GOVERNANCE, GOVERNMENTALITY AND POLICY INSTRUMENTS
The question of policy instruments has to be disentangled from that of a new governance paradigm. The most positivist, sometimes naïve and normative tone of some of the literature has to be contested. To start with, the question is not so new and should be embedded within a broader literature.
Interest in policy instruments is not new. As Hood (2007: 128), reminds us:
Debating alternative possible ways of keeping public order, enforcing laws, or collecting revenue is a classical concern of political thought. In the Enlightenment era, discussion of effective instru- ments of policy was a central concern of European ‘police science’ from the early policy science litera- ture of the 1530s.
In fact, social scientists studying the state and government have long taken an interest in the issue of the technologies of govern- ment, including its instruments – Weber and Foucault, for instance. Max Weber pioneered this interest, in his analysis of forms taken by the exercise of power, when he made the creation of bureaucracies a major indicator of the degree of rationalization of societies.
Through this emphasis on the importance of devices that embody a formal legal rationality in the development of capitalist societies, he gave an autonomous role to the material technologies of government (Weber, 1978), whereas classic theories had centred mainly on the sovereignty and legitimacy of those who govern. In seeing public policy instruments as a technique for domination, he was also offering an early problematiza- tion of their role.