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Remaking governance focuses on the dynamics of change as new strategies - active citizenship, public participation, partnership working, consumerism - encounter existing institutions. It explores different sites and practices of governing, from the remaking of Europe to the increasing focus on ‘community’ and ‘personhood’ in governing social life.
The authors critically engage with existing theory across political science, social policy, sociology and public administration and management to explore how ‘the social’ is constituted through governance practices. This includes the ways in which the spaces and territories of governing are remade and the peoples constituted; how the public domain is re-imagined and new forms of state-citizen relationships fostered and how the remaking of governance shapes our understanding of politics, changing the ways in which citizens engage with political power and the selves they bring to that engagement.
Remaking governance is essential reading for academics and students across a range of social science disciplines, and of interest to those engaged in policy evaluation and reform.
This contribution explores how far notions of ‘political generation’ – formed in and through common experience and agency – is sustainable. It draws on a research study to show how generation can be understood as multifaceted (traversed by multiple social divisions and identities), dynamic (rather than a static form of belonging) and recursive (rather than denoting clear, temporally sequenced, distinctions). However, a focus on generation does offer one important way of ‘telling the (political) time’.
This paper addresses the problem of how to engage with the politics of public policy in the current period of cuts, austerity and retrenchment. It explores current strategies of divestment, design and decentralisation, assessing the scope within each for creative enactments and alternative pathways. It then explores ‘public-making’ as a means of countering the affective consequences of austerity, and shows how practitioners mediate and manage the tensions that result through multiple forms of ‘border work’. Finally the paper explores the troubled relationship between progressive policy enactments and neoliberal appropriations.
The boundary between academic research and policy making is characterised by at least two different sets of ‘troubles’. This article draws on the author's experience as scientific adviser to a UK government department to highlight the often-problematic relationship between researchers and policy actors, and to tease out conflicting understandings of the value and robustness of different kinds of ‘evidence’. The article assesses the contributions of both governance theory and theories of governmentality to understanding the case material, and challenges the idea that there might be a new settlement between social science and policy that represents a ‘post-ideological’ turn in policy making.
This chapter provides a gendered analysis of the changing relationships between state, market, networks, and self-governance as domains of governance. It notes in particular how networks open up new questions about gender and gendered work. It emphasises the significance of issues of identity and agency in welfare governance.
This chapter emphasises the importance of public participation as a strategy which invites citizens to collaborate with state and non-state actors in shaping public policy or taking decisions on public services. It traces the ways in which the public domain of participation and deliberation is produced and reproduced, opening up questions of public and private to critical scrutiny. It also traces the contradictory implications of the new technologies of power associated with participation and collaboration.
This chapter reviews the contribution of the book to theorising the remaking of governance both in terms of the constitution of new governable subjects and new sites and possibilities of social agency. It argues that governance shifts are profoundly political in that they reshape the public realm of welfare-state provision and redraw citizenship rights and responsibilities. It offers novel ways of conceptualising the ‘people’ around imaginary unities of interest or identity. It also opens up the possibility of changing the terrain of political engagement and action. It suggests a politics of the social rather than a view of politics as separate from society. It explores how new tactics of governance rest on cultural projects concerned with reconstituting peoples and publics as governable entities, while also holding on to the idea that these cultural projects are subject to contestation, struggle, and dissent.
This chapter discusses the remaking of peoples and publics, both as the object of governance and also as the subjects of new forms of agency. It views the social as something defined by its ‘otherness’ to the state and economy, as an entity to be governed, a resource to be mobilised, or the site of social reproduction. It emphasises ways in which new governance relationships and practices may reshape patterns of identity and belonging. It focuses on the remaking of the contested boundary between public and private domains of responsibility and activity, as European welfare states reconfigure benefit entitlements and services. It examines how notions such as ‘the people’, ‘citizenship’, or ‘community’ are being reconstituted in an attempt to form new social settlements that are supposedly suited to the requirements of globalisation.
This postscript offers both a celebration of the achievements of the Productive Margins research programme and an attempt to set it in the broader context of contemporary political possibilities — and constraints. Its particular focus is on attempts to transform universities into instruments of engagement and connectedness — to turn them inside out. This is an attempt to take the ‘productive’ emphasis of the programme seriously, and to ask how far, or in what ways, the engagement of ‘communities at the margins’ has the potential to transform university hierarchies of knowledge and power. In addressing this question, the programme raises a number of issues that, if pursued in future work, have a transformative potential. The chapter also considers further unresolved questions and their potential limits on the impact of transformative agendas.
This paper addresses the problem of how to engage with the politics of public policy in the current period of cuts, austerity and retrenchment. It explores current strategies of divestment, design and decentralisation, assessing the scope within each for creative enactments and alternative pathways. It then explores ‘public-making’ as a means of countering the affective consequences of austerity, and shows how practitioners mediate and manage the tensions that result through multiple forms of ‘border work’. Finally the paper explores the troubled relationship between progressive policy enactments and neoliberal appropriations.
