Najam Speaks at Brussels Launch of Collaborative Governance Book
Dean Emeritus and Professor Adil Najam joined a panel of international experts in Brussels at the Delegation of the Basque Country to the European Union on March 28, 2023, for the launch of the book Building Collaborative Governance in Times of Uncertainty, in which he has written a chapter on “Collaborative Governance as Jazz.”
Edited by Xabier Barandiaran, María José Canel, and Geert Bouckaert and published by Leuven University Press, the book is a collection of research that looks at “Pracademic Lessons from the Basque Gipuzkoa Province” to chart lessons on opportunities and challenges for collaborative governance in our current democratically uncertain times. Najam’s chapter is one of the invited expert commentaries on the Gipuzkoa experience that looks at what it means and what it can learn from other experiences from around the world.
The launch event in Brussels brought together experts on collaborative governance from across Europe to discuss the lessons from this book in contrast to lessons from elsewhere in Europe. The event opened with remarks from Markel Olano, President-General Deputy of the Gipuzkoa Provincial Council (Basque Country) on Etorkizuna Eraikiz (Building the future), the collaborative governance initiative that he had spearheaded in his province and which is the subject of the book. This was followed by remarks from the Dubravka Šuica, the Vice-President of the European Commission for Democracy and Demography.
Following this two panel discussions were held and Najam spoke in the first panel on “Why the Collaborative Governance is important?” The panel was moderated by Marta Marín (Basque Delegate to the EU), and included Toma Šutić (European Commission), Jaume Duch (European Parliament), María José Canel (Complutense University of Madrid), and Xabier Barandiaran (Gipuzkoa Provincial Council). Najam highlighted lessons from his chapter and why thinking about collaborative governance as jazz allows us to think of governance not as a ‘systemized’ exercise but as a ‘negotiated’ endeavor. He also highlighted that this should be contextualized within the evolution of democracy itself and why there is a feeling of democratic discontent across many parts of the world as citizens, especially young people, are finding “the mechanics of democracy to be no longer fit-for-purpose.”
Adil Najam is a global public policy expert who served as the Inaugural Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and was the former Vice-Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). While currently on sabbatical he is based at the University of Oxford’s Wolfson College and the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. His research focuses on issues of global public policy, especially those related to global climate change, South Asia, global governance, environment and development, and human development. Read more about Najam on his faculty profile.