Judy Watling
Director General at Policy Horizons Canada
Foresight. Governance for Sustainable Development. Government designed for new times | The rise of hybrid governance. The age of hybrid governance is already upon us. China today is a hybrid of 19th-century communist ideology and 21st-century capitalist practice, yet it stands on the cusp of becoming the world’s largest economy. Asian state capitalism is actually a centuries-old European practice dating back at least to the government of Victorian Britain, which gradually brought the British East India Company under its direct supervision and control over the course of the 19th-century, absorbing all of its colonies and wealth.
Could China’s state-owned companies and banks today—with their expansive operations and lending across the developing world—be the East India Company of the 21st-century? As much as this article is about the future of governance, there are always important echoes from the past. More and more entities occupy the middle ground between state-owned and fully privatized, especially in emerging markets. The return of parastatals Is hybrid governance better governance? About the authors. Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story. The Future of Making Things (article and video) | Futures Group. “The industrial revolution of the late 18th century made possible the mass production of goods, thereby creating economies of scale which changed the economy – and society – in ways that nobody could have imagined at the time. 3D printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands and thus undermines economies of scale.
It may have as profound an impact on the world as the coming of the factory did.” Economist, 10 Feb 2011, “Print me a Stradivarius” With the emergence of new tools and new business models related to additive manufacturing, we think this will lead to two shifts in the way we make things. Firstly, the ability to make things cost-competitively on a small scale and sell them online has made production more scale-free and shifted from manufacturing for many to manufacturing for one. Secondly, the ability to make physical objects from their digital representations has shifted production from a capital-intensive process to an information-intensive one.
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