Knowing Governance

The Epistemic Construction of Political Order

Jan-Peter Voß, Richard Freeman, Jan-Peter Voß, Richard Freeman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781349564767
  9781137514493
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137514509
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Knowing Governance sets out to understand governance through the design and making of its models and instruments. What kinds of knowledge do they require and reproduce? How are new understandings of governance produced in practice, by scientists and policy makers and by the publics with whom they engage?

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Introduction: Knowing Governance

Jan-Peter Voß and Richard Freeman

Knowing governance

This book is about the making of knowledge about governance and how it shapes political action. In a sense, doing politics has always turned on knowing governance, since political action builds on a certain understanding of what it is to act politically and how to do so effectively. Those seeking power have invariably wanted to know how collective order can be built and maintained: governing implies knowledge about the world to be governed and the resources available to do so, and about the interests and dispositions of the actors involved. What is more, while knowing governance has always been key to ruling effectively, it is at the same time a principal lever for those who seek to challenge authority. Shared knowledge is a precondition of collective action and of the imagined communities of modern politics, whether nations or social movements or issue-based constituencies.

But where does this knowledge come from? How do political actors come to know about governing? How do they learn about the dynamics of collective order and ways of shaping it? What they know of ‘doing politics’ may be learned in practice, derived from experience and direct observation, or from socialization and ongoing communications with peers. Often, however, this knowledge is provided and reinforced by expertise of some kind. For governance is a matter of authoritative knowing, not only in a general sense, but also in terms of very specific kinds of knowledge work and expertise. In this book, we set out to identify, explore, and explain the production and development of models, instruments, and techniques of governing based in scientific practices and oriented towards establishing an authoritative claim over social life.

Most of the time, the kinds of expertise that come to bear on politics are problem-oriented, concerned with issues such as ecology, public health, education, economic growth, or social inequality. As in the question of climate change, the close and complex relationship between scientific problems and political problems makes for a widely discussed ‘scientization of politics’ – and a corollary ‘politicization of science’ (Jasanoff 1990; Weingart 1999; Miller 2004; Hoppe 2010; Lövbrand 2011). In this volume, by contrast, we set out to discover the ways in which knowledge of the patterns and processes of governing itself develops into what we might think of as an ‘expertise of political practice and process’. We want to draw attention to patterns of scientization and technologization in matters of politics itself, that is, in the agency of governing. This involves not just academic research in political science and governance studies, but the distributed work of an array of think tanks and polling institutes, governance schools, public relations agencies, strategy advisors, campaign consultants, and international organizations (IOs). What work do they do in establishing certain representations of political reality? How do they build epistemic authority in matters of doing politics, by providing the categories, data, and tools by which political practices are configured? How do they contribute in this way to the construction of political order?

We are interested, then, in the formalization and development of ways of knowing how to do politics, or what we call ‘knowing governance’; we are interested in the formulation and articulation of authoritative claims about the nature and process of governance. That includes classifications of actors and accounts of political agency, analyses of fields of interaction and political systems, understandings of specific interdependencies and power relations as well as models of political change. Knowing governance also comprises assessments of legitimacy and effectiveness, developmental trajectories and capacities for collective action, diagnoses of obstacles to and requirements for reform, functional concepts and analytic schemes, as well as mechanisms, metrics, indicators, templates, and standards of governing for use in campaigns and consultation strategies or in the design of institutional arrangements and electoral systems.

We are interested in the means by which experts on governance come to know what they do, the devices with which they work, the practices and processes by which they establish and expand particular representations of governance. We are interested in their workplaces, that is, in the sites at which this knowledge is made, and how they are connected with each other, whether academic departments, laboratories, think tanks, parties, ministries, consultancies, industrial organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), IOs, or experiments in concrete political situations. Our title speaks to a dual concern: we want to know governance through the ways it is made known to those who govern. How do representations of the reality of governance become established in practice, that is, how do those engaged in it come to know what governance is? And, then, more reflexively, how far does establishing epistemic authority in this way itself constitute a form of governance, that is, how does governing occur through being made known?

Standard modern conceptions of knowledge and governance treat science and politics as separate spheres or logics of interaction, and are concerned principally with exploring the relationship between them. Truth and power are treated as ready-made products and institutionally guaranteed merits of one or the other functional system (science or politics). This is the problematic expressed in Wildavsky’s ‘speaking truth to power’ (Wildavsky 1979) as well is in more dialogic conceptions (Habermas 1968, 120–145; Hoppe 2005). An alternative position understands power and knowledge as essentially fused, as in Foucault’s exploration of the ways in which governing is realized in specific modes of knowing (Foucault 1980 [1977], 1991 [1968]), or even earlier in Mannheim’s discussion of the Seinsgebundenheit (‘being-boundedness’) of knowledge about politics (Mannheim 1995 [1929], 95–167). Our purpose here is both more reflexive and more immediate. We are concerned, we have said, with the production and mobilization of ways of knowing about governance: we focus on how representations of governance are produced in practice, by scientists and policymakers and by the publics with whom they engage. How does collective knowledge about governance become established in ‘doing governing’? How does politics work through the production of epistemic authority, not just about social and political issues, but about the nature and practice of governing itself?

In exploring these questions, we will want to know how claims to knowing governance are produced, that is, how governance is rendered knowable and manageable by science-based and technical expertise.

A new technocracy?

Of course, we do not claim any of this is wholly new, but we think it is newly technocratic. Political practices and the process of governing have themselves become objects of scientific analysis and technological control. Sociologists of work and engineering have shown clearly and variously how production becomes a matter of special expertise through related processes of professionalization and scientization, whether that production has to do with farming or building, making or distributing, healing, teaching or caring. More recently, professionalization and scientization have also been discussed in areas of everyday life such as body care, life counselling, cooking and home furnishing, and even dating and sexuality. It is our contention here that a parallel story holds for political work, for the mobilization of collective identities and interests, for the negotiation of commitments to common values, goods, and norms, for projects of collective action, for the crafting of coalitions, for the design of institutions and specific rules. It marks and describes a shift from the distributed, situated, and often tacit or implicit understandings of what it means to act politically or to govern (and be governed) to a formalized and standardized, now explicit, and more abstract account of governance mediated by the analysts and advocates of specific models, instruments, and techniques.

But why should we notice this now? Why is it now, a decade or so into the twenty-first century, that we should want to explore and take account of these problems of knowing governance? In the first place, we should not be surprised by the ‘scientization of politics’, since it is but a further expression of the ‘scientization of everything’. If the twentieth century really did witness the decline of alternative sources of social steering such as political ideology and religious faith, at least in Western capitalist countries, so we might expect science to become the essential framework and source of reference for both individual and societal development. Governing, it may be argued, turns increasingly on claims of instrumental functionality and technical necessity rather than on those of collective identity, value, and interest; it is worked out in competition for epistemic authority, rather than in the probings, conflicts, and corroborations of political mobilization and public debate (for an extended debate see Ellul 1964; Marcuse 1964; Price 1967; Habermas 1968; Ezrahi 1990; Rose 1991).

What is interesting is that this is initially experienced as loss. Politics seems somehow to have lost its hold on the public sphere, to have been displaced from executive and legislature and the party machines which controlled access to them. It has been displaced by expertise: politics as we knew it, as ongoing struggles over matters of concern, is supplanted by struggles over matters of fact (Latour 2004). These struggles work differently, taking place in different sites and by different means and devices. Governing now happens in expert networks and conferences, IOs, taskforces and fact-finding missions, issue-based summits and consultations. It has adopted the methods of technoscience, including model building, simulation studies, monitoring schemes, databases, experiments, and knowledge platforms. Standard ways of establishing collectively valid, authoritative knowledge have diffused from science into the realm of public policy, political power, and collective action: social ordering is now achieved by seeking to establish valid representations of reality and shared acceptance of the factual conditions of collective action, rather than political representations of a collective will. Entry into politics is marked not by the articulation of values and interests but by the acquisition of expertise.

Meanwhile, there are changes in the discourse and practice of politics which make it more likely that it will have recourse to newly sophisticated forms of establishing authoritative knowledge. For the scientization of politics is perhaps most immediately a function of the shift from government to governance, from the essentially centralized and hierarchical organization of political authority in the nation state to sets or networks of dispersed actors who negotiate projects of collective ordering without recourse to either the territorial monopoly of physical force or democratic legitimation through liberal–representative procedures. In the absence of any single source of physical force or political authority, how should conflicts be settled and interactions between autonomous actors be managed if not by the production, management, and regulation of knowledge and information? (For a historical account, see the contending philosophies of Hobbes and Boyle in Shapin and Schaffer [1985]).

For this reason, we should expect the recourse to epistemic authority to be most advanced where single-source authority is least developed or in greatest recession, that is, in the transnational realm. It is in transnational governance beyond the state that shared ontologies, rationalities, models, and technical standards of governing develop...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Knowing Governance
• Part I: Knowing the Body Politic: Collective Agency
• Part II: Knowing Instruments: Modes of Governing
• Part III: Material Knowing: Documents and Bodies
• Part IV: Boundaries of Knowing: Science and Politics
• Part V: Reflexive Knowing: Doing Knowledge Politics
• Index