Читать книгу Putting Civil Society in Its Place - Jessop Bob - Страница 14
ОглавлениеThis book explores the roles of markets, organizations, networks and solidarity as modes of governance, their respective strengths and weaknesses, and how they are combined and operate in hybrid ways in the real world. Civil society is not the main object of this book, which seeks instead to locate this field of social relations within a governance approach. Civil society can be said to exist at the intersection of networks and solidarity as opposed to markets or command, and its agents have the potential to guide markets and state action. In these terms, civil society may serve as a means of self-responsibilization as well as self-emancipation, and this can be seen in dialogues around the ‘Big Society’, social enterprise, social innovation, the formation of the commons, and so forth, as well as in practices of societal organization in response to disasters and crises. In this regard the governance approach rejects the tripartite classification of market, state and civil society inherited from the Enlightenment in favour of an analysis of hybrid relations of governance.
First comments on civil society
Let me confess that I find ‘civil society’ problematic on conceptual as well as empirical grounds. It is hard to separate ‘civil society’ fully from the economy (which is always socially embedded, although the forms of embeddedness vary) and from the state (defined by Gramsci, for example, as ‘political society + civil society’, 1971: 242; 1975, Q15, §10: 1765). Gramsci added that the state can be understood as ‘[t]he entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the consent of those over whom it rules’ (Gramsci, 1971: 244; 1975, Q15, §10). Nicos Poulantzas (1978) developed this idea further when he defined the state as a social relation. This is an elliptical statement that draws on Marx’s own statement that capital is not a thing but a social relation between people, established through the instrumentality of things (Marx, 1996 [1883]: 753). For Poulantzas, this meant that state power is a social relation between politically relevant forces mediated through the institutional structure of political society (Poulantzas, 1978: 128–9). Both Gramsci and Poulantzas adopted a class-theoretical approach to state power. This is not required in a governance-theoretical strategic-relational approach (SRA), but can be useful for some purposes.
I do not support a concept of ‘civil society’ as denoting a specific institutional site with its own structured coherence. This is problematic, especially as there is no definition of civil society that corresponds to the modern territorial state. ‘Civil society’ comprises a heterogeneous set of institutional orders and pluralistic set of agents, many of which are operationally autonomous and resistant to control from outside – whether through market forces, top-down command or horizontal networking. It is also the site of identities and interests that are not grounded in any specific institutional order but crosscut them by virtue of their relationship to the experience and ‘lifeworld’ of whole persons. This is reflected in David Lockwood’s questioning of sociologists’ focus on class formation over citizenship and his recognition of the politics of intersectionality (cf Lockwood, 1999: 531, 537, 547). Indeed, people with multiple roles and complex personal identities and in addition, complex multifunctional organizations, often attempt to integrate their personal and organizational lives by retaining autonomy and resisting state intervention. This is where demands for empowerment and capacity-building become relevant. But identity politics and empowerment could become just another opportunity for capital to appropriate more flexible labour power, to commodify other institutional orders, to restructure consumption even as its tendencies towards economic polarization continue on a global scale, to seek legitimacy through the domestication of calls for corporate social responsibility, and so forth. This would limit attempts to ensure the inclusion of all citizens within each order.
This raises the question of whether ‘civil society’ is an autonomous domain of social life with its own logic, or comprises no more than a heterogeneous set of social relations that are not (yet) dominated by other institutional orders. The former approach can be illustrated through Habermas’s analysis of the public sphere with its dialogical role in elaborating the ‘public interest’ (1989). In contrast, the latter approach sees ‘civil society’ as a horizon of action or ‘environment’ for other institutional orders (such as the economy or political system and their relevant actors) that form the main object of analysis. I incline more to the latter view, especially as the increasing functional differentiation of modern societies along with the tendential globalization of different functional systems (such as economics, law, science, education, health, politics or military security) makes it harder to identify a distinct site on which ‘civil society’ might be unproblematically located. Indeed, it is precisely this increasing decomposition or formlessness of ‘civil society’ that makes it such a significant (if often imaginary) stake in so many different struggles.
Not only are there what Habermas calls ‘colonizing’ attempts to penetrate civil society and subordinate it to the requirements of specific institutional orders (for example, market, law, science, education, healthcare, politics, foreign or homeland security). Civil society also serves as a heterogeneous site of struggles to resist such colonization in defence of identities and/or interests that lie outside and/or crosscut the relevant institutional orders (for example, in defence of class, gender, race, nationality, generation, stage in the life course, citizenship, human rights or the natural environment). In this sense ‘civil society’ is an essentially contested space (as well as an essentially contested concept) for representatives of very different types of interests, norms and values. It serves both as a horizon of action for strategies to secure the dominance of a given institutional order, and as a reservoir of antagonistic ‘instincts’ (rooted in other identities) and social resources for resisting such colonization (Habermas, 1989).
This was expressed well by Maurizio Lazzarato, in the following:
In order for governmentality to preserve its global character, in order for it to not be separated in two branches (the art of economics and juridical government), liberalism invents and experiments [with] a series of techniques (of government) which are exerted on a new level of reference that Foucault calls civil society, society or the social. But here civil society is not the space for the making of autonomy from the state, but the correlative of certain techniques of government. Civil society is not a first and immediate reality, but something that belongs to the modern technology of governmentality. Society is not a reality in itself or something that does not exist, but a reality of transactions, just like sexuality or madness. At the crossing of these relations of power and those which continue to escape them emerge some realities of transaction that constitute in a way an interface between the governing and the governed. At this junction and in the management of this interface liberalism is constituted as an art of government and biopolitics is born. (Lazzarato, 2005: 2–3)
These practical concerns are also reflected in new theoretical and policy paradigms that highlight the need to govern in and across different systems or institutional orders. Relevant concepts include the ‘triple helix’ formed by government, business and universities, the desirability of ‘joined-up thinking’ in promoting international competitiveness and the improbability of effective intersystemic cooperation to promote sustainable development. In addition to explicit use of the word ‘governance’ to denote these issues, analogous terms such as steering, networks, stakeholding and partnerships are also liberally deployed nowadays.1 Nor has civil society escaped this fascination with new forms of governance. Indeed, with its growing pluralization of individual and collective identities and its multiplication of social movements, civil society is seen as ripe for their development. This is linked to a continuing search for forms of inclusion in the political process that go beyond the relationship of individual citizens to their respective sovereign states and for forms of participation that would enable various stakeholders to influence the operation of other systems too. As such, civil society is a rich and confused site of multiple and contestable identities that can be mobilized for both pro-and anti-systemic purposes. Compounding this already ample complexity are recommendations that governance be used to guide interactions between systems and the lifeworld in response to issues such as ecological crisis, the dialectic of globalization–regionalization, social exclusion and the risk society.
Governance
This introductory chapter presents the theoretical background to interest in governance, shows the etymological roots of the concept, offers some reasons for the explosion of interest in governance in the 1960s and 1970s, and describes the main features of governance practices. Chapters 2 and 3 of Part I then frame the discussion of governance in terms of a dialectic between the governance of complexity and the complexity of governance. This highlights the relation between the increased interest in governance that is associated with more recognition of the growing complexity of world society and that the greater resort to governance, whatever its modalities, often ends in governance failure. This is intended to counter the ‘governance optimism’ that exaggerates the potential of new (or rediscovered) governance practices and to provide the basis for my recommendations about approaching governance in a spirit of romantic public irony. Chapter 4 introduces supplementary arguments about the spatio-temporal complexities of the objects and modalities of governance, and makes a case for approaching the meso-and macro-level governance of complex objects in terms of their multispatial (and multitemporal) dimensions as well as other substantive features. It argues that neglect of its spatio-temporal complexities is one dimension of governance failure.
Chapter 5 of Part II shows how WISERD (Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods) is concerned with the politics and policy concerns of civil society, and has developed an interest in civic stratification and civic repair in its second five-year funding round. Chapter 6 extends this interest to the political economy of civil society by drawing on the insights of Marx and Gramsci. Chapter 7 introduces the work of Michel Foucault and Foucauldian scholars to illustrate the politics of governance and its role in civil society.
Part III then comprises two chapters that illustrate the preceding arguments from case studies drawn from different fields of governance and metagovernance, and focuses on their forms of failure. In Chapter 8, the examples chosen are global social policy (GSP) and the discourse of ‘good governance’ in cities. Chapter 9 discusses regional economic governance and the nature of corporatism. Chapter 10 examines attempts to use competition as a mode of governance. Chapter 11, the Conclusions, returns to the theme of romantic public irony and its implications for participatory governance based on an expanded civil society.
Why governance, why now?
The notion of ‘governance’ seems to encapsulate and condense a wide range of concerns in the contemporary world and therefore carries enormous theoretical, descriptive, practical and normative weight. There has been growing interest from the late 1970s onwards as to whether and how new (or revived) forms of governance (or steering), such as networks, public–private partnerships, multilevel governance (MLG), the cooperative state or the enabling state 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.2 It has also been applied to a wide range of social issues and to every scale of social organization from the micro-through the meso-and macro-to the meta-social level. As such, governance has become an increasingly significant theme in the standard anglophone social science lexicon (and elsewhere), and is employed liberally in the social and management sciences, in social practices and in the rhetoric and narratives of social transformation. It has also become a ‘buzzword’ in various lay circles. Unsurprisingly, it has acquired multiple meanings and can be inserted into many different paradigms and problematics. For the same reasons, however, governance has become a rather fuzzy term that can be applied to almost everything. Indeed, the very popularity of the term increases the likelihood that those who use it will talk past each other, leading to ill-founded misunderstandings and pointless disagreements.
Perhaps one reason for this is that governance is not – indeed, cannot be – defined in the same abstract terms as statehood, the state or government as this is conceived in general state theory. This is because it can be applied in many different fields of social action rather than being concentrated in just one apparatus or institutional ensemble. This is indicated by common use of the definite article for the state but not for governance. While the state is often treated as if it were a (fictive) subject or single actor or, alternatively, reified as a thing (an instrument, machine or cybernetic device), governance lacks such a fixed, albeit often illusory, reference point. In another context, of course, as critical governance studies has argued, one might question the validity of general state theory. Sticking with general state theory, however, one implication of this contrast is that, to paraphrase Marx, just as there is neither production in general nor general production, there is no governance in general nor general governance. Rather, there is only particular governance and the totality of governance (cf Marx, 1973b [1857]: 99; Jessop, 1990a: 186). There are only definite objects of governance that are shaped in and through definite modes of governance. It is important to note that this excludes any general theory that would apply to all forms of governance, whether outside or inside the state. This explains why governance often figures in debates on the state in terms of qualities or properties of the state, such as the planning state, network state, liberal market state, cooperative state, therapeutic state, and so on.
It follows that one should focus instead on the many and varied struggles over the constitution of governance objects, competing strategies and techniques of governance in these and other regards, and the contingently necessary incompleteness or failure of efforts to govern them. It is the failure fully to govern (and so stabilize or at least, modulate) potential objects of governance that creates, in turn, space for competing governance strategies and ensures that the future remains pregnant with a surplus of possibilities around how social relations are defined as objects of governance (or not) and how their governance is approached (or not).
These complexities and the surplus of possibilities lead to conceptual fuzziness, especially where governance practices are decentred, dispersed or lack clear borders. This is reflected in the many typologies of governance developed for different purposes and in significant (often unspoken) disagreement about what is included, and excluded, from the concept. Indeed, Claus Offe (2009) questioned its value, describing it as polysemic, as having a multitude of possible meanings, as an irredeemably overstretched concept, as a ritualized or fetishized linguistic sign, as a bridge concept, and as an empty signifier. The main problem, it seems, is that ‘governance’ is both equivocal, because it has different but stable meanings in different contexts, and ambiguous, as its meanings vary even in similar contexts. These issues matter because there is no direct equivalent to governance in many European languages, let alone beyond Europe (witness the broad contrast between the governance, gouvernance, gobernia family of words in romance languages and that of steering, Steuerung, styring and so forth in North European languages). Similar problems occur outside Europe for the concept of state, which reveals the Eurocentric nature of much work addressing the state and state power. This is why governance is often proposed as an alternative, less Eurocentric, approach to studying government.
Even after some 30 to 40 years of widespread deployment, social scientific usages of governance are often ‘pre-theoretical’ and eclectic. Lay usages are just as diverse and contrary. Indeed, governance theory tends to remain at the pre-theoretical stage of critique and theorists of governance operate within several, often disparate and fragmented, problematics. It is generally much clearer what the notion of governance is against than what it is for. In theoretical terms, governance, then, comprises the ‘other’ modality (or set of modalities) for a wide range of dominant concepts or paradigms in the social sciences. This is reflected in a proliferation of typologies of governance mechanisms constructed for different purposes and a large measure of (often unspoken) disagreement about what is included, what is excluded, from the overall concept (vivid examples of different typologies can be found in Campbell et al, 1991; Kitschelt, 1991; Thompson et al, 1991; Grabher, 1993; Kooiman, 1993b).
Nonetheless, in general terms, two closely related, but nested, meanings can be identified in the literature over the last 40 to 50 years. First, governance can refer to any mode of coordination of interdependent activities. Among these modes, four ideal-typical forms are relevant here: the anarchy of exchange; organizational hierarchy; self-organizing and self-reflexive ‘heterarchy’;3 and solidarity rooted in unconditional commitments. Some governance theorists have correlated these types of governance to different sets of social relations, respectively: exchange with markets; hierarchy with the world of states and interstate relations; self-reflexive heterarchy with networks and civil society; and solidarity with real or imagined communities. They also link them to different kinds of social logic. Thus, market exchange involves ex post coordination based on the formally rational pursuit of self-interest by individual agents; hierarchical command corresponds to various forms of ex ante imperative coordination concerned with the pursuit of substantive goals established from above and imposed on organizational members; self-organizing networks are suited for systems (non-political as well as political) that are resistant to top-down internal management and/or direct external control and that coevolve with other (complex) sets of social relations with which their various decisions, operations and aims are reciprocally interdependent; and solidarity is especially well-suited as the primary mode of governance for sustainable social cooperation (for example, in the social economy or for community empowerment, cultural emancipation, and so on). In each case, successful coordination depends on the performance of complementary activities and operations by other actors, whose pursuit of their activities and operations depends in turn on such activities and operations being performed elsewhere in the relevant social ensemble.
The second, more restricted, meaning is heterarchy (or self-organizing networks), and this is often the main reference in the revival of the governance paradigm, whether in theoretical or policy guise. Interest in this specific mode of governance developed because it is alleged to integrate complexity more explicitly, reflexively, and, it is hoped, effectively than reliance on markets or command and, to the extent that it is ever considered, solidarity. Indeed, far from just responding to demands from social forces dissatisfied with both state and market failure, state managers themselves have actively promoted these new forms of governance as adjuncts to and/or substitutes for more traditional forms of top-down government. They have done so in the expectation and/or hope that policy-making and implementation will thereby be improved in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and transparency and also made more accountable to relevant stakeholders and/or moral standards, thereby leading to ‘good governance’. This is reflected in growing concern with the role of various forms of political coordination that not only span the conventional public–private divide but also involve ‘tangled hierarchies’, parallel power networks or other forms of complex interdependence across different tiers of government and/or different functional domains. More generally, new forms of partnership, negotiation and networking have been introduced or extended by state managers as they seek to cope with the declining legitimacy and/or effectiveness of other approaches to policy-making and implementation. Such innovations also redraw the 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. Where solidarity is involved, we also find arguments that the broader networks, especially coordinated through the state, can provide a means of community empowerment, prevent the isolation of local initiatives and generalize feelings of solidarity to a wider (imagined) community.
Etymology, genealogy and discourse
It is important to distinguish words from concepts. This applies especially to governance. It has a long and chequered past, dating back to medieval Latin and earlier. Its recent revival suggestively highlights a major paradigm shift in political (and economic) analysis as it provides a narrative and/or analytical framework in the contemporary world. The anglophone term ‘governance’ can be traced to the classical Latin and ancient Greek words for the ‘steering’ of boats. It originally referred mainly to the action or manner of governing, guiding or steering conduct, and as such, it overlapped with ‘government’. The first recorded uses of ‘governance’ occur in the 14th century and refer mainly to the action or manner of governing, guiding or steering conduct. It is only in the last 40 to 50 years that there has been a sustained revival in explicit theoretical and practical concern with governance as opposed to government. In short, as far as the anglophone world is concerned, the recently renewed interest in regulation and governance can be dated to the mid-1970s. For a long time, usage was mainly limited to constitutional and legal issues concerning ‘affairs of state’ and/or to the direction of specific institutions or professions with multiple stakeholders.
The key factor in its revival has probably been the need to distinguish between ‘governance’ and ‘government’ in response to crucial changes in the external demarcation and internal organization of the state apparatus and the nature of state powers (plural). Thus, governance came to refer to the modes and manner of governing, government to the institutions and agents charged with governing, and governing to the act of governing itself. The analogous German concept of Steuerung (steering, guiding) proved popular in the 1970s and 1980s for much the same reasons.
There are also significant historical precursors to the idea of metagovernance as well as some close contemporary equivalents. Its antecedents include Greek and Roman notions of a balanced constitution; the medieval and Renaissance ‘mirror of princes’ literature on the art of government (such as Machiavelli’s The Prince, 1988); various notions of ‘police’ (policey or Polizei concerned with the structures and practices that would help to promote a sound political economy, good governance and state security; see Heidenheimer, 1986); and political principles of statecraft and diplomacy such as the mixed constitution at home and the wisdom and necessity of maintaining an international balance of power.
These traditional interests in governance and metagovernance have survived in different forms. But governance has also been discussed without explicit use of this term, and this provides a rich repertoire for illuminating the analysis of governance, whether explicitly in these terms or not. For example, theories of governance have obvious precursors in institutional economics, work on statecraft and diplomacy, research on corporatist networks and policy communities and interest in ‘police’4 or welfare. And although the idea of ‘governance’ has now gained widespread currency in mainstream social sciences, it has by no means displaced other research on economic, political or social coordination. In addition, newer theoretical paradigms have turned their attention from governance (or its equivalents) to metagovernance for their own reasons, at different times, and in their own ways. An influential contemporary analogy is Foucault’s approach to governmentality as ‘the conduct of conduct’ (1991; 2003: 138), especially as developed by the Anglo-Foucauldian school of governmentality studies (see, for example, Miller and Rose, 2008). It is also evident in the increasing interest in resilience (see, for example, Joseph, 2016, 2018).
It is nonetheless worth noting one major source of ambiguity in the mobility of ‘governance’ between theoretical inquiries and practical politics. This is the fact that governance offers both a theoretical and a policy paradigm. Wallis and Dollery (1999) distinguish between them as follows:
… policy paradigms derive from theoretical paradigms but possess much less sophisticated and rigorous evaluations of the intellectual underpinnings of their conceptual frameworks. In essence, policy advisers differentiate policy paradigms from theoretical paradigms by screening out the ambiguities and blurring the fine distinctions characteristic of theoretical paradigms. In a Lakatosian sense, policy paradigms can be likened to the positive heuristics surrounding theoretical paradigms. Accordingly, shifts between policy paradigms will be discontinuous, follow theoretical paradigm shifts, but occur more frequently than theoretical paradigms since they do not require fundamental changes in a negative heuristic. (Wallis and Dollery, 1999: 5)
Drawing on this distinction helps us to understand that the explosion of interest in governance has policy as well as theoretical roots, and that the transfer of ideas and arguments across these two types of paradigm may be both limited and subject to serious misunderstandings. Conversely, failure to make this distinction is likely to contribute to two complementary fallacies. The first is that governance, when viewed largely from the ideas that inform the policy paradigm, is seen as an essentially incoherent concept. This is especially problematic in the case of ‘good governance’ as a discursively mediated policy paradigm. This is reinforced when it is shown that the discourse of ‘good governance’ often serves to legitimate neoliberalism, serving as a flanking and supporting mechanism for an essentially inegalitarian and unjust economic and political project (see Chapter 8). The second fallacy is that, when measured against the demands for analytical rigour of governance as a scientific concept and practice, it is claimed that governance practices are bound to produce no more than ‘muddling through’ at best and failure at worst. This poses at least three problems in exploring theoretical and policy paradigms. What is the best way to link theoretical and policy paradigms without committing errors? The first error is to reduce one to the other. The second is to subject policy paradigms to a purely theoretical critique or seek to derive immediate policy lessons from the theoretical paradigm. The third is to adopt the normative assumption that the practical necessity of governance justifies any and all attempts at governance,5 or to make the fatalistic claim that the practical impossibility of fully effective governance practices nullifies all such attempts.
Theoretical background to governance
These general etymological and conceptual accounts do not explain why a relatively dormant concept with limited scope and restricted usage came to be revitalized at a particular time and has been applied by so many individuals, agencies and organizations to so many different topics. An important general answer (with varied instantiations) to the ‘why this concept, why now’ question is a convergent reaction to perceived inadequacies in earlier theoretical paradigms. It is particularly tempting in the political and social sciences to suggest that the ‘other’ of governance is government (considered as state or organizational hierarchy).6 Thus theories of governance are primarily concerned with a wide range of ‘social’ modes of social coordination rather than with narrowly political (sovereign, juridico-political, bureaucratic or at least hierarchically organized) modes of social organization. In this context, social coordination refers to the ways in which disparate but interdependent social agencies are coordinated to achieve specific social objectives. And in these terms, one could define the general field of governance studies as concerned with the resolution of (para-)political problems (problems of collective goal attainment or the realization of collective purposes) through specific configurations of governmental (hierarchical) and extra-governmental (non-hierarchical) institutions, organizations and practices.
In theoretical terms, this can be linked to certain paradigmatic crises in the social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s – crises partly due, in turn, to dissatisfaction with their capacity to describe and explain the ‘real world’. An interest in ‘governance’ as a major theme is rooted in the rejection of several simplistic dichotomies that inform the social sciences. These include market vs hierarchy in economics; market vs plan in policy studies; private vs public in politics; and anarchy vs sovereignty in international relations. Indeed, Fritz Scharpf (1993) was prompted to write:
Considering the current state of theory, it seems that it is not so much increasing disorder on all sides that needs to be explained as the really existing extent, despite everything, of intra-as well as interorganizational, intra-as well as intersectoral, and intra-as well as international, agreement and expectations regarding mutual security. Clearly, beyond the limits of the pure market, hierarchical state, and domination-free discourses, there are more – and more effective – coordination mechanisms than science has hitherto grasped empirically and conceptualized theoretically. (Scharpf, 1993: 57; translated by BJ [author])
In general terms, it could be suggested that the various approaches to governance share a rejection of the conceptual trinity of market–state–civil society that has tended to dominate mainstream analyses of modern societies. Thus reflexive self-organization has been greeted as a new social-scientific paradigm, as a new mode of problem-solving that can overcome the limitations of anarchic market exchange and top-down planning in an increasingly complex and global world, and as a solution to the perennial ethical, political and civic problems of securing institutional integration and peaceful social coexistence. In part, this recent interest involves little more than an attempt to put old theoretical wine in new bottles and/or reflects one more turn in the never-ending policy cycle whereby disenchantment with one mode of coordination leads to excessive faith in another – until that, too, disappoints.
Political scientists, for example, have expressed growing dissatisfaction with a rigid public–private distinction in state-centred analyses of politics and its associated top-down account of the exercise of state power. Whereas statehood (or, less abstractly, authoritative government) presupposes a state apparatus, territory and population, the notion of governance lacks this core juridico-political or otherwise relatively fixed institutional reference point. If statehood is a concept that applies in the first instance to the polity, then governance relates more to politics and policy. It concerns public politics, public policies or public affairs (Larsson, 2013: 107) rather than the state-cum-polity that provides the framework in which these unfold. However, it is even broader in scope because governance practices are not limited to the polity and indeed, are often advocated as a means to avoid the iron fist (even when concealed in a velvet glove) of state power. This has been reflected in growing concern with various forms of political coordination that not only span the conventional public–private divide, but also involve ‘tangled hierarchies’, parallel power networks or other forms of complex interdependence across tiers of government and/or different functional domains.
The Köln School has been an influential contributor to governance studies under the rubric of Steuerung (steering).7 It has thereby developed a distinctive approach to the problems of governing functionally differentiated, organizationally dense and complex societies. Its leading figures recognized that these problems involved both the steering capacity of governing subjects and the governability of the objects to be governed (Mayntz, 2003: 29; cf also Mayntz, 1993). While these problems can lead to ‘steering pessimism’ (for example, in the work of Niklas Luhmann), the Köln School was more optimistic, influenced, perhaps, by specific examples of successful administrative reform and the overall record of neocorporatism in Germany in promoting economic development and sustaining a high-waged, high-tech, globally competitive ‘Modell Deutschland’ (German Model). Two key figures in developing these ideas were Renate Mayntz and Fritz Scharpf who codirected the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies at Köln for many years. A distinctive feature of this school is its actor-centred institutionalism, namely, its interest in how the interaction between micro-and meso-level actors and institutional factors shapes the possibilities of effective governance. Indeed, Mayntz (2004) later emphasized that the actor-centred political steering (Steuerung) approach to policy-making was quite distinct from the governance (Regulierung) approach, which is more institutionalist and deals with regulatory structures combining public and private, hierarchical and network forms of action coordination. In this spirit, the Köln School explored how to (re)design the interaction between institutions and actors to improve the chances of overcoming policy problems. This is yet another way in which the topic of metagovernance (or, in this context, metasteering) has emerged.
Theoretical background to metagovernance
The notion of metagovernance obviously builds on that of governance. As noted, in its most basic and general sense, it denotes the governance of governance. Whereas some scholars and practitioners explicitly refer to metagovernance, many other terms have been used to denote or connote this phenomenon. This linguistic variety is linked in part to the relatively ‘pre-theoretical’ nature of work on governance and metagovernance, to the diversity of theoretical traditions with which more rigorous work is associated, to the different political traditions and tendencies that have shown interest in governance, to the great heterogeneity of the subjects and objects of governance and, a fortiori, of metagovernance, and to the challenges involved in translating theoretical reflections on governance and metagovernance into policy paradigms or indeed, commercial consultancy in the public, private and third sectors.
This is illustrated neatly in Louis Meuleman’s work on metagovernance (2008: 73). He shows some significant routes to interest in metagovernance in two theoretical traditions (rational choice vs sociological) and with respect to the three most commonly identified modes of governance (market, hierarchy and network). Of particular interest in his analysis is an implicit distinction between first-, second-and third-order governance, to which we return below, as well as the key role this distinction accords to reflexivity, deliberation and normative commitments in second-and third-order governance, which are also the two main sites of what he identifies as metagovernance.
One of the two authors most often cited as the originator of the term ‘metagovernance’ is the Dutch scholar, Jan Kooiman, who belongs to a broader Dutch tradition of sociocybernetic inquiry (see, for example, Kickert et al, 1997; Edelenbos and Klijn, 2007; Meuleman, 2008; see also Deutsch, 1963). Interested in the problems that states faced in governing complex societies, he drew on sociocybernetics to explore state–society interactions not only in terms of automatic cybernetic mechanisms but also in terms of conscious guiding actions (Kooiman, 1993a, 2003). Rather than assume that the state stands over and against society, he viewed governments as cooperating with key societal actors to guide societal development.
Accordingly, he stressed the need for requisite variety among modes of government–society interactions that range from hierarchical governance (top-down intervention) through cogovernance (joint action) to self-governance (societal self-organization without government interference). Whereas Kooiman recognized that each mode has its own specific properties, he argued that they also interact to produce hybrid, or mixed, patterns of governance (Kooiman, 2003: 7). He further noted the importance for effective governance of cultivating the capacity to reflect on, and rebalance, the mix among these modes in response to changes in the challenges and/or opportunities that exist at the interface of market, state and civil society. Governing in modern society requires an interactive perspective concerned to balance social interests and facilitate the interaction of actors and systems through self-organization, co-arrangements or more interventionist forms of organization. Thus, for Kooiman, the key problem is how best to ‘strike a balance’ among different kinds of actors and steering mechanisms at the micro, meso and macro levels of society.8
Kooiman distinguishes first-, second-and third-order governing. First-order governing is problem-solving; second-order governing occurs when attempts are made to modify the institutional conditions of first-order governing when, according to Kooiman, these conditions are out-dated, dysfunctional or detrimental in governance terms; and third-order governing (or, for Kooiman, metagovernance) involves attempts to change the broad principles that concern the way governing takes place: it is the governance of governance or governors through modification of the (normative) framework in which first-and second-order governing activities evolve (Kooiman, 2000, 2002).
Whereas the literature on governance and metagovernance has shown much interest in issues of institutional design appropriate to different objects of governance, work on governmentality has explored attempts to change the subjects of governance and their values. The neoliberal project, for example, clearly requires attempts to create entrepreneurial subjects and demanding consumers aware of their choices and rights as well as actions to expand the scope of the market mechanism. Anglo-Foucauldian scholars have explored the role of power and knowledge in shaping the attributes, capacities and identities of social agents and, in the context of self-reflexive governance, in enabling them to become self-governing and self-transforming (cf Miller and Rose, 2008). This raises questions about the compatibility of modes of governance not only institutionally but also in terms of individual and collective capacities to pursue creatively and autonomously the strategies and tactics required to sustain contrasting modes of governance. This indicates that collibration demands more than the search for a technical, problem-solving fix. It also involves specific objects, techniques and subjects of governance and efforts to manage the wider ‘unstable equilibrium of compromise’. Applied to metagovernance, this means comparing the effects of failure or inadequacies in markets, government, self-organization and solidarity, and regularly reassessing how far current actions are producing desired outcomes. This, in turn, requires monitoring and modulating mechanisms, and a willingness to reevaluate objectives.
Political contexts
Given such theoretical pre-histories and current theoretical alternatives, it is worth asking whether other factors might lie behind the recent interest in governance. Here one should certainly consider the strong practical dimension to such paradigm shifts. Current fascination with the nature and dynamics of governance is closely linked to the failure of many taken-for-granted coordination mechanisms in the postwar world. Here we could mention the competitive threat to Anglo-American capitalism posed by other models of capitalism (such as Continental European or East Asian variants); the crisis of US hegemony in a post-Cold War order and the attendant search for post-hegemonic and/or ‘post-national state’ solutions to global problems; the crisis of the postwar Keynesian welfare national state and its typical modes of economic and political coordination, including tripartite macro corporatism; and the eruption of identity politics and new social movements that threaten established forms of social and political domination. In these circumstances we find concern with both corporate governance and national competitiveness; managing new (or newly defined) economic, military, demographic, environmental and other threats to global security; with ‘good’ rather than ‘bad’ governance in ‘Third World’ polities, whose authoritarianism and corruption can no longer be simply defended as preferable to totalitarian communist rule;9 with compensating for the failure of hierarchical decision-making and ‘top-down’ planning in a turbulent environment marked by complex reciprocal interdependence; and with resolving the disciplinary crisis of an allegedly dependency-inducing ‘state of welfare’ by instituting new forms of ‘regulated self-discipline’ in an ‘enterprise society’. On a more meso-level scale there was also growing interest in clinical governance in medicine, the governance of schools and universities, the self-regulation of the scientific community and the governance of sport.
It is certainly worth noting that the increased interest in governance coincided with the crisis of Atlantic Fordism and the Keynesian welfare national state, and it was strengthened, in the mid-1990s, as recognition grew of the limited success of an over-enthusiastic and fetishistic turn to the market. This was also a period when civil society was celebrated and efforts made to integrate community organizations and old and, especially, new, social movements into policy-making and implementation. These responses also opened up the space for some governance scholars to assert or predict that the sovereign national state was losing authority and influence, and to intone the ‘government to governance’ mantra. The plausibility of this claim was reinforced because governance arrangements were identified within and across many different social fields and functional systems, at and across different scales of social organization, and transversally to the conventional juridico-political boundaries between the state and society. In short, the turn to governance theoretically and in practice seemed to be a general trend that extended beyond the state or political system. The state and the modalities of state power nonetheless remained central to some analyses that regarded governance as an integral part of state projects and strategies. Overall, then, these empirical and theoretical trends opened up the space for society-and state-centred approaches to governance as well as for accounts that sidestepped or crosscut this familiar, indeed, often reified, distinction.
Another aspect of the changing economic and political order in this period was the reshaping of the world economy by a complex dialectic of globalization–regionalization under the dominance of capitalist relations that combined growing integration of the world order together with the survival of a plurality of national states. This process is alleged to make it more difficult for (national) states to control their own domestic economies let alone the global dynamic of capital accumulation. At the same time, capital accumulation was said to depend on an increasing range of extra-economic factors generated on various spatio-temporal scales through other institutional orders (see, for example, Chesnais, 1987; Castells, 1989; Porter, 1990; Reich, 1991; Nelson, 1993; Boyer, 1996). Major changes were also occurring in the (global) political system with equally paradoxical effects. Thus, on the one hand, there has been a tendential denationalization of the state system through the movement of state power upwards, downwards and sideways as attempts are made by state managers to regain operational autonomy (if not formal sovereignty as such) and thereby enhance the state’s own strategic capacities. On the other hand, there has been a tendential destatization of politics (a shift from the primacy of top-down government towards more decentred governance mechanisms) as political capacities are seen to depend on the effective coordination of interdependent forces within and beyond the state (for a review of these and related trends, see Jessop, 2015). It is in this context that governance (or ‘partnership’) strategies were strongly advocated as alternatives to market anarchy and organizational hierarchy in promoting economic development.
Interest in metagovernance was related to the growing perception of the problems generated in the 1990s by a combination of state and market failure and/or by a decline in social cohesion in the advanced capitalist societies. This was reflected in notions such as governmental overload, legitimacy crisis, steering crisis and ungovernability. It prompted theoretical and practical interest in the potential of coordination through self-organizing heterarchic networks and partnerships and other forms of reflexive collaboration. Most of the early studies of governance were concerned with specific practices or regimes oriented to specific objects of governance, linked either to the planning, programming and regulation of specific policy fields or to issues of economic performance. Concern with problems of governance and the potential contributions of metagovernance followed during the mid-1990s, and the nature and dynamics of metagovernance have since won growing attention.
The real world of governance
Many practices now subsumed under ‘governance’ have been examined under other rubrics. Thus corporatism, public–private partnerships, industrial districts, trade associations, statecraft, diplomacy, interest in ‘policing’, policy communities, international regimes and the like all involve aspects of what is now termed ‘governance’. In this sense, we find pre-cursors of current interest in governance in various disciplines. One could interpret this in four ways. First, regardless of the changing importance or otherwise of heterarchy (neither anarchy nor hierarchy) and solidarity, the significance of governance in lay discourses has changed, and this is reflected in social science scholarship. Second, a stable but recently subterranean stream of heterarchic practices has resurfaced and begun to attract renewed attention. Third, after becoming less significant compared with other modes of coordination, heterarchy has once again become important. And fourth, an upward trend has continued, is becoming dominant, and is likely to continue to do so. There is a kernel of truth in each interpretation.
The first possibility is suggested by the expansion of governance discourses. These range from ‘global governance’ through ‘multilevel governance’ (MLG) and the shift from ‘government to governance’ to the issues of ‘the stakeholding society’ and ‘corporate governance’. Given the close, mutually constitutive relationship between the social sciences and lay discourses, this suggestion would be worth exploring further.
The second possibility is the persistence of underlying realities beneath the vagaries of intellectual fashion. So-called ‘governance’ mechanisms (as contrasted to markets or hierarchy) have long been widely used in coordinating complex organizations and systems. There have always been issues and problems for which heterarchic governance is, so to speak, the ‘natural’ mode of coordination.10 Certain forms of interdependence are inappropriate for (or at least resistant to) market and/or imperative coordination. For example, public–private partnership is theoretically well-suited in cases of organized complexity characterized by a loose coupling of agents, complex forms of reciprocal interdependence and complex spatio-temporal horizons. In addition, different state traditions have given scope for market forces and/or self-regulation to operate in their economies and civil societies. There are also normative preferences for self-organization in certain contexts. This socially necessary minimum of heterarchic practices makes it even more curious that they have only recently attracted focused scientific interest. This is almost certainly related to the blind spots associated with specific disciplinary paradigms or prevailing forms of ‘common sense’. Thus, during the postwar period of growth based on a virtuous circle of mass production and mass consumption in North America and Western Europe, when the ‘mixed economy’ was a dominant paradigm, institutions and practices intermediate between market and state were often neglected. They had not actually disappeared; they were simply marginalized theoretically and politically. Subsequent disenchantment with the state in the 1970s, and with markets in the 1990s, has renewed interest in something that never really disappeared.
A third factor contributing to the rise of governance is the cycle of modes of coordination. All modes are prone to dilemmas, contradictions, paradoxes and failures, but the problems differ with the mode in question. Markets, states, networks and solidarity fail in different ways. One practical response to this situation is to combine modes of policy-making and vary their weight over time – thereby shifting the forms in which tendencies to ‘failure’ manifest themselves and creating room for manoeuvre (Offe, 1975a, b). This suggests that the current expansion of networks at the expense of markets and hierarchies and of governance at the expense of government may involve little more than a specific stage in a regular succession of dominant modes of policy-making. In this sense, what we are witnessing today is really discontinuity in continuity: oscillation within a repeated policy cycle. In other words, the rediscovery of governance could mark a fresh revolution in this process – a simple cyclical response to past state failures (especially those linked to attempts to manage the emerging crisis of Atlantic Fordism from the mid-1970s) and more recently, market failure (and its associated crisis in corporate governance).
An alternative explanation would be that, for various reasons, there has been a shift in the institutional centre of gravity (or ‘institutional attractor’) around which policy cycles operate due to some qualitative shift in the basic problems that regularizing or governmentalizing policies must address. Here we would be dealing with continuity in discontinuity: the revival of familiar governance mechanisms for qualitatively new purposes. If there is a major transition from Fordism to post-Fordism (linked additionally to new technologies, internationalization and regionalization), then such a long-term shift may be at work. Similar possibilities are indicated by the crisis of the national state – with a proliferation of cross-border and multitier problems that can no longer be coordinated within national state hierarchy or through neorealist anarchy of market (see Jessop, 1995). Here, too, we could anticipate that the expansion of networks and/or governance is a sign of a qualitative shift rather than a simple pendular swing within a policy cycle. Rather than prejudge this issue, however, one should recognize that there could be various path-dependent possibilities.
The fourth possibility is that a fundamental secular shift in social relations has occurred. Important new economic and social conditions and attendant problems have emerged that cannot be managed or resolved readily, if at all, through market-mediated anarchy or top-down state planning. This secular shift reflects the dramatic intensification of societal complexity that flows from growing functional differentiation of institutional orders in an increasingly global society – which leads, in turn, to greater systemic interdependencies across various social, spatial and temporal horizons of action. As Scharpf (1994: 37) notes:
… the advantages of hierarchical coordination are lost in a world that is characterized by increasingly dense, extended, and rapidly changing patterns of reciprocal interdependence, and by increasingly frequent, but ephemeral, interactions across all types of pre-established boundaries, intra-and interorganizational, intra-and intersectoral, intra-and international.
A similar argument could be made about the declining advantages of market coordination. In this sense, the recent expansion of networks and solidarities at the expense of markets and hierarchies and of governance at the expense of government is not just a pendular swing in some regular succession of dominant modes of policy-making. It reflects a shift in the fundamental structures of the real world and a corresponding shift in the centre of gravity around which policy cycles move.
Introducing some conceptual clarity
Faced with the wide range of factors that have prompted interest in governance and metagovernance and the wide range of usages and parallel vocabularies, it is useful to distinguish words from concepts. This holds especially where the terminology is not only unclear but also essentially contested. The latter is particularly common in periods of rapid social change and/or when new fields of academic inquiry are emerging. Both sets of circumstances apply in the present case. This illustrates the close, mutually constitutive, links among academic discourse, political practice and changing realities.11 This reflects the fact that the question of governance is more often and more directly related to problem-solving and crisis management in a wide range of fields than the regulation approach in heterodox economics. While this can have salutary effects in diverse fields, it also risks falling into a ‘floating eclecticism’12 by working both within and against old paradigms in a wide range of terrains. The risk of eclecticism is reinforced in some cases by the interest of governance theorists in issues of institutional design, which has led some governance theorists to focus more on specific collective decision-making or goal-attainment issues in relation to specific (socially and discursively constituted) problems. In this sense, governance theorists have sometimes inclined towards instrumentalist analyses that are less concerned to speak truth to power than to become its advisers. This is a temptation in the WISERD Civil Society programme.
More disinterested governance scholars are also interested in the diversity of policy regimes that emerge in response to crises, emergencies and other social problems and the political dynamic behind regime shifts. This often leads to an innovation process oriented to solving the purported governance problems and doing so in a more or less turbulent environment; new forms of governance will emerge on condition that collective action problems are resolved through one (or more) of the attempted solutions and become part of new patterns of conduct. Thus, one might examine how failure in established forms of governance and/or an emerging ‘crisis’ of governance is perceived by political actors (broadly conceived) and is then translated into demands for restructured and/or new governance regimes. This helps to explain the growing breadth of interest in the relative weight of government and governance.
Defining governance
Having emphasized the polyvalent, polycontextual and essentially contested nature of ‘governance’, I will now engage in the seemingly self-defeating exercise of offering a definition of governance. But at least this will provide a basis for later discussion in this book and illustrate ironically the importance of self-reflexive irony in addressing complex problems. This approach involves two analytical steps, the first identifying the broad field of coordination problems within which governance can be located, the second providing a narrow definition that identifies the differentia specifica of governance within this broad field. In broad terms, governance is one of several possible modes of coordination of complex and reciprocally interdependent activities or operations. What makes these modes relevant for our purposes is that their success depends on the performance of complementary activities and operations by other actors – whose pursuit of their activities and operations depends in turn on the performance of complementary activities and operations elsewhere within the relevant social ensemble (see Table 1.1).13 In general, the greater the material, social and spatio-temporal complexity of the problems to be addressed, the greater the number and range of different interests whose coordination is necessary to resolve them satisfactorily, and the less direct the reciprocities of these interests, the greater will be the difficulties of efficient, effective and consensual coordination regardless of the method of coordination that is adopted (for further discussion of complexity, see the chapters in Part I). It is still useful to distinguish four main forms of coordination of complex reciprocal interdependence: ex post coordination through exchange (for example, the anarchy of the market); ex ante coordination through imperative coordination (for example, the hierarchy of the firm, organization or state); reflexive self-organization (for example, the heterarchy of ongoing negotiated consent to resolve complex problems in a corporatist order or horizontal networking to coordinate a complex division of labour); and coordination through drawing as needed on unconditional commitments based on more or less extensive solidaristic relations in an imagined community. It is the third type of coordination that I refer to as ‘governance’ when the term is otherwise unqualified.
Table 1.1: Modalities of governance
| Exchange | Command | Dialogue | Solidarity | |
| Rationality | Formal and procedural | Substantive and goal-oriented | Reflexive and procedural | Unreflexive and value-oriented |
| Criterion of success | Efficient allocation of resources | Effective goal attainment | Negotiated consent | Requited commitment |
| Ideal typical example | Market | State | Network | Love |
| Stylized mode of calculation | Homo economicus | Homo hierarchicus | Homo politicus | Homo fidelis |
| Spatio-temporal horizons | World market, reversible time | Organizational space, planning | Rescaling, path shaping | Any time, any where |
| Primary criterion of failure | Economic inefficiency | Ineffectiveness | ‘Noise’, ‘talking shop’ | Betrayal, mistrust |
| Secondary criterion of failure | Market inadequacies | Bureaucratism, red tape | Secrecy, distorted communication | Codependency, asymmetry |
| Significance | Anarchy | Hierarchy | Heterarchy of civil society |
Source: Jessop (2017)
Reflexive self-organization can be distinguished from the other three types of coordination in terms of the basic rationale for its operations and its institutional logic (see Table 1.2). Thus, market exchange is characterized by a formal, procedural rationality that is oriented to the efficient allocation of scarce resources to competing ends. In contrast, imperative coordination has a substantive, goal-oriented rationality that is directed to the effective realization of specific collective goals established from above. In turn, governance, as defined here, has a substantive, procedural rationality that is concerned with solving specific coordination problems based on a commitment to a continuing dialogue to establish the grounds for negotiated consent, resource sharing and concerted action. As such, it is a form of self-organization that, in contrast to the anarchy of exchange, depends not on purely formal, ex post and impersonal procedures, but on substantive, continuing and reflexive procedures.
Solidarity, conversely, relies on an unreflexive and value-oriented rationality. It has roots in the voluntary giving of public goods, akin to classical liturgical associations (Kelen, 2001: 7–40). Since then it has taken many forms in ancient societies, analysed by Marcel Mauss (1990) in his book on gift giving, and it appears across history in diverse forms of commoning based on solidarity, mutuality and conviviality (de Angelis, 2017). More recently it is seen to depend on attitudes of mutual acceptance, cooperation and mutual support in times of need (Banting and Kymlicka, 2017: 3). Following Banta and Kymlicka (2017: 4), we can distinguish three dimensions of solidarity:
•Civic solidarity: this involves mutual tolerance; a commitment to living together in peace, free from intercommunal violence; acceptance of people of diverse ethnicities, languages and religions as legitimate members of ‘our’ community; and openness to newcomers from diverse parts of the world.
•Democratic solidarity: this involves support for basic human rights and equalities; support for the rule of law and for democratic norms and processes, including equal participation of citizens from all backgrounds; tolerance for the political expression of diverse political and cultural views consistent with basic rights and equalities; and acceptance of compromises among legitimate contending interests.
•Redistributive solidarity: this involves support for redistribution towards the poor and vulnerable groups; support for the full social inclusion of people of all backgrounds to core social programmes; and support for programmes that recognize and accommodate the distinctive needs and identities of different ethnocultural groups.
Governance procedures are concerned to identify mutually beneficial joint projects from a wide range of possible projects, to redefine them as the relevant actors attempt to pursue them in an often-turbulent environment and monitor how far these projects are being achieved, and to organize the material, social and temporal conditions deemed necessary and/or sufficient to achieve them. Moreover, in contrast to the hierarchy of command, reflexive self-organization does not involve actors’ acceptance of pre-given substantive goals defined from above on behalf of a specific organization (for example, a firm) or an imagined collectivity (for example, a community or nation) and the centralized mobilization of the resources to achieve these goals. Instead it involves continued negotiation of the relevant goals among the different actors involved and the cooperative mobilization of different resources controlled by different actors to achieve interdependent goals. For these reasons and to distinguish it from the anarchy of the market and the hierarchy of command, it is also common to refer to these forms of reflexive self-organization as heterarchic in character.
Reflexive self-organization
There are various forms of reflexive self-organization. One way to classify them is in terms of the level of social relations on which they operate. We can distinguish collaboration based on informal interpersonal networks, the self-organization of interorganizational relations, and the indirect steering of the coevolution and structural coupling of intersystemic relations. The individuals who are active in interpersonal networks may represent only themselves and/or articulate the codes of specific functional systems. However, although they may also belong to specific agencies, groups or organizations, they are not mandated to commit the latter to a given line of action. In contrast, interorganizational relations are based on negotiation and positive coordination in task-oriented ‘strategic alliances’ derived from a (perceived or constructed) coincidence of organizational interests and dispersed control of the interdependent resources needed to produce a joint outcome that is deemed to be mutually beneficial. The key individuals involved in interorganizational relations are also empowered to represent their organizations and to negotiate strategies on their behalf for positive interorganizational coordination. Another layer of complexity is introduced by the more programmatic or mission-oriented, decentred, context-mediated nature of intersystemic steering. Whereas noise reduction involves the mediated nature of intersystemic steering, here noise reduction and negative coordination are important means of governance. Noise reduction comprises practices that are intended to facilitate communication and mutual understanding between actors and organizations oriented to different operational logics and rationalities; negative integration involves taking account of the possible adverse repercussions of one’s own actions on third parties or other systems and exercising self-restraint as appropriate.14
Although governance in the sense of reflexive self-organization occurs on all three levels, the term itself is often limited to interorganizational coordination mechanisms and practices. However, where the relevant agencies, stakeholders or organizations are based in different institutional orders or functional systems, problems relating to intersystemic steering will also affect the ‘self-organization of interorganizational relations’ even if they are not explicitly posed as such in this context. Indeed, more generally, all three forms of reflexive self-organization may be linked in tangled hierarchies. For example, interpersonal trust often helps to maintain markets and hierarchies (cf Granovetter, 1985). It can facilitate interorganizational negotiation and/or help build less personalized, more ‘generalized trust’ as organizations and other collective actors (including interorganizational partnerships) are seen to sacrifice short-term interests and reject opportunism (cf Luhmann, 1979: 120–2; Marin, 1990).
Table 1.2: Two-dimensional hybridity
| Primacy of profitability | Primacy of command | Primacy of dialogue | Primacy of solidarity | |
| Secondary role of exchange | n/a | Mafias, new public management | Benchmarking, good governance | Trade unions, syndicalism |
| Secondary role of command | Firms, mixed economy | n/a | Public–private partnerships, deliberative democracy | Bund, commune, associational democracy |
| Secondary role of dialogue | Guanxi, network economy | Parties, soft law, cooperative state | n/a | Community, communitarianism |
| Secondary role of solidarity | Social enterprises, cooperatives, social economy | Commune, subsidiarity | Social movements, civil society | n/a |
Source: Jessop (2017)
In turn, interorganizational dialogue across systems eases intersystemic communication by reducing the ‘noise’ that can arise from major differences between systems in their respective institutional logics, operational codes and modes of calculation. If organizations representing different systems can formulate and communicate these contrasting desiderata and legitimate them in terms of their respective functional requirements, this may promote mutual understanding and the search for mutually beneficial trade-offs. It thereby permits ‘systemic trust’ (in the integrity of other systems’ codes and operations) by promoting mutual understanding and stabilizing reciprocal expectations around a wider ‘societal project’ as the basis for future self-binding and self-limiting actions. In turn, the resulting noise reduction can promote interpersonal trust by enhancing mutual understanding and by stabilizing expectations. In negotiated economies, for example, a few formal organizations and forums are entrusted to formulate and represent the identities and interests of different subsystems at the same time as they contribute to the definition and promotion of a wider ‘societal project’.
The rise of governance practices
The rise of governance is partly due to secular shifts in political economy that have made heterarchy and solidarity more significant than markets or hierarchies for economic, political and social coordination. I now consider the reasons for this by undertaking two tasks: first, identifying the logic of governance as a distinctive coordination mechanism in contradistinction to markets and imperative coordination; and second, considering more fully what societal (or macro-social) changes might have made heterarchy more appropriate as an economic coordination mechanism.
First, the most general case for the shift from government hierarchy and pure market exchange to heterarchic governance can be made in terms of the evolutionary advantage (the relative capacities to innovate and learn in a changing environment) that it offers in certain circumstances. Self-organization is especially useful in cases of loose coupling or operational autonomy, relations where a plurality of interdependent but autonomous organizations, each controlling important resources, need to coordinate their actions in the face of complex reciprocal interdependence, complex spatio-temporal horizons and shared interests or projects to produce a joint outcome that is deemed mutually beneficial. Mayntz (1993) has discussed networks as a form of heterarchic governance in these terms. She suggests that their typical logic is that of negotiation directed to the realization of a joint product, such as ‘a specific technical innovation, a city plan, a strategy of collective action, or a problem solution in public policy’ (Mayntz, 1993: 11). In this way, common short-term objectives can be identified, and their self-interested realization used to promote generalized compliance with interorganizational expectations and rules (Marin, 1990: 15; Scharpf, 1994). Crucial to the success of such arrangements is the building of interorganizational capacities that synergetically reinforce those of individual organizational members. These arguments can be illustrated from the emergence and dynamics of the so-called ‘negotiated economy’ that was realized in Scandinavia (cf Nielsen and Pedersen, 1988, 1993; Andersen et al, 1996).
I would add that such negotiation typically occurs in the context of more or less complex forms of interpersonal and interorganizational networking that bring and keep together those involved in negotiation; that the key to successful negotiation is noise reduction, that is, reducing mutual incomprehension in the communication between different institutional orders in and through attempts to enhance understanding and sensitivity to their distinctive rationalities, identities and interests; and that, once agreements are reached, they form the basis for negative and positive coordination of activities. In short, if reliance on heterarchy has increased, it is because increasing interdependencies are no longer so easily managed through markets and hierarchies.
Second, turning to the macro-social changes that might explain the growth of heterarchy, I focus on the interdependencies in and across the economy and polity. The world economy is being reshaped by a complex dialectic of globalization-regionalization. This has allegedly made it more difficult for (national) states to control economic activities within their borders let alone global capitalist dynamics. Once the relative coincidence of coherent economic spaces and national territories typical of postwar Atlantic Fordism (in the US, Northwestern Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) was undermined by internationalization of the economy (especially among the advanced capitalist economies), faith in the national state’s capacities to govern the economy was undermined. A corresponding increase in the ‘unstructured complexity’ of the economy on a world scale has triggered attempts on various spatial scales (from local to global) to reimpose some structure and order through resort to heterarchic coordination.
These changes also make public–private partnerships and other forms of heterarchy more relevant than conventional legislative, bureaucratic and administrative techniques. This is seen in a turn from the ‘Keynesian welfare national state’ to a more complex, negotiated system oriented to international competitiveness, innovation, flexibility and an ‘enterprise culture’. The primary coordination instruments in the Keynesian welfare system were the market and the state. They were articulated in a ‘mixed economy’ in which big business, big labour and the big state often engaged in tripartite concertation at the national or regional level. In the emerging Schumpeterian workfare regime (Jessop, 1993, 2002b), the market, the national state and the mixed economy have lost significance to interfirm networks, public–private partnerships and a multilateral and heterarchic ‘negotiated economy’. Moreover, in contrast to the primarily national focus of the mixed economy, these new forms of negotiated economy also involve ‘key’ economic players from local and regional as well as national and increasingly, international, economic spaces. This is linked to the partial ‘hollowing out’ of national states through the expansion of supranational government, local governance regimes and transnationalized local policy networks in an attempt to enhance the ‘decentred context-mediated steering’ of capitalist economies. And this latter shift poses further coordination problems concerning the management of the interscalar as well as intersystemic dependencies.
Likewise, the traditional models of the large, vertically integrated firm of the 1960s, and of the small autonomous, single-phase firm of the 1970s and part of the 1980s are replaced by a new type of large networked firm, with strongly centralized strategic functions extending in several directions, and by new types of small enterprise, integrated into multicompany local networks. Across these networks, a system of constantly evolving power relationships governs both the dynamics of innovation and the capacity of partners to capture returns. The network firm is attracted towards diversified mass production and a single firm’s competitiveness is its control of complementary assets in the hands of its potential partners (Capello, 1996: 490).
Governance failure
The early interest in governance and the later interest in metagovernance indicate that markets, states, governance and solidarity all fail as modes of coordinating relations of complex reciprocal interdependence. This is not surprising because failure is a central feature of all social relations, for ‘there is no such thing as complete or total control of an object or set of objects – governance is necessarily incomplete and as a necessary consequence must always fail’ (Malpas and Wickham, 1995: 40). Indeed, given the growing structural complexity and opacity of the social world, failure becomes the most likely outcome of most attempts to govern it with reference to multiple objectives over extended spatial and temporal horizons – whether through markets, states, partnerships or another mechanism.
This is often recognized. However, while failure in other modes of coordination is regarded as inevitable, in the preferred mode of coordination it is typically seen as exceptional and corrigible. For example, for liberals, although the state is prone to failure, a turn to the market will solve the problem. If the market fails, however, it can be improved. Conversely, for statists, the response to market failure is government. If government fails, however, it should be improved. This polarization is reflected both in the succession of governments and in policy cycles within governments in which different modes of policy-making succeed each other as the difficulties of each become more evident. These issues are further explored in Part I.
Overall, then, this book explores:
•The implications of complexity theory for the inevitability of failure. This is a new approach in terms of critical policy studies and critical governance studies (Chapter 2).
•A taxonomy of modes of governance and their hybrid forms. This typology is more comprehensive than others, grounded theoretically and historically as well as in a survey of empirical analyses (Chapters 2, 3 and 4).
•An analysis of governance and governance failure in terms of the limits, contradictions and dilemmas of different modes of governance (Chapter 4).
•A theory of metagovernance, metagovernance failure and responses to failure (Chapters 2, 3 and 4).
•Locating civil society in terms of the theory of governance (and governance failure) as a potential point of intersection of networks and solidarity as modes of governance and resources for other modes of governance (Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4).
•Locating civil society as a point of intersection between competing strategic responses to market and state failure: top-down self-responsibilization and bottom-up self-emancipation. This represents a major challenge to current policy, practice and thinking in the field of government and governance practice (this holds for the following bullet points too) (Chapters 1, 2 and 7).
•An analysis of the struggles to integrate self-responsibilization and self-emancipation into broader strategies for governance and metagovernance (Chapter 7).
•A series of case studies to illustrate some of the points at issue above. These case studies will include, but are not confined to, research conducted within the WISERD Civil Society programme (Chapters 5, 8, 9 and 10).
