Putting Civil Society in Its Place. Jessop, Bob
world. Here we could mention the competitive threat to Anglo-American capitalism posed by other models of capitalism (such as Continental European or East Asian variants); the crisis of US hegemony in a post-Cold War order and the attendant search for post-hegemonic and/or ‘post-national state’ solutions to global problems; the crisis of the postwar Keynesian welfare national state and its typical modes of economic and political coordination, including tripartite macro corporatism; and the eruption of identity politics and new social movements that threaten established forms of social and political domination. In these circumstances we find concern with both corporate governance and national competitiveness; managing new (or newly defined) economic, military, demographic, environmental and other threats to global security; with ‘good’ rather than ‘bad’ governance in ‘Third World’ polities, whose authoritarianism and corruption can no longer be simply defended as preferable to totalitarian communist rule;9 with compensating for the failure of hierarchical decision-making and ‘top-down’ planning in a turbulent environment marked by complex reciprocal interdependence; and with resolving the disciplinary crisis of an allegedly dependency-inducing ‘state of welfare’ by instituting new forms of ‘regulated self-discipline’ in an ‘enterprise society’. On a more meso-level scale there was also growing interest in clinical governance in medicine, the governance of schools and universities, the self-regulation of the scientific community and the governance of sport.
It is certainly worth noting that the increased interest in governance coincided with the crisis of Atlantic Fordism and the Keynesian welfare national state, and it was strengthened, in the mid-1990s, as recognition grew of the limited success of an over-enthusiastic and fetishistic turn to the market. This was also a period when civil society was celebrated and efforts made to integrate community organizations and old and, especially, new, social movements into policy-making and implementation. These responses also opened up the space for some governance scholars to assert or predict that the sovereign national state was losing authority and influence, and to intone the ‘government to governance’ mantra. The plausibility of this claim was reinforced because governance arrangements were identified within and across many different social fields and functional systems, at and across different scales of social organization, and transversally to the conventional juridico-political boundaries between the state and society. In short, the turn to governance theoretically and in practice seemed to be a general trend that extended beyond the state or political system. The state and the modalities of state power nonetheless remained central to some analyses that regarded governance as an integral part of state projects and strategies. Overall, then, these empirical and theoretical trends opened up the space for society-and state-centred approaches to governance as well as for accounts that sidestepped or crosscut this familiar, indeed, often reified, distinction.
Another aspect of the changing economic and political order in this period was the reshaping of the world economy by a complex dialectic of globalization–regionalization under the dominance of capitalist relations that combined growing integration of the world order together with the survival of a plurality of national states. This process is alleged to make it more difficult for (national) states to control their own domestic economies let alone the global dynamic of capital accumulation. At the same time, capital accumulation was said to depend on an increasing range of extra-economic factors generated on various spatio-temporal scales through other institutional orders (see, for example, Chesnais, 1987; Castells, 1989; Porter, 1990; Reich, 1991; Nelson, 1993; Boyer, 1996). Major changes were also occurring in the (global) political system with equally paradoxical effects. Thus, on the one hand, there has been a tendential denationalization of the state system through the movement of state power upwards, downwards and sideways as attempts are made by state managers to regain operational autonomy (if not formal sovereignty as such) and thereby enhance the state’s own strategic capacities. On the other hand, there has been a tendential destatization of politics (a shift from the primacy of top-down government towards more decentred governance mechanisms) as political capacities are seen to depend on the effective coordination of interdependent forces within and beyond the state (for a review of these and related trends, see Jessop, 2015). It is in this context that governance (or ‘partnership’) strategies were strongly advocated as alternatives to market anarchy and organizational hierarchy in promoting economic development.
Interest in metagovernance was related to the growing perception of the problems generated in the 1990s by a combination of state and market failure and/or by a decline in social cohesion in the advanced capitalist societies. This was reflected in notions such as governmental overload, legitimacy crisis, steering crisis and ungovernability. It prompted theoretical and practical interest in the potential of coordination through self-organizing heterarchic networks and partnerships and other forms of reflexive collaboration. Most of the early studies of governance were concerned with specific practices or regimes oriented to specific objects of governance, linked either to the planning, programming and regulation of specific policy fields or to issues of economic performance. Concern with problems of governance and the potential contributions of metagovernance followed during the mid-1990s, and the nature and dynamics of metagovernance have since won growing attention.
The real world of governance
Many practices now subsumed under ‘governance’ have been examined under other rubrics. Thus corporatism, public–private partnerships, industrial districts, trade associations, statecraft, diplomacy, interest in ‘policing’, policy communities, international regimes and the like all involve aspects of what is now termed ‘governance’. In this sense, we find pre-cursors of current interest in governance in various disciplines. One could interpret this in four ways. First, regardless of the changing importance or otherwise of heterarchy (neither anarchy nor hierarchy) and solidarity, the significance of governance in lay discourses has changed, and this is reflected in social science scholarship. Second, a stable but recently subterranean stream of heterarchic practices has resurfaced and begun to attract renewed attention. Third, after becoming less significant compared with other modes of coordination, heterarchy has once again become important. And fourth, an upward trend has continued, is becoming dominant, and is likely to continue to do so. There is a kernel of truth in each interpretation.
The first possibility is suggested by the expansion of governance discourses. These range from ‘global governance’ through ‘multilevel governance’ (MLG) and the shift from ‘government to governance’ to the issues of ‘the stakeholding society’ and ‘corporate governance’. Given the close, mutually constitutive relationship between the social sciences and lay discourses, this suggestion would be worth exploring further.
The second possibility is the persistence of underlying realities beneath the vagaries of intellectual fashion. So-called ‘governance’ mechanisms (as contrasted to markets or hierarchy) have long been widely used in coordinating complex organizations and systems. There have always been issues and problems for which heterarchic governance is, so to speak, the ‘natural’ mode of coordination.10 Certain forms of interdependence are inappropriate for (or at least resistant to) market and/or imperative coordination. For example, public–private partnership is theoretically well-suited in cases of organized complexity characterized by a loose coupling of agents, complex forms of reciprocal interdependence and complex spatio-temporal horizons. In addition, different state traditions have given scope for market forces and/or self-regulation to operate in their economies and civil societies. There are also normative preferences for self-organization in certain contexts. This socially necessary minimum of heterarchic practices makes it even more curious that they have only recently attracted focused scientific interest. This is almost certainly related to the blind spots associated with specific disciplinary paradigms or prevailing forms of ‘common sense’. Thus, during the postwar period of growth based on a virtuous circle of mass production and mass consumption in North America and Western Europe, when the ‘mixed economy’ was a dominant paradigm, institutions and practices intermediate between market and state were often neglected. They had not actually disappeared; they were simply marginalized theoretically and politically. Subsequent disenchantment with the state in the 1970s, and with markets in the 1990s, has renewed interest in something that never really disappeared.
A third factor contributing to the rise of governance is the cycle of modes of coordination. All modes are prone to dilemmas,