Governance

Governance is a term used to describe the making of public policy and the delivery of public goods in modern states following the rise of the new right, the development of new public management, public sector reform and globalization.

The overarching question is what significance or meaning remains of the liberal democratic notion of the state as the undisputed centre of political power and its self-evident monopoly of articulating and pursuing the collective interest in the era of ‘economic’ globalization, a hollowing out of the state, decreasing legitimacy for collective solutions, and a marketi- sation of the state itself.

For the proponents of governance, public sector reform and privatization have hollowed the state from within, whilst developments within civil society and the globalization of economies have constrained the state from without. It appears that we are seeing the pluralist dream of the state competing as one power centre among many. For Rhodes (1997) it is governing without government and hence the development of a differentiated polity where no single interests is able to dominate the policy process.

Where the governance school differs from the American pluralists is in the way it emphasizes the international context within which decisions are made and so moves away from much of the insularity of both British and American pluralists. One of the most important developments has been the notion of multi-level governance (MLG) (see Bache and Flinders 2004). Developing out of analysis of the European Union, the multi-level governance literature suggests that there is an increasingly complex process of governance with decision-making operating between different levels. The levels interact to produce new forms of policy-making. The key premise of multi-level governance, like the rest of the governance school, is that authority has dispersed away from centralized nation states, and that there are multiple sites of decision-making each involving different actors and interests. MLG again adopts pluralist assumptions about the way power is dispersed and the limits on the state. It effectively by-passes the issue of how actors with different levels may exercise power on each other. Jessop (2002: 67) makes the point that what appear to be self-regulating networks are in fact organized by political authorities that

provide the group rules for governance, ensure the compatibility of different governance mechanisms and regimes, deploy a relative monopoly of organizational intelligence and information.

The problem with governance accounts of state reform and development is that they fall back on the simplistic assumptions of traditional pluralism. They again confuse plurality with pluralisms and ignore the asymmetries of power that potentially exist even in network relations (Marsh, Richards and Smith 2003). Perhaps the main problem is the way in which the governance assumes that the central state has lost power when there is a raft of empirical evidence to demonstrate the high level of resource and authority that remains within the central state. The governance literature solves part of the pluralist problem by theorizing the state and in particular theorizing the type of state that exist in a new global context. However, they continue the pluralist error of not problematizing the state. It is seen again as a benign force that has weakened significantly and is now challenge by multiple power centres. What this conception really indicates is how modern political science continues to be influenced by US conceptions of the state as a fragmented and weak organization.