"Contested Temporalities of Governance: A Panel Discussion"

The politics of global governance, regulation, and norm-setting are historical in two senses. First, they emerge, are embedded and operate at particular historical moments or eras. Over the last several decades this historical frame has been characterized variously as neoliberal and/or populist-authoritarian. The questions of development theory and practice in the Global South, the ‘good governance’ agenda that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s has been shaped by these historical forces. The same can be said of urban governance, green transitions, climate change, or immigration across the North Atlantic economies. Temporality is an important dimension of attempts at governing. Second, governance regimes, modalities and instruments speak to different time horizons or temporalities: the electoral cycle, human lifetimes, inter-generational, long-term sustainability or survival. These temporalities are often simply expressed in terms of short, middle or long-term futures. However, the intricacies of time and temporality in governance processes are too often taken for granted. Despite the apparent constancy and rigidity of time, the pliability of time and temporality is integral to the politics of global norm-making, implementation and resistance. To bring time and temporality more integrally into the understanding of contemporary forms of governance, attention to perspectives on time amongst different agents, actors and constituencies: the temporal thinking and practices of social categories of people and professionals – and to how these may clash, collide, or complement each other – represents interesting and important avenues for research. What temporalities may be observed amongst policy-makers, climate scientists, corporate leaders, investors, architects, and local populations, and other groups of people that influence or are influence by governance initiatives? What can attention to time and temporalities bring to the study of governance? What sorts of temporalities are at work among various forms of actually existing neoliberalism? How have the so-called crises of democracy associated with deepening authoritarianism and the weakening of democratic guard-rails, shape and be shaped by, these different temporal logics? In this panel, we invite discussions around these topics based on ongoing research.