Acknowledgements
Several colleagues have generously offered advice, critique and support throughout this project. The late Vincent wright at Nuffield college and rolf solli at forvaltningshogskolan in Gothenburg have provided opportuonities for us meet and discuss early drafts steven kennedy and two reviewers offered extensive comments on previous drafts of various sections of the book which significantly helped us sharepen the arguments also our work was very much inspired by the discussions at a conference on theories of government at the ross priory outside Glasgow in 1977. The conference wasfinancially supported by the university of stasthclvde And the esrc local governance programme.
We are also indebted to the many colleagues and friends at the university of Pittsburgh,
University of Strathclyde and university of Gothenburg who listened patiently as we struggled to explain what governance is all about and why we think it is important. The KLM royal wing lounge at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam provided seclusion and a realaxed environment that re like to think adcqanced our thinking on these and realated issues.
Most importantly } sheryn peters and monkika pierre offered the kind o o f support without which any academic project is doomef to fail.
Introdction : What is Governance?
In the last decade of the twentieth century the concept of “governance” has emerged from virtual obscurity to take a central place in contemporary debates in the social sciences. The concept has come to be used frequently, but often with quite different meanings and implications. A key reason for the recent popularity of this concept is its capacity – unlike that of the narrower term ‘government’ to cover the whole range of institutions and relationships involved in the process of governing. The aim of this book is to elucidate this concept in its various meanings and to demonstrate how thinking about governance can contribute to our understanding of the con-temporary political world. Although we will be discussing a variety of meanings, our focus is on the capacity of government to make and implement policy – in other words, to steer society.
Part of the appeal of governance as a concept is that it links the political system with its environment, and may complete the project of making political science more policy – relevant. Thinking about governance means thinking about how to steer the economy and society, and how to reach collective goals. The debate that has arisen is whether government is the only way of deciding upon those goals or not, or even if it remains an effective way of performing those tasks. The weakened position of governments then forces considera - tion of how their role can be strengthened, and of alternative modes of political governance. It also points to the different ways in which countries have coped with changes in their international and domestic environments. Thus, governance addresses some general questions but also provides a means of asking questions about com – parative politics.
Despite its recent prominence, governance is actually a rather old term. It was known in Fernch (gouvernance) in the fourteenth century although it quickly came to refer to royal officers rather than to the
Process of governing or ‘steering’. In this volume we will be con – cerned with the more contemporary question of the relationship of government to governance, and the fundamental question of whether governments can continue to govern their societies success-fully by making and implementing policies. Providing direction to society, whether directly or indirectly, is the central governance activity. Several decades ago the capacity of governments to provide that governance would have been axiomatic in the industrialized democracies. At the end of the twentieth century that capacity has become a hotly contested issue.
Governance and government
The concern with governance represent a closing of the circle of the rapid, if not turbulent, political development during the twen-tieth century. The first decades of this era saw the consolidation of democratic government throughout the western world. In Western Europe, and slightly later in the United States, the early post-Second World War period witnessed the second phase of political change. Governments took a higher profile, embarked on political projects of regulation, economic redistribution and, more generally, an expan-sion of the political sphere of society (Maier, 1978). What in the United as ‘The Strong’ – two very different national con-texts – essentially meant growing government, including increased public spending on public services and welfare state programmes and – albeit with substantial national variation – a growing political intervention in the market. These were the times when government was seen as the appropriate, legitimate and unchallenged vehicle for social change, equality and economic development.
In the third phase, illustrated excellently by the Thatcher and Reagan eras in Britain and the United States respectively, much of this development was effectively turned around in an astonishingly short period of time (Rockman, 1998; Savoie, 1994). Government was now increasingly defined not as the solution to societal problems but instead as the very root and cause of these problrms. Through privatization, deregulation, cut-backs in public spending, tax cuts, monetarist economic policies, radical institutional and administrative reform, and the introduction of a distinctly market-based philosophy in public service production and delivery normally referred to as the New Public Management (Hood, 1991), Britain and the United States – with countries like Australia and New Zealand following suit (Boston et al., 1996; Zifcak, 1994) attempted to reverse the growth in government in order to allow the market to play a leading role in society. However, countries like France and Germany – and until quite recently Japan – have been reluctant to embark on these types of reform, something which suggests that national contextual factors such as political culture and traditions make a difference with regard to reforms of state restructuring.
The fourth and final phase, which dates back to the early 1990s onwards, highlights the emergence of a partially new model of government. This emerging model of government draws on new ideas about what is, and what should be, the role of government in society; new perspectives on the process through which governments implement their programmes; and new approaches to the perennial issue of how elected and accountable government is to conduct a coordinating role in a society which is increasingly prone to follow market ideals. Thus, in some respects the political economy of the 1990s looks remarkably similar to that of the interwar period when governments played a fairly modest role in society with regard to the limited range of public services provided and the presence of the state in markets.
The key question addressed by governments, civil servants and citizens in the 1990s is how democratic government – which we rightfully expect to be able to exert some influence, control and coordination – is to be able to perform these roles in the political climate and the economic and fiscal situation of the 1990s. Even at the end of the twentieth century much thinking about government and is role in contemporary society remains very traditional. Although any reasonably keen observer can identify change occurring throughout the public sector, the traditional ways of thinking about government remain deeply entrenched. The public sector is still conceptualized (especially in Anglo-American democracies) as largely independent from the private sector, and government is often thought to have the capacity to control easily, and directly, activities within the private sector, as and when it feels it necessary to impose that control.
Similarly, democracy is still conceptualized in terms of elections and voting, with governments presumed to have substantial latitude for action between those elections. We will note below (Chapter 7) the extent to which the latitude for government action is now constrained by participatory mechanisms, as well as by an increasing legalism in many cultures. If they are to be successful in governing, democracies will have to devise means of accommodating more continuous forms of participation while still being able to supply the needed direction to society.
There is also an assumption that ‘good government’ implies uniformity of services across the entire political unit, both geographically and personally. Devolution and decentralization are making that assumption about governance appear increasingly quaint.
Finally, governing is still discussed primarily in terms of national governments which exercise authority throughout the territories within their national boundaries and which can exert substantial control over international influences on their domestic policies and institutions (for example, national markets).
However, following the budget cut-backs and the dismantling of many public services, we can identify signs of a changing perspective on governments and what governments are expected to do and how they should do it. In this introductory chapter we suggest that the new emerging way of thinking about government is characterized by three general ideas or concepts. First, there has been a gradual shift in focus among the political and administrative elite as well as among social scientists from input control towards outcomes and output control. This is not to say that institutions should be of any less interest than