Community Directions - Who Decides - Limits to Governance and the Hand of the Linear Engineer

The perennial problem of identifying who does and who should make decisions in society is not made easier by presenting it to engineers in terms of 'community directions' especially in an environmental context. This framework requires examination of the concept of community, its countervailing components and exploration of the practical limits of community governance. A further difficulty beyond these structural limitations in decision making is whether appropriate and consistent choices of community directions can be made when agreed goals, aspirations and values are only articulated at a high level of generality. Exogenous environmental factors further complicate these difficulties of definition and process. Such factors include not only physical and social (including economic) components but also the technological milieu of the community. In this milieu engineers, proceeding linearly to their own goals in their own closed frames of reference, continuously change the directions of wider communities in ways quite unforeseen by them or the community in which they are embedded. Sometimes other elements of the community see that these changes may not lead to community goals as they perceive them. Occasionally they check the course of the linear engineer. However in the end there seems to be a large stochastic element in setting longer term community directions which remain indeterminant under present processes of governance.