Governing Societal Transformations

Course goals

After completing this course students have:

• Knowledge and understanding of three societal transformations (digital transformation, sustainability transformation, socio-economic transformation);
• Knowledge and understanding of governance of transformations at organisational, national and global level;
• Ability to analyse governance challenges and to propose strategic directions for tackling the governance challenge;
• Ability to critically reflect on perspectives on and future of the governance of transformations.

Content

The world is in flux: digital technologies such as Generative AI transform societies, global warming demands radical changes in our economies, and a variety of interconnected demographic developments transform our societies. This course focuses on the key challenges for governance at the moment: governance of transformations.
The course is ambitious in the sense that it emphasises the connections between different socio-technical transformation at different levels of aggregation. How to manage the digital transformation in your organisation? How to organise collaboration in a city for the sustainability transformation? How to work on global justice in time of a socio-economic transformation?
The various societal transformations have implications both at the organisational level and at the national and global level. What is the nature of these transformations? What does this imply for organisations and governments? How can they deal with these interconnected societal transformations?

In this course you will first examine each transformation individually through focused lectures before analysing your interconnections at organisational, societal and global levels in the middle weeks of the course. The culmination of the course involves a futuring exercise exploring alternative paths forward, followed by individual work and final presentations that demonstrate your ability to critically reflect on governance strategies for managing these complex, interconnected transformations.

The course is structured as a ten-week programme exploring digital, sustainability and socio-economic transformations through various teaching methods, including case analysis, interactive lectures, student-prepared classes and imagination exercises.

Note for exchange students
Resits may be scheduled after the end of the teaching period. Please consider this when planning your departure from the Netherlands. If in doubt, please ask the course coordinator when the resit is scheduled.