paquet offers a new approach to governance in this collection of
essays. In the book, he argues that centralized, hierarchical, top-down
managerial techniques for coordinating organizational activity, whether
they be private or public institutions, are no longer sufficient to cope
with an increasingly global, democratic, information-based world. In
short, it is necessary to develop an new framework for both the analysis
and the practice of government.

Paquet takes several chapters to outline a new approach to the study of
government. Rather than viewing the modern state as a static monolithic
structure, he suggests that we view it as a network of alliances and
loosely knit teams, developing negotiated solutions to social-policy
problems through a process of ad hoc and in situ social learning. Under
this model, governance is really situational learning, with individual
modules or nodes co-evolving within a larger organic whole, each
learning from and adapting to the other. What Paquet is doing here,
theoretically at least, is proposing a paradigm shift in the way
government is studied and practised.

The rest of the book is taken up with an analysis of several prominent
social policy problems: science and technology policy, free trade,
energy policy, the environment, multiculturalism, higher education, the
Public Service Commission and research funding. It is difficult to
distil exactly what Paquet’s position is on each of these policy
issues. What is clear, however, is that he is critical of the way they
have been debated and discussed to date, and he seems confident that the
implementation of his social learning program will move us some way to
finding new solutions to these public issues.

Although this book is heavily theoretical and therefore jargon-laden in
parts, it is an interesting and brave contribution to the study of
government. Recommended for practitioners and students of government.