Governance

Governance and Social Cohesion: Survivability in the 21st Century

Gilles Paquet Centre on Governance University of Ottawa Tel. 613-562-5800 Ext. 4729 / Fax 613-562-5164 e-mail paquet@admin.uottawa.ca

Table of contents

Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. Governance and social capital Traverse The Quiet Revolution in Quebec as a cautionary tale Desquishing the concept of trust

Conclusion

Paperdelivered at the 1998 Symposium of the Royal Society of Canada on the theme Human Survivability in the 21st Century at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa on November 21, 1998. The assistance of Anne Burgess and the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (410-97-0899) is gratefully acknowledged. This paper is to be published in the Transactions of the RoyalSociety of Canada in 1999.

“Government and the market are similar to two legs on a thre-legged stool. Without the third leg of civil society, the stool is not stable.” Bill Bradley

Introduction

Canada has an extraordinary wealth of natural resources, an educated population, and a rich array of mediating structures enabling its population to make reasonable use of these resources. So,survivability is likely. But surviving is hardly the optimal performance except in the very short run. Survivability is nothing more than the promise to remain in existence. This entails no more than the lowest form of life. So, an additional question must be: can we do better than merely survive in the 21st century, can we thrive, and what must we do to ensure that this is the case.

I proposed arather grim diagnosis on the lack of productivity and progressivity of the Canadian economy at the 1997 symposium (Paquet 1998a) and I suggested some broad-ranging strategies to inject a new dynamism in Canada’s learning economy: overcoming Canada’s adversarial system, a reframing of the worplace problématique, better use of local systems of innovation, and the development of organizationalcitizenship as a move toward stakeholder capitalism.

3 What has become much clearer, over the last while, however, is the fact that these proposals, designed to reduce the degree of disconcertion in the Canadian economy in the longer run, are unlikely to have much effect unless some kind of riverbed or foundation can first be put in place. Indeed, to a great extent, the disconcerted learning economyphenomenon that I had put at the center of my diagnosis about Canada is ascribable to a failure to develop the requisite underpinning social cohesion that is necessary for the optimal degree of concertation and learning to occur.

In section 1, I clarify how social cohesion and trust play this foundational role and how they underpin the process of governance. In section 2, I examine the drift inCanada’s governance system over the last few decades and the impact of the change in governance regime on social capital. Section 3 illustrates in a sketchy way the possible consequences of an inadequate governance regime by evoking the plight of Quebec as a result of the excessive growth of statism and the consequent erosion of civil society in the post-1960 era. Section 4 presents a plea for“desquishing the concept of trust” (Keen 1999:30) and making it into a capability that can be cultivated and learned as a system of survival, and sketches some strategies for engineering trust mechanisms. In conclusion, I suggest some of the reasons why “there are reasons to hope – not to be optimistic but to hope” (Michael 1988:17).

1.

Governance and social cohesion

One of the unfortunatestatements made by Oliver Williamson, a well-known 20th century American economist, is his declaration that “trust, if it obtains at all, is reserved for very special relations

4 between family, friends, and lovers.... Commercial relations do not qualify” (Williamson 1996:27375). Indeed, Williamson has built his now famous transaction costs economics on the concept of distrust: “opportunism”...