The Politics of Self-Governance

Eva Sørensen, Peter Triantafillou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317020073
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Liberal democracies are experiencing a major transformation of public governance by which self-regulation, co-operation and negotiation between public and private actors and across different political-administrative levels play an increasingly important role for policy-making and implementation. Using the term 'governance imagery', or what a given society envisions to be the proper way of governing public affairs, this volume examines the emergence, causes and consequences of the politics of self-governance both within relevant social science theorizing and in the everyday production of public governance in various policy areas. It questions how self-governance materialized in various areas of public governance in different liberal democracies, and the driving forces and political effects of attempts to enhance the role of self-governance. Challenging the theory and practice of public administration, The Politics of Self-Governance is an indispensable read for all those interested in new forms of public governance.

1 The Politics of Self-Governance: An Introduction

Eva Sørensen and Peter Triantafillou

DOI: 10.4324/9781315554259-1

1. Towards a new governance imagery

Over the last 30 years we have witnessed a slow but steady emergence of a new governance imagery that embodies a novel understanding of what it entails to govern in an efficient, effective and democratic manner. From being perceived as an act that is carried out by a publicly elected sovereign ruler over a population consisting of individual and collective subjects through different forms of rules and regulations, governance is increasingly being regarded as a complex process of co-governance involving a plurality of relevant and affected public authorities and private stakeholders in carrying out various governance tasks through different forms of self-governance. This new imagery is embedded in a variety of, often contradictory, governing activities carried out under such headings as participatory planning, active social policies, network governance and new public management. While these diverse activities cannot in any way be reduced to one and the same phenomenon, they all, in one way or another, hold the promise of being more effective, efficient and/or democratic by latching on to the self-governing capacities of individuals and collectives. In that sense, they all inscribe themselves in a governance imagery that we denote the politics of self-governance.

One of the most striking features of this new governance imagery is that it redefines society from being an object of governance that represents a burden to the governors, to being a potential resource that needs to be activated in the pursuit of efficient, effective and democratic public governance. Hence, affected and involved citizens, firms, voluntary organizations and interest organizations are increasingly being regarded as knowledgeable, competent, resourceful and responsible contributors to solving governance tasks. If the once celebrated institutionalized divide between state, market and civil society – between the public and the private sector – ever did exist, its clarity and relevance is increasingly contested. According to the emerging governance imagery, market and civil society are not spheres of freedom beyond the reach of public rule, but rather important contributors to the production of public governance due to their alleged ability to produce public value through self-governance. The state, on its side, is regarded not as an institutional condensation of hierarchical rule but as a relay for the articulation and management of institutional settings engendering the self-governing capacities of public and private agencies.

Before proceeding, some conceptual clarification may be appropriate. By the notion of 'self' – used in the context of self-governance – we are allowing for a variety of individual and collective selves of which some are public and some are private. Hence, we refer to a diverse body of agents ranging from public administrators, politicians, citizens and private entrepreneurs to public institutions, private companies and NGOs. The term 'self', indicates that these agents share a certain capacity to act not due to some innate quality, but due to the social and political processes in which the self is embedded. We use the term self-governance indifferently from the term autonomy which literally translates as self-legislation from the Greek. Of course, this is a deceptively simple definition which immediately raises several questions of which the perhaps most important one is: Does self-governance entail a form of governing (by the self) taking place in isolation from other social and political forces? The short answer is no, because such a definition would exclude analytical attention to all the political forces impinging on self-governance. While we do not regard self-governance as something taking place in a social or political vacuum, we do restrict our understanding to the situations in which the governing of the self is not wholly determined by forces external to the self. This would in our view make it meaningless to talk of self-governance. Consequently, our notion of self-governance comprises that vast array of situations in which the self is allowed and possibly even urged to govern itself by external, non-deterministic forces. Our motivation for picking such an admittedly broad definition is that it allows us to explore the diversity of the many ideas, arguments, programs and interventions seeking to utilize and augment self-governance.

The questioning of the borderline between the public and the private sector –between what was traditionally seen as the realm of coercion and the realm of freedom – has not only transformed the private sector into a potential co-governor, but has also paved the way for the introduction of different market-like and civil society-like forms of self-governance into the public sector. Hence, the staging and managing of competitive games and norm based collaboration between more or less self-governing public and private actors have become a central tool kit in efforts to advance public governance. These new forms of regulated self-governance seek to push bureaucratic forms of governance aside in order to give way to incentive-or motivation-based forms of governance that enhance the eagerness of public institutions, public employees and individual and organized users of public services to contribute actively to defining central governance problems, qualifying policy objectives, implementing policy initiatives and evaluating governance performance. In brief, the new governance imagery is characterized by a form of governing that works by nurturing and shaping the problem solving and self-steering capacities of both public and private, and both individual and collective selves.

But what is really new about the emerging governance imagery and the reforms that are informed by it? Certainly there is nothing new about political steering being dependent on the self-governing capacities of citizens, groups, firms and organizations. The type of (social) liberal governing emerging after the bourgeois, democratic revolutions in Western Europe and other parts of the world from the end of the eighteenth century clearly depended upon the making of citizen-subjects who were able to freely conduct themselves according to existing codes of morality and civility. This amounted to a form of classical liberal governing that as a constituting feature depended on the ability of free subjects to govern themselves properly and on the ability of the state apparatus and other governing actors to instill in these subjects the discipline of freedom (Foucault 1979; Hayek 1979, 163). In particular, this classical form of liberal government depended on the making of a more or less autonomous private sphere (civil society) distinct from the public sphere in general and the state in particular (Habermas 1989). Today we are seeing a new form of governing that tries to unfold the self-governing capacities of individual and collective actors by going across if not by outright ignoring the public-private boundaries that were so dear to classical liberal government – a fact lamented by a number of concerned democratic scholars (Habermas 1987). Today the role of governing authorities (be they private or public) seems to be less about producing disciplined and docile bodies and more about creating entrepreneurial individual and collective actors that are constantly improving themselves in terms of health, wealth and social skills (Deleuze 1995).

In a certain sense, the new governance imagery espouses a far more interventionist mode of governing than classical liberalism ever imagined. The ambition of the new governance imagery is not only that of correcting and disciplining, but above all also that of augmenting and improving. This entails that the types of selves addressed by the new politics have expanded. Today, the selves who are targeted by governance interventions are not only the criminals, the ill and the deviant, but also communities, business councils, policy networks and public agencies whose self-governing powers are invoked in order to make them more effective, efficient or democratic. More importantly, the interventions aim to construct capable individual and collective selves through initiatives that augment their self-esteem, life-long learning abilities, entrepreneurial capacities and flexibility and sense of responsibility. Correspondingly, we witness the emergence of a wide range of devices, procedures, techniques and programs that seek to gauge the capacities of societal actors to develop and improve themselves. In effect, these devices are creating new visibilities and measures of human and organizational capacities such as contracting out, public-private partnerships, performance measurement, bench marking and human resource management.

The working hypothesis of this book is that the changes sketched above amount to a significant change in the way in which the possibilities and tasks of public governance are being understood. More precisely, we believe that we are witnessing the emergence of a new hegemonic governance imagery characterized by high hopes of potential benefits of self-governance for the enhancement of efficient, effective and democratic governance. By the term 'imagery' we are referring neither to a political ideology manipulating objective interests or covering up the true state of affairs, nor to some kind of abstract collective unconscious structuring of human conduct from the outside. Instead we use the term governance imagery to refer to those manifold and often contradictory lines of questioning and ways of thinking about public governance that are always already inscribed in concrete activities be that academic labour such as the production of theories or political-administrative interventions such as public sector reforms, or both. Thus, in line with Wittgenstein's understanding of rules in language games (Wittgenstein 1997), we regard the governance imagery not as something that stands above or apart from social practice but as part and parcel of it.

By hegemony we refer to a dominant way of thinking about the nature, potentials and tasks of public governance, not to an all-embracing (totalizing) political ideology. This hegemony has materialized itself in two ways over the last three decades, namely in public sector reforms and in the academic theorizing on public governance. Public sector reforms in advanced liberal democracies all over the world and in a wide variety of policy areas have been preoccupied with institutionalizing forms of governance that exploit the potential self-governing capacity of the involved and affected stakeholders in ways that is meant to enhance the efficiency, effectiveness and democratic quality of public governance. With regard to the latter, social scientific theories, notably political science, public administration research and sociology, have increasingly occupied themselves with reflections and speculation concerning why and how individual and collective forms of self-governance have become a core ingredient in contemporary governance and what the possible impact of different forms of self-governance is likely to be.

If we accept that governance has changed in the direction sketched above, what could be the reasons? It would of course be a blatant display of hubris to suggest that any single force is lying behind these changes. More importantly, as the chapters of this book show, the intellectual vocabularies and political reforms informed by the governance imagery are highly diverse and often contradictory phenomena that are the result of highly differential forces. If we should dare propose some general forces contributing to the emergence of the governance imagery, it would be 'the usual suspects'. First of all, the rapid economic growth in most post-WWII Western states had created high ambitions among policy makes and similarly high expectations among citizens of the public provision of health services, education and social security. Thus, when the same states were hit by severe economic recession and fiscal deficits in the 1970s and 1980s, policymakers and administrators were under severe pressure to find new ways of reducing public expenditures. Secondly, the emergence of new computer-based systems of taxation, accounting, auditing, performance measurement, etc. held the promise of delivering public services in a more goal- and cost-effective manner. Thirdly, we see a rather queer merging of 'Leftist' ideals of emancipation, self-determination and self-realization found in the new social movements with 'Rightist' ideals propagating the withdrawal of the state and other public service providers to an absolute minimum number of core functions in favor of a reinvigoration of the ability and responsibility of individuals, families and communities to take care of themselves. Despite continued differences and conflicts over the ways in which self-governance should be put into concrete practice, we seem to see the emergence of a broad consensus in support of self-governance as both an end in itself and as a means to provide more effective public governance.

If it is correct that the new governance imagery has materialized more or less simultaneously in concrete public governance reforms and in academic studies of public governance, we are faced with the question of whether the theoretical diagnoses are spurred by the public governance reforms or, the other way around, whether the emergence of new theories and perceptions of governance is one of the driving forces behind the reform initiatives. In line with our Wittgenstein inspired approach to social practice, we adopt the both-and position: The governance imagery is fed by problems, plans and reforms in public governance as well as by academic thinking about these changes. This may seem a rather facile approach. Yet we believe it is a fruitful one in that it allows u...