Decolonising Governance

de Paul Carter

"Power may be globalized, but Westphalian notions of sovereignty continue to determine political and legal arrangements domestically and internationally: global issues - the legacy of colonialism expressed in continuing human displacement and environmental destruction- are thus treated 'parochially' and ineffectually. Not designed for dealing with situations of interdependence, democratic institutions find themselves in crisis. Reform in this case is not simply operational but conceptual: political relationships need to be drawn differently; overlooked, erased or forgotten histories and geographies need to be recovered and plotted. Taking the forgotten or marginalized cultural/intellectual histories and geographies of the archipelago as its theme, this volume drives forward current discussions about the changing relationship between governance and democracy. It builds on the author's own contributions to new discourses of place making that engage public space urban design, culturally-led regional development and contemporary bicultural land/sea management practice. An important intervention in the related fields of ecological, ecocritical and environmental humanities, it is methodologically innovative in its foregrounding of relationality as the nexus between poetics and politics and will be of great interest to scholars in a range of areas, including postcolonial politics"--