Governance as a ‘social object’: A ‘realist’ interpretation

It is rare to come across such articulated and conceptually dense analyses such as the one proposed by Davies on the theoretical premises and empirical observations of governance, a discussion now rife in the field of social and political sciences and amongst political decision-makers and consultants who support and justify it. Governance has become so widespread that many, not only Gramscian neo-Marxists like Davies, explicitly use the image of a triumphant orthodoxy, which instead of transcending what remains in the traditional order represented by government institutions, hierarchies and authorities, surreptitiously replaces it with a new theoretical platform that offhandedly uses the ‘network’ metaphor. Although there is an almost endless and transversal disciplinary bibliography about governance and networks, interrelated by inseparable functional and operational ties, they have de facto become empty shells, good for all and everything that politicians and public administrations wish to convey.

The key issue used by Davies in his j’accuse is the flawed interpretation and practice of two fundamental categories of post-traditional political thought – governance and network.

The former, considered as a ‘governing arrangement where one or more public agencies directly engage non-governmental actors in a collective decision-making process that is formal, consensus-oriented, and deliberative and that aims to make or implement public policy or manage public programs or assets’ (Ansell and Garsh, 2008, p. 544), is in fact too restrictive, since it ignores the scale of the decision-making networks involved in the collaborative mechanisms used to mobilise active citizenship beyond organised public structures.

The latter, used to define more or less stable forms of interaction between governmental and nongovernmental actors, axiomatically assumes the existence of a single level of inter-actor relationships, almost as if the network itself ensures nonhierarchical relationships and is therefore a tool to overcome the authoritative logic of government inherent in traditional power practices.

In his long and challenging analyses, the author gradually unearths the concepts in an attempt to illustrate the Gramscian concept of ‘hegemony’ as an explicative function of the deficiencies and paradoxes of governance that does not consider the additional power due to the dominant group’s ‘capacity to lead society in a direction that not only serves to the elites but is also perceived by subordinate groups as serving a more general interest’ (Davies, 2011, p. 103). Together with the concepts of ‘historical blocks’ and ‘integral state’, Davies argues how neo-liberal regimes have used governance networks to create a kind of integral state that turns connectionist theories into a prevailing ideology that – up to now – has not been opposed by counter-hegemonic forces or even a form of ‘passive revolution’.

On the other hand, it is easy for Davies to expose the simplifications and illusions of the theory of reflexive modernisation (Bauman, 2002; Beck et al., 1994; Giddens, 1994): if the decline of tradition, the centrality of the individual and the emergence of a ‘risk society’ is incontrovertible evidence emerging in the background against the ruins of industrial society, the advent of ‘fluid network relationships’ between ‘reflexive individuals’ has more to do with hope than certainty. In fact, Davies uses his in-depth knowledge of an extensive bibliography to stress that governance networks in an era of reflexive modernity tend to replicate the modernist hierarchies they were intended to replace.

I confess to have been one of the many people – but obviously this is not a mitigating factor – captured by the initiatory fascination of network analysis, a dominant paradigm of postmodern social sciences particularly successful amongst the radical left, liberal right and anarcho-capitalists. Many people had hailed the fall of Fordism as an epochal shift to more open forms of social and economic organisation and – at long last – towards a more negotiable and deliberative approach to the construction of public policies. Network governance seemed to pave the way towards a new deliberative pluralism free from traditional coercive government which either tended to be, or was, openly authoritarian: governance was considered as an intermediary and mediator between the limitations of anarchic market exchange and top-down planning.

However, we gradually found ourselves faced with an influential, but perhaps not so novel orthodoxy soon opposed by more aggressive and widespread social movements that rose up against this instrumental dematerialisation of power, denouncing it as a sort of ‘therapy of pain’, a pain induced by the relentless violence of institutions that used massive doses of anaesthetics against the participation and broadening of decision-making networks.

After reflecting for 20 years on a ‘naturally’ fuzzy term, coined ‘almost’ as a synonym of government in the framework of a comparative study on government models and systems (Finer, 1997), the parabola of the concept seemed once again to be lost in an indistinct dimension, merging the roles of formal institutional actors and the informal management modes of collective action.

The gradual blurring between governance and government seemed to follow two parallel and, I believe, intimately connected routes. One involved an intellectual and, in some ways, quite irritating review sparked by the protagonists of this pluralistic ‘shift’ – Rhodes and Stoker – who backtracked, saying: ‘We were joking!’ Their reflexive critique focused on the failure to recognise the value of the hard power exercised by state organisations, and the over-estimation of forms of coordination based on the skills of diplomacy, communication and bargaining that should have characterised local government. Davies reminds us that, according to Bevir and Rhodes (2010) (Rhodes, 2007), the parabola of governance rose and fell in three waves.

Rhodes’ conclusions can be summarised in his statement according to which there is no single account of theory of governance, but only the differing constructions of several traditions, thereby seconding a constructivist – postmodern – vision of governance as a ‘story’. On one hand, Rhodes’ statement is banal, because we all know that politological literature proposes many governance theories. On the other hand, it is badly posited from a theoretical point of view, because the ontological nature of governance and networks differs from that of other ‘objects’.

I’d like to briefly discuss the topics that have sparked contemporary philosophical debate based on the need to review the fundamentals behind the postmodern interpretation of society and politics. One viewpoint in this debate is once again taking centre stage: a ‘realist’ ontological perspective rooted in the long tradition of thought, which in the last 20 years has hinged on authors such as Putnam (1990), Searle (2010), Sayer (1993) and so on.

I apologise for the rather brutal schematics, but realist ontology suggests that a world exists independently of our representations – which can undoubtedly be imperfect, conditioned as they are by our senses – and that in this world, our actions are real and not the fruit of our imagination.

A similar approach allows us to describe the ‘objects’, dividing them into three classes (Ferraris, 2012, p. 71): ‘natural objects (italics in the original text), which exist in space and time independently of subjects; social objects, which exist in space and time dependently of subjects, and ideal objects, which exist outside of space and time and independently of subjects’.

It is pretty clear that from this perspective, governance and networks are in actual fact social objects and not, simplistically, ‘stories’ created by a specific epistemology: the decision-making networks of governance exist because there are actors who, using their own conceptual patterns – their own epistemology – acknowledge their existence and, in one way or another, assert their effectiveness compared with a set of predefined goals.

The analytical shortcomings of extreme poststructuralist positions such as those belatedly assumed by Rhodes lie in the confusion between the epistemology and ontology behind these ideas. The extreme constructivism of postmodernism is based on a long-standing philosophical tradition initially inspired by Descartes’ distrust of the res extensa, followed by Nietzsche’s statement according to which ‘facts do not exist, only interpretations’, and finally the positions of Derrida and Foucault on the absolute centrality of texts and conceptual patterns in the construction of reality.

However, if truth be told, these concepts only reiterate the specific nature of ‘social objects’ and the fact that only their inclusion in textual practices decrees not only their existence but also the possibility to influence the material reality of everyday life.

So, if governance and its networks are social objects, we cannot put them aside and confine their existence to conceptual patterns that are now rejected by those who once supported them. The proposal to build an interpretation of governance and its power relationships on the basis of an articulated application of the concept of hegemony drawn from Gramsci is an avenue worth explored. The six neo-Gramscian archetypes of governance elaborated by Davies cover a wide range of possible hegemonic structures, even though they have not all been checked by empirical analysis. But this is a challenge for the future agenda of research.