ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a broad set of issues, including motives, methods, and institutional possibilities for arriving at collective decisions which are new, and yet refer back to intentions and practices that are by no means novel. Knowledge politics and knowledge policies are for the control and regulation of the social, cultural, and economic use of knowledge, and the kind of impact knowledge and technical artifacts have on the social fabric that deploys rules and sanctions and have always been a part of the modern "regulatory" apparatus and are widely accepted as part of "doing business". It is important, to describe in specific terms what is meant by the governance of knowledge, although it is at times difficult precisely to fix the boundaries. Even in prehistory, elements of defensive knowledge policies might have been present, if only to affirm and assure the perpetuation of what by all accounts must be fairly stable and robust cultural patterns.
