To browse Academia. Traditional forms of governance have fallen short of dealing with many important global challenges, such as the spread of radical ideologies, the emergence of authoritarian regimes in democratic societies, the threat of climate change, and other environmental problems.
In recent decades, there have been attempts at exploring good governance at both grassroots and national levels. Inspirational models feature in, for instance, practices of co-governance or collaborative governance, commons-based decision making, participatory democracy, public value cocreation, and inclusive policy dialogue.
However, despite such promising practices, these models with a few exceptions tend to be engaged outside the local and national governance structures and formal institutional processes, rather than integrated in the systems.
For this reason, we propose this Special Issue to analyse the key components of dialogue-centred practices in governance and explore how the dynamic characters of listening, encountering, sharing, inquiring, appreciating, collaborating, co-creating, and other forms of relating can help us re-imagine good governance. In doing so, the Special Issue puts forward innovative ways that dialogue may facilitate structural and institutional evolution and systemic transformation towards more inclusive, participatory, and relational paths to future making.
As pointed out by the authors of this issue, for dialogue to contribute to future-forming governance, there are necessary shifts at three levels. At a basic level is a shift from dialogue as a gateway to knowledge to dialogue as a pathway to understanding, a move from knowing the fact to knowing what-it-means. As these articles demonstrate, governance involves understanding as the basis for collaborative and collective decision making. Understanding through dialogue enables us to transcend fragmentation and integrate knowledge into our shared ways of being human together.
