Governance

From policy-making to problem-solving

As Claus Offe has suggested, one reason why the discourse on governance has gained such a strong hold over us in such a short period of time is that it conveys a widespread perception that there are ‘problems in countless areas of public life for which state policy and, generally speaking, hierarchical modes of action … fail just as manifestly as market and quasi-market incentives’ (2009: 554). This notion of ‘problems’ has become the ever more dominant key in the discourse on governance, but it first emerged in the field of public administration in the early 1990s. In that literature, the concept of governance signified privatization and deregulation, but it was also seen to involve a more intricate kind of change. As one commentator described it in 1993, ‘[n]ew patterns of interaction between government and society can be observed in areas such as social welfare, environmental protection, education and physical planning’, patterns ‘apparently aimed at discovering other ways of coping with new problems or of creating new possibilities for governing’ (Kooiman, 1993: 1).

‘Problems’, we all know, need solutions. No matter just what the problem seemed to be, in the discourse on governance that grew out of the field of public administration in the 1990s the solution was called ‘networks’. Early on, the concept of governance became equated with policy-making by network, and the network concept became the privileged term in an ideal-typical trichotomy of forms of governing within the modern welfare state: hierarchies, markets, and networks. This trichotomy allowed for the perception of a step-wise evolution over time, a contracted historical narrative taking the late-modern welfare state from hierarchies to markets to networks in the course of two decades, starting in the 1970s. There was a strong functionalist undercurrent – and often an explicit functionalism – in the favored narrative, a legacy of earlier theories of state overload from which the storyline originally derived (Crozier et al., 1975; Kaase, 1980; Rose, 1980; cf. Pierre, 2000: 4). According to this narrative, ever increasing pressure on key service functions in the modern state, coupled with ever increasing public spending during the post-war era, eventually resulted in a decreasing ability to govern effectively in the course of the 1970s and 1980s, at which point conventional forms of governing by state hierarchy gave way to market and quasi-market solutions to public service provision. Partly as a consequence of the sudden flair for privatization and deregulation came the veritable explosion of network forms of governing described and analyzed in the early literature on governance. As Rod Rhodes, one of the pioneers of the governance turn in British public administration, explained in 1997, ‘the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s deliberately fragmented service delivery systems, generating functional imperatives for interorganizational coordination’ (1997: 57). And largely as an unintended consequence of that process, the narrative continues, the nature and role of the state itself changed. ‘The state,’ Rhodes remarked by way of denouement, ‘becomes a collection of intergovernmental networks made up of governmental and societal actors with no sovereign actor able to steer or regulate’ (1997: 57).

To this day the functionalist narrative has remained in place in the discourse on governance, other discontinuities aside. What has changed in this narrative since the early 1990s are the problems purportedly faced by conventional forms of governing. The public administration literature has remained centered on the question with which it began: the question of the will and ability of the state to govern effectively in the wake of privatization and deregulation of public services. And the functional challenges supposedly faced by the state in this regard have remained the same as in the literature on state overload: the provision of established forms of welfare to the citizens of Western democracies (Pierre and Peters, 2000). In the course of the 1990s, however, as the discourse on governance branched off regionally and globally, and the concept of multi-level governance gained ground in the process, the functional challenges facing the state came to be seen not only in terms of endogeneous factors as described and theorized since the 1970s; a new set of exogeneous developments have added insult to injury.

One such exogeneous development is the effect of regional integration on what the British literature came to refer to as a ‘hollowing-out’ of the state, meaning a ‘loss of functions upwards to the European Union, downwards to special-purpose bodies, and outwards to agencies’ (Rhodes, 1997: 17). Another exogeneous development frequently invoked in the discourse on governance is the emergence of ostensibly new problems such as climate change, transnational terrorism, and global financial crises (Kickert et al., 1997: 1). So in addition to old truths about the state’s inability to deliver what citizens of Western democratic welfare states had come to expect in the post-war boom economy, the state has been found wanting in governing ability on a new set of issues as well. And this perception has in turn encouraged a view of governance less centered on the nature and role of the state in policy-making, and more centered on ‘the coordination of social systems’ around the new problems identified in the discourse on governance (Pierre, 2000: 3; Enroth, 2011a: 30).

In tandem with this move from a focus on the nature and role of the state in policy-making to a focus on systemic governing functions in society, the identity and make-up of the kind of society that needs to be governed have become ever more elusive in the turn from the national to the regional to the global. In the process, the discourse on governance has ever more insistently put into question one of the key presuppositions in the modern art of governing: the very existence of subjects and objects of governing embedded in a nation-state-society constellation. As Renate Mayntz has perspicaciously observed, this presupposition can be readily extended to the institutions and practices of governing in the EU, where ‘it is, in principle, still possible to talk of a policy process with its input and output aspects’, but this is ‘no longer possible at the global level where there exists no identifiable steering subject, and no institutionalised framework containing the object of steering’ (2003: 34).

The modern art of governing presupposes some reference to a society for which policy is made and whose population is thus being governed individually and as a collectivity, and it presupposes some reference to a governing subjectivity, whether construed conventionally as a group of persons or an institutional complex in the state or as an all-pervasive governmentality criss-crossing received distinctions between state and society and public and private. What makes the governance turn something more and much more radical than a mere change in governing forms or a simple continuation of a modern art of governing in Foucault’s sense is the ever more conspicuous absence of such reference points in the discourse on governance. As suggested by Mayntz, the crucial step in this respect has been the transition from national and regional to global governance.

Problem-solving going global

Whereas governance in national and regional contexts has largely been defined and described in terms of the presence and impact of networks in various policy processes, the discourse on global governance initially defined its subject matter negatively: as the absence of hierarchy on the global arena, yet at the same time as being functionally equivalent to world government. When Lawrence Finkelstein in 1995 asked, ‘What is global governance?’ in the newly launched journal, Global Governance, he started out by noting the ambiguity which was already then seen to besiege governance talk. What was clear to Finkelstein was that governance ‘does not mean “government”, or we would say that instead’. As he explained, ‘since the international system notoriously lacks hierarchy and government, the fuzzier word governance is used instead’ (Finkelstein, 1995: 367). Defining global governance in terms of the absence of government came naturally for erstwhile students of international relations. To Rosenau, the world of global governance seemed but ‘an extension of the anarchic structures that have long pervaded world politics’ (1995: 17). Early notions of global governance thus smacked of ersatz government in a context where the real thing had never existed yet now seemed more needed than ever before.

The increasing attention to transnational problems in the course of the 2000s has lent ever greater force to the notion that new governing functions are needed on a global scale in the absence of world government, but it has remained unclear what the exact functional requirements are in the absence of a clear view of the society or social system that needs to be governed. ‘There is no single organizing principle on which global governance rests,’ Rosenau explained in the same issue of Global Governance in a few words that have been widely quoted since, ‘no emergent order around which communities and nations are likely to converge. Global governance is the sum of myriad – literally millions of – control mechanisms driven by different histories, goals, structures, and processes’ (Rosenau, 1995: 16). ‘In terms of governance,’ Rosenau concluded, ‘the world is too disaggregated for grand logics that postulate a measure of global coherence’ (1995: 16). Many have followed Rosenau in denying any fundamental coherence in global governance, but many have also – in undeniable if understandable tension with this denial – felt the need to conceive of the global as such in more systemic if not communal terms. The 1995 Report of the Commission on Global Governance is paradigmatic in this regard. The Commission’s report declared that ‘governance must take an integrated approach to questions of human survival and prosperity. Recognizing the systemic nature of these issues, it must promote systemic approaches in dealing with them’ (Commission on Global Governance, 1995: 4).

If the apparent lack of coherence in global governance has boosted the perceived need for collective action in the face of new transnational problems, it has also made the prospects of such measures seem less than auspicious. ‘It is difficult,’ one commentator has remarked, ‘to believe that the interconnection of these plural and protean configurations could occur spontaneously, and there is nothing to suggest that the outcome is a coherent program of action that meets the objectives desired by all the groups that comprise mankind’ (Smouts, 1998: 87). In practice and in much empirically oriented research, this old pluralist problem tends to be evaded or negotiated in a pragmatic and incremental manner, with global governance portrayed as something like a patch-wise institutionalization of functions of governing beyond the nation-state (cf. Jönsson and Tallberg, 2010). But this problem has also spurred an intense preoccupation among theorists of global governance with concepts such as world society and global community variously construed to conceptualize the possibility, at least, of unity in global plurality (Shaw, 2000; Keane, 2003; Bartelson, 2009; Meyer, 2009; Albert et al., 2010; cf. Enroth 2010). Yet at present there is no agreement either as to how such a society or system might be conceived of theoretically or as to what kind of indicators and evidence we might need in order to ascertain its existence and constitution empirically, or indeed whether talk of societies and systems is an appropriate idiom for broaching the nature of the global in the first place (cf. Bartelson, 2010).

The persistent efforts of John Meyer are an emblematic illustration of this, whose concept of world society remains a world itself composed of societies identified and held together as such within nation-states (Meyer, 2009; cf. Wagner, 2000; Urry, 2000; Bartelson, 2009). If this usage may arguably reflect the current state of world society, it certainly does nothing to facilitate the conceptualization of society beyond nation-states. At the same time there has evolved in the discourse on governance an almost total agreement as to the need for governing beyond the nation-state-society constellation, even – or especially – in the absence of a clear view of what kind of society might call for new governing functions. Michael Zürn, for one, has pointed to ‘the rising need for enlarged and deepened international cooperation in the age of globalization’ (2005: 137). David Held has noted, similarly, that ‘global politics is anchored today not just in traditional geopolitical concerns – trade, power, security – but in a large diversity of social and ecological questions’ supposedly shared across the globe (2005: 242). And, lest anyone still be in doubt on this matter, ‘the problems now needing to be confronted on a global scale – from environmental deterioration, to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, to the stabilization of complex markets, to public health emergencies – demand political innovation’ on a global scale (Pauly, 2005: 120).

As these messages have been relentlessly hammered in for more than a decade, the core connotation of ‘global governance’ has thus become pretty much what came out of the early governance literature in public administration: ‘finding solutions to highly complex problems’ (Zürn, 2005: 145; Peters, 2011: 85; cf. Altvater, 1999; Hardin, 1999). The vital difference is that in the literature on global governance hammering in these messages has also meant forgetting the fact that problems and solutions are now all that is left of our received social ontology of governing, having abandoned the possibility of tying problems to societies and populations as objects of governing, and solutions to whatever governing subjectivity we think we can identify within the nation-state-society constellation. The discourse on governance has thus pushed us into a paradoxical situation where everybody seems to agree that new functions of governing are desperately needed on a global scale while nobody seems to agree on the nature of the kind of society that needs to be governed, nor indeed on who should be doing the governing. And since any problem that can be described as having transnational implications can be a priori incorporated into the discourse on global governance, and since ‘almost any process or structure of politics beyond the state – regardless of scope, content, or context – has within the last few years been declared part of a general idea of global governance’, the latter concept has in effect become boundless (Dingwerth and Pattberg, 2006: 185), encompassing nothing less than ‘the totality of human existence’ (Latham, 1999: 27).

The a-legitimacy of governance

The developments chronicled so far amount to a far-reaching and profound questioning of the modern art of governing, changing what it means to govern and be governed. We must now turn to the normative implications of this process, specifically to the question of what it means to govern legitimately. As we have most recently been taught to think of the concept in terms nominally ‘democratic’, legitimacy turns on the extent to which the words and deeds of those who govern are considered legitimate by those who are being governed. The concept of legitimacy in this context conveys the idea that political authority can be justified only by popular consent expressed by, or – which is usually the case – ascribed to, those subjected to the same authority. Legitimacy thus construed is about the ‘social credibility and acceptability’ of political authority (Black, 2008: 142). Let it be noted that our entrenched ideological predispositions notwithstanding, this concept of legitimacy does not in itself presuppose any particular regime type or constitution in the Aristotelian sense. It does, however, presuppose a clear distinction between subjects and objects of governing. Regardless of inflection, the concept of legitimacy derives its justificatory force from the reference to beliefs and attitudes among the governed. Thus justifying any given form or instance of governing – in principle, at least – becomes a matter of establishing its legitimacy by referring back to the beliefs and attitudes of the governed (Beetham, 1991).

Thus far, the discourse on governance has been no exception, although the grounds for belief in the credibility and acceptability of the authority exercised have been widely and intensely debated. In the early public administration literature and in a fair share of the literature on global governance today, discussions about legitimacy have tended to start with matters of efficacy, rendering governance effective more or less by definition – in the case of public administration insofar as state and market are considered failed or inadequate forms of governing by standards set by the discourse on governance itself; in the case of global governance by reference to the lack of a world government and the perceived need for governing functions on a global scale. The stipulated efficacy of governance in turn tends to be construed as grounds for legitimacy, under labels such as ‘output’ or ‘performance’ legitimacy and on the assumption that governing performance – getting the job done, whatever the job might be – is essential to its credibility and acceptability among those whose beliefs and attitudes on this matter are seen to matter. ‘Global governance institutions,’ Allen Buchanan and Robert Keohane have explained in a widely cited article, ‘provide benefits that cannot be provided by states’, and ‘securing those benefits may depend upon these institutions being regarded as legitimate’ (Buchanan and Keohane, 2006: 417, 422).

Others have tried to shift the grounds for debating legitimacy in governance either towards entrenched input values such as representation, participation and deliberation, or towards procedural values such as accountability and legality (e.g. Braithwaite, 1999; Weiss, 2000; Skogstad, 2005; Bevir, 2010a; Zürn and Stephen, 2010; Dryzek and Niemeyer, 2010; Considine and Afzal, 2011). Whether drawing our attention to input, output or procedure, however, any and all efforts to normatively justify institutions and practices of governance have continued to rely on the conventional construal of the concept of legitimacy outlined above, key controversies boiling down to what kind of values we should seek to maximize in order to foster the proper beliefs and attitudes among the governed. It is this model of justification that enables students of global governance to infer the existence of a ‘global common good’, a global ‘general public’, a ‘global public space’ or the like, simply by pointing to the existence of transnational problems of various kinds, regardless of the less than clear reference of terms such as ‘common’ and ‘public’ on a global scale (Koenig-Archibugi, 2005: 113; Pauly, 2005: 137; Dryzek and Niemeyer, 2010: 184–96).

Yet such an inference inevitably adds inconsistency to our received concept of democratic legitimacy when transposed onto the global arena since the structure of this concept stipulates that any problems we face in the world become political problems only by being defined as such, by being framed as worthy and viable items of collective decision-making in a process of public deliberation, and by being subsequently politicized in the strict sense of being brought onto a procedurally defined agenda (Dahl, 1989). And the structure of our received concept of democratic legitimacy further stipulates that when any given problem becomes a political problem in this sense, it becomes a political problem only for a specific collectivity, by being defined as such by members of that collectivity; and, again, that it is only by reference to beliefs and attitudes within such a collectivity that institutions and practices of governing can be deemed legitimate, by whatever standards (Dahl, 1999).

In the discourse on global governance, by contrast, the identity of the governed rarely enters into arguments about justification, except indirectly: by reference to the problems identified as problems of global governance. Global governance problems thus appear less as issues on a political agenda to be dealt with in a specified manner by institutionally specified agents, as in a national or multi-level polity. Problems of global governance appear more as transcendent imperatives that demand responses, without any attached specification as to who should respond to what and to whom (cf. Lingis, 1998: 1–2). The grounds for such imperatives may be that we all share an ecosystem of planetary scope, or that we are all vulnerable to global terrorist threats, or that we are all subject to the increasingly dramatic and erratic movements of global financial markets.

Not all imperatives seem to carry the same weight, however. Even among those who suggest that suffering problems such as these turn us all into members of a world society or a global community, few if any would claim that we all suffer all these problems equally. But since our conventional concept of democratic legitimacy in this context offers us no means of assessing who should legitimately respond to what and in whose name, we are left with the rhetoric of problem-talk as the only available ground for the justification of global governance. With the rise and spread of the discourse on governance, the justification of political authority has come to rest on nothing but the perceived need for new forms of governing where none exist or existing ones seem inadequate. The perception of such a need, in turn, is contingent on the nature and implications of the problems at hand, which in turn are contingent on nothing but the rhetorical efficacy of the discourse on governance itself in making the problems at hand seem urgent and complex enough to demand the kind of solutions presented and justified by the same discourse.

In effect, the discourse on governance has opened up a space of a-legitimacy in which our conventional concept of democratic legitimacy makes little sense (cf. Erman and Uhlin, 2010). In that normative void, questions about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of institutions and practices of governing become difficult to ask, let alone answer. What we now – or at least for now – have to live with is a predicament in which there is no straightforward answer to the straightforward question of what it means to govern and be governed legitimately, for the plain but normatively disappointing reason that the discourse on governance has no use for a categorical distinction between subjects and objects of governing (cf. Offe, 2009).

This normative void may be bad news for all of us and a slap in the face for political theorists, yet as if to temporarily save us from facing the full awkwardness of this predicament the discourse on governance has come to function in a manner that may be described as mythical, in Roland Barthes’ sense of the word: like myth, the discourse on governance has effected what Barthes refers to as a ‘conjuring trick; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and filled it with nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance’ (Barthes, 1972: 155; cf. Baudrillard, 2001). In the discourse on global governance, the humanly ascribed meaning and significance of problems such as climate change, terrorism, and global financial crises must be forgotten so that these problems may appear as given to human experience and expectation (cf. Butler, 1993: 1–16). It is as if problems that are seen to transcend the nation-state-society constellation were problems independently of any belief system or ascription of social meaning, as if our belief systems and our ways of ascribing social meaning were only operational within the nation-state-society constellation.

Theorizing the art of governing after governmentality

Having traced in broad outline the evolution of the discourse on governance over two odd decades, we are now in a position to return to and reconsider Foucault’s sixteenth-century questions about governing. Without overstating the point, the discursive shift traced here turns much of Foucault’s account of the specificity of the modern art of governing on its head, pace his acolytes and their interpretation of the theory and practice of governance as so many ever more subtle variations on the theme of liberal governmentality.

For one thing, to govern is no longer to engage in the conduct of conduct of populations, but rather to engage with transcendent problems of human existence and coexistence. We have seen the scope of this ambition expand rapidly from the familiar and relatively tangible kind of welfare provision associated with the modern state, to the tackling of all-pervading diffuse harms such as climate change, terrorism, and financial crises. What it means to be governed has transmuted accordingly into something like having efforts at solving such problems made on your behalf, albeit not necessarily or typically by your own authorization or meaningful consent – a less than satisfactory situation insofar as we still entertain ideals of popular control over political authority. And as we just saw, the question of what makes governing credible and acceptable for those subjected to it can no longer be settled in principle by reference to an immanent relationship between governors and governed as subjects and objects of governing within a nation-state-society constellation. In the discourse on governance this question can only be settled in an ad hoc and indirect manner in relation to whatever problems happen to be identified and passed off as imperatives beyond any specific nation-state-society constellation.

From this, it has been concluded that scholars and practitioners alike need to attend more carefully and critically to ‘the question why some issues come to be publicly seen or constructed as issues of global governance while others are not’ (Dingwerth and Pattberg, 2010: 709). Yet what may be construed as evidence of a failure to recognize the socially constructed nature of global governance problems may as well be construed as evidence of an emerging belief that those problems indeed are problems independently of any particular belief system or ascription of social meaning, and that our established belief systems and our habitual ways of ascribing social meaning indeed are operational only within the nation-state-society constellation. To my mind, this points to what may be the most daunting task in this shift from one art of governing to another, namely to reopen and rethink the underlying relationship between the political and its outside, a relationship that has been effectively closed off since the seventeenth century.

According to the entrenched modern view of this relationship, the boundaries separating the political and whatever is thought to be rightfully outside its perimeter are themselves set politically: through collective decision-making and deliberation in an immanent relationship between subjects and objects of governing within a given polity (Pizzorno, 1987). Today the discourse on governance reopens the political domain onto the transcendent and the transcendental, reversing the closure effected in modern political, theological and ethical discourse (Pizzorno, 1987; Taylor, 1987: 211–33; Foucault, 1991: 87–8). Whereas Foucault’s modern art of governing found its impetus in the specific circumstances that pertained within specific states, nations, and societies, the theory and practice of governance draw their rationale and justification from the outside, from whatever can be defined as imperative problems in virtue of being defined as something that transcends the specifics of nations, states, and societies.

The rhetorical force of this figure really cannot be overestimated. Even to a fierce critic such as Claus Offe, ‘it is evident that one cannot simply ignore these problems’ (Offe, 2009: 554, emphasis added); the self-fulfilling self-evidence of problems cast as governance problems makes ‘cannot ignore’ in this context read something like ‘cannot but accept whatever measures are presented as solutions to the same problems in and by the discourse on governance’. There is more than a hint of decisionism in the insistence that urgent and extraordinary challenges in the world call for urgent and extraordinary measures in governing, albeit in the discourse on governance, the rule of law is typically not suspended in an explicit manner by an established sovereign authority in the name of the state; instead it tends to be silently transcended by sovereignty ‘in fragments’, by ‘disaggregated’ sovereignty in the fuzzy realm of global governance (Schmitt, 2005; cf. Slaughter, 2004; Agamben, 2005; Kalmo and Skinner, 2010).

Down in the depths of social ontology, governance thus conjures up John Pocock’s ‘Machiavellian moment’ more than Carl Schmitt’s moment of sovereign decision on the exception to the rule of law: the moment when the art of governing first became the art of dealing with the contingent event, before that art petrified in the institutions and ideas of modern statehood as traced by Foucault in his lectures on governmentality (Pocock, 1975; Foucault, 1991, 2007). Today we are again shaken by contingent events that transcend the conventional boundaries of the political, only this time Fortuna calls as climate change, terrorist attacks and economic crises. This time, too, we respond by political innovation and conceptual change that may inadvertently amount to nothing less than a revolution in the concept of politics (Viroli, 1992). And like the Renaissance discourse on reason of state, the discourse on governance, too, makes contingency look like necessity and necessity like a justification for new forms of governing that would be difficult to justify within conventional political discourse. And as in seventeenth-century Europe friends of the old world and of the political discourse associated with it vociferously object – this time in the name of democratic legitimacy – that the new art of governing is but ‘false politics’, as Campanella condemned reason of state in 1631 (Viroli, 1992: 474). And the tragedy of their plight is the same as that of critics of reason of state in the seventeenth century, in that received normative concepts no longer apply when we accept the descriptive elements of the new discourse (cf. Viroli, 1992). The ready acceptance of the ontology of governance is what makes legitimacy in governance a catachresis, and visions of ‘democratic governance’ an oxymoron, however edifying in intent (cf. Bevir, 2010a; Enroth, 2011b).

None of this is meant to suggest that existing social and political theory is null and void on the subject of governance. Foucault’s followers can still convincingly argue that the way governance problems are publicly presented and disseminated may well affect the perceptions, self-perceptions and behavior of large numbers of people. Similarly political theorists can still argue that our received notions of democratic legitimacy have lost none of their regulative appeal, and that the ideal of democracy is sorely needed in the discourse on governance not in spite of, but precisely because of what Gerry Stoker some fifteen years ago referred to as ‘a divorce between the complex reality of decision-making associated with governance and the normative codes used to explain and justify government’ (Stoker, 1998: 19).

But what I have argued in this article is not that existing social and political theories of governance fail on their own terms, but that they fail to make sense of governance as a consequential change in the art of governing. We can indeed conceive of governance in terms of the conduct of conduct, but what we then describe and analyze will not be knowledge and power targeted at specific populations residing in specific societies but measures adopted in order to solve problems that are seen to transcend existing collectivities and their institutional arrangements. And we can certainly continue to insist that institutions and practices of governance should meet accepted standards of democratic legitimacy, but when we do so, we are beholden to ideals that effectively bar access to changing beliefs about the nature and boundaries of the political. In order to access and assess the new art of governing on its own terms, we need a sociological imagination that stretches beyond societies, and a political imaginary that can do without the presupposition of collectivities. As to the former, some promising preparatory work has already been done (Urry, 2000; Wagner, 2000). As yet, there is no real sign of the latter. ¹