Understanding the so-called shift from government to governance

Current use does not treat governance as a synonym for government. Rather governance signifies a change in the meaning of government, referring to a new process of governing; or a changed condition of ordered rule; or the new method by which society is governed.

Well, yes and no. Rhodes’ oft-cited argument that governance, the ‘new governance’, as it were, refers to fundamental changes in governing was instrumental in triggering widespread interest in governance as a phenomenon. Rhodes believed that the change in the style of governing in the United Kingdom during the 1980s meant the emergence of a distinctly new governing process summarized as ‘governing without government’. Public­private partnerships, market-based administrative reform and the rolling back of the state coupled with the deregulation of markets were all seen as elements of a large-scale transformation of the ways in which the modern state - the ‘hollow state’ - governed society.

In this ‘hollow state’ the formal institutions of government have been largely replaced by the capacity of social actors such as networks and markets to govern. To the extent that it is important government is there to legitimate the actions of the social actors and to provide representative democracy, while the ‘real’ democracy is expressed through the involvement of individuals and groups in networks. Thatcherism clearly represented a new era in British politics and society, and that pattern has persisted, and in some ways been expanded by the Blair government.

All of that having been said, however, it also seems clear that some of the conclusions Rhodes drew from these changes were ethnocentric or exaggerated, or possibly both. First of all, while the emergence of institu­tionalized forms of concerted action between public and private actors was a novelty to the British political milieu, it was certainly a familiar phenomenon both in (the rest of) Europe (Katzenstein 1984; Kraemer 1964) and even in the United States (see, for example, Beauregard 1988).

Second, and more important in terms of theory development, what is changing is not a process of governing from government to governance but the role of government in governance. It is, of course, not the case that contemporary British governance takes place without government; rather, what has changed is the centrality of government in governance and the modus operandi of government within that new model of governance. As soon as we conceptualize the developments Rhodes uses to illustrate his argument in that fashion, we can more easily ascertain what is new and what is not. Also, we will be in a better position to apply governance theory in comparative research. And, finally, by doing so we have also escaped the trap of singling out one national context - a case which arguably displays one of the more extreme transformations in these respects - as a norm or a yardstick with which we assess similar developments in other institutional and political contexts.

So exactly what is happening in terms of changes in governance? The next section of the chapter discusses some general patterns in contemporary govern­ance change. Following that, we will briefly discuss how these changes have affected the state. The next section of the chapter looks more at the resilience of institutions and how institutions adapt to changes in their environment.