6. Interactive Governance

In order to begin analysing the interaction of new environmental and social sustainability certification systems with the Vietnamese Pangasius industry it is important to first elaborate a framework of ideas to help you, the reader, to share or at least understand my perspective. My primary inspiration is derived from the ‘school’ of interactive governance, comprised of a small group of academics focused on governance of fisheries systems through the interaction and interplay of state, market and civic sectors. They have developed a framework for assessing the status and appropriateness of governance systems by using different criteria to assess different parts of the system and their interactions. I will use this framework to elaborate the case of certification in Vietnamese Pangasius.

The word ‘governance’ is very commonly and carelessly used in government and policy making circles which can cause confusion because of a lack of clarity, however, a group of scholars have coined the term “interactive governance” in an attempt to proliferate a clearer common understanding of governance. The idea of modern governance is that determining the direction of our society is not solely the role of our state institutions, but includes actors from all sectors including civil society and the market. Kooiman (2002) develops a theoretical approach to the governing of resources which posits that the creation of pattern and order in society in order to solve problems and create opportunities (governing) is accomplished through the interaction of many different societal actors, not just state but civil and market, and occurs at different levels from creation of societal beliefs and values, to development of institutional arrangements and finally to management of day to day activities. A variety of other publications have further developed the concept differentiating between the system to be governed, the governing system, and governance interactions, specifically in relationship to fisheries governance (see Kooiman et al. 2005, Bavinck et al. 2005 and Jentoft 2007) clearly defining interactive governance as both an analytical and a normative perspective on governance.

Recent publications on interactive governance have begun to elaborate on the idea of governability, a normative concept that allows researchers to operationalise the theory in practical situations. The Webster’s definition of governable is “Capable of being governed, or subjected to authority; controllable; manageable; obedient. Locke” (Porter 1913:614), which seems to focus on those being governed. However, proponents of interactive governance define governability more generally as: “The overall capacity of for governance of any societal entity or system” (Kooiman et al. 2008:3) referring to all aspects of the system including the governed, governors and their interactions.

Interactive governance theorists begin to evaluate the governability of a system by first reducing it to three entities they call the ‘system-to-be-governed’ (SG), the ‘governing system’ (GS) and ‘governance interactions’ (GI) and then assessing their qualities relative to each other. SGs are described in terms of human and natural components and GS in terms of principles and values, institutions and problem solving while GI is described in terms of intentionality (participatory, collaborative, and policy/management) and structure (self-governance, co-governance and hierarchical governance) (Kooiman et al. 2008). The overall system has core characteristics that include complexity, diversity and dynamics, and sometimes also vulnerability and scale, depending on the author (see Jentoft 2007, Chuenpagdee et al. 2008, and Kooiman et al. 2008). I have tried to create a visualisation of the interactive governance perspective delineating the system entities, their characteristics and the core features of the entire governance system, adapted from Kooiman et al. (2008) and presented in the picture opposite. By breaking down the governance system in this way, one should be able to evaluate how well the different entities fit, thus describing the governability of the system.

It is important to understand that the idea of governability is fundamentally a normative concept, positing that there is an optimum arrangement of governance that should be sought after.

Jentoft (2007) make clear arguments that structural adjustments must be made within the different entities, and the table opposite presents their view on how a GS must fit the core characteristics of the SG. Fundamentally the interactive governance school argues that good governance will be attained when interactions are principled, interdependent and multi-stakeholder driven. In theory this normative aspect of the approach allows researchers to assess system governability, and make recommendations to improve governance.

To date, very little academic work has been carried out to practically test the application of this theoretical framework in real-world situations. Although the overall framework has been well developed and seems appropriate, the operationalisation of concepts such as complexity and diversity may in fact prove quite difficult to accomplish. Several publications have chosen to forego a complete governability assessment in favour of focusing on particular aspects of the governance system or the system to be governed (see Bavinck & Salagrama 2008, Chuenpagdee et al. 2008). In this thesis I will follow a similar pattern, operationalising two discrete concepts, one in relation to the SG and the other related to the GS. In the following section I will elaborate on these two concepts I have labelled embeddedness and boundaries.