Inaugural lecture Mr Prof R.L. Holzhacker: Building Bridges: Governance, Societal Impact, and Sustainable Society in Southeast Asia

Prof. Holzhacker's lecture focuses on how we reach decisions within our societies, and the process of interaction between citizens, civil society organizations, and institutions to reach collective decisions. Through these processes, we may lay out our collective aims, and strive to realize our individual and societal goals. Thus, more concretely, we will be talking about governance, the societal impact of our multilevel governance systems, and the future of building inclusive, equitable, and sustainable societies, for present and future generations.

The lecture begins by discussing democracy and governance, and the importance of building specific and diffuse legitimacy for regional governance mechanisms, such as the European Union (EU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Increasingly, we reach and implement decisions in a system of multilevel governance, involving international, regional, national, provincial and local levels of government. The important question is how do we assure democratic participation in these processes? One consideration is to focus on the spread of ideas through a society and across a region. Here we specifically focus on human rights norm diffusion and the ‘ricochet’ of ideas between civil society organizations and institutions as an important component of democratic governance.

The lecture concludes by introducing the new Groningen Research Centre for Southeast Asia and ASEAN (SEA ASEAN), located at the University of Groningen and Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia. The Centre builds on the existing Spirit Indonesia Groningen (SInGA) research team on governance, to include the traditionally democratic, middle-income countries in the region, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines, and two countries in political and economic transition, Vietnam and Myanmar. The inter-disciplinary team of scholars and PhD researchers are engaged with theoretically driven comparative research focused on governance, societal impact, and sustainable society in Southeast Asia.

UEF Professor by special appointment

Holzhacker is UEF Professor by special appointment for the chair of ‘Comparative Multi-Level Governance and Regional Structure’ at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences. The chair is sponsored by Unilever Indonesia and Shell Indonesia.

More information

• Inaugural lecture: Mr Prof R.L. Holzhacker
• Title: Building Bridges: Governance, Societal Impact, and Sustainable Society in Southeast Asia
• Chair: Comparative Multilevel Governance and Regional Structure
• Faculty: Spatial Sciences
• Register at the latest one week in advance by returning the replycard or by filling in the registration form