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Wilhemina Welsch: From Knowing to Doing - Affective Bureaucracies as a Tool for Future Proof Governance

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From Knowing to Doing: Affective Bureaucracies as a Tool for Future Proof Governance

After a decade of “datafication” in humanitarian work and the whole-heartedly embraced assumption of “more data – better response” and its iterations to “better data – better response” have heralded a mind-shift towards evidence-based decision-making, the conversation has increasingly shifted to “data for action.”

In the current polycrises context, building synergies across disciplines is the only way to address global challenges. Only truly open platforms and networks composed of human and non-human communities, particularly of those that have not had a voice, can go beyond mere inclusion but ensure participation in decision-making.

But policy makers and academia have been unable to establish that more data, and more knowing, has an effect on our actions—at policy and individual levels. While one of its initiatives, the United Nations (UN) Ocean Decade, is firmly advocating for not just evidence-based decision-making, but also for science-based action, still almost no tools and approaches that investigate what actually moves people to act on what they know are being explored and used. Global governance is asking itself how we can achieve behavioral change. The UN 2.0 initiative puts behavior science at the centre, calling upon behavioural scientists to affect change. And even when behaviour science is consulted, scientists will point out that an important element of behaviour—besides interest, self-efficacy, attitudes, and intent—is irrational action. Key ingredients for care is a major principle that should shape our global futures, both in the sense of the recognition of economies of care as well as in the practice of care towards all human and non-human.

In the current polycrises context, building synergies across disciplines is the only way to address global challenges. Only truly open platforms and networks composed of human and non-human communities, particularly of those that have not had a voice, can go beyond mere inclusion and ensure participation in decision-making. 

Therefore, this article proposes to take a much needed and even greater vantage point: in a time of material and information overload, the capacity of art to move and transform [metabolize] is an essential and regenerative principle. Art addresses the root of the inability of humans to reverse or reduce the damages caused to Earth: a profound lack of empathy and imagination to create liveable futures in accordance with ecological transformation—understanding ecological as entanglement of political, social, environmental human and non-human interdependencies. That in-between space is where art emerges, and where it operates as a metabolic agent. Parts of the UN system have begun to explore the potential of artistic practice for regenerative futures and futures thinking to tackle complex systemic issues and support organizational transformation– with UN Global Pulse leading the thinking. 

Platforms such as Organismo, Embassy of the North Sea, Ocean Uni and Ocean Archive, and Ministries of the Ocean are already exploring new ways to approach one of the environmental policy focus areas of oceanic matters through art, education, science, and advocacy—exemplified by the request of the creation of Ministries of the Ocean as put forward by the Varda Group in its LetsbeNicetotheOcean initiative (2023).

As part of the Organismo: Art in Applied Critical Ecologies Fellowship, my collaborators and I launched a platform to question and imagine these institutions from an all-inclusive, interdisciplinary, and comprehensive standpoint (www.ministriesoftheocean.com). In collaboration with the artist Rosa Casado, we seek to offer a complementary approach, focused on ocean governance and policymaking, through artistic research, creative action, and poetic praxis—which has the potential to be transformational particularly to the operationalization of large aspirational objectives of global governance such as global solidarity, multilateral trust, and enhanced democratic participation: developing poetic political strategies that begin to rehearse and practice an affective bureaucracy within political apparatuses to find tools for affective bureaucracy, therefore as we describe it: be an Affective Companion

The Affective Companion is a project imagined in direct response to the challenge articulated by the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development in its Vision 2030 White Paper 10: Restoring society’s relationship with the ocean (2024). We engaged with the authoritative, complex, and restrictive language of the document which, paradoxically at times, seeks to tackle the soft tissues of relations. With the “affective companion,” we propose a new way of writing, reading, and relating through such authoritative reports or guides. We also seek to more fundamentally address two major questions, which governance models—at local, global and planetary levels—are struggling to resolve: 

  • How do we bridge the gap between knowing and doing?
  • How do we do it together? – and as the Challenge asks: How can we extend these effects to broader society?

We focused on a well-known tool used by bureaucracies at every level from local to global: policy level white papers. White papers are authoritative reports or guides that inform readers concisely about a complex issue and present the issuing body’s philosophy on the matter. They are intended to help readers understand an issue, solve a problem, or make a decision. In government or policy contexts, white papers may be used to propose new laws or changes in policy—laying out arguments and evidence to support government initiatives, or to explain complex issues to the public and stakeholders. However, white papers as a medium are often conceived in a general and one–directional manner—addressing a generic audience, void of situatedness in both present time and place, and leaving substantial gaps of “execution” and relationality. In this time of profound environmental transformation, there is a growing sense of the urgent need to find new ways to foster an alternative and critical imagination; to generate creative action and poetic praxis, as an enabling aesthetic and political response to the actualities of contemporary eco–political and eco–social crisis. Within this frame, we offer our “affective companion” as a “situationer”—proposing an alternative notion of authoritative report or guide, to invite people to affectively engage with the complexity of an issue, to hopefully foster creative and transformative action. The “situationer” is “a document written in times of crisis or disaster or sensitive maneuvering. It describes the conditions, concerns, difficulties, and active tactics faced on the ground, intending to give the lay of the land for a complex situation” (Teran, 2021). As a framework and methodology, it allows us to step beyond the limitations of the white paper. The “affective companion” is situated and situates, we can therefore only articulate one of the multiple possible “affective companions” that could exist or be imagined within a given situation, creating an awareness of and opening for all other “affective companions” that are not included or present in it. 

As we, and Ursula K. Le Guin, write-read in our preliminary work: “language has the power to change perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors; it allows people to unite and give each other parts of themselves, ourselves, in proximity and at distance.” The “affective companion” offers both a social practice and space, where the ways in which we think about environmental issues and interdependencies, and indeed about “the ocean” itself, might be reconsidered, reshaped, and rehearsed, in ways perhaps not possible elsewhere. An assertion that, without wanting to collapse the very real distance between poetic acts and “real” ones, posits artistic modes of doing as a unique form of praxis. Its “frame of appearance” might have the capacity to alter how we exist in the world—precisely through its invitation to safely step outside our daily modes of thinking and feeling, to participate.

Taking advantage of two related opportunities we have already secured within other contexts—with fluent in Santander and Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao—we will begin to explore and develop strategies for co-creation with ocean stakeholders such as the Canadian Ocean Literacy Coalition (with whom we are already in conversation to produce the “Affective Companion” to the UN Ocean Decade White Paper in time for the UN Ocean Decade Conference in Nice in 2025) and colleagues within the Ministries of the Ocean platform – and for sharing our first poetic explorations.

What we aspire to is those things inherent to impact: a contribution to and catalyst for long-term change. We imagine three dimensions of this long-term change: 

  • Long-term change in the way democratic participation is conceived of, ultimately proposing a suite of approaches and proven pathways for profound, practiced, and accountable working with communities on governance at local, regional, global, and planetary scales. 
  • A long-term change in the possible interfaces of governance with all ocean-stakeholders, human and non-human alike. By providing a liminal space between these often-segregated entities, we inject the affective companion, as an enzyme to porosity. 
  • A long-term change in perceptions of the role of artistic practice, beyond the decorative, as a metabolic agent for change.