Governing as Governance

Alistair Cole

Definitions• Leca (1996) governing ‘ is a matter of taking decisions, resolving conflicts,

producing public goods, coordinating private behaviour, regulating markets, organising elections, distributing resources, determining spending’.

• Governing is the core business of government, which claims to speak with an authoritative voice and to embody a superior legitimacy to other interests or forces in society.

• For Le Galès (2002:17) government ‘refers to structures, actors, processes and outputs’, while governance ‘relates to all the institutions, networks, directives, regulations, norms, political and social usages, public and private actors that contribute to the stability of a society…’ .

• Governance represents new forms of coordination - of or governing – that go beyond the traditional confines of government. But what is government and how does it exemplify itself in the ‘strong state’ of France?

Structure and institutions• The concept of structure is an essentially contested one. Some research

traditions, such as that of constructivism, refuse its existence altogether or at least challenge the existence of structure as a separate category from agency (Hay and Rosamond 2002, Rosamond, 2001, Christiansen, 2001). Structure is what actors make of it and portray it to be.

• Most research traditions accept some form of structuralism, even those such as discourse analysis that are rooted in the power of language and symbols.

• In its strongest sense, structure signifies deep meta-level variables that determine (or at least strongly influence) the shape of contemporary polities and politics.

• The most obvious causal variables would include, inter alia, the underlying socio-economic system and social class relationships, non-economic cleavages (religion, territory, ethnic identity), the weight of key historical junctures and events, the persistence of competing belief systems.

• Meta narratives can provide a rich context for understanding modern French government, but they are couched at a very high level of generality

Competing meta-narratives• Several competing, credible narratives can account for deep

structural features to the French polity. • Economic meta-narratives focus on the conformity of the political

system with the underlying economic structure.• Ideational meta-narratives identify deep ideological cleavages that

come to a head at critical junctures, such as the ideological rivalry between the Catholic Church and the Republic throughout the nineteenth century (Hazaresingh, 1994).

• Territorial meta-narratives have emphasised the importance of spatial and geographical variables. Rokkan and Urwin (1982) for example, identified three types of European state: the strong empire-nations of the Atlantic west; the economically weaker states of the eastern plains; and the states of the imperial central Europe, unified only in the nineteenth century (Flora, Kuhnle and Urwin 1999).

• Meta-narratives of power, domination lie in the domain of political sociology; but are used less often in comparative politics

Middle range analysis of gvernment

• Middle range institutional analysis allows for more scope for empirical investigation than structural meta-narratives. In the rich but rather inconsistent new institutionalist tradition, institutions are understood either as organisations, as beliefs, as history, as human action, as forms of appropriate behaviour, or as some combination of these (Hall and Taylor, 1996, Guy Peters, 1999).

• Studying the development of the professional bureaucracy, usually linked with the German sociologist Max Weber, lies at the core of such classic analyses of government.

• For Weber, the development of the bureaucratic state was a general feature of capitalist development, with an impartial state essential to provide legal security for contracts. The role of the bureaucracy is to ensure that rules are respected and that predictability, regularity and conformity to uniform standards are achieved.

Core features of government • In the model of governing as government, the State as a moral

authority, above specific interests in society. • Reduced to its core, government (in France) rests upon: • the legitimate use of force; • a tradition of strong central authority which gives direction to other

public and private actors; • a doctrine of undivided political sovereignty (republicanism);• a clearly affirmed territorial hierarchy;• established constitutional rules• and a hierarchy of legal orders,• the development of a powerful bureaucracy, • The public law approach continues to defend government as

providing an overarching normative framework and a monopoly use of force.

• Underpinning the model of the sovereign government there is only one source of power and authority.

Governing as Governance• The popularity of governance is that it openly challenges

this model. • All definitions of governance start from the weakening of

older forms of vertical statist regulation• The fundamental ambiguity of governance has helped to

explain its success• Governance contains within it potentially contradictory

causal narratives about the reshaping of the State. • It can apply to different levels and scales of analysis

(territorial and functional) and across variable temporal and spatial dimensions.

• It constructs imaginary boundaries between public and private and contains within it implicit theories of the public space.

• Some reject governance and prefer governability…

National traditions of governance• In the German tradition, for instance, governance signifies the method of

macro co-ordination between markets (the economy), hierarchies (the state) and networks (civil society), to some extent reformulating the Corporatist structures of German society (Mayntz, 1991).

• In the rich Dutch tradition, governance signifies a method of decision-making based on repeated interactions between public and private actors, responding to issues of complexity by co-operation (Kooiman, 1993, 2003).

• According to the main UK school, governance refers to the role of networks of public and private actors, to public sector management reforms and to ideas of good governance and best practice (Rhodes, 1996, 1997).

• Usually describing either EU or state-level processes, accounts of local and regional governance can also focus upon the operation of new networks of public, private and associative actors (John, 2001).

• In the case of the European Union, powerful metaphors of multi-level governance have attempted to capture the complexity of contemporary governing processes in a way that can accommodate territory, sector and function (Hooghe, Marks and Blanc, 1996).

Good Governance

• Governance has sometimes dressed itself in prescriptive clothing, most notably in relation to the false panacea of ‘good governance’.

• For international financial organisations such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, ‘good governance’ refers to specific practices of corporate management, accountability, transparency and to the importance of international benchmarking and standard setting.

• ‘Governance’ has become embraced as a standard to measure performance by developing states, typically in terms of markets and neo-liberal adjustment.

• Normative, yet influential framework

Governance and Governability.

• Governance became popular in Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and France as part of a broader reflection on the governability of modern complex societies.

• Why are modern societies so difficult to govern? • What problems of coordination do they face? • What dynamics underpin their operation and

how best can these be understood and compared?

Controversies

• No fundamental agreement on the answers to these questions.

• In one account the notion of governability raises the issue of the contradictory nature of the interests in presence, the different strategies of social groups and the overloading of demands placed upon the local and national state (Rangeon, 1996).

• Writing in a different tradition, Marin (1991) considered that governance implies agreement amongst the partners in presence.

Core definition of governance

• Reduced to its common core, governance signifies • challenges to traditional state-centric modes of delivering

public policy• the development of inter-organisational relationships,

the emergence of new policy actors and forms of interaction (with a special emphasis on public-private interactions)

• the importance of new levels of policy action• organisational reforms and the growth of new types of

response to the problems of governability and capacity building that affect modern societies.

Coordination and Regulation

• Sociological accounts, especially those of Le Galès (1995, 1999, 2002, 2007), emphasise above all the role of governance as coordination (‘regulation’) and exchange between political, social and economic spheres.

• Regulation refers to relatively stable relations between actors and social groups, who exchange resources and who are brought together in institutional relationships that are bound by rules and norms (Commaille and Jobert, 1999).

• The French Regulation School describe distinct modes of coordination between actors, the five ideal-types being the market (competition), the firm (hierarchy), the State (constraint), the community (solidarity) and social partnership (negotiation).

• Governing requires coordination; but modes of coordination vary across sector, space and level.

Steering, not Rowing • If modern governments can influence political and policy outcomes, they are

less capable than previously of engaging in command and control techniques.

• The metaphor of governance as steering draws obvious inspiration from older, less finite ideas of pilotage, or the direction of public affairs (Mayntz, 1991, Kickert, 1993) .

• Steering can take several forms. In a proactive sense, steering involves attempts to mobilise policy networks and build new partnerships to connect central government, public authorities and civil society.

• But steering can also take the form of reducing the scope of central government activity, by decentralising difficult decisions, by creating new administrative agencies or policy instruments. In short, governing systems across Europe have tried to reduce the need for governing by deregulation, privatisation and administrative reform (Kooiman, 2003).

• All governments have been confronted with a weakening capacity to steer society by proposing solutions to the problems they have identified. Modern states of very different traditions have felt the need to develop new policy instruments and management philosophies to meet these challenges (Lascoumbes and Le Gales, 2004).

Causal narratives around the State

• Governance challenges the state-centric construction of political authority that reifies the State as embodying a superior legitimacy to non-state actors.

• Governance narratives recognise complexity, contingency and diversity far more than traditional politico-administrative models, which insisted upon the uniform application of rules.

• From a legal perspective, the state has lost its centrality and is now embedded in a complex system of multiple legal orders.

• The State is no longer an adequate frame for understanding the world; in the opinion of one analyst ‘the great narrative of the Sovereign state embodying the general interest is less and less credible’ (Caillose, 2007: 47).

• Though the state remains a key player, it has everywhere been undergoing a process of restructuring.

Strong governance• At the heart of the ‘strong governance’ argument is the claim that there has

been a decentring of political power. • The State is no longer at the centre of international relations. It is no longer

in command of the economy. It is no longer at the centre of public administration and public policy (Gaudin, 2002).

• Contemporary States are called into question in virtually all of their spheres of activity.

• The state is being fundamentally transformed because it is no longer able to perform its internal (welfare) and external (defence) functions and can no longer manage its own institutions and territorial relationships.

• In international relations, the new global governance paradigm has steadily gained ground (Rosenau, 1992).

• The international system has escaped the control of states. International organizations, such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organisation are assuming a much more important role.

• Non-governmental organisations and charities are treated as equal stakeholders of governments in various international fora (Kjaer, 2004).

European integration and state capacity

• European integration has removed many competencies from the central state level, even in areas of core sovereignty such as monetary policy and defense.

• Most accounts now emphasise the loss of functional autonomy for the state. European integration threatens the state because it challenges the mystique of sovereignty (Börzel, 2002; Bache and Flinders 2004).

• European integration also undermines the normative supremacy of states, which can no longer claim a monopoly of the allocation of values.

• The role of bodies such as the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights is to challenge state-bound values.

• States no longer occupy the moral high ground, and new actors, such as international organizations, voluntary associations and sub-state authorities, have stepped into the breach (Keating, 1998).

Political economists and the hollow state

• Jessop (2007) identifies a transition from the Keynesian Welfare State to the Schumpeterian Workfare State as the principal consequence of the shift to a post-Fordist economy since the 1970s.

• As conceptualised by Jessop, the Keynesian Welfare state is an ideal type with the following characteristics: the production of full employment in relatively closed national economies, the promotion of mass consumption, the provision of collective goods to citizens, the intervention of the national state in economic management to compensate the failures of the market.

• The Schumpeterian Workfare State is of a different nature. Its function is to support the market and to create the conditions for innovation and enterprise in relatively open and competitive economies. The Schumpeterian Workfare State sets out to bring down labour costs and to enhance flexibility in the economy.

• The core decisions in economic policy are no longer decided at a national level, but are international or global in nature. The State is unable to deal effectively with the global or local demands that this new imagined economy requires.

Weakened state capacity, enhanced state responsibilities

• Weakened to the core of its capacity, the state is forced to imagine new solutions for governing national societies, most notably through new forms of central steering that rely the involve the state sharing responsibilities with non-state partners in policy networks. Though state capacity has weakened, the national state remains the level of regulation for social policy, hence it has to imagine innovative responses (Levy, 2006).

From Welfare state to neo-liberalism

• In some accounts the loss of state centrality has been accompanied by a paradigm shift from Welfare State to neo-liberalism.

• The Welfare State model is depicted as the final stage of organised modernity by Loughlin (2004: 13), a state based on ‘centralisation, standardisation, and bureaucratisation’.

• During the prolonged post-war period of welfare state hegemony, there was a basic belief about the role of state, the market and civil society and about their relationship to each other. During this period, government was top-down, hierarchical and technocratic and the State was the dominant actor in mediating social and territorial relationships.

• In the early 1980s, there was a paradigm shift, with the welfare model replaced by a dominant neo-liberal paradigm. In this neo-liberal governance paradigm, the market is dominant and market approaches have penetrated public administration.

• These tendencies have been most fully expressed in the UK, US and other Anglo-Saxon countries, such as New Zealand (Schmidt, 2002), but all advanced liberal democracies have espoused some form of neo-liberalism.

• This view is similar to that of Muller (1990, 1992) or Jobert (1994) for whom the social market economy was replaced by a neo-liberal paradigm in the mid 1980s.

Benchmarking and policy transfer

• There are comparable trends across European countries. Under the impact of Europeanisation and the challenges of the international political economy, European states have voluntarily pooled sovereignty in international organisations and increasingly converged their rules and institutions to conform to a common standard (Mény 1993). The importance of benchmarking and ideas of best practice are propagated by the EU, as well as national governments. There are various converging forces pushing for change. The economic changes of globalisation have challenged the state in multiple ways. At the international and European levels, new structures of binding rules and institutions have promoted trans-national unity.

Governance as Convergence?• As it has been presented above governance is consistent with

analyses based on convergence. • Under the impact of Europeanisation and the challenges of the

international political economy, European states have voluntarily pooled sovereignty in international organisations and increasingly converged their rules and institutions to conform to a common standard (Mény 1993, Bulmer and Lequesne 2005).

• There are various converging forces pushing for change. The importance of benchmarking and ideas of best practice - propagated by the EU, as well as national governments – have gradually been given formal status in programmes such as the Lisbon, Luxembourg and Bologna processes.

• At the international and European levels, new structures of binding rules and institutions have promoted trans-national unity.

What’s left of the State?

• Modern States no longer steer market capitalism, but they provide a market supporting orientation.

• The state capacity argument centres on the proposition that there has been a ‘shift in the purposes and modalities of contemporary state intervention’ (Levy, 2006).

• Levy describes the ‘three varieties’ of capitalism as (French) statism, (German) corporatism and (Anglo-American) neo-liberalism. He breaks with Hall and Soskice (2001) who speak only of coordinated market economies and liberal market economies, losing the ‘statist model somewhere along the way.

• Levy (2006) emphasises four new state missions: repairing the ‘three varieties of capitalism’; making labour markets more employment friendly; recasting regulatory frameworks; and expanding market competition

• For the current argument, these might be reformulated in terms of a spectrum ranging from the compensation state to the regulatory state.

A Compensation State?• The compensation state corrects the dysfunctions of modern

capitalism. • Even in apparently harsh neo-liberal regimes, such as that of

Thatcher in the UK, the state has intervened by providing support for the losers of economic modernisation, and shielding the weakest from market forces.

• It is no coincidence that the large trading countries have developed sophisticated welfare states.

• Modern states have intervened to train displaced workers to take up new employment opportunities and impose new responsibilities as a condition of obtaining welfare benefits.

• States have attempted to direct labour markets and to make them more employment friendly: with varying degrees of success (dependent upon the resistance and social partners).

• In the case of France, Howell (2006), Lalliemont (2006) and others demonstrate how the state has intervened to expand labour market flexibility and expand decentralised collective bargaining.

A Regulatory State?• Economic liberalisation not only constrains, but also provides opportunities

for new state activities. • Though from a political economy perspective, globalisation is usually

considered to weaken the state, it can also create new opportunities for state interventionism.

• Global markets require strong regulatory states, able to ensure that rules are respected, that commitments entered into are delivered, that the rules of market competition are fair.

• The regulatory hand of the state has been strengthened.. and the state has introduced itself into the most private affairs of multi-national firms.

• The most neo-liberal economies have arguably strengthened the state at the expense of societal networks, the case for post-Thatcher Britain in particular.

• Strong states are needed to control public expenditure, rein-in local authority spending, create targets for performance.

• Even in areas of deregulation – such as telecommunications – the state has had to act in a regulatory sense to ensure that the rules are respected. The US and EU have had to develop new regulatory capacities to ensure equitable competition.

European Governance• The European Union is the model for this mode of regulatory

governance. With few budgetary or administrative means at its disposal, the EU mainly regulates, rather than administers or redistributes. It sets rules that must, in theory, be acted upon by national officials, controlled by national and European judges.

• Regulatory governance has an instrumental logic: its core justification is that of respecting ‘Pareto-efficient’ formulae for the operation of markets and devising performance indicators as neutral forms of arbitration (Leca, 1996)

• ‘Pareto-efficient’, the optimal point for a community, signifies a situation where no-one loses.

• The European Union, conscious of criticisms of its own democratic deficit, is also the site where competing versions of participatory governance are experimented.

• Building capacity through a permanent dialogue with core interests and associations from civil society is a proxy for the operation of the European Union as a genuine system of representative and responsible government.