By Mark Bevir
Governance, governance everywhere – why has the word “governance” become so common? One reason is that many people believe that the state no longer matters, or at least the state matters far less than it used to. Even politicians often tell us that the state can’t do much. They say they have no choice about many policies. The global economy compels them to introduce austerity programs. The need for competitiveness requires them to contract-out public services, including some prisons in the US.
If the state isn’t ruling through government institutions, then presumably there is a more diffuse form of governance involving various actors. So, “governance” is a broader term than “state” or “government”. Governance refers to all processes of governing, whether undertaken by a government, market, or network, whether over a family, corporation, or territory, and whether by laws, norms, power, or language. Governance focuses not only on the state and its institutions but also on the creation of rule and order in social practices.
Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament
The rise of the word “governance” as an alternative to “government” reflects some of the most important social and political trends of recent times. Social scientists sometimes talk of the hollowing-out of the state. The state has been weakened from above by the rise of regional blocs like the European Union and by the global economy. The state has been weakened from below by the use of contracts and partnerships that involve other organizations in the delivery of public services. Globalization and the transformation of the public sector mean that the state cannot dictate or coordinate public policy. The state depends in part on global, transnational, private, and voluntary sector organizations to implement many of its policies. Further, the state is rarely able to control or command these other actors. The state has to negotiate with them as best it can, and often it has little bargaining power.
But, although the role of the state has changed, these changes do not necessarily mean that the state is less important. An alternative perspective might suggest that the state has simply changed the way it acts. From this viewpoint, the state has adopted more indirect tools of governing but these are just as effective – perhaps even more so – than the ones they replaced. Whereas the state used to govern directly through bureaucratic agencies, today it governs indirectly through, for example, contracts, regulations, and targets. Perhaps, therefore, the state has not been hollowed-out so much as come to focus on meta-governance, that is, the governance of the other organizations in the markets and networks that now seem to govern us.
The hollow state and meta-governance appear to be competing descriptions of today’s politics. If we say the state has been hollowed out, we seem to imply it no longer matters. If we say the state is the key to meta-governance, we seem to imply it retains the central role in deciding public policy. Perhaps, however, the two descriptions are compatible with one another. The real lesson of the rise of the word “governance” might be that there is something wrong with our very concept of the state.
All too often people evoke the state as if it were some kind of monolithic entity. They say that “the state did something” or that “state power lay behind something”. However, the state is not a person capable of acting; rather, the state consists of various people who do not always not act in a manner consistent with one another. “The state” contains a vast range of different people in various agencies, with various relationships acting in various ways for various purposes and in accord with various beliefs. Far from being a monolithic entity that acts with one mind, the state contains within it all kinds of contests and misunderstandings.
Descriptions of a hollow state tell us that policymakers have actively tried to replace bureaucracies with markets and networks. They evoke complex policy environments in which central government departments are not necessarily the most important actors let alone the only ones. Descriptions of meta-governance tell us that policymakers introduced markets and networks as tools by which they hoped to get certain ends. They evoke the ways central government departments act in complex policy environments.
When we see the word “governance”, it should remind us that the state is an abstraction based on diverse and contested patterns of concrete activity. State action and state power do not fit one neat pattern – neither that of hollowing-out or meta-governance. Presidents, prime ministers, legislators, civil servants, and street level bureaucrats can all sometimes make a difference, but the state is stateless, for it has no essence.
Mark Bevir is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of several books including Governance: A Very Short Introduction (2012) and The State as Cultural Practice (2010). He is also the editor or co-editor of 10 books, including a two volume Encyclopaedia of Governance (2007). He founded the undergraduate course on ‘Theories of Governance’ at Berkeley and teaches a graduate course on ‘Strategies of Contemporary Governance’.
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Image Credit: Martin Schulz during the election camapign in 2009. Creative Commons Licence – Mettmann. (via Wikimedia Commons)
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By Elvin Lim
The Republican “Pledge to America” is an attempt to show that the Republicans are more than a Party of No. The Pledge to America, however, is just a clever way to disguise a set of promises to undo or not do; but it is not ultimately a pledge to do anything.
Party platforms make a little more sense in the British parliamentary system, from whence they developed, because parliamentary sovereignty there does not have to contend with the separation of powers. But the Republican’s watered-down platform is a stunt if only for one reason alone. It’s called the presidential veto, and the Pledge exaggerates what Republican takeovers in one or both chambers of Congress in November could achieve. This is a Pledge of faux intentions because Republicans know full well that it would only take a stroke of a presidential pen and almost every one of the proposals contained in the Pledge will not see the legislative light of day. If Democrats think they had it tough in the last two years trying to get 60 senators on board with each of their proposed bills, wait till the Republicans try getting 67.
The Pledge, then, is not even governing by campaigning, because it is pretend-governing by campaigning. How the Republicans are going to deliver, for example, on their promise that they will allow any lawmaker (Democratic or Republican) to introduce an amendment that would cut spending on any spending bill boggles the mind. What if the likes of Dennis Kucinich introduces amendments to reduce defense spending in every bill and the Congress grinds to a procedural halt? And if that’s the intention (as John Boehner flirts with the idea of shutting down the government), there is a problem there too.
At root, there is something fundamentally inconsistent about the Pledge. A philosophy of Government against Government is rather more self-defeating than the far Right admits. Not many people and certainly not many independents want to send representatives and Senators to Washington to sit there and do nothing or merely to undo something (like Obamacare). And Tea Partiers should realize that no politician is going to endure the campaign trail and finally get to DC only to make his/her job and reason for existing perfunctory. There is a built-in bias for government in the very notion of elections, and the far Right’s desire to starve the beast called the federal government cannot be accomplished for as long as the American people support Medicare and Social Security (neither of which are given much attention in the Pledge.) The beast is here to stay, so we might as well learn to tame it.
The GOP plans to unveil this Pledge at a hardware store in suburban Virginia on Thursday. The ceremony and hoopla may look patriotic, and heart-felt, and in keeping with our highest founding ideals. But the Pledge to America is little more than a publicity stunt revealing the danger of pretend-governing via campaigning in America. The solution to our troubles is not no government, but better government, and this nuance appears to be lost on the poll-tested slogans of this election year.
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at
This morning among other stalling tactics I have been practicing while I stubbornly resist finishing my now-overdue article for NextSpace, I scanned the interesting articles in the latest two print magazines to hit my desk: American Libraries and Governing. Both had cover stories on environmental topics, which was not surprising as Earth Day is in April, spring is finally coming, etc.
So after I mopped up the drool from all the great green library architecture featured this month, I flipped over to Governing, to see that Fayetteville, AR has hired a person to help them be greener in the city government. And the guy has become known as Mr. Sustainability. AND he's all of 30 years old. How cool is that?! Nice that he's gotten some recognition for his work, and I hope it inspires some of us to be greener in our workplaces, too. Do you turn your monitor off at night? Flip the lights out? Walk occasionally, instead of always riding the elevator?
It strikes me that libraries are part of a not-so-big, green lifestyle by implicit design: you don't need to own the book in order to read it, absorb its knowledge and share it with others.
May be we should start capitalizing on our built-in green-ness, in addition to our beautiful new LEED-certified buildings. Can you appoint a Mr. (or Ms.) Sustainability for your staff? Or maybe it's a rotating distinction, that different staff members (or a volunteer!) wears for a couple of weeks, notes behaviors, and then suggests easy changes.
If you have a cotton/canvas library bag available for sale, why not team up with local grocery stores and make you bag available for purchase at the grocery store check-out? Whole Foods is aiming to be plastic-bag free by Earth Day. If they can do it, so can your grocery.
Writers corner the market on carpal tunnel syndrome--or so we think.
My membership is in good standing. My forearm (especially the right side) hurts from the elbow to the wrist. The splint and elbow band help, but even in my sleep my arm aches. I've tried different keyboards, mouse positions, etc., but I still haven't found what I'm looking for. (Hey! That sounds familiar.)
While surfing the net last night (thus ensuring my membership in The Carpal Tunnel Club), I discovered that people in other vocations suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome. According to this Wikipedia entry, U2 drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. has experienced pain throughout most of his career--he even uses specially designed drumsticks.
Cake decorators suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome. So do pizza makers, waterskiers, and hairstylists.
My research stopped there; my hand was hurting. But I discovered the club was not as exclusive as I had originally thought. And if Larry can do it, so can I! Buck up, writers! We're all suffering for our art!
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last year there was a session on "Green computing" by the University of Guelph at the Ontario Libary Association's conference (their slides are online at: http://urltea.com/33xh). Certainly opened my eyes.
On the grocery note - seems to me most of the major grocery stores here in Canada already are selling their own bags, and I know the liguor stores here plan on going bag free come December.
Oh and my library gives our canvas totes away for free!
Cool! Canada is always ahead of the US for environmental activities, it seems. And how cool that you can give away your totes for free!
While there is nothing cooler than green right now, I think the more exciting trend you point to is young innovators arriving on the scene. Both articles you mention feature very young entrepreneurs with designs on filling gaps and solving problems. As a Boomer, I welcome these fresh faces. They may be green, meaning young, but that's part of what makes them so cool! Thanks for a great post.
You are so right, Patricia Martin. I was drawn to both articles because there were young people doing green things!
I did see yesterday that the first boomer (born one second after midnight in 1946) filed for social security. The silver tsunami begins?