Abstract
Whatever the sector—codification and management of legal norms, climate change regime, governance and multilateralism, social-ecological interactions, health, natural resource management—law and public policies form complex systems resulting from the diversity of agents, resources, norms and principles they imply, and from the multiplicity of processes and activities that contribute to the evolution of the state of affairs. The complexity is also demonstrated by the poor control that stakeholders and decision-makers have over the impacts of the instruments deployed and over the responses to their implementation. In such a context, as evidenced by the studies gathered in this volume, the methods deployed to interpret, understand or explain the law or the public policies in action multiply the types of approaches and the means solicited for their study. However, an emerging trend not only provides analytical tools, but also inspires several approaches to phenomena related to law and public policy. It consists in apprehending these phenomena in terms of various networks, supports for change, intricate exchanges, knowledge and innovation, management, but besides essential ingredients of the incessant, sometimes labile, interactions between the systemic components.
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Notes
- 1.
If, unsurprisingly, there is no consensus on what inter-disciplinarity is, measures have been proposed for a decade or so, based on bibliometric data and network analysis. For example, Rafols and Meyer (2010) suggest combining two concepts: “disciplinary diversity indicates the large-scale breadth of the knowledge base of a publication; network coherence reflects the novelty of its knowledge integration”. For examples of mapping of inter-disciplinarity in academic research, cf: http://idr.gatech.edu/concept.php. Accessed 25 Feb 2018.
- 2.
In this sense we converge on one of the conclusions put forward by Szostak et al. (2016, p. v) in their book on the organization of interdisciplinary knowledge: “A novel approach to classification, grounded in the phenomena studied rather than disciplines, would serve interdisciplinary scholarship much better. It would also prove advantageous for disciplinary scholarship.”
- 3.
See the Springer books entitled “AI approaches to the complexity of legal systems” published these last years (for ex. Casanovas et al. 2010).
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Mazzega, P., Lajaunie, C., Boulet, R. (2019). Public Policies, Law, Complexities and Networks. In: Boulet, R., Lajaunie, C., Mazzega, P. (eds) Law, Public Policies and Complex Systems: Networks in Action. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 42. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11506-7_1
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