Varieties of Governance

Dynamics, Strategies, Capacities

G. Capano, M. Howlett, M. Ramesh, G. Capano, M. Howlett, M. Ramesh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137477965
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137477972
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Économie du développement

This edited collection examines various facets of governance - the organization and steering of political processes within society - for a better understanding of the complexities of contemporary policy making.

Part I

Introduction: Varieties of Governance as a Concept and Empirical Reality

1

Re-thinking Governance in Public Policy: Dynamics, Strategy and Capacities

Giliberto Capano, Michael Howlett and M. Ramesh

1.1 Introduction

Governance is not a fashion, but a firmly established lens through which to analyse the complexity of contemporary policy-making, that is the way in which a society and its political processes are organized and steered. Thus, governance needs to be seen as a general concept within political analysis that represents a necessary, heuristic tool with which to describe some of the complexity of political processes. Governance is not only a fashionable term, but one destined to remain with us for some time yet.

However, despite a great deal having been written on the subject in recent years, questions remain about many fundamental aspects of governance. This is especially the case in both defining and understanding governance modes and their dynamics, the subject of this book. Many “varieties of governance” exist, both cross-nationally and cross-sectorally, and understanding why this is the case and how it has come about is important for the future of governance studies.

In this introductory chapter, after a brief reflection on the heuristic relevance of the concept, we focus on the following three specific aspects of governance: dynamics, strategy and capacity.

The notion of governance dynamics suggests that “modes of governance” identified in earlier studies may not be stable, but rather dynamic, meaning that that there are no set governance arrangements within a given political system. These may change over the course of time, as governments adopt different architectural features and mix policy tools in different ways. A mode of governance, in this perspective, is an equilibrium moment, rather than a permanent stable construct.

Governance strategy is a concept that reflects this ability of governments to alter governance arrangements and give them their dynamic character. It suggests that behind every mode or governance equilibrium lies a specific undertaking by different policy actors, as they seek the best governance arrangement to attain their purposes, and consequently try to see that it is established. This is particularly true of governments, since they continue to be in charge of systemic responsibility and are the most powerful authoritative actors in virtually all societies.

Governance capacity is a third critical concept, one which emphasizes that not every choice of governance mechanism is likely to be equally successful in terms of attaining government goals. Every governance arrangement must be effective, that is capable of resolving political and policy problems, but simply designating or advocating a specific arrangement does not ensure its success.

1.2 Governance as a heuristic means

Following 20 years of enthusiastic discussion as a theoretical panacea capable of finally explaining contemporary policy-making, the time has come to start afresh in the study of governance as a social phenomenon. In fact, following the passing of the fashion of studies of “new governance” arrangements due to its empirically unsustainable nature, there is now a fair degree of agreement among public policy scholars as to what governance is, and what it does

The general concept behind governance thinking – of complexity in government policy processes beyond the confines of what goes on in formal state structures – is not a new one. This is because policy-making is an arena full of actors who are not only vertically structured, but are also linked by a series of informal relationships, and this is not a recent discovery (Solomon 2008; Richardson 2012). Nevertheless the use of the term “governance” to capture these additional aspects of government and governing achieved importance not because it was fashionable, but because it was, and still is, necessary to redefine the scope of public policy research and of all branches of political scientific analysis where a multitude of actors interact in both formal and informal ways (for example: international relations, international political economy, global studies).

The governance lens is useful in this context because one can re-direct the analytical perspective away from the details of formal institutional behaviour and towards answering the fundamental question of political theory, namely “How is the social and political order possible?” We know perfectly well that in order to answer this question we need to understand how political power is distributed and exercised, and how policy problems are dealt with by it. In other words, we need to understand how society is steered. And here the concept of governance is useful from a heuristic perspective, since it enables us to render the apparently chaotic reality of policy-making organized and readable by describing sets of state and societal relationships as different “modes of governance”.

Assuming such an inquisitorial pose allows one to deal with the fact that political and policy reality cannot be grasped simply by observing the behaviour of those actors who are formally granted power (governments, parliaments, courts). Of course this does not mean that hierarchy no longer matters (Goetz 2008; Heritier and Lehmkuhl 2008; Bell and Hindmoor 2009; Lynn 2012). Many actors participate in the power game by pursuing their own interests and ideas; and there are many places where such participation may be witnessed. However many different games can be played by policy actors at different levels, or at different times at the same level and such complexity cannot be resolved, from either an analytical or a practical perspective, simply by recourse to the hierarchical approach to steering. There will always be a degree of hierarchy, because governments exist and have to do their job, but this blends with other principles of co-ordination and co-exists with market-driven principles and network-oriented behaviour, and a focus on “governance” mechanisms and modes helps address this complexity.

Governance thinking, however, requires a dynamic orientation since the way in which society and its political processes are steered can radically change, at least in terms of the intensity of this steering process. It is clear that even in the past, governments were not the sole decisional forces, at least not in democratic political systems and even dictatorial and totalitarian systems encountered resistance from many elements of society. However, thinking about the dynamics of general modes of governance in recent years has focused on shifts away from governments to societal actors and has attributed this change to two converging factors. On the one hand, it notes a trend towards the current fragmentation of the policy-making process, during which a number of actors have found new room for manoeuvre they may not have had in the past (interest groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), social movements), and notes the fact that many countries have decentralized their political institutional arrangements in response to it. On the other hand, studies have also shown that this change has been intentionally pursued by governments, following the discovery that the traditional command and control approach to steering was inefficient and ineffective, and that the involvement of other actors in policy-making could help temper the constant social pressure they were under. These counter-forces have generated what may appear at first sight to be a radical change of the way in which society is steered, involving more actors and making decision-making more horizontal and less hierarchical, but on closer inspection emerges as a complex new trend in designing the ways of governing.

After lengthy, heated debate among policy scholars, the original dichotomy proposed by a first generation of governance scholars – between old governance/new governance – finally appears now to have been superseded. Only those with a specific normative afflatus continue to see current governance as something totally different from “old” governance (Rhodes 1997; Sabel 2011; Zeitlin 2011). Not only are such dichotomies historically inaccurate, many scholars have pointed out that the features of the new governance arrangements often promoted as effective responses to changes in state–societal arrangements (polycentrism, flexibility, co-operation, deliberation, non-coerciveness) seem to be less effective than expected and, above all, that their effectiveness and enforcement are closely linked to the presence and actions of public institutions and their own fundamental resources (authority, financial means, information and organization) (Davis 2002; Richards and Smith 2002; Kooiman 2003; Heritier and Eckert 2008; Lynn 2010). So, new governance often simply means that new actors have entered the policy-making arena and new policy instruments (contracts, partnership, recommendations, participation, benchmarking, learning) have been added to the traditional policy-steering tool-kit. These changes are undoubtedly important, since they have increased the complexity of policy-making, and thus its possible dynamics, direction and equilibria, but not do not represent a sharp distinctive non-linear break with the past.

Thus, it is clear that the ways in which policy is steered in many countries and sectors at present are less monocentric than previously, as they are characterized by the presence of a plethora of policy actors; however, whether this means a reduced degree of hierarchy and greater co-operation is a matter for empirical research to establish, and cannot be taken for granted. Furthermore, the use of new policy tools does not mean that they do not need to be hierarchically addressed, at least from a distance, through various other policy instruments that governments adopt in such cases: instruments such as financial incentives, periodic evaluation, the request for transparent processes, and so on (Howlett 2011).

So while some of the ingredients have changed in contemporary governance arrangements, we need to direct our research towards answering the right questions with respect to their import and variety. Having superseded the problem of whether or not there is more, or less, government in governance, it is now time to examine how governments can interpret their role in governance arrangements, which new actors really matter, how these arrangements evolve over time, and whether, and in what sense, such arrangements are effective.

1.3 Elements of governance: beyond the typological tradition

Political scientists use typologies as a methodological tool with which to order reality and grasp the most important aspects of a political phenomenon and there is a vast array of typologies in governance studies. The typological tradition present in the governance literature gives a rather clear picture of what may be the more important dimensions of governance arrangements. Many scholars emphasize the fundamental principles of co-ordination on which a governance arrangement can be based. Considine and Lewis (2003), for example, focus on hierarchy, network and enterprise bases of state–societal linkages. Others like Treib et al. (2007) focus on three pairs of dichotomies related to both co-ordination modes but also tools and actors involved in specific arrangements (soft vs. hard law; only public actors/only private actors; hierarchy vs. market). These are applied according to the specific field of governance (politics, policy and polity) involved. Börzel (2010), on the other hand, focuses above all on the institutionalized structure of governance, by distinguishing between hierarchy, competition and the negotiating system. Howlett (2011), by using the dichotomization of implicit and explicit rules, and of hierarchical and non-hierarchical interaction, has proposed four types of governance arrangements: legal, network, corporate and market. Howlett et al. (2009) and Tollefson et al. (2012) have gone beyond the focus on the fundamental co-ordination mechanisms characterizing the previous typologies, and assume that governance arrangement fulfil a multi-dimensional space in that each can be more, or less, hierarchical, and thus more, or less, plurilateral, with corresponding possibilities in their institutional, political and regulatory dimensions.

All of these typologies offer important insights into the ways in which governance arrangements can be designed, but nevertheless they only portray a rather general picture of what governance is. They clarify the fundamental co-ordinating logic of a governance arrangement, but as always happens with typologies, they only offer a static picture of something which is intrinsically dynamic. Governance arrangement are usually composed of a prevailing co-ordinating principle (hierarchy, market, network) accompanied by other principles (it is quite rare to find a monopolistic governance arrangement, that is an arrangement governed or monopolized by just one co-ordinating principle). The reason for this is not only the ever-present shadow of hierarchy, but also because policy-making is usually characterized by the asymmetric co-existence of different co-ordinating principles. For example, in education policy – even in the more market-driven systems (for example, in the Netherlands or England) – policy instruments such as institutional autonomy and competition are accompanied by the supervision of public institutions and work through the involvement of several stakeholders in a network-based system (Woessman 2007; OECD 2010) Over the course of time, the balance between these constituent principles may change as a result of the pressure or actions of the most important actors, and may shift in a specific direction (towards the increased institutional autonomy of schools or, on the contrary, towards the more intrusive role of the state by means of a closer link between funding and national testing). This way of working can be found in all policy fields. Governance is ever changing.

Several further elements also emerge from the governance literature that merit consideration in relation to existing typologies of governance. First, these typologies do not offer any further information about how prevailing governance arrangement is chosen; this is a matter for further theorization as we explain below. Second, recent research shows how hierarchy is always present, at least potentially, in every governance arrangement, albeit in different forms (Hill and Lynn 2005; Goetz 2008; Heritier and Lehmkuhl 2008; Börzel 2010; Lynn 2010; Capano 2011), and this constant factor slips away in many typological efforts in which it appears as only one of the principles of co-ordination Finally, the typological approach only manages to account for the some prevailing trends in governance arrangements and policy designs, but is inherently limited by the fact that, very often, real governance arrangements consist of complex policy mixes, that is of a blend of different co-ordinating principles and their respective policy instruments (Capano et al. 2012).

So, what emerges from the aforementioned literature is that we need to further analyse the actual workings of governance arrangements, in order to get a better grasp of their dynamics (due to the fact that they change over time and very often are characterized by different policy mixes), of their strategic nature (since they are the products of the actions and interactions of policy actors driven by specific goals), and of their capacity (that is how likely governance arrangements can be effective in relation to certain important collective goals).

1.4 Governance dynamics

Governance arrangements are dynamic, and thus – paraphrasing Hogwood and Peters (1983) – all governance is governance change. This means that governance arrangements and workings should be analysed from a diachronic perspective. Thus, the nature of a governance arrangement will change over the course of time, even in the short term. A mode of governance thus is not stable but rather in equilibrium, meaning the mix of co-ordinating principles and policy instruments adopted at time 0, which persists until one of the components is changed, is only temporarily at rest.

Very often, the intrinsically dynamic character of governance is not taken into consideration, and scholars tend to portray a static picture of the reality of gover...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I  Introduction: Varieties of Governance as a Concept and Empirical Reality
• Part II  Governance Dynamics
• Part III  Governance Strategies
• Part IV  The Capacities of Governance Modes: Explaining Variation in Modes of Governance
• Part V  Conclusion: Moving Forward in Studies of Governance Arrangements
• Index