Governing Open Complex Giant Generative Relational Systems beyond Representation and Reach: A Synoptic Discussion of Systems, Scales, and Arrangements

Abstract

Three companion papers establish results about the governance of systems that exceed what any party can represent or reach, and a fourth constitutes the class of problems such systems present. This paper adds the survey of the systems themselves that the four leave to be made. It places the systems of human–nature and human–cosmos relation on a landscape whose axes are the two limitations that define the class, the accessibility of a system to representation and the reach of deliberate intervention within it, with the reversibility horizon of a foreclosure as a third dimension. It then overlays the arrangements presently governing each region. The survey draws its vocabulary, in the standing of an inspiration, from the classification of open complex giant systems developed by Qian Xuesen and colleagues, under which a system is giant by the number of its subsystems, complex by the variety of their kinds together with a hierarchical structure among them, and open by exchange with an environment. Each system surveyed is identified as an open complex giant system by naming the characteristics it exhibits, and the classification serves the survey solely as that characterisation: the paper is a discussion in social science, the tradition's own methodological programme addresses a question proper to it, the organised combination of dispersed knowledge, and the question treated in this paper, what stands outside what any party has recorded, is a different one. A dedicated section treats heterogeneity, a term the series has used and which admits no description-independent statement, since a field is one collection of kinds under one description and another under another. The paper adopts a relational definition, under which a field is heterogeneous with respect to a party when no common measure over its participants is available to that party, and records the consequence that heterogeneity so defined is a condition of the relation between a field and a party in place of a property of the field. Three findings follow from the landscape: the systems cluster in ways that cut across the domains by which governance is presently organised; the arrangements are dense where visible damage has occurred and sparse where it has not; and the results of the companion papers hold over determinate and differing regions.