Definitions

1
Definitions

• Leca (1996) governing is a matter of taking
  decisions, resolving conflicts, producing public
  goods, coordinating private behaviour,
  regulating markets, organising elections,
  distributing resources, determining spending.
• Governing is the core business of government,
  which claims to speak with an authoritative voice
  and to embody a superior legitimacy to other
  interests or forces in society.
• For Le Galès (200217) government refers to
  structures, actors, processes and outputs, while
  governance relates to all the institutions,
  networks, directives, regulations, norms,
  political and social usages, public and private
  actors that contribute to the stability of a
  society .
• Governance represents new forms of coordination -
  of or governing that go beyond the traditional
  confines of government. But what is government
  and how does it exemplify itself in the strong
  state of France?

2
Core features of government

• In the model of governing as government, the
  State as a moral authority, above specific
  interests in society.
• Reduced to its core, government (in France)
  rests upon
• the legitimate use of force
• a tradition of strong central authority which
  gives direction to other public and private
  actors
• a doctrine of undivided political sovereignty
  (republicanism)
• a clearly affirmed territorial hierarchy
• established constitutional rules
• and a hierarchy of legal orders,
• the development of a powerful bureaucracy,
• The public law approach continues to defend
  government as providing an overarching normative
  framework and a monopoly use of force.
• Underpinning the model of the sovereign
  government there is only one source of power and
  authority.

3
Governing as Governance

• The popularity of governance is that it openly
  challenges this model.
• All definitions of governance start from the
  weakening of older forms of vertical statist
  regulation
• The fundamental ambiguity of governance has
  helped to explain its success
• Governance contains within it potentially
  contradictory causal narratives about the
  reshaping of the State.
• It can apply to different levels and scales of
  analysis (territorial and functional) and across
  variable temporal and spatial dimensions.
• It constructs imaginary boundaries between public
  and private and contains within it implicit
  theories of the public space.
• Some reject governance and prefer governability

4
National traditions of governance

• In the German tradition, for instance, governance
  signifies the method of macro co-ordination
  between markets (the economy), hierarchies (the
  state) and networks (civil society), to some
  extent reformulating the Corporatist structures
  of German society (Mayntz, 1991).
• In the rich Dutch tradition, governance signifies
  a method of decision-making based on repeated
  interactions between public and private actors,
  responding to issues of complexity by
  co-operation (Kooiman, 1993, 2003).
• According to the main UK school, governance
  refers to the role of networks of public and
  private actors, to public sector management
  reforms and to ideas of good governance and best
  practice (Rhodes, 1996, 1997).
• Usually describing either EU or state-level
  processes, accounts of local and regional
  governance can also focus upon the operation of
  new networks of public, private and associative
  actors (John, 2001).
• In the case of the European Union, powerful
  metaphors of multi-level governance have
  attempted to capture the complexity of
  contemporary governing processes in a way that
  can accommodate territory, sector and function
  (Hooghe, Marks and Blanc, 1996).

5
Good Governance

• Governance has sometimes dressed itself in
  prescriptive clothing, most notably in relation
  to the false panacea of good governance.
• For international financial organisations such as
  the International Monetary Fund or the World
  Bank, good governance refers to specific
  practices of corporate management,
  accountability, transparency and to the
  importance of international benchmarking and
  standard setting.
• Governance has become embraced as a standard to
  measure performance by developing states,
  typically in terms of markets and neo-liberal
  adjustment.
• Normative, yet influential framework

6
Governance and Governability.

• Governance became popular in Germany, the
  Netherlands, the United Kingdom and France as
  part of a broader reflection on the governability
  of modern complex societies.
• Why are modern societies so difficult to govern?
• What problems of coordination do they face?
• What dynamics underpin their operation and how
  best can these be understood and compared?
• No fundamental agreement on the answers to these
  questions.
• In one account the notion of governability raises
  the issue of the contradictory nature of the
  interests in presence, the different strategies
  of social groups and the overloading of demands
  placed upon the local and national state
  (Rangeon, 1996).
• Writing in a different tradition, Marin (1991)
  considered that governance implies agreement
  amongst the partners in presence.

7
Core definition of governance

• Reduced to its common core, governance signifies
• challenges to traditional state-centric modes of
  delivering public policy
• the development of inter-organisational
  relationships, the emergence of new policy actors
  and forms of interaction (with a special emphasis
  on public-private interactions)
• the importance of new levels of policy action
• organisational reforms and the growth of new
  types of response to the problems of
  governability and capacity building that affect
  modern societies.

8
Coordination and Regulation

• Sociological accounts, especially those of Le
  Galès (1995, 1999, 2002, 2007), emphasise above
  all the role of governance as coordination
  (regulation) and exchange between political,
  social and economic spheres.
• Regulation refers to relatively stable relations
  between actors and social groups, who exchange
  resources and who are brought together in
  institutional relationships that are bound by
  rules and norms (Commaille and Jobert, 1999).
• The French Regulation School describe distinct
  modes of coordination between actors, the five
  ideal-types being the market (competition), the
  firm (hierarchy), the State (constraint), the
  community (solidarity) and social partnership
  (negotiation).
• Governing requires coordination but modes of
  coordination vary across sector, space and level.

9
Steering, not Rowing

• If modern governments can influence political and
  policy outcomes, they are less capable than
  previously of engaging in command and control
  techniques.
• The metaphor of governance as steering draws
  obvious inspiration from older, less finite ideas
  of pilotage, or the direction of public affairs
  (Mayntz, 1991, Kickert, 1993) .
• Steering can take several forms. In a proactive
  sense, steering involves attempts to mobilise
  policy networks and build new partnerships to
  connect central government, public authorities
  and civil society.
• But steering can also take the form of reducing
  the scope of central government activity, by
  decentralising difficult decisions, by creating
  new administrative agencies or policy
  instruments. In short, governing systems across
  Europe have tried to reduce the need for
  governing by deregulation, privatisation and
  administrative reform (Kooiman, 2003).
• Modern states of very different traditions have
  felt the need to develop new policy instruments
  and management philosophies to meet these
  challenges (Lascoumbes and Le Gales, 2004).

10
Causal narratives around the State

• Governance challenges the state-centric
  construction of political authority that reifies
  the State as embodying a superior legitimacy to
  non-state actors.
• Governance narratives recognise complexity,
  contingency and diversity far more than
  traditional politico-administrative models, which
  insisted upon the uniform application of rules.
• From a legal perspective, the state has lost its
  centrality and is now embedded in a complex
  system of multiple legal orders.
• The State is no longer an adequate frame for
  understanding the world in the opinion of one
  analyst the great narrative of the Sovereign
  state embodying the general interest is less and
  less credible (Caillose, 2007 47).
• Though the state remains a key player, it has
  everywhere been undergoing a process of
  restructuring.

11
Strong governance

• At the heart of the strong governance argument
  is the claim that there has been a decentring of
  political power.
• The State is no longer at the centre of
  international relations. It is no longer in
  command of the economy. It is no longer at the
  centre of public administration and public policy
  (Gaudin, 2002).
• Contemporary States are called into question in
  virtually all of their spheres of activity.
• The state is being fundamentally transformed
  because it is no longer able to perform its
  internal (welfare) and external (defence)
  functions and can no longer manage its own
  institutions and territorial relationships.
• In international relations, the new global
  governance paradigm has steadily gained ground
  (Rosenau, 1992).
• The international system has escaped the control
  of states. International organizations, such as
  the United Nations, the World Bank, the
  International Monetary Fund or the World Trade
  Organisation are assuming a much more important
  role.
• Non-governmental organisations and charities are
  treated as equal stakeholders of governments in
  various international fora (Kjaer, 2004).

12
European integration and state capacity

• European integration has removed many
  competencies from the central state level, even
  in areas of core sovereignty such as monetary
  policy and defense.
• Most accounts now emphasise the loss of
  functional autonomy for the state. European
  integration threatens the state because it
  challenges the mystique of sovereignty (Börzel,
  2002 Bache and Flinders 2004).
• European integration also undermines the
  normative supremacy of states, which can no
  longer claim a monopoly of the allocation of
  values.
• The role of bodies such as the Council of Europe
  and the European Court of Human Rights is to
  challenge state-bound values.
• States no longer occupy the moral high ground,
  and new actors, such as international
  organizations, voluntary associations and
  sub-state authorities, have stepped into the
  breach (Keating, 1998).

13
Political economists and the hollow state

• Jessop (2007) identifies a transition from the
  Keynesian Welfare State to the Schumpeterian
  Workfare State as the principal consequence of
  the shift to a post-Fordist economy since the
  1970s.
• As conceptualised by Jessop, the Keynesian
  Welfare state is an ideal type with the following
  characteristics the production of full
  employment in relatively closed national
  economies, the promotion of mass consumption,
  the provision of collective goods to citizens,
  the intervention of the national state in
  economic management to compensate the failures of
  the market.
• The Schumpeterian Workfare State is of a
  different nature. Its function is to support the
  market and to create the conditions for
  innovation and enterprise in relatively open and
  competitive economies. The Schumpeterian Workfare
  State sets out to bring down labour costs and to
  enhance flexibility in the economy.
• The core decisions in economic policy are no
  longer decided at a national level, but are
  international or global in nature. The State is
  unable to deal effectively with the global or
  local demands that this new imagined economy
  requires.

14
From Welfare state to neo-liberalism

• In some accounts the loss of state centrality has
  been accompanied by a paradigm shift from Welfare
  State to neo-liberalism.
• The Welfare State model is depicted as the final
  stage of organised modernity by Loughlin (2004
  13), a state based on centralisation,
  standardisation, and bureaucratisation.
• During the prolonged post-war period of welfare
  state hegemony, there was a basic belief about
  the role of state, the market and civil society
  and about their relationship to each other.
  During this period, government was top-down,
  hierarchical and technocratic and the State was
  the dominant actor in mediating social and
  territorial relationships.
• In the early 1980s, there was a paradigm shift,
  with the welfare model replaced by a dominant
  neo-liberal paradigm. In this neo-liberal
  governance paradigm, the market is dominant and
  market approaches have penetrated public
  administration.
• These tendencies have been most fully expressed
  in the UK, US and other Anglo-Saxon countries,
  such as New Zealand (Schmidt, 2002), but all
  advanced liberal democracies have espoused some
  form of neo-liberalism.
• This view is similar to that of Muller (1990,
  1992) or Jobert (1994) for whom the social market
  economy was replaced by a neo-liberal paradigm in
  the mid 1980s.

15
Governance as Convergence?

• As it has been presented above governance is
  consistent with analyses based on convergence.
• Under the impact of Europeanisation and the
  challenges of the international political
  economy, European states have voluntarily pooled
  sovereignty in international organisations and
  increasingly converged their rules and
  institutions to conform to a common standard
  (Mény 1993, Bulmer and Lequesne 2005).
• There are various converging forces pushing for
  change. The importance of benchmarking and ideas
  of best practice - propagated by the EU, as well
  as national governments have gradually been
  given formal status in programmes such as the
  Lisbon, Luxembourg and Bologna processes.
• At the international and European levels, new
  structures of binding rules and institutions have
  promoted trans-national unity.

16
Whats left of the State?

• Modern States no longer steer market capitalism,
  but they provide a market supporting orientation.
  
• The state capacity argument centres on the
  proposition that there has been a shift in the
  purposes and modalities of contemporary state
  intervention (Levy, 2006).
• Levy describes the three varieties of
  capitalism as (French) statism, (German)
  corporatism and (Anglo-American) neo-liberalism.
  He breaks with Hall and Soskice (2001) who speak
  only of coordinated market economies and liberal
  market economies, losing the statist model
  somewhere along the way.
• Levy (2006) emphasises four new state missions
  repairing the three varieties of capitalism
  making labour markets more employment friendly
  recasting regulatory frameworks and expanding
  market competition
• For the current argument, these might be
  reformulated in terms of a spectrum ranging from
  the compensation state to the regulatory state.

17
A Compensation State?

• The compensation state corrects the dysfunctions
  of modern capitalism.
• Even in apparently harsh neo-liberal regimes,
  such as that of Thatcher in the UK, the state
  has intervened by providing support for the
  losers of economic modernisation, and shielding
  the weakest from market forces.
• It is no coincidence that the large trading
  countries have developed sophisticated welfare
  states.
• Modern states have intervened to train displaced
  workers to take up new employment opportunities
  and impose new responsibilities as a condition of
  obtaining welfare benefits.
• States have attempted to direct labour markets
  and to make them more employment friendly with
  varying degrees of success (dependent upon the
  resistance and social partners).
• In the case of France, Howell (2006), Lalliemont
  (2006) and others demonstrate how the state has
  intervened to expand labour market flexibility
  and expand decentralised collective bargaining.

18
A Regulatory State?

• Economic liberalisation not only constrains, but
  also provides opportunities for new state
  activities.
• Though from a political economy perspective,
  globalisation is usually considered to weaken the
  state, it can also create new opportunities for
  state interventionism.
• Global markets require strong regulatory states,
  able to ensure that rules are respected, that
  commitments entered into are delivered, that the
  rules of market competition are fair.
• The regulatory hand of the state has been
  strengthened.. and the state has introduced
  itself into the most private affairs of
  multi-national firms.
• The most neo-liberal economies have arguably
  strengthened the state at the expense of societal
  networks, the case for post-Thatcher Britain in
  particular.
• Strong states are needed to control public
  expenditure, rein-in local authority spending,
  create targets for performance.
• Even in areas of deregulation such as
  telecommunications the state has had to act in
  a regulatory sense to ensure that the rules are
  respected. The US and EU have had to develop new
  regulatory capacities to ensure equitable
  competition.