Governance, Politics and the State

Jon Pierre, B. Guy Peters

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780230220454
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350311435
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Administrative Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Having started out as a new and alternative way of thinking about policy making and governing more broadly, governance is now established as a dominant paradigm in understanding national, subnational and global politics. The long-awaited second edition of this textbook takes into account the significant growth and proliferation of the field in recent years and offers a state of the art introduction to how governance is being theorised and studied today. Written by two leading political scientists, Governance, Politics and the State considers how societies are being, and can be, steered in a complex world where states must increasingly interact with and influence other actors and institutions to achieve results. It is a valuable book for all students of governance. New to this Edition:
- A fully updated and revised set of chapters, including four new chapters – on multilevel governance, global governance, metagovernance and populism and governance.
- A postscript on how to study governance

1	DIFFERENT WAYS TO THINK ABOUT GOVERNANCE

Governance can be a confusing term. It has become an umbrella concept for such a wide variety of phenomena as policy networks (Rhodes, 2017), public management (Hood, 1991; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2017), coordination of sectors of the economy (Campbell et al., 1991; Hollingsworth et al., 1994), public–private partnerships (Pierre, 1998a), collaboration between public and private actors in public service delivery (Ansell and Gash, 2007; Donahue and Zeckhauser, 2011), corporate governance (Tricker, 2015; Williamson, 1996), and ‘good governance’ as a reform objective for some time promoted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Leftwich, 1994).

Furthermore, there is a tendency to confuse governance as an empirical phenomenon with theories about how this phenomenon operates and can be understood. And the governance debate has also seen examples of confusion between the empirical and normative aspects of governance, as will be discussed later in this chapter and also in the concluding chapter. With the proliferation of governance studies, the need for maintaining conceptual clarity has also increased.

Given the possible confusion about the term, we need to examine and evaluate the different ways to think about governance and the different definitions of that concept existing in the contemporary political science and economics literature. In this chapter we will discuss different perspectives on governance. The bulk of the chapter examines governance in terms of a configuration of structures and governance defined as different types of processes. Following that discussion we will focus on governance as an analytical framework and how governance is used and conceptualized in other academic disciplines.

First we discuss governance as structure and process. We begin with three common governance arrangements that have existed historically as well as at present: hierarchies, markets and networks. In addition we will discuss governance as the processes of steering and coordination, which are two dominant dynamic perspectives in the current literature.

Process and outcomes: The State as independent and dependent variable

This book considers governance from a State-centric perspective. Some might object that if one of the defining characteristics of governance is the downplaying of the State in the pursuit of collective interests, focusing on the State is an awkward approach. However, in order to understand the role of the State which we see emerging in various modes of governance, and before dismissing the State as a leading actor in this governance, we must have a clear picture of the historical role of the State. The State-centric perspective allows us to look at the State as either the independent or the dependent variable. In less positivist language, we can look at the State either as a cluster of factors which explain governance, or we can observe how emerging modes of governance affect the State in different respects.

In the first perspective the role of government in governance is, in fact, one of the key aspects of governance. The role of the State in governance can vary from being the key coordinator to being one of several powerful actors. To be sure, we can think of governance processes in which the role of the State is close to non-existent. Also, as subsequent chapters will discuss in detail, the role of the State in governance derives to a significant extent from the role which the State has played historically in society and the institutional strength of the State.

The role which the State plays in governance depends on a large number of factors such as the historical patterns of regulation and control of the particular policy sector; the institutional interest in maintaining control; the degree to which governance requires legal and political authority; and the strength of societal organizations and networks (see Peters and Pierre, 2016). Networks come in any number of shapes and forms. For our analytical purposes, network will refer to a formal or informal constellation of actors sharing an interest defined by function, territory or policy who interact on a regular basis.

The actual role which the State plays in governance is often the outcome of the tug-of-war between the role the State wants to play and the role which the external environment allows it to play. In the political economy literature on governance we find several examples of persistent self-regulation of market sectors and a common interest among corporate actors to minimize State presence in the governance of industrial sectors (Campbell et al., 1991; Hollingsworth et al., 1994). Similarly, the network approach to governance substantiates the capacity of cohesive networks to fend off State interests in the governance of policy sectors (Marsh and Rhodes, 1992).

The alternative research strategy – looking at the State as the ‘dependent variable’ – raises questions about how the emergence of governance alters the powers and capacities of the State. The increasing reliance on various forms of public–private coordinated projects, or on voluntary forms of joint action with subnational government, or the challenges posed by transnational forms of governance, puts tremendous strain on the institutional arrangement of the State and the management of these institutions (Kooiman, 1993). This is primarily because political institutions are significantly constrained by the ‘due process’ and cannot move financial resources as easily as corporate actors. While public–private partnerships aim precisely at granting institutions such discretion, this is often used as an argument against such partnerships (Keating, 1998; Peters, 1998b). Thus, while partnerships may be a comfortable way of increasing the State’s points of contact with the surrounding society they also feed back into the State apparatus and cause strain between the ‘due process’ and the need to be as flexible as the other partner.

For the State to be able to engage in different forms of governance, many of the traditional models of public sector command and control need to be replaced by more relaxed and decentralized management models. Furthermore, the extensive decentralization programmes which have been implemented in a large number of western democracies over the past decades have helped facilitate governance at the local level. Even if the traditional assumptions are relaxed, we should remember that it is still the State which is the actor

Obviously, whatever perspective on the State we choose, it is clear that when it is observed over time we need to incorporate elements of both approaches. The role which the State can play in future governance is to a considerable degree explained by how past governance has impacted on the State and its institutions. The continuing accretion of experience in governing changes the State, and the State will in turn alter its performance in governing.

Perspectives on governance

As an initial, broad-brushed introduction, we can distinguish between three perspectives on the nature of governance (see Peters and Pierre, 2016), not very different from what Hysing (2009: 647) calls ‘grand storylines’. One perspective is to simply state that governance – finding and implementing collective solutions to collective problems – is the core function of government (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992). Most scholars with an interest in governance theory would argue that this first-year politics textbook version is a major simplification of real-world governance. While we would largely agree with that criticism, the positive aspect of this perspective is that it directs our attention to how government organizes itself and its exchanges with the surrounding society.

Another approach to governance focuses on the role of societal actors in organizing governance. Civil society, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), private businesses, action groups, regional and local governments and sometimes international actors such as European Union (EU) institutions control considerable amounts of resources, knowledge, expertise and organizational capabilities that make them attractive partners to government in governing. The key question here, and indeed an issue that has been widely debated, is to what extent such partnerships change the role of government in these forms of interactive governance (see for instance Bell and Hindmoor, 2009; Sörensen and Torfing, 2007; Torfing et al., 2012). Is government still in control or is it being sidelined? Can we think of governance as coordination among societal actors with government more or less absent? Is there, as it were, governing without government (Rhodes, 1997)?

A third perspective, finally, suggests that governance tends to be facilitated by a mixture of State and societal actors where the relative weight of these actors may vary from one policy sector to the other, but this governance provides only limited and fragmented steering and coordination of society as a whole. The key point here is thus less about the composition of actors in governance but rather the scope of that governance in a societal perspective. This perspective raises questions about the variable capacity of the State to steer society; about understanding State—society relations; and about the capacity of economic interests to fend off’ political pressures and ensure self-regulation of market actors.

We will return to these three different perspectives throughout this book. We will now discuss governance as structure and process as a first step towards a deeper understanding of the concept and practice of governance.

Governance as structure

We will begin by thinking about governance in structural terms. That is, one reasonable assumption about the variety of political and economic institutions that have been created over time is that they were designed (or evolved) to address problems of governance. Each of the three structural arrangements we will be discussing addresses the problem of providing direction to society and economy in its own way. Each appears effective in solving some parts of the governance problem, but each also has its weaknesses. Further, each of the ‘solutions’ is bound in cultural and temporal terms so they may be effective in some places and at some times, but may not be a panacea for all problems.

Governance as hierarchies

Governance conducted by and through vertically integrated State structures is an idealized model of democratic government and the public bureaucracy. In the bureaucratic sphere, the Weberian model of the public service characterized most of the advanced western democracies for more than a century if not longer. This was essentially governance by law; instead of bridging the public–private border, this type of governance strictly upheld that distinction. The State – conceived of as the epitome of the collective interest – was thus distinctly separated from the rest of society but governed society by imposition of law and other forms of regulation. Other institutions of the State were also entangled in a hierarchical system of command and control. In most unitary States, subnational government enjoyed some degree of autonomy but the State never surrendered its legal authority over these institutions which, while ‘autonomous’, remained creatures of the State. In federal systems, by comparison, there are strong notions of ‘shared sovereignty’ where the right of one institution to infringe on the jurisdiction of other institutions is quite limited. Thus, hierarchy characterized the State’s exchange with society as well as its internal organization and modus operandi.

Much of the current governance literature is dismissive of hierarchy as a model of governance. Hierarchies, critics contend, were an appropriate institutional order in the days of highly standardized public services, a ‘Fordist’ economy, domestically controlled markets and unrivalled State strength. With most of these factors profoundly altered, so must hierarchies fall, the argument goes. The emphasis now is instead on smaller scales, flexibility, diversification, informal exchange rather than formal control, and ‘sharing power’ between State and market (Kettl, 1993) rather than maintaining a strict division between the public and the private.

Further along this argument, globalization appears to have engendered a ‘new localism’, a rearticulation of values related to local democracy, community engagement and citizenship (Clarke, 2003; Stoker, 2004). More recently, a slightly different version of ‘new localism’ has emerged in the wake of the rise of populism (Katz and Nowak, 2018). In this rediscovery of local issues and values, networks bringing together a variety of actors are emerging as increasingly powerful coalitions of interests. Indeed, at the national level, networks are sometimes even said to be powerful and cohesive enough to sustain pressures from the State and to perform an autonomous regulatory role within their sector (Rhodes, 1997, 2017). While some of these accounts of policy networks may exaggerate the powers and capabilities of these coalitions, they nevertheless suggest that hierarchies no longer reflect power relations in society. The rise of populism has added fuel to the critique of rigid government hierarchies (see Chapter 8). As a result, governance must be reconfigured so that it relates to a new, emerging model of social and political organization.

Furthermore, hierarchies were designed to address issues that States were facing more than a century ago, issues that may still be present but that are now being supplemented by more complex and vexing issues. In 1987, Daniel Bell predicted that in 2013 the hierarchical State would have become ‘too big to solve the small problems in life and too small to solve the big problems’ (Bell, 1987). It would appear that Bell’s prediction is not very far off the mark. Many of the ‘small issues in life’ have been removed from the State’s agenda and transferred either to the market, civil society or subnational government or to individuals and families. Meanwhile, addressing the big issues – we need only think of national security, migration, climate change, pandemics and antibiotic resistant bacteria – have proven to be of a scale that requires collaboration across national borders. In both cases, governmental hierarchies have increasingly come to prefer problem-solving in concert with societal actors instead of going it alone (Head and Alford, 2015). Why this has happened, how collaboration tends to be organized and what the consequences are of this change in governing style is the theme of this book.

Moreover, the State is said to be too weak to maintain the same control it exercised only a couple of decades ago. This is partly due to the shrinking resource base of the State and partly because of changes in the State’s external environment. The globalization of financial and other markets during the 1990s reduced the State’s control over its economy. The precise nature and extent of the changes brought about by globalization are topics of a heated current argument (see, for instance, Boyer and Drache, 1996; Camilleri and Falk, 1992; Evans, 1997; Hirst and Thompson, 1999; Pierre, 2013; Scott, 1997; Weiss, 1998). It is difficult to argue that nothing has changed, but it is also easy to assume that everything has changed, so this debate must be considered carefully.

Critics of the globalization thesis argue that States have responded to market globalization by developing transnational institutions and organizations which exercise effective control over the deregulated markets, such as the EU or the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Helleiner, 1994; Mann, 1997; Pierre, 2013; Strange, 1986). However, the leverage which these transnational institutions control is to a significant extent surrendered by the nation-states. Therefore, the emergence of transnational institutions tends to pull in the same direction as globalization to the extent that they reduce nation-state sovereignty and autonomy (see Chapter 5). As will be argued later in this book, however, linkages upward towards transnational governance institutions like the EU and downward towards subnational government should be thought of more as State strategies to reassert control than as proof of States surrendering to competing models of governance.

In addition, actors in the State’s environment are said to be increasingly reluctant to conform to the State’s interests and objectives. Previously, the State was an attractive target for organized interests not least because it controlled vast economic resources. In the 1990s and early 2000s many nation-states faced considerable economic and fiscal problems and hence were less interesting in the eyes of most societal actors. Later, as the economy picked up after the 2007–08 global financial crisis, governments learned that tight fiscal and budgetary control is imperative in a globalized economy. Public spending therefore remained under firm control (Pierre, 2013). The mutual dependence between State and key societal actors has, however, become more accentuated over time, and collaborative forms of service delivery have mushroomed during the first two decades of the third millennium (Ansell and Gash, 2007; Donahue and Zeckhauser, 2011).

Finally, a key argumen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Titlepage
• Seriespage
• Seriespage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the second edition
• 1 Different ways to think about governance
• 2 Conceptual and theoretical perspectives on governance
• 3 The transformation of governance
• 4 Governance beyond the state
• 5 Multilevel governance
• 6 Metagovernance
• 7 Populism and participatory modes of governance
• 8 State strength and governing capacity
• 9 Governance past, present and future
• Postscript: How do we study governance?
• References
• Index