e-Governance

Managing or Governing?

Leslie Budd, Lisa Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415965170
• eBook ISBN: 9781135890483
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Developing hand in hand with e-Business in its use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), e-Government emerged in the 1990s with the promise of a more accessible, efficient and transparent form for public institutions to perform and interact with citizens. The successes-and some critics say, general failures-of e-Government initiatives around the world have led to the development of e-Governance-a broader, more encompassing concept that involves not only public institutions but private ones as well.

Taking a multidisciplinary approach, this book explores e-Governance in theory and practice with an analytical narrative from heterodox perspectives. Covering such essential issues as global governance of the Internet, the European Knowledge Economy, the transformative promise of mobile telephony, the rise of e-Universities, Internet accessibility for the disabled and e-Governance in transition economies, this book draws on contributions from experienced academics and practitioners with an expertise in an emerging field. In addition, each chapter includes such features as discussion of key issues that draw on case studies in order to facilitate significant discussion questions.

PART I

SETTING THE e-GOVERNANCE SCENE

1

GOVERNANCE PUZZLES

JOHN CLARKE

Introduction

This chapter focuses primarily on puzzles about changing forms and practices of governance and then addresses the ways in which issues of e-Governance are implicated in these puzzles. Governance has emerged as a key concern of studies of changing relations between state and society or government and people in the last two decades (see, inter alia, Cooper, 1998; Kooiman, 1993; Newman, 2001 and 2005; Pierre, 2000; Rhodes, 1997). Despite — or possibly even because of — this growing attention, it remains a somewhat blurred and elusive term, bearing a range of different meanings and interpretations, and carrying the imprint of different theoretical perspectives. Nevertheless, most positions seem to treat governance as a defining feature of the modern/contemporary world — for example, expressed in the claim that we have moved ‘from government to governance’ (Rhodes, 1997). For others, however, governance refers to a still emergent set of institutional forms, arrangements and practices involved in the coordination of the public realm and its unsettled and uncertain relations with other domains — the private, the domestic and the transnational (Newman, 2005). An alternative view of governance challenges the ‘grand narrative’ of the shift from government to governance and addresses new governance processes as disorganised and disorganising (Bode, 2007; Clarke, 2006).

In this chapter, I draw on a diverse field of work about governance that ranges from studies of British public service reform to the processes and politics of governing a new social, political and economic space — south-eastern Europe. One end of this range — British public service reform — appears as a ‘classic case’ of governance studies: the move away from direct government to first ‘markets’, and then ‘networks’ as modes of governing the public realm (Rhodes, 1997). While it might be marked by new dimensions of ‘multi-level governance’ (with levels ranging from the supra-national agencies such as the European Union and the World Trade Organisation to sub-national levels of regional and local governance), it is still framed by a spatial conception of a ‘mature democracy’, adapting to new governing dynamics. In the process, Britain represents a leading example of new models that may be exported to others (from the New Public Management to Public Private Partnerships).

In contrast, the other end of this range — the governance of an emergent regional space — looks more unsettled. There are problems of defining, much less governing, south-eastern Europe (Syrri and Stubbs, 2005). Political and institutional arrangements have been profoundly unsettled, and national spaces and their institutionalisations and interrelationships are still in the process of being worked out. Here, governance and the subjects and objects of governing are in the process of simultaneous and mutual invention or constitution (Lendvai and Stubbs, 2006). However, I will suggest that studies of governance might learn more from such emergent processes than from a focus of ‘leading examples’. Indeed, the processes of governance emerging in ‘marginal’ locations might illuminate what is going on in British governance arrangements. This orientation focuses my attention on ‘governance puzzles’ — the peculiar and unpredictable dynamics associated with emergent governance arrangements.

The chapter explores two particular ‘puzzles’: the multi-ness of governance; and the problem of making governance popular. Both of these puzzles are linked to issues about the emergent dynamics of governance and each of them is tied to the rise of e-Governance in distinctive ways.

The Multi-Ness of Governance

In political science, it has become commonplace to refer to the rise of ‘multi-level governance’, indicating the multiplicity of levels, scales, or tiers of governance bodies or processes that may be nested together (e.g., Bache and Flinders, 2004). Such levels or tiers involve differentiated but overlapping (and possibly even integrated) authority over, and claims on, particular governance issues and governable places. Multi-level governance is associated with what Rhodes (1997) called the ‘hollowing out of the state’ as nation states are subjected to the authority of superordinate tiers and to processes of devolution or decentralisation to sub-national levels. Processes of both globalisation and Europeanisation have proved fertile terrain for the investigation and elaboration of such concepts (see, inter alia, Beyeler, 2003; Ferrera, 2005). There are problems about the concept of level, and about the assumption that it has a corresponding spatial character (see, for example, Allen, 2003). So we are invited to think of levels nested within increasingly larger spaces (from the neighbourhood to the global level). Contemporary approaches in geography suggest that space is not ordered in such tidy and orderly formations (Massey, 2004). We might want to think about the ways in which the ‘multi-ness’ of governance brings new spaces into being, or makes new framings of space visible. We may see this in governance projects that aim to bring new regions such as ‘south-east Europe’ into being; that construct neighbourhoods as a site of governing or new governance arrangements for primary health care that claim to address and develop the ‘local health economy’ (Aldred, 2007; Cochrane, 2006; Lendvai and Stubbs, 2006). In the last case, the ‘local’ is not a fixed or given category: indeed, the localness of different public services and their governance arrangements may vary substantially, while the ‘health economy’ has to be constructed and developed, rather than discovered. Similarly, South East Europe has to be imagined, mapped, and brought into being — made into a reality — by the very governance arrangements that name themselves as governing the area, just as ‘Europe’ has to be defined and reconstructed in the process of its governance through the EU (Walters, 2004). Put simply, the object of governance is constructed in the process of governance — whether this object is a space, a group or an institution. And through governance arrangements, claims are established about who has the authority to govern, the bases of such authority, and the means by which it may be exercised.

This more dynamic understanding of the interrelationship between governance processes and spatial formations reopens the concept of levels (Stubbs, 2002). Where multi-level governance treats the organisation of scale and space as vertical, we can think about governance relationships as multiple, multi-dimensional and overlaid in complicated figures. Some of those relationships are hierarchical and vertical, involving claims about forms of sovereignty and authority, and structured around principles of decentralisation and devolution. But some are horizontal, such as networks within and across national borders. For example, Hansen and Salskov-Iversen use the idea of ‘globalising webs’ to analyse the transnational articulation of e-Government, arguing that they ‘can be seen as one organisational instantiation of how social processes are increasingly unhindered by territorial and jurisdictional barriers and enhance the spread of trans-border practices in economic, political and social domains’ (Hansen and Salskov-Iversen, 2005: 230). Other governance relationships may work vertically, but leap over intervening levels (connecting individuals or localities to supra-national agencies) or mix up levels (local partnerships with transnational corporations as one partner). In this way, a spatial perspective alerts us to the ways in which ideas, agents and practices flow in multiple directions.

In this context I am interested in taking the ‘multi’ of multi-level governance as a pointer to the many ‘multi-s’ that might be at stake in these new arrangements of governing. For example, governance arrangements that are multi-level are also often multi-national, multi-agency, and multi-ethnic or multi-cultural. I think these different ‘multi-s’ and their intersections form one central governance puzzle: how to analyse governance arrangements that are both multiple and mobile.

Governance processes are increasingly engaged by the multinational — in terms of dealing with multiple and overlapping national sovereignties, with cross-border spaces, and with transnational processes taking place both between and within particular national spaces (flows of objects, money and people for example). The increasing significance of such transnational processes, relations and organisations has given many aspects of governance a distinctively multi-national character. This may merely imply that governance arrangements link several national spaces in networks, webs or partnerships. But multi-national governance may require forms of cross-border working or the creation of partnerships that ‘transcend’ national identification — for example, the economic or social development of ‘regions’ that cross borders cannot be allocated to a singular national sovereignty claim. Indeed, the region being brought into being may acquire its own powers and capacities beyond singular national sovereignty claims (the European Union, Mercosur and other ‘economic’ regions embodied in governance entities). As a result, governance arrangements both negotiate and modulate the sovereignty associated with nations as bounded spaces, even as — in some cases — the ‘nations’ themselves are in the process of being invented, redefined or recreated. This applies equally to the reconfigurations of the countries of the former Yugoslavia as it does to the countries of the increasingly dis-united Kingdom (involving differentiated forms of ‘national/regional’ devolution).

Governance is, almost by definition, multi-agency: both in the narrow sense of engaging multiple agencies in some common project or concern and in the wider sense of drawing upon different sorts of agents (individuals, groups, organisations) to engage in the business of governing. Governance arrangements, or what Stephen Ball (2006) has called the ‘new architecture of governance’, require multiple agents because specific projects or objectives are not the sole property of a single entity (government or a government department) but the shared concern of different agents and interests. This understanding of the mutli-agentic character of governance links very different theoretical perspectives: the governance narrative of UK scholars; the dynamic systems view of views of governance as co-steering; and even post-Foucauldian conceptions of governing at a distance (Rhodes, 1997; Kooiman, 2000; Rose, 1999). Governance moves analytic attention beyond the state — opening up questions of its disaggregation (Slaughter, 2004); its decentring (McDonald and Marston, 2006) or its dispersal (Clarke and Newman, 1997). These terms are rather different from some of the epochal claims about the disappearance or even death of the state, insisting that the state persists, albeit in new formations, relationships and assemblages (Sharma and Gupta, 2006).

‘Partnership’ might be one defining motif of the new governance. Partnership implies the displacement of the (nation) state as the sovereign authority, such that governance involves co-steering between different types of authority, rather than merely being (contingently) devolved authority from the state. Partnership as a mode of governance draws attention to the co-existence of, and possible collaboration between, different sources of authority — the public power of the state and varieties of ‘private authority’ (corporations, communities, consumers, for example, see Hansen and SalskovIversen, forthcoming). In practice, of course, partnerships vary as formations of power and authority. Some enrol multiple sources of authority into new projects; others look more like virtual partnerships or shells for the pursuit of one set of interests (the recurrent criticism levelled at the Private Finance Initiative and its successor form Public Private Partnerships in the UK, where ‘corporate welfare’ appears to be the main outcome, e.g., Pollock, 2004). Others look like ‘compulsory partnerships’ where the power of the state is used to enforce partnership between agents and agencies who might not otherwise have sought collaboration (see Glendinning, Powell and Rummery, 2002, on New Labour’s approach to partnership making in the UK).

This compulsory/coercive approach to partnership as a mode of governance makes visible what Jessop (and others) have called the relationship between governance and ‘meta-governance’. For Jessop ‘meta-governance’ is one of the ways in which the state may have been displaced, engaging in new roles and relationships — rather than disappearing. Within the complex of new governance mechanisms, the state ‘reserves to itself the right to open, close, juggle and re-articulate governance arrangements, not only terms of particular functions, but also from the viewpoint of partisan and overall political advantage’ (Jessop 2000: 19).

There are two other dynamics about the multi-agency character of governance that are worth some attention. First, new governance arrangements may have to discover, or even create, the agents that they need to do the business of governing. For example, finding governors, trustees or representatives for particular interests (parents in education governance; tenants in social housing governance) is a task of governance. Such people have to be discovered, groomed and developed to take up their governance roles. They have to possess or acquire the relevant ‘expertise’ to govern. In a similar way, governance arrangements often need the objects of governance to be ‘represented’ (embodied in persons who can ‘speak for them’). Neighbourhoods, communities, service users, regions, or specified socio-demographic groups have to be ‘brought to voice’ in governance. In the following section, I will explore some of the complications associated with these processes of representation.

Secondly, however, new governance bodies become agents themselves, acquiring powers, capacities and interests unique to them. However limited, transitory or even virtual such bodies are — they are nevertheless bodies. They have the capacity to enact governance — to make the principles, models and schemas of governance materialise in practice. We cannot, or should not assume, that there are direct transitions from the principles and plans to the practices of governance. What are conventionally described as ‘implementation processes’ are better understood as processes of translation, in which meanings are subject to inflection, interpretation by active agents in specific locations (Newman, 2006; Lendvai, 2005; Lendvai and Stubbs, 2006, see also Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005). While translation may be true of ‘implementation’ in general, it has a particular resonance in relation to governance — because governance arrangements are still emergent organisational forms for which previous organisational templates may be a poor guide. Terms such as hybrids, flex organisations, public-private agencies, network ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge e-Business series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION: MANAGING GOVERNANCE OR GOVERNANCE MANAGEMENT. IS IT ALL IN A DIGITAL DAY'S WORK?
• PART I SETTING THE e-GOVERNANCE SCENE
• PART II ENABLING AND MANAGING TECHNOLOGIES
• PART III FUNCTIONAL FIELDS FOR e-GOVERNANCE
• INDEX