Essays on Baroque Governance in Honor of 20th Anniversary

Introduction

As we continue to explore the enduring relevance of Gilles Paquet’s The New Geo-Governance:

A Baroque Approach on its 20th anniversary, this series delves into distributed governance and social learning. I also examine how Baroque governance—characterized by complexity, fluidity, and adaptation—manifests in modern AI governance, Agile methodologies, project management, and sustainability.

We turn to two crucial concepts in Paquet’s work:

Distributed Governance: The shift from rigid, centralized power structures to fluid,multi-stakeholder governance models.

Social Learning: The collective intelligence process where organizations and societiesadapt, innovate, and solve problems collaboratively.

These ideas have profound implications for leadership, Agile project management,sustainability, and nonprofit management—fields increasingly reliant on decentralizeddecision-making and continuous learning.

These essays explore case studies from different parts of the world to demonstrate these principles in action.