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Preface

As a more-or-less distinctive set of political practices, governance has a long history. Nonetheless, theoretical interest in these practices under the rubric of ‘governance’ has mostly emerged in the last 40 to 50 years. This was initially prompted in the late 1960s and 1970s by growing elite concerns in liberal democracies about governmental overload, state failure, legitimacy crises and general ungovernability – concerns that triggered a search for political and social arrangements to address these problems. One response was to seek to lower expectations by informing the public of the limits to what any government could achieve faced with growing global turbulence and scarce resources. Another was neoliberal calls for ‘more market, less state’. A third response, more significant for this book, was growing theoretical and practical interest in the potential of coordination through self-organizing networks, partnerships and other forms of reflexive collaboration and, relatedly, in an alleged ‘shift from government to governance’ in the polity and similar shifts from hierarchical authority to networked or ‘heterarchical’ coordination in many other social fields. This amounted to a rediscovery of the potential contribution of civil society to problem-solving without representing a direct engagement in philosophical reflection.

Relatedly, there has been growing interest from the late 1970s onwards in whether and how ‘civil society’ in one guise or another might enhance state capacity in the face of growing complexity and/or whether or how they might provide new ways to overcome old problems that postwar state intervention and the more recent (re)turn to market forces seem to have left unsolved, if not aggravated. Civil society is sometimes regarded as a flanking and supporting mechanism of neoliberalism and authoritarian statism. Involving civil society actors, organizations and partnerships raises hopes or expectations that policy-making and implementation will thereby be improved and made more accountable, either to relevant stakeholders and/or to pre-given criteria of efficiency, effectiveness, transparency and moral standards. This interest in civil society as a supplement to government occurs on all scales from the local state through metropolitan and regional governments to national states, and can also involve various intergovernmental arrangements at the international, transnational, supranational and global levels. This is reflected in the rise of civil society organizations (CSOs) in the operations of the European Union (EU) and international governance mechanisms. Likewise, new forms of partnership, negotiation and networking have been introduced or extended by state managers as they seek to address the declining legitimacy and/or effectiveness of other approaches to policy-making and implementation. Such innovations also redraw the inherited public–private divide, engender new forms of interpenetration between the political system and other functional systems, and modify relations between these systems and the lifeworld as the latter impacts on the nature and exercise of state power (on the lifeworld-vs-system distinction, see Habermas, 1987). Since that critical juncture 40 to 50 years ago, interest in governance has exploded, either explicitly or indirectly through work on parallel concepts and trends.

In this sense, civil society is a well-worn theme in social and political theory, conceptual history and democratic theory. The present book takes a very distinctive approach to the topic. It does not provide one more analysis of the concept through a conventional history of ideas or a normative theoretical approach, but seeks to locate how CSOs, partnerships and associations (in various guises and linked to different discourses) are being mobilized in response to market failure and state failure. In other words, it locates civil society in the context of critical governance studies and seeks to show how it has become the point of intersection between two contrasting sets of political strategy that seek to revive and recontextualize the significance of civil society. One strategy is to promote individual and collective self-responsibilization in order to lighten the governance burdens of local and central states. The other is to facilitate collective self-emancipation through social innovation, community mobilization and creating the commons to limit or escape the constraints of market and state. In both cases, governance can be located at the intersection of networks and solidarity as alternatives to market exchange and hierarchical command.

Given growing disillusion with the neoliberal formula, ‘more market, less state’, civil society has become a central stake in political struggles, as seen in new forms of resistance, such as the Occupy movement, the appeal of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, the gilets jaunes, the rise of right-wing populism, the vote for Brexit in 2016 or the increasing incivility in political discourse. It is also evident in the churning of terms like ‘Big Society’ or the development of community initiatives such as food banks as austerity tightens. Self-responsibilization and solidarity are also evident in responses to the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. This makes this book relevant to current political debates.

Governance is clearly a notion whose time has come. It appears to move easily across philosophical and disciplinary boundaries, diverse fields of practical application, the manifold scales of social life and different political camps and tendencies. Yet even a cursory glance at the literature reveals that the meaning of governance varies by context and it is being deployed for quite contrary, if not plain contradictory, purposes. These range from philosophical and theoretical ends through shaping problem construals and policies (including the marketing of quick governance fixes as one-size-fits all solutions to quite heterogeneous problems) to efforts to implement new constitutional and ethical solutions to global problems (for example, the concept of ‘good governance’ as advanced by the World Bank).

Thanks to these terminological uncertainties and heterogeneous applications, it is doubtful whether governance sans phrase can really provide a persuasive theoretical entry-point for analysing contemporary social transformation or, again, a plausible practical entry-point for coping with complexity and turbulence. It is this paradox that I wish to pursue and resolve in this text. Its ultimate intention is to provide a clear account of the nature and limitations of governance and metagovernance in a complex world. It also introduces a typology of forms of governance related to their distinctive coordinating logics, principal domains of application and tendential forms of failure.

This set of objectives has two aspects. First, I want to put governance, governance failure and metagovernance at the centre of the analysis rather than treating them as having secondary significance at best. Second, I want to put governance, governance failure and metagovernance in their place within a more comprehensive analysis of social relations. These practices have distinctive features and effects that cannot be theorized or explained without a broader theory of social relations. Thus, rather than develop a state-or society-centred account of governance, which comprise two well-rehearsed perspectives in the literature, I develop a strategic-relational analysis of governance that identifies its general and specific features, its strengths and weaknesses, and associated responses to the inherent improbability and empirically recurrent experience of governance failure. In this regard, I follow Foucault’s analysis of civil society as a set of governmental discourses and practices (see Chapter 7).

This book seeks to avoid one-sided interpretations of the shift from government to governance by combining four main theoretical approaches: complexity theory, institutional and evolutionary economics, including especially a ‘plain Marxist’ approach that treats Marxist analysis as posing important problems even if the answers given to date are not always satisfactory (or, indeed, relevant to all potential topics of investigation), and the strategic-relational approach (hereafter SRA) (see especially Jessop, 2007c). These elements are presented in Chapters 1 to 4.

Different governance arrangements are better suited to the pursuit of some types of strategy than others because they mobilize different resources, appeal more to some identities, values and interests than others, have different operational logics and are prone to different kinds of failure. Indeed, following disillusion with the turn to ‘more market, less state’ in the 1980s, in the 1990s there was growing recognition of failures in the new (or newly revived) forms of governance intended to address these earlier failures. This was followed from the mid-1990s by growing theoretical and practical interest in different kinds of metagovernance. In its most basic and general sense (but also most eclectic sense), metagovernance denotes the governance of governance. Other work on governance and/or metagovernance has examined the self-organization of organizations, the constitution of organizational identities, the modalities of coordination of interorganizational relations, and issues of organizational intelligence and learning. Overall, metagovernance occurs on many sites and scales and with different orders of ‘meta-ness’. Higher-order metagovernance, or collibration, has become a key activity of states and can be seen as a countertrend to the shift from government to governance. In other words, while the early interest in governance was associated with this alleged shift, there has been growing interest in a shift from governance to metagovernance.

In this context, the SRA adopted below advances four more or less distinctive claims. First, it identifies four ideal-typical modes of governance – market exchange, imperative coordination, reflexive networks and unconditional solidarity – and argues that each of these ‘first-order’ forms of governance is prone to its own distinctive kinds of failure. They can also exist in hybrid forms. The same growing complexity that generated the demand for new governance mechanisms also contributes to their tendential failure to achieve what is expected of them, resulting in repeated patterns of failed attempts to resolve problems through promoting first one, then another, form of governance. These governance cycles prompt attempts to modulate the forms and functions of governance. This is the field of different kinds of metagovernance. Thus, second, the SRA identifies four ideal-typical responses that correspond to these four main modes of governance. These ‘second-order’ responses aim to improve, respectively, the efficiency of markets, the effectiveness of command, the responsiveness of networks and the level of trust and solidarity in communities. Third, in addition to attempts to improve the operation and outcomes of the first-order modes of governance through second-order governing practices, there can be efforts to alter the weight of the four individual modes of governance so that the overall ensemble of governance arrangements at a higher or more comprehensive level of social organization is better adapted to coordinate complex social relations. This can be described as ‘third-order’ metagovernance.

And fourth, whereas second-order governing occurs in many arenas and policy fields and need not involve the state (which is primarily concerned in these terms with the effectiveness of command), third-order governing is more likely to involve the state as the addressee in the last instance of appeals to solve societal problems by taking responsibility for the overall balance among modes of governance. This is where the shift from governance to metagovernance directly involves the state or close substitutes for the state. In all cases, however, despite significant differences between their respective modes of complexity reduction (which inevitably marginalizes some features essential to effective governance), the continuing excess or surplus of complexity – especially deep complexity – is a major cause for failure in efforts at governance and metagovernance alike. Collibration reorders the relative weight of alternative modes of governance (Dunsire, 1996). It can also be seen as ‘third-order’ metagovernance based on observing how first-order modes perform and how second-order attempts to improve them succeed or fail. It involves reflexive governance of the articulation of social conditions and relations and their modes of governance. We should note here that there is no master meta-governor, no single summit from which metagovernance is performed: the sites, stakes and agents of metagovernance itself are highly contested and its modalities reflect a changing equilibrium of compromise.

In terms of a research agenda on (meta)governance, the preceding remarks invite the following questions. First, given the inherent complexity of the real world, what role does semiosis (that is, sense-and meaning-making) play in reducing complexity and, a fortiori, defining collective problems? This is a field where critical discourse analysis has much to offer not only in understanding the discursive framing or construction of social problems but also in the critique of ideology. Second, given the inherent complexity of the real world, what role does structuration play in limiting compossible social relations? This set of issues is one where an SRA to structurally inscribed strategic selectivities and, a fortiori, to patterns of domination, has much to offer. Third, given the importance of disciplinary, normalizing and regulatory practices in both regards, what specific modes of calculation and technologies of power or knowledge are involved in governance? There are some interesting and productive links here to Foucauldian analyses of governmentality and questions of power or knowledge relations. And fourth, because of the lack of social closure in a hypercomplex, discursively contested, structurally underdetermined and technically malleable world, what scope is there for social agency to make a difference? This is where questions of conjunctural analysis, strategic calculation and social mobilization belong.

If we accept the incompleteness of one-sided attempts at coordination (whether through the market, the state, networks or solidarity) as inevitable, then we need to adopt a satisficing approach to these attempts. This, in turn, has three key dimensions: a self-reflexive orientation to what will prove satisfactory in the case of failure, a self-reflexive cultivation of a repertoire (requisite variety) of responses so that strategies and tactics can be combined to reduce the likelihood of failure and to alter their balance in the face of failure, and a self-reflexive ‘irony’ in the sense that participants must recognize the likelihood of failure but proceed as if success were possible.

Finally, in terms of practical recommendations on governance and metagovernance and their recurrent forms of failure, I advocate a principled and pragmatic reliance on romantic public irony combined with participatory governance. I juxtapose ‘romantic public irony’ to fatalism, stoicism, cynicism or opportunism. The fatalist concludes that, since everything fails, there is no point in trying to achieve anything, and therefore lapses into passive resignation. The stoic agrees but carries on regardless, out of a ritualistic sense of duty or obligation. The cynic shares the fatalists’ ‘pessimism of the intellect’ but seeks, sometimes in a self-deluding manner, to deny evident failures or to redefine them as successes or else manipulates appearances so that success seems to have occurred. The opportunist recognizes the possibilities (indeed, probability of failure) but hopes to bail out in time as a winner, leaving others to carry the costs of failure. In contrast to the cynics and opportunists, ironists are sceptical and romantic. They act in ‘good faith’ and are prepared to admit to failure and bear its costs. One cannot choose to succeed completely and permanently in a complex world, but one can choose how to fail. This makes it imperative to choose wisely!

Given the main alternatives (markets, imperative coordination, self-organization and solidarity) and what we know about how and why they fail, the best chance of reducing the likelihood of failure is to draw on the collective intelligence of stakeholders and other relevant partners in a form of participatory democracy. This does not exclude resort to other forms of coordination, but it does require that the scope granted to the market mechanism, the exercise of formal authority, the contribution of networks or the resort to solidarity is subject as far as possible to decision through forms of participatory governance or commoning that aim to balance efficiency, effectiveness and democratic accountability. This provides the public dimension to romantic irony. Key substantive outcomes to be added here include sustainable development, the prioritization of social justice and respect for difference. In this sense, public romantic irony is the best mechanism for working out which modes of governance to resort to in particular situations and when collibration is required. It is not the only method to be adopted in each and every situation.