Panarchy

Panarchy (from pan and archy), coined by Paul Emile de Puydt in 1860, is a form of governance that would encompass all others. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the noun as 'chiefly poetic' with the meaning 'a universal realm,' citing an 1848 attestation by Philip James Bailey, 'the starry panarchy of space'. The adjective panarchic 'all-ruling' has earlier attestations. In the twentieth century the term was re-coined separately by scholars in international relations to describe the notion of global governance and then by systems theorists to describe non-hierarchical organizing theories.The truth is that there is not enough of the right kind of freedom, the fundamental freedom to choose to be free or not to be free, according to one's preference....Thus I demand, for each and every member of human society, freedom of association according to inclination and of activity according to aptitude. In other words, the absolute right to choose the political surroundings in which to live, and to ask for nothing else.In each community a new office is opened, a 'Bureau of Political Membership'. This office would send every responsible citizen a declaration form to fill in, just as for the income tax or dog registration: Question: What form of government would you desire? Quite freely you would answer, monarchy, or democracy, or any other... and once registered, unless you withdrew your declaration, respecting the legal forms and delays, you would thereby become either a royal subject or citizen of the republic. Thereafter you are in no way involved with anyone else's government—no more than a Prussian subject is with Belgian authorities.The term was coined as an antithesis to the word hierarchy (literally, sacred rules). Our view is that panarchy is a framework of nature's rules, hinted at by the name of the Greek god of nature, Pan.Panarchy, a term devised to describe evolving hierarchical systems with multiple interrelated elements, offers an important new framework for understanding and resolving this dilemma. Panarchy is the structure in which systems, including those of nature (e.g., forests) and of humans (e.g., capitalism), as well as combined human-natural systems (e.g., institutions that govern natural resource use such as the Forest Service), are interlinked in continual adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal.The cross-scale, interdisciplinary, and dynamic nature of the theory has led us to coin the term panarchy for it. Its essential focus is to rationalize the interplay between change and persistence, between the predictable and unpredictable. Panarchy (from pan and archy), coined by Paul Emile de Puydt in 1860, is a form of governance that would encompass all others. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the noun as 'chiefly poetic' with the meaning 'a universal realm,' citing an 1848 attestation by Philip James Bailey, 'the starry panarchy of space'. The adjective panarchic 'all-ruling' has earlier attestations. In the twentieth century the term was re-coined separately by scholars in international relations to describe the notion of global governance and then by systems theorists to describe non-hierarchical organizing theories. In his 1860 article 'Panarchy' de Puydt, who also expressed support for laissez-faire economics, applied the concept to the individual's right to choose any form of government without being forced to move from their current locale. This is sometimes described as 'extra-territorial' (or 'exterritorial') since governments often would serve non-contiguous parcels of land. De Puydt wrote: