Abstract
Mark Bevir (2010) Democratic Governance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Pres. ISBN 978-0-691-14538-9 (hbk); 978-0-691-14538-6 (pbk). 301pp.
This volume fills a significant gap in discussions about modern formations of governance – the role of social scientific ideas in constituting new forms of policy production. It begins by challenging the ahistoricism and apparent naturalism of current (or at least recent) policy narratives with a genealogical reading of how the “present” was formed and “new worlds” emerged. Part 2 (on constitutionalism) comprises chapters on democratic governance, constitutional reform and judicial reform; and Part 3 (on public administration) comprises chapters on public policy, joined up governance and on policy reform. The primary focus is an analysis of New Labour, though there are references to developments in Australia and the U.S. in some chapters.
Many of the critical engagements with governance are relatively familiar: for example, others have pointed to the problems of voice and participation in areas dominated by expertise; or have highlighted the ways in which governing instruments – of targets, regulation and other “instrumental” forms of intervention – tend to erase debates about questions of value. What Bevir adds to these critiques is a rigorous and historically informed challenge to the power of modernist social science and its influence on the policy process. In Bevir’s words, ‘My diagnosis suggests that modernist social science has undermined faith in representative democracy and led policy actors to turn increasingly to an expertise based on modernist social science itself. My prescriptive hope is that an interpretive social science may reveal the limitations of this expertise and encourage more pluralist and participatory democracy’ (Bevir, 2010: 3).
This is seductive stuff. It chimes with the cultural, ethnographic and interpretive turns in policy analysis and – to a lesser extent – in public administration. It also speaks to some of the political shifts we are currently witnessing – at least in the UK – where the role of professional and administrative expertise is being further challenged as politicians turn away from ideas of the “Big State” and towards a revalorisation of “popular common sense”, co-production and personal, rather than governmental, responsibility. This currency means that it is particularly important to engage with some of the assumptions on which the argument is based. I want to point to three issues underpinning the analysis that produced some disquiet: those of causality, temporality and “alternatives”. Underpinning each of these are problems based on Bevir’s refusal to engage seriously with other theoretical traditions that have sought to challenge the precepts and prescriptions of modernist social science.
Causality
Bevir proposes that ‘the concept of governance arose both as new theories led people to view the world differently, and as policymakers drew on these theories actively to promote markets and networks’ (p. 252). While agreeing with the kinds of critiques offered by Bevir (about, for example, the problems flowing from the turn to rationalistic and instrumental policy measures under New Labour), I am less sure about the chain of argument that attributes the problems to the rise of “modernist” social scientific thought. For example Bevir cites as one example of the problems of such thought the shift from the ethos of “responsible” government to an emphasis on the “accountability” of governments, with all of the (flawed) technologies of accountability that followed. But perhaps the shift might be a response to the failure of responsible government – coupled with the rise of a media all too willing to illuminate and magnify such failures. And the subsequent shift – from procedural accountability to performance-based accountability, leading to the perils associated with the measurement culture – may perhaps be attributed less to the availability of measurement technologies than to the ways in which procedural accountability proved insufficient in an increasingly complex and interdependent world in which rules and norms of what counted as proper procedure were no longer held in common.
These are minor points and I do not want to suggest that my possible version is any more tenable than that offered by Bevir. But these and other examples suggest a more general problem about the status attributed to shifts in social scientific theory in shaping new models of public policy and administration. Certainly ideas do influence policy, and Bevir presents a stringent critique of their pernicious effect of the turn to policy models that drew on rational choice theory, the new institutionalism, systems theory, regulation theory and so on. But how exactly do ideas influence policy? To address a possible tendency towards an “ideational turn” in which ideas are privileged in explanations of change, we need to ask questions such as: what happens in the black box in which actors, ideas, norms, laws, ethics, institutional histories, political ideologies, ethics, democratic mandates and media panics – not to mention events – encounter each other in complex assemblages of power? How might ideas be drawn down by policy actors as they seek solutions, and in turn privilege (and fund) particular forms of social scientific enquiry? How do ideas and theories flow dynamically across disciplinary, institutional, linguistic and spatial boundaries, becoming translated by actors to fit with particular circumstances and needs? And how might policy actors come to perform particular theories and ideas as they encounter new governmentalities of rule? Notions of assemblage, translation, spatial flows, performance and governmentality of course all belong to the post-modernist traditions of social scientific thought that Bevir does not engage with – though his focus on the value of interpretive social science offers one way forward to address some of the issues raised here (see for example a forthcoming issue of Policy and Politics on ‘Ideas into Policy’, which Bevir and Gains have edited).
Temporality
I underscore the significance of Bevir’s attempts to situate the present in a genealogical reading that challenges and disrupts the apparent naturalism and ahistoricism of the present (or rather of the present that was pre-eminent at the time of writing under New Labour). Many students will find the summaries of how the present came into being in Chapters 1–3 very useful; though there are some assertions that are made rather too swiftly. My difficulty however comes in the accounts of change in some of the substantive chapters. These offer nuanced accounts of the disjuncture between policy intentions and outcomes, but Bevir can sometimes be charged with repeating one of the key flaws of much of the governance literature – the emphasis on diachronic accounts of change. Many have argued (including myself – Newman, 2001, 2005; Newman and Clarke, 2009) that the present is comprised of multiple governance regimes and ideologies overlaid on each other, producing a field of tensions. Bevir does acknowledge problems of temporality, noting how ‘when new techniques of change have arisen, they have generally mingled and competed with the persistence of older techniques’ (p. 89). However, the main thrust is on diachronic accounts of change in which the long march of modernist thought displaces other forms of theory. These need, I suggest, to be complemented by more attention to synchronic accounts of how different temporal logics are overlaid on each other and collide in the present.
Alternatives
In the final chapter Bevir develops his argument – hinted at elsewhere – that interpretive political science might not only offer an alternative to the main theories of governance but might also encourage a more participative and dialogic response to the dilemmas facing representative democracy. Rather than a reliance on economic and social forms of rationality, he proposes a turn to local rationality that privileges interpretive social science, pluralist concepts of citizenship, participatory democracy and dialogic processes of policy making. Local, he is quick to point out, refers to a local web of beliefs rather than a local geographical area. ‘Local knowledge refers to people’s grasp of their own experiences, circumstances, and locality, and it is thus taken to be specific, concrete, and practical, rather than general, abstract and theoretical’ (p. 262). In this claim he moves from interpretive social science as method to a more philosophical engagement with ‘the holistic and contingent nature of belief and action’ (p. 263). Bevir is to be commended for his emphasis on the coexistence of diverse and contested webs of beliefs and on forms of democratic practice that can engage with – and be situated in – local reasoning. This has (unacknowledged) resonances with the tradition of feminist work on democratic participation that has engaged with the difficulties of reconciling presence, voice and experience (eg Young, 1990).
It is always more easy to offer critique than to suggest alternatives and I do not want to adopt an overly critical stance to Bevir’s proposals, but for me the alternatives leave some difficult questions unresolved. First, despite his careful qualification of the use of the ‘local’, he leaves questions about how general issues that require coordinated and even strategic action – from climate change to health pandemics to security to care – might be addressed. Second, the privileging of local reasoning opens up space for webs of belief that are antithetical to what might be envisaged as progressive and secular policy developments. That is, it potentially returns us to the revalorisation of pre-modern forces of religion, faith and all of the prejudices that a century of modern legal reforms (not least on gender, race, sexuality) and their associated bureaucratic architectures have sought to address. Finally, I wondered about power. One issue here is how far local webs of meaning can be stretched to encompass global connections and non-local forms of action across deeply entrenched differences of power. But I am also concerned with a missing narrative in the move beyond or after modernism: namely the contribution of Foucauldian theories of governmentality that suggest how dialogic and participative practices do not lie ‘outside’ governmental power but may be a means of inculcating new forms of governable and self-governing subjects.
These are difficult issues but ones that in the move away from New Labour (with its tradition of policy making based on economic and sociological rationality that is rightly critiqued by Bevir) to a coalition government committed to shrinking the state, reducing regulation, abolishing targets and fostering a Big Society are likely to become more, rather than less, pressing. While this book will be a productive resource for subscribers to Public Policy and Administration, I rather hope that Cameron and his aides do not read it.