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Summary Course GW4008MV Governance & Strategy
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Summary Course GW4008MV Governance & StrategyInclude lectures!
Week 1: What is Governance?
Lecture 1: From government to governance
Mandatory literature
Rhodes, R.A.W. (2007). Understanding governance: Ten years on. Organization Studies, 28
(8): 1243-64.
Policy Networks
The term ‘policy network’ refers to sets of formal and informal institutional linkages
between governmental and other actors structured around shared interests in public
policymaking and implementation. These institutions are interdependent. Policies emerge
from the bargaining between the networks’ members. The other actors commonly include
the professions, trade unions and big business. Also, there are too many groups to consult so
government must aggregate interests. It needs the ‘legitimated’ spokespeople for that policy
area. The groups need the money and legislative authority that only government can
provide.
The phrase ‘sets of institutional linkages’: ‘an organization has power, relative to an element
of its task environment, to the extent that the organization has the capacity to satisfy needs
of that element and to the extent that the organization monopolises that capacity’.
(a) Any organization is dependent upon other organizations for resources.
(b) In order to achieve their goals, the organizations have to exchange resources.
(c) Although decision-making within the organization is constrained by other
organizations, the dominant coalition retains some discretion. The appreciative
system of the dominant coalition influences which relationships are seen as a
problem and which resources will be sought.
(d) The dominant coalition employs strategies within known rules of the game to
regulate the process of exchange.
(e) Variations in the degree of discretion are a product of the goals and the relative
power potential of interacting organizations. This relative power potential is a
product of the resources of each organization, of the rules of the game and of the
process of exchange between organizations’.
Policy networks have developed consensuses about what they are doing that serve the aims
of all involved. They have evolved routine ways of deciding. They form a private government
of public services.
The government of Margaret Thatcher sought to reduce their power by using markets to
deliver public services, bypassing existing networks and curtailing the ‘privileges’ of
professions, commonly by subjecting them to rigorous financial and management controls.
But these corporate management and marketization reforms had unintended consequences.
They fragmented the systems for delivering public services and created pressures for
organizations to cooperate with one another to deliver services. In other words, and
,paradoxically, marketization multiplied the networks it was supposed to replace.
Fragmentation not only created new networks, but also increased the membership of
existing networks, incorporating both the private and voluntary sectors. The government
swapped direct for indirect controls and central departments are no longer either
necessarily or invariably the fulcrum of a network. The government can set the limits to
network actions. It still largely funds the services. But it has also increased its dependence
on multifarious networks.
Networks are characterized by trust and diplomacy. Shared values and norms are the glue
which holds the complex set of relationships together; trust is essential for cooperative
behaviour and, therefore, the existence of the network. As a working axiom, networks are
high on trust, while contracts are low on trust. With the spread of networks there has been a
recurrent tension between contracts on the one hand, with their stress on competition to
get the best price, and networks on the other, with their stress on cooperative behaviour.
Governance
In much present-day use, governance refers to: a new process of governing; or a changed
condition of ordered rule; or the new method by which society is governed. Defined as:
1. Interdependence between organizations. Governance is broader than government,
covering non-state actors. Changing the boundaries of the state meant the
boundaries between public, private and voluntary sectors became shifting and
opaque.
2. Continuing interactions between network members, caused by the need to exchange
resources and negotiate shared purposes.
3. Game-like interactions, rooted in trust and regulated by rules of the game negotiated
and agreed by network participants.
4. A significant degree of autonomy from the state. Networks are not accountable to
the state; they are self-organizing. Although the state does not occupy a privileged,
sovereign position, it can indirectly and imperfectly steer networks’.
In sum, governance refers to governing with and through networks.
The term ‘network governance’ has two faces.
1. First, it describes public sector change whether it is the increased fragmentation
caused by the reforms of the 1980s or the joined-up governance of the 1990s, which
sought to improve coordination between government departments and the
multifarious other organizations.
2. Second, it interprets British government; it says the hierarchic Westminster model of
responsible government is no longer acceptable. We have to tell a different story of
the shift from government with its narrative of the strong executive to governance
through networks.
Core Executive
This mainstream analysis assumes the best way to look at the executive is to look at key
positions and their incumbents. Instead of asking which position is important, we can ask
which functions define the innermost part or heart. The core functions of the executive are
to pull together and integrate central government policies and to act as final arbiters of
conflicts between different elements of the government machine. These functions can be
,carried out by institutions other than prime minister and cabinet. By defining the core
executive in functional terms, the key question becomes: ‘Who does what?’
There is a second strand to the argument for a focus on the core executive rather than prime
minister and cabinet. The positional approach assumes that power lies with specific
positions and the people who occupy those positions. But power is contingent and
relational; that is, it depends on the relative power of other actors.
- This power-dependence approach focuses on the distribution of such resources as
money and authority in the core executive and explores the shifting patterns of
dependence between the several actors argues, the core executive is segmented into
overlapping games in which all players have some resources with which to play the
game and no one actor is pre-eminent in all games.
So, the term ‘core executive’ directs our attention to two key questions: ‘Who does what?’
and ‘Who has what resources?’
Hollowing Out
The ‘hollowing out of the state’ means simply that the growth of governance reduced the
ability of the core executive to act effectively, making it less reliant on a command operating
code and more reliant on diplomacy.
- The state has been hollowed out from above (for example, by international
interdependence); from below (by marketization and networks); and sideways (by
agencies and the several species of parastatal bodies).
- Hollowed out by the unintended consequences of marketization that fragmented
service delivery, multiplied networks and diversified the membership of those
networks.
It is important to distinguish between intervention and control. Centres intervene often but
its interventions do not have the intended effects and so cannot be considered as control.
‘Diplomacy’ or management by negotiation is the hands-off alternative to hands-on
management. Such skills are commonly associated with international relations, but they also
lie at the heart of steering networks.
Summary – The Differentiated Polity
The phrase ‘the differentiated polity’ is my preferred summary term for my account of
government. Its core ideas are policy networks, governance, the core executive and
hollowing out. It argues there has been a shift from government by a unitary state to
governance through and by networks. Differentiation became more extensive in the 1980s
and 1990s, which saw significant changes in the functional and territorial specialization of
government. The arguments that networks have multiplied as an unintended consequence
of marketization; that the degree of international interdependence is greater and that, as a
result, the core executive’s capacity to steer is reduced or hollowed out serve to reinforce
the interpretation that centralization and control are incomplete.
Key Criticisms and the Way Forward
if needed, see workgroup.
, Whither governance?
A decentred account of differentiated polity represents a shift of topos from institutions to
meanings in action. It explains shifting patterns of governance by focusing on the actors’
own interpretations of their beliefs and practices. The everyday practices arise from agents
whose beliefs and actions are informed by traditions and expressed in stories. It explores the
diverse ways in which situated agents are changing the boundaries of state and civil society
by constantly remaking practices as their beliefs change in response to dilemmas. It reveals
the contingency and contestability of narratives. It highlights a more diverse view of state
authority and its exercise.
Peters, B. G., & Pierre, J. (2001). Developments in intergovernmental relations: towards
multi-level governance. Policy and Politics, 29(2): 131-136.
The emergence of multi-level governance challenges much of our traditional understanding
of how the state operates, what determines its capacities, what its contingencies are, and
ultimately of the organisation of democratic and accountable government. Acknowledging
the risk of idealising times past in order to exaggerate changes over time, we could say that
we are moving from a model of the state in a liberal– democratic perspective towards a state
model characterised by complex patterns of contingencies and dependencies on external
actors. Political power and institutional capability is less and less derived from formal
constitutional powers accorded the state but more from a capacity to wield and coordinate
resources from public and private actors and interests.
- Put slightly differently, we have been witnessing a development from a ‘command
and control’ type of state towards an ‘enabling’ state, a model in which the state is
not proactively governing society but is more concerned with defining objectives and
mustering resources from a wide variety of sources to pursue those goals.
The gradual shift from a government towards a governance perspective reflects the new role
of the state which has become typical of western politics in the past decade or so. Multi-
level governance is to some extent merely a logical extension of these developments.
What is multi-level governance?
A baseline definition of multi-level governance is that it refers to negotiated, non-
hierarchical exchanges between institutions at the transnational, national, regional and local
levels. Taken one step further, the definition could be slightly expanded to denote
relationships between governance processes at these different levels.
- Thus, multi-level governance refers not just to negotiated relationships between
institutions at different institutional levels but to a vertical ‘layering’ of governance
processes at these different levels. The important point here is that although we tend
to think of these institutional levels as vertically ordered, institutional relationships
do not have to operate through intermediary levels but can take place directly
between, say, the transnational and regional levels, thus bypassing the state level.
The linkage between policy change and institutional change; policy changes trigger or
necessitate institutional changes and, similarly, institutional changes frequently entail some
degree of policy change.
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