Governance Analysis: Critical Enquiry at the Intersection of Politics, Policy and Society 9781788111751, 9781788111744

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Governance Analysis

Critical Enquiry at the Intersection of Politics, Policy and Society

Edited by

Emma Carmel University of Bath, UK

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Editor and Contributors Severally 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This book is available electronically in the Social and Political Science subject collection DOI 10.4337/9781788111751

ISBN 978 1 78811 174 4 (cased) ISBN 978 1 78811 175 1 (eBook)

Contents List of figuresvii List of contributorsviii Acknowledgementsx PART I

ONTOLOGY, THEORY, EPISTEMOLOGY

1

Introduction to Governance Analysis: Critical Enquiry at the Intersection of Politics, Policy and Society2 Emma Carmel

2

Regimes of governing practices, socio-political order and contestation24 Emma Carmel

3

Governance analysis: epistemological orientations and analytical framework Emma Carmel

PART II

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GOVERNING PRACTICES, STATEHOODS AND SOCIAL INEQUALITIES

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Governing skills, governing workplaces: explaining the New Labour Skills Strategy for England Hannah Durrant

69

5

The political ordering of migrant workers through labour admission policies Regine Paul

93

6

Understanding the complexity and implications of the English care policy system Fiona Morgan

112

7

Understanding the state–third sector relationship in public services delivery Jenny Harlock

132

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Governance analysis

PART III GOVERNING PRACTICES, SOCIAL POLITICS AND CONTESTATION 8

Participatory governing through co-production and co-design Michelle Farr

152

9

Participatory governing at the margins of the state Sarah Morgan-Trimmer

173

10

Governing, politics and policy contestation within European networks Hester Kan

191

02

Index211

Figures 3.1

Basic elements of governance analysis framework

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3.2

Governance analysis: an elaborated framework

62

4.1

The policy narratives of high-skills consensus in the context of structural uncertainty

79

4.2

Remapping the narratives of high-skills consensus: the voice of business representatives

82

4.3

Remapping the narratives of high-skills consensus: the voice of worker representatives

85

10.1

Objectives of EUPAN network members

202

10.2

Objectives of HOPES network members

203

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Contributors Emma Carmel is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath. She has published widely on different dimensions of European migration governance and is co-editor of Boundaries of European Social Citizenship (Routledge, 2019) and the Handbook on Governance and Politics of Migration (Edward Elgar, 2020). She is starting a new strand of work on the normalisation of digital statehood and digital governance as an everyday governmental practice. Hannah Durrant is Senior Research Fellow at the Wales Centre for Public Policy (Cardiff University). Her research examines the changing role of the state, processes of public policymaking and the role of research, evidence and expertise in policy design and implementation. She currently leads projects on the practices of evidence use to inform policy at the local level. Previously she led the research programme of the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) at the University of Bath. Michelle Farr is Senior Research Associate at the National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care West (NIHR CLAHRC West). She works as a qualitative researcher whose research interests include co-production and co-design in public services, digital health innovations, and collaborative research with policymakers, practitioners and service users to develop and improve health and social care. Jenny Harlock is Senior Research Fellow in the Division of Health Sciences, University of Warwick, and an Associate Health Services Researcher of the University of Oxford. She has published widely on the third sector’s role in health and social care services delivery. Previously she was Research Fellow at the Health Services Management Centre and the Third Sector Research Centre, University of Birmingham. She has also held roles with the National Council for Voluntary Organisations and Department of Health Voluntary Sector Partnerships Programme. Hester Kan is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Bath. She has published policy learning and governance networks in the European Union.

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Fiona Morgan is Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Wolverhampton where she has been employed since 2013. Fiona previously worked as a social worker in local authorities in England, having qualified in 1998. Fiona completed her PhD thesis entitled ‘An analysis of the treatment of informal care as a social risk in England’ at the Department of Social & Policy Sciences, University of Bath. She is an informal carer and continues to undertake research on the topic of informal care. Sarah Morgan-Trimmer is Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. She researches health and social interventions work to understand how interventions are implemented and how participants respond to them. She has particular interest in qualitative and process evaluation methods. She advises on and develops process evaluations for clinical trials. She has conducted evaluations of voluntary and public sector programmes in the health and social fields. Regine Paul is Interim Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Kassel, having formerly been a postdoctoral political scientist at the Law & Society Unit of Bielefeld University in Germany and John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow 2017/18 at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. Regine has published widely on migration, mobility and risk governance in Europe, and is co-editor of Regulation, Governance and Society: New Modes of Shaping Social Change? (Edward Elgar, 2017) and the Handbook on Governance and Politics of Migration (Edward Elgar, 2020).

Acknowledgements This book is the result of many years’ collaborative thinking, writing, talking and walking among all the contributors here. It is an even greater testament than normal to the patience, goodwill and commitment of the authors that this volume has come to fruition. I am deeply grateful to the great band of women scholars who have stayed the course in this project since it was the ‘Governance Research Group’ (GRG) at the University of Bath. In that time, their resolve and good humour have seen each of us through several major life events, both joyful and traumatic, and I, at least, still enjoy everyone’s company. Thank you all. It is to my collaborators that I owe the greatest debt, as it is from our collective ideas and discussions that I have been able to write the first part of the book. But there are other voices in here, too. In particular, early on I benefitted from discussions with Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum, as well as John Clarke, Janet Newman and Noemi Lendvai-Bainton. I continue to value the conversations shared with colleagues at Berkeley in 2014, including Mark Bevir, Ryan Philippe, William Walters, Katharyne Mitchell and Merje Kuus. Closer to home, Ana Dinerstein, Thomais Massala, Berenice Scandone, Lydia Medland, Bożena Sojka, Graham Room, Jason Hart, Anna Kvittingen, Joe Devine, Sarah White, Oliver Walton and Luisa Enria have all enriched and enlarged my understanding of matters power, postcolonial and governance related. Of course, especial thanks go to Theo Papadopoulos, my intellectual right hand for more than 20 years, whose influence is evident throughout the book. And, finally, thanks to our children, Phoebe and Nicholas, who not only tolerate our arcane dinner-time conversations on power, politics and society, but even better, also join in with the very best ideas. Emma Carmel Bath, March 2019

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PART I

Ontology, theory, epistemology

1. Introduction to Governance Analysis: Critical Enquiry at the Intersection of Politics, Policy and Society Emma Carmel INTRODUCTION This book offers a theoretical and analytical account of governance that enables us to investigate how societies are governed, and with what consequences for power and inequality. This approach enables us to treat governance as at once fully political and fully social, and to rescue its relevance for the analysis of politics, policy and society. How we are governed is vital in the reproduction and transformation of societies. The ideas, decisions and actions that govern our collective life have material and discursive effects that structure social relations. And because such effects can be contested or erased over time, we need a theoretical account of governing that enables us to make visible the politics of these structuring effects in different settings. Our account of governance is therefore concerned both with the material and discursive manifestations of power and their contestation (the political), and also with how social formations are structured, (self-) organised and managed over time (the social). In this book, we conceptualise governance as regime(s) of governing practices that produce socio-political orders, of varying durability and contingency. We treat governance as produced by the material actions, interpretive understandings and structured social positions of socially constituted political actors. We move beyond poststructuralist accounts of government and discourse, and beyond accounts of state-centred policymaking. As such, our account is self-consciously ‘post’-poststructuralist. We use this term as a shorthand to acknowledge the influence of original writings on governmentality, semiosis and state theories that we combine with a resolutely historicist and actor-centred approach. The actor-centredness of our conceptualisation gives due emphasis to meaning, action and structure in shaping governance in different settings. Any theoretical account is of course always developed in dialogue 2

Introduction

3

with existing theorists. We combine the significant insights from poststructuralist writings on government, governmentality, state and hegemony, with the actor-centred and materialist pre-occupations of political anthropology and institutional ethnography. I draw on these approaches in Chapter 2, to explain the three central conceptual features of our account of governance: regimes, governing practices, and the production of socio-political order. In addition, we have developed this account with the intention of examining how governing is done, and how and why it matters in particular places and at particular times. This means that we are centrally concerned with empirical investigation. In light of this aim, the book also outlines an analytical framework that enables us to apply our theoretical account to explain specific empirical cases of governance. This is set out in Chapter 3. This approach provides an analytical toolkit to identify how particular instances of governance structure, and are structured by, the relations between political actors; the processes and practices they adopt to meet their goals; and the wider contexts of their action. Our framework offers a holistic investigative lens to examine and explain the relationships among actors, structures and processes, and their implications for the production of socio-political order in specific contexts. In this opening chapter, I examine the conceptualisations of ‘governance’ that were developed from the 1990s to the 2000s. These all emphasised the importance of complexity and unpredictability in shaping public policy. They addressed what were generally viewed as the significant contemporary changes in the state, politics and political economy, under conditions of globalisation and marketisation. I discuss the key characteristics of debates that centred around the idea that this period saw the emergence of something new, called governance. I examine some critiques, and consider the importance of the context(s) within which they were developed, in order to explore their limitations in making sense of public policy and how it is made. As Davies and Chorianopoulos (2018) rather witheringly suggest, by the 2010s, these debates had become rather sterile. The shortcomings of discussions about the end of the state; new ‘types’ of state, new ‘modes’ of governing, and the emergence of, and potential for, new ‘types’ of ‘democratic’ governing were increasingly evident. The assumptions that such debates rested on were shown to be normatively misplaced as well as ahistorical, seduced by a myopic and teleogical view of contemporary political and social change. In this chapter, I mark out where our differences lie in relation to these earlier debates. I do so in order to suggest that we might usefully rescue the theoretical relevance of governance as a term, by proposing a conceptualisation that meets certain requirements. The first requirement is a conceptualisation that accommodates the need for a theoretically coherent account of governing, rather than a description of an empirical phenomenon, like the decline, congestion or transformation of the state. Our second requirement is that this account must

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Governance analysis

facilitate an interrogation of, rather than rest on, assumptions about how states, statehood and governing are related, both in general, and in specific contexts. Both these requirements are addressed in Chapter 2. Third, this theoretical account should be both historicised and also analytically coherent across contexts. Analytical coherence refers to the ability to apply our account to specific but diverse cases of ‘governance’ and governing. I address this in Chapter 3 by discussing our analytical framework, which can be applied in a range of contexts to explore how specific, contextualised instances of governing unfold and exert their effects. In Chapters 4 to 10, we offer seven case studies of governance, ranging from local to comparative and European contexts, and covering an array of public policy issues. Each contribution addresses its independent research questions, situated in theoretical debates about governance and policy in its particular policy area. Each contribution also reflects on how governance analysis provided a way of looking, a framework for organising, or insights into the implications of governing, for these empirical cases. Taken together, these contributions enable us to show how governing is done: undertaken by political actors, who act purposefully, interpret their actions, and contingently respond to circumstance and environment. And, at the same time, we also show with what implications governing is done across these cases: how these circumstances and environments are themselves structured by, and structure, existing relations of power, authority and resources. Before we introduce these contributions in more detail, however, this chapter starts by problematising our understandings of public policy and policymaking as a task of government or as an attribute of statehood. This discussion about policy provides an analytical ‘way in’ to review afresh the debates on ‘governance’ of recent decades, presented in the subsequent section. I use these reviews of ‘policy’ and of ‘governance’ studies to highlight and contextualise the themes and concerns that underpin the presentation of our theoretical account of governance in Chapter 2, and of governance analysis as an approach to studying public policy and governing in Chapter 3.

‘POLICY’ STUCK BETWEEN POLITICS, POLICYMAKING AND STATE INSTITUTIONS The most common way that ‘policy’ features as a conceptual object of analysis is in studies of policymaking processes. There are numerous mid-level theories of public policy focused on processes of policymaking (e.g. Baumgartner and Jones, 2010[1993]; Kingdon, 1984; Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1993). Some of these have proved very efficacious in explaining the relative success or failure of specific social or economic interests in pursuing these interests in policymaking. They continue to inspire critical development work on policymaking and processes (Cairney and Jones, 2016). For the analyst interested

Introduction

5

in how policy might relate to governing, however, such approaches to policy have a peculiarly antisceptic quality, driven by a decisionist view of policymaking. While apparently explaining how interests and ideas shape policy, ‘policy’ itself is presented ontologically as a decision or output. The politics of the purpose, practice and outcomes of policy is rather presented as epiphenomenal to the story. As such, policy is reified as an object, a thing produced by a state as the outcome of competitive interests in largely instrumentalist and technocratically conceived policy processes. What is contested in these studies is the characteristics of the process: both the state and policy remain unexamined, even when the messy business of practical policymaking are directly addressed (Weible and Cairney, 2018). From within political science, Rod Rhodes and David Marsh (1992a, 1992b) and Martin Smith (1993) were leading scholars in the development of a complex institutionalist understanding of how policy is shaped and its articulation with institutions of the state. Within a neo-pluralist paradigm, these authors asserted the importance of treating the state as a disaggregated but co-ordinated set of institutional arrangements. It was argued that state action in different policy areas was subject to societal interests, of varying organisational coherence and power, that self-organised in a loosely co-ordinated way to shape policy outputs and even future institutional arrangements. The form and degree of co-ordination around particular policy concerns varied, and was categorised as a range of network types. For example, long-term, close-knit groups of organised economic interests engaged with specialist state actors having shared norms and values, produced ‘policy communities’, seen typically in agriculture (farmers, agri-business, agri-chemicals and technical specialists in ministries). More loosely based, highly differentiated groups might temporarily assemble over a specific cause (protecting woodland from privatisation). Nonetheless, analysis of policy communities, networks and coalitions assume the state is a centripetal locus of political power around which social and economic interests coalesce. In line with its disciplinary origins in political science, these theories of policymaking did not engage with wider sociological theories of states and statehood and their transformation (Foucault, 2007; Jessop, 1990) until much later. The ontology of policy was unquestioned and even tautologically defined: policy was what was produced in policy processes. Earlier work in organisational sociology, however, already offered a wider perspective, in which the production of policy was not reducible to questions of interest, organisational capacity and conscious action around governments and legislation (Cohen et al., 1972; Lindblom, 1979). These studies showed that policy emerged from institutions that themselves shaped the identification of interests, and that interests could be invoked and reproduced with varying degrees of purpose and consciousness by social actors. The latter had gained

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Governance analysis

particular expression in the contribution of Bachrach and Baratz (1962) and their work on the mobilisation of bias as a structural feature of policymaking, in which ‘non-decisions’ and decisions not to act in policy matter just as much as decisions made and legislation passed. In this vein, with an even stronger actor orientation, Lipsky’s (2010) work on ‘street-level bureaucrats’, first published in 1980, has been a fruitful resource for scholars working on how policy works in practice. He showed that policies do not (only) comprise legislation, regulations and the distribution of resources as assumed in work on the high (state) politics of policymaking. Citizens and service users experience policy as it is directly made by practices of street-level bureaucrats who adjust their behaviour to accommodate their own preferences, norms, expectations and habits. Policy is made, unmade and re-made in actions on the ground that might mediate, contradict or harden policy goals and intent of ‘policymakers’. Lipsky’s insights enabled scholars to explore how policy takes effect for citizens on the ground, and highlighted that policy is ‘peopled’, that is, it is produced by people as social actors in concrete contexts, not only abstractly produced as formal rules and regulations. So prior to the emergence of ‘governance’ literatures in political science, public administration and political economy, scholars from these disciplines, concerned with policy (rather than ‘the state’ per se) were already interrogating and problematising how states and organisations contribute to making public policy over time. Still, this work shared some assumptions: ‘government’ makes policy decisions; leads the complex institutions that comprise the state; and is (should be) accountable for the implementation of those decisions. Furthermore each of these approaches in their different ways remained intently focused on processes of policymaking, rather than on policy per se. ‘Policy’ in analyses of processes is generally a vehicle for examining interests and values of political actors. Implementation is concerned with the distance between policy intent and policy outcome (and how these can be measured or overcome). Analysts working in specific policy domains, in contrast, problematise ‘policy’, and see policy as produced dynamically in specific contexts and settings, whether this is in environmental, criminal justice, migration or education policy, for example. Researchers with interest in these fields, rather than in policy per se, seek to address the purposes, politics, ethics, appropriateness and meaning of policy in those contexts. They show that some of the most important questions about policy are only tangentially addressed in ‘policy studies’: • What is the problem addressed by; what are the rationales for, and purpose of, specific public policies? • How is the problem, rationale and purpose related to power relations and contexts of the field, including knowledge of that field?

Introduction

7

• What other aspects of the organisation of societies are addressed, disguised, erased in this policy? • How does practice of policy change its purpose, shape the rationale, and address or alter the power relations in the field? In this book, it is these questions that we link to wider concerns of how governing is done, by whom and with what effects. They lead us to questions about relationships between ideas about ‘the state’, governing, policy and society. They highlight the uncertain ontology of ‘policy’ as an instrument of government and state, and the constitution of policy-in-practice and how it takes effect, in ways rather more complex than can be easily accommodated in studies of policy processes. In our account of governance, we use the terms policy and public policy interchangeably. The term ‘public’ in this context signals the collective and social aspects of governing. We treat policy as involving the purposeful use of one’s own and others’ resources (money, people, power) for achievement of these collectively applicable goals to shape the actions of others. Policies generate new – or confirm existing – inequalities of power that affect two aspects of public policymaking. First, this concerns who is subject to which aspects of public policy (laws, regulations, access to resources or services) and under what conditions. Second, it also concerns who has access to decision-making in which arenas that shape diverse aspects of public policy. The emphasis on steering social subjects that underpinned many subsequent analyses of policy and political action, discussed next, also appears in our account of governance presented in Chapter 2. However, we go much further in our elaboration of the political and social implications of steering social subjects in unequally structured regimes of governance. Governing attempts to shape social subjects and their relational positions of power, as well as steering their action. As such, ‘policy’ comprises both purpose and practice. ‘Policy’ is an aspect of governing practices that contributes to the creation and reproduction of governance regimes over time, but the specific relationship of policy to states and to governing in any one case is a matter for empirical investigation rather than theoretical assumption.

‘GOVERNANCE’ STUCK BETWEEN STATE STEERING AND NEO-LIBERAL HEGEMONY In the meantime, the context within which all these ideas about policy processes were developed was changing rapidly. Party politics since the Second World War in ‘developed’, Western, liberal countries was seen as becoming dynamic and less predictable, while the global policymaking environment became more multi-layered and constraining for such states. Significant con-

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Governance analysis

tributors to interpreting these developments were the democratic ‘overload thesis’ and related arguments. These arguments suggested that states could not manage either the financial or the political demands placed upon them, as providers of employment, economic growth and prosperity, distribution and welfare in the expanding post-war state (see discussion in Birch, 1984). These contentions were further promoted and given legitimacy by the emergence of informal economic governance including (originally) the influential Tri-lateral Commission that was followed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and later by formal trade arrangements and other mechanisms of economic governance (Ansell and Torfing, 2016, pp. 6–7). New constraints of integration in a globalising political economy were uneven, but nonetheless significant for states, individuals and social groups (Bakker, 2008; Rosenau, 2000; Sassen, 1996). Increasingly powerful international financial institutions in the postcolonial and post-Cold War period took up the role of trying to exert their authority over global economic development, cast in a mould of minimalist social protection and the normalisation of monetarist economics. Taken together these developments shaped the development of legal norms, the perceived possibilities of political action, and trajectories of political economy in transnational, national and local policy spaces (e.g. Gill and Cutler, 2014; Shaffer, 2013). On the one hand, there was a significant divestment of public assets to private ownership, including land, buildings, industries, infrastructure and financial resources (pensions most notably) in Western and in postcolonial states, later in former Warsaw Pact countries. On the other hand, this exclusion of the state from formerly public/collectively organised policies and services was frequently also combined with the inclusion of private actors in the organisation, delivery and management of many assets that remained publicly owned, like social benefits, and services for unemployment, water, education. These developments did not ‘emerge’. They were political and purposeful decisions to divest, privatise and marketise (Broad, 2006; Prince, 2012; Saint-Martin, 1998; Seabrooke and Tsingou, 2009; Wedel, 1998). Yet the capacity of the (developed, Western, liberal) state to deal with these developments – that were presented as structural conditions – was questioned across a whole range of policy domains (see, among many other examples, Botzem and Hofmann, 2010; Newman, 2004; Ponte and Cheyns, 2013). The boundaries of policy, politics and the characteristics of statehood were challenged by perceptions of threats to the presumed social, economic and territorial integrity of post-war states (Jessop, 1999, 2002).

Introduction

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Governance and Steering from Markets to Partnerships Contributing to this sense of change, internally, the roles of the state in Western Europe were seen as more diverse (states were ‘doing more things’) and, at the same time, these societies were changing rapidly. Interpreting these sociological developments, another group of authors suggested that ‘looking to the state’ for the pursuit of collective goals and collective action had become a forlorn and even a foolish task: [in] contemporary society no single actor, public or private, has the knowledge and capacity to solve complex, dynamic and diversified problems (Kooiman, 1993, p. 4; also 2003, pp. 57–60, 196–208).

Yet even accepting this premise, the challenge of how to organise ‘the process of steering society and the economy through collective action in accordance with common goals’ (Ansell and Torfing, 2016, p. 4) still remained. From this position, then, emerged both prescriptive and descriptive arguments, that public policy as a state activity was now more about ‘steering’ rather than ‘rowing’. Mayntz (2016, p. 260), reviewing decades of theorising about steering (including her own foundational work), suggests it comprises four elements: (1) a steering subject, typically the government, the state or some public authority, (2) steering instruments, in particular law, (3) a policy goal and (4) the target group or object of steering … Steering presupposes the political intention to direct a specific social process or effect a specific change in the economy or civil society, but the concept does not imply that the goal of intervention is in fact achieved.

Steering was a way of describing what policy was for and how states or ‘public authorities’ asserted purposeful action in the process of shaping the actions of others. The emphasis on ‘steering’ complex societies created new roles for public policy, and led to new ideas about the role of policymakers in the state. In particular, Rod Rhodes (e.g. 1996, 2000), developing his earlier work on different types of networks, argued that the increasingly accepted sceptical position about the role of the state and state policymakers resulted in major shifts in the organisation of decision-making within the UK (one of the most centralised ‘Western’ states), creating a ‘hollowed-out state’. Later attempts to describe empirical shifts in how policy, politics and the institutional characteristics of states were organised and related were dominated by Bevir and Rhodes’ contention that there were alternative narratives of governance, later discussed as ‘three waves of governance’ (Bevir, 2003; Rhodes, 2012); see also the discussion in Kjær (2011).

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Governance analysis

In a first ‘wave’ of governance/policymaking shifts, the adoption of market-based principles for the organisation and delivery of policies became commonplace, and public policymakers became subject to new management and control mechanisms. Such contract-based systems for organising public policy must be monitored in terms of whether they meet immediate policy goals for which they were designed, and also whether they meet wider policy and political purposes. In the face of new contract-based ways of thinking about policymaking and delivery, combined with devolution to agencies, the risk of policy fragmentation and incoherence was significant. The need for oversight of policy developments came under scrutiny by policymakers and analysts. For example, how does one policy, subject to a specific contract with targeted aims, affect policies or social groups in related policy areas? Who has oversight of this interaction? The risk of ‘governance failure’ (Jessop, 2003) was acute. To manage and improve state oversight over policy fragmentation, ‘co-ordination’ and ‘regulation’ strategies were developed, in a ‘second wave’ of governance. This second wave, argues Rhodes (2012) introduced the importance of partnerships, and public–public institutional alliances, focused on achieving specific policy or service outputs, oriented as mechanisms to generate state and political capacity across a range of places, political contexts and policy areas (e.g. Bode, 2006; Chesterman and Fisher, 2009; Osborne, 2010; Sabel and Zeitlin, 2010; Schuppert, 2011). These types of co-ordination arrangements could be formal, involving state sanction, requirements and regulation. Or they might be informal, or semi-formal arrangements with varying degrees of institutionalisation (Beermann, 2017; Liese and Beisheim, 2011; Mörth, 2009; Raffaele, 2017) Contrary to the claim that this constituted a new wave or alternative mode of governance for ‘the state’, co-ordination strategies can rather be seen as enhancing existing trajectories in policymaking. In an elaboration of marketised governing practices, the diversity of institutional partnerships expanded across scales and between policy domains; informal partnerships co-existed with contractualised policy delivery; and policy coherence and sustainability were subject to temporal limitations, as delivery and practice was organised around contracts for projects, pilots and ‘experimental government’. In a similar vein, and still focused on the ‘developed state’, while seeking to describe changing empirical phenomena, Newman (2005) and Newman and Clarke (2009) identified more complex, layered and co-existing ‘modes’ of governance, where what went before (hierarchical, direct state-directed bureaucratically organised policymaking) is layered with both marketised, contractualised policymaking and also informal, self-organised ‘modes’ of governance in networks. Taken together, these empirical developments were

Introduction

11

interpreted as intensifying and extending the highly structured opacity, complexity and contingency of government from the 1990s onwards. There is a more significant problem for the story about successive waves of governance shifts, however. In postcolonial contexts, both the adoption of market-based principles, and the initiation and monitoring of regulatory control, especially by international organisations promoting ‘good governance’ in the liberal tradition, were not successive ‘waves’, but part and parcel of the same process. This dual process deliberately re-worked colonial distributions of power, authority and interests. It did so in contexts that were national and regional, but also transnational, neo-liberal and ‘Western’-dominated (Mignolo, 2010), sustained by continued universalisation of ‘Western’ understandings and experiences of national statehood, politics and power (de Sousa Santos, 2012; Mignolo, 2007, 2011). This re-working transformed the anti-imperial conflicts over power resources, autonomy and control in the marketised and globalised historical contexts of the postcolonial period, but it did not resolve them (Elgert, 2010; Escobar, 2001; Gupta, 1995; Kothari, 2005). This complex re-working further accelerated, extended and intensified after the end of the Cold War and the loss of Soviet spheres of influence in a number of postcolonial contexts. Thus, rather than being new developments of complex and opaque governance, in the ‘Global South’, also later in Eastern Europe and central Asia, the politics of policymaking and the assertion of domestic interests continued to be in politically complex and financially constrained circumstances, subject to their own dynamics (Aitken, 2010; Berry and Gabay, 2009; Bridge and Wood, 2005; Larner and Laurie, 2010; Stattman and Gupta, 2015; Vaughan and Rafanell, 2012). Postcolonial domestic policy actors moved between, endorsed and/or contested marketisation agendas and the imposition of financial, political and social controls in a wide array of settings as a matter of course. These included structural adjustment programmes; trade negotiations; donor-funded health and social programmes; and development and governance loan conditionality. They did so across transnational, national and local scales and spaces, both governmental and non-governmental. So, some specific types of contractualised and partnership governing practices described as ‘new’ may indeed have been relatively novel, across the globe. However, complexity of state and public authority, opacity of power relations, and contingency in governing are historically quite ‘normal’. Implicitly referencing Western developed states, but making universalised conceptual claims, the narratives of governance change morphed into theoretical claims that significantly misinterpreted the universalised characteristics, coherence and integrity of states and government both in the post-Second World War period and earlier (see Chapter 2). They also misrepresented this ahistorical view of states and policymaking as a referential norm from which

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Governance analysis

the emergence of complex co-existing forms of governance appeared to be an aberration (Bevir, 2010). Furthermore, the empirical shifts and trajectories described in these literatures are not evident to the same degree in all states. They are not even evident to the same degree in all policy areas in individual states. The governing practices described in these literatures represent empirical trends or trajectories, traces of which can be seen in a range of settings, from local authorities (see Harlock, Chapter 7; Morgan-Trimmer, Chapter 9) to projects of regional integration (see Kan, Chapter 10). Their theoretical status as a new form of politics, policy or statehood is not convincing, as we discuss next. There were three significant theoretical responses to these developments that we discuss in the next section. Starting from around the early 2000s, the ‘Roskilde school’ used the concept of ‘network governance’ to make normative prescriptions regarding the best (most ‘democratic’) way to respond to the benefits of complex governance. Second, a Gramscian-influenced critique was developed, notably by Jonathan Davies. Third, Bevir and Rhodes (2012; Bevir, 2010, esp. Chapter 4) proposed an alternative reading of governance in a ‘third wave’ of governance shifts, theorising ‘governance’ as being constituted in the stories told (by political actors) about governing. Roskilde School, the Gramscian Critique and Governance as Practice The members of the ‘Roskilde school’ of Danish political theorists were among the earliest prescriptive proponents of the idea that market mechanisms could not accommodate the special characteristics of public policy – i.e. to define collective action for collective and politically accountable purposes. Yet they also argued that a ‘return’ to a hierarchical or rule-bound form of organisation was also undesirable. This school of thought addressed itself to the challenges hinted at in the debates on the emergence of steering as the main role of policymaking. The increased social complexity of late modernity, with its individualised subjectivities, apparently identity-based and post-material politics, and the presumed decline of organised and class-based hierarchical society led to the need to generate new forms of citizenship and engagement with the collective organisation of social life (Bang, 2003; Kooiman, 2000, 2010). These social transformations were argued to place new challenges on ‘the state’ and the nature of government. What was required was something neither wholly state nor wholly private, the forging of new relationships across the public/private boundaries (cf Mayntz, 2004), something called ‘governance networks’. Contrasting with the categorisation of policy networks organised in and around a centripetal state discussed earlier in this chapter, governance networks are conceptualised as resting on distributed power relations, in which state actors may, but need

Introduction

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not, be dominant. Over time, the governance networks themselves contribute to the distribution of political power and resources. Organising policy and decision-making through governance networks would create a relatively open system of purposeful policymaking where policy actors are both autonomous and not hierarchically positioned in relation to one another: [a] network of interdependent yet autonomous actors engaged in institutionalized processes of public governance based on negotiated interactions and joint decision making. (Sørensen and Torfing, 2009, p. 237)

For Sørensen, Torfing and colleagues (Sørensen, 2013; Sørensen and Torfing, 2007), the development of ‘governance networks’ in a specific setting should lead to the emergence of a new way of governing. ‘Network governance’ involves the autonomous self-organisation of policy actors, often from a diverse range of institutions (e.g. private, public, agency, third sector) to develop and co-ordinate policy agendas and ideas, and to promote more open and flexible participation in policy development, deliberation and delivery. In later work they do acknowledge that network governance is one way among others through which governing is done or public policy is made, but this makes their normative preference for ‘network governance’ as an empirically identifiable form of governance all the more striking (Sørensen and Torfing, 2009). The networks of ‘network governance’ are inter-institutional. These networks overcome institutional and sectoral boundaries between policy domains, at least for the duration of the network and its purpose. Network governance conceptualises an empirical phenomenon where governing is primarily done through such self-organising networks, which function to achieve public purpose and goals without a hegemon or even pre-defined direction, and without contracts. Network governance is flexible and adaptable, so networks themselves can cross-over, form and re-form; they prioritise goal-oriented, informal ways of thinking and doing governance that rely on high levels of interpersonal trust. Roskilde school scholars recognised that their conceptualisation of network governance, and claims about its emergence and characteristics in specific empirical settings poses questions of democratic deliberation, accountability and political choices over how governing might be done. For example, how do we decide to make policy on the basis of a market-based contract or through deliberation? Networks can only ever govern in ‘the shadow of hierarchy’ (Börzel, 2010; Heritier and Lehmkuhl, 2008) and we need systems of ‘metagovernance’ to choose how best to make policy in any one instance (see also the discussion in Jessop, 2003). Eventually, this perspective results in a rather conventional view of how to secure accountability (Sørensen and

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Torfing, 2018; Torfing, 2016). The state should keep oversight via conventional means of representative parliamentary party politics, but there should not be a return to state bureaucracies as the main way of developing policies. Concerns with governing have also led to a valuable stream of work on the role of, and potential for, deliberative policymaking to re-enchant democratic decision-making (Elstub et al., 2016; Fischer, 2009). Yet there is a striking lack of attention to the limited and specific contexts within which a democratic ethics of governing and policymaking has been claimed and fought for in ‘deliberative systems’, or why. These recent theoretical reflections on deliberative decision-making lack engagement with the settings in which deliberation takes place: in particular states, places and times. To theorise how deliberation, participation and governing intersect in social and political change requires conceptual attention to how power, policy and decision-making are produced and shaped in practices and relative positions of political actors (Gottweis, 2003; Griggs et al., 2014; Wagenaar, 2011). More sceptical views about the democratic possibilities of network governance, and with a significantly less sanguine view of ‘metagovernance’ came from British scholars, but there is also disagreement among them. Jonathan Davies (2011, 2012; Davies and Chorianopoulos, 2018) argues that ‘network governance’ is a misleading misnomer. Using examples from the UK, he argues that the state remains the most powerful actor in public policy and governing more broadly. The state sets the purpose, direction, resources and membership of public policy, and can start or shut down networks as well. Using the work of Antonio Gramsci, he argues that ‘network governance’ disguises the maintenance of state power through networks (for example, we might consider whether non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working on policy with local or national government are ‘co-opted’ into a policy agenda that they may not agree with). Davies also shows that in theories of network governance there is a relative lack of attention to the structural conditions of governance networks, and to questions of how power and authority are distributed and organised in ‘network governance’, notably in relation to the state (cf Davies, 2011). Mark Bevir (Bevir, 2013; Bevir and Rhodes, 2010, 2012) is also sceptical about the normative claims of the Roskilde school. Originally through his work with Rod Rhodes, but also in his work on democratic governance, he argued that while networks are important as modes of governance, they are not only one among many but that ‘network governance’ is part of the third wave of governance (Bevir, 2010, pp. 65ff). More than this, ‘network governance’ is bad for democracy: it makes accountability blurred, privileges particular forms of expertise and experts, and de-politicises significant conflicts in policymaking (Bevir, 2010, Chapter 5; and pp. 214–220). It is also unrealistic, in his view, to see governance as anything other than what is practised by

Introduction

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policymakers (rather than what they claim they want to do). This critique stems from Bevir’s rather different theoretical position on governance. In their most extended discussion of governance as a theory, Bevir and Rhodes argue that it is the description of practices as ‘governance’ that brings it into being; ‘governance’ has no essence or objective existence. ‘Governance’ is used by social actors as a descriptor of phenomena that are understood as sharing ‘family resemblances’ (Bevir and Rhodes, 2010: 92–95) from the stories that policymakers tell about them. ‘Governance is not a given set of characteristics. It is the stories people use to construct, convey and explain traditions, dilemmas, beliefs and practices.’ (Bevir and Rhodes, 2010: 94). This position offers an anti-foundationalist view of ‘the state’, as cultural practice. The state is neither system, institutions, nor assemblage. Social actors are only conditioned in their action by their own sedimented interpretations of how things are done (‘traditions’). Stories and traditions matter more than institutions, positionality, power and political economy, which, in this strong interpretivist position, only exist as aspects of these actors’ stories. This argument combined Rod Rhodes’ ethnographic-type research on policymaking in Whitehall with Bevir’s interest in anti-foundationalist theory. Its flaws also stem from these origins. Our account of governance also uses the concept of ‘practices’ (discussed in Chapter 2). However, our account differs in important ways from the claims of all three preceding theoretical approaches. First, we reject the narrative of progression from simple states/governments to governance, and, indeed, its counterpart in broader theoretical explanations of the emergence of ‘the state’. We reject the possibility of a unitary historical narrative, and instead develop a reading of the always empirically variable, but still structured, intersection of politics, power and statehood in governance. This then enables us to treat governing practices as both politically structured and as having material outcomes that affect socio-economic inequalities and the relational positions of social actors more widely. Governing practices are organised around, and reproduce, asymmetries of power and social inequality, in a ‘regime’ that neither ignores nor makes assumptions about the presence, absence or power of ‘the state’ in a hegemonic formation. This position also attends to the critiques of Rhodes’ erasure of the profoundly context-dependent, elite, classed/gendered/ethnicised, and highly structured organisation of power in Whitehall in his ethnographic work on governance, from which he developed his later conceptual accounts of governance (see especially Kjær 2011). A truly social and political ethnography of governance must accommodate and make visible these patterns of power and their effects on the collective organisation of social life. Second, we treat governing practices as comprising both meaning-making/ interpretation and political action. Processes of governing, and the positionality of actors, are indeed subject to interpretation about conditions of possibility for

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policy or political action. But they are also manifest in actions that have material effects on individual lives, relative social positions and collective experiences. Governing practices are also inscribed in the real objects and artefacts of government, like databases, forms, files, fines, ID cards, guns, flak jackets and walls. Such artefacts, material as well as digital, also contribute to how we physically or socially organise, order and manage populations, individuals and their social relationships. Governing practices link meaning-making and discourse together with action and with artefacts. When conceptualised and investigated creatively, systematically and carefully, it is through (regimes of) governing practices that we can reveal deeply unequal and barely visible relations of power in governance. Third, and extending the contributions of policy studies and governance studies, we integrate into our approach an analysis of the consequences of policymaking. In our conceptualisation, governing practices include the purpose/ intent of policy. As result, we can analyse how such practices contribute to the production of socio-political order, whether this is by attempting to steer social subjects, by legitimising or producing particular processes and by producing or contesting the relational distribution of power and other resources. Rather than reifying policy as a product of policy processes, or governance as expressed in ‘modes of governing’, we interpret both policy and governance as dynamically related to the (re)production of social relations, including the distribution of power and authority in a specific setting.

GOVERNANCE ANALYSIS At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that in order to ‘rescue’ the usefulness of the idea of governance, there are three requirements that must be met. First, any theoretical account of governance should be theoretically coherent and robust. This means that we need to move beyond description of ‘types’, ‘modes’ or ‘waves’ of governance into a theoretical account of what ‘governance’ is and how it matters. Theoretical coherence also requires that this account should be political: not technocratic, but enabling us to account for how governance is produced both through action by particular political actors, and through conditions of possibility for action that are structured and marked by power asymmetries. And this account should be social: historicised, seeing governing as inscribed in, and shaping, the formation and organisation of societies, while taking seriously the intent, purpose and form of ‘policy’ and governing. Second, this account should facilitate a critical interrogation of how statehood, governing and policy are linked together, both in general and in specific contexts. Without such an interrogation, any account of governance easily lapses into assumptions about the existence, and preeminent role, of ‘the state’

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shaping social relations. At the centre of a theoretical account of governance must be an interrogation of how statehood, and the authority to act as a state, are produced by the interactions and practices of social actors and with what implications for political and social inequalities over time. Both these requirements are addressed in our theoretical account of governance, discussed in detail in Chapter 2. Third, our account should be analytically coherent, that is, applicable to the investigation of specific cases of ‘governance’ in a wide range of institutional and political settings. The translation of general theoretical claims into workable analytical framework is a fraught task, especially in light of the interpretivist approach adopted by many of our contributors. What is needed is a framework that is simple enough to manage the tension between workability and insight. We address these concerns in Chapter 3. We outline an analytical framework that enables us to analyse regimes of governing practices as constituted from specific relationships between structures, actors and processes. These relationships, and how they are revealed in governing practices, are our object of analysis. Evaluated in light of three contexts – socio-spatial, socio-economic and temporal – we are able to explore the socio-political ordering effects of these governing practices. The theoretical account and analytical framework must not only ‘work’ in application to specific governing practices or regimes, but must also make sense of these specific cases in ways that illuminate wider theoretical concerns of governance analysis and/or the specific theoretical concerns of the setting. In Chapters 4 to 10 we discuss a range of examples exploring how governing is done in diverse empirical settings. These examples pay close attention to how governance analysis sheds light on the implications of policy for how governing in particular settings shapes political and social inequalities, in keeping with the theoretical account we propose. In Part II, Chapters 4 (Hannah Durrant), 5 (Regine Paul), 6 (Fiona Morgan) and 7 (Jenny Harlock), we examine the workings of governing practices centred around the production of particular states and statehoods in policy, states that are also fully imbricated in the (re)production of unequal social relations. Durrant addresses the development of ‘skills policy’ in England, and shows how three types of political actor engaged with, re-worked and challenged this policy, while also reproducing it. Paul examines how state actors in France, Germany and the UK selectively engaged structural conditions to develop differentially selective labour migration policies. Morgan forensically investigates a complex environment that cuts across three separate domains of state policymaking to structurally position informal carers in contradictory and socially unprotected positions. Harlock shows how local authority actors and third sector organisations negotiated their relationship under the shadow of (partial, uneven) contractualisation of public services and, in doing so, jointly

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produced the structural conditions under which that contractualisation was practised and changed the relationship of state and third sector. In Part III, Chapters 8 (Michelle Farr), 9 (Sarah Morgan-Trimmer) and 10 (Hester Kan) examine how governing practices are produced by social actors whose positioning in governance is both highly structured and unequal, but also contestable, flexible, and contingent on their actions and their interpretive understanding of their positions. Farr examines two concrete processes of service co-production, in health services and a local authority. She explains how these processes generated new intersubjective understandings among policy actors, professional staff and service users, but also reproduced and disguised wider structural conditions of their participation. Morgan-Trimmer, focusing on those citizens ‘at the margins’ of the state, explains how citizens re-made their positions from feeling ignored to being a target of governance, pursued their own goals, and strategically selected their engagement with participatory governance in ways that protected their needs. Kan explores how policy professionals engaged in two European Union (EU) networks. She shows that they were always and at the same time: managing and pursuing their policy agendas in both the domestic and the Europeanised environments, positioning themselves politically in relation to other actors in the network and shaping the structural context within which the network operated. Before introducing this array of empirical case examples, we must explain in more detail the theoretical basis for our definition of governance as a regime of governing practices that produce socio-political orders over time: Chapter 2.

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Beermann, J., 2017. Urban Cooperation and Climate Governance: How German and Indian Cities Join Forces to Tackle Climate Change. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. Berry, C., Gabay, C., 2009. Transnational political action and ‘global civil society’ in practice: the case of Oxfam. Global Networks 9, 339–358. Bevir, M., 2003. A decentred theory of governance, in: Bang, H. (Ed.), Governance as Political and Social Communication. Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp. 200–221. Bevir, M., 2010. Democratic Governance. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Bevir, M., 2013. A Theory of Governance. University of California Press, Berkeley. Bevir, M., Rhodes, R.A.W., 2010. The State as Cultural Practice. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Bevir, M., Rhodes, R.A.W., 2012. Interpretivism and the analysis of traditions and practices. Critical Policy Studies 6, 201–208. Birch, A., 1984. Overload, ungovernability and delegitimation: the theories and the British case. British Journal of Political Science 14, 135–160. Bode, I., 2006. Disorganized welfare mixes: voluntary agencies and new governance regimes in Western Europe. Journal of European Social Policy 16, 346–359. Börzel, T., 2010. European governance: negotiation and competition in the shadow of hierarchy. Journal of Common Market Studies 48, 191–219. Botzem, S., Hofmann, J., 2010. Transnational governance spirals: the transformation of rule-making authority in Internet regulation and corporate financial reporting. Critical Policy Studies 4, 18–37. Bridge, G., Wood, A., 2005. Geographies of knowledge, practices of globalization: learning from the oil exploration and production industry. Area 37, 199–208. Broad, R., 2006. Research, knowledge, and the art of ‘paradigm maintenance’: the World Bank’s Development Economics Vice-Presidency (DEC). Review of International Political Economy 13, 387–419. Cairney, P., Jones, M.D., 2016. Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Approach: What Is the Empirical Impact of this Universal Theory? Policy Studies Journal 44, 37–59. Chesterman, S., Fisher, A., 2009. Private Security, Public Order: the outsourcing of public services and its limits. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Cohen, M.D., et al., 1972. A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative Science Quarterly 17, 1–25. Davies, J., 2011. Challenging Governance Theory: From Networks to Hegemony. Policy Press, Bristol.

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Davies, J., 2012. Network governance theory: a Gramscian critique. Environment and Planning A 44, 2687–2704. Davies, J., Chorianopoulos, I., 2018. Governance: mature paradigm or chicken soup for European public management? Critical Policy Studies 12, 360–366. de Sousa Santos, B., 2012. Public sphere and epistemologies of the South. Africa Development 37, 43–67. Elgert, L., 2010. Politicizing sustainable development: the co-production of globalized evidence-based policy. Critical Policy Studies 3, 375–390. Elstub, S., et al., 2016. The fourth generation of deliberative democracy. Critical Policy Studies 10, 139–151. Escobar, A., 2001. Culture sits in places: reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization. Political Geography 20, 139–174. Fischer, F., 2009. Democracy and Expertise. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Foucault, M., 2007. Security. Territory. Population. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Gill, S., Cutler, A.C., 2014. New Constitutionalism and World Order. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gottweis, H., 2003. Theoretical strategies of poststructuralist policy analysis: towards an analytics of government, in: Hajer, M.A., Wagenaar, H. (Eds.), Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 247–264. Griggs, S., et al., 2014. Practices of Freedom. Decentred Governance, Conflict and Democratic Participation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gupta, A., 1995. Blurred boundaries: the discourse of corruption, the culture of politics, and the imagined state. American Ethnologist 22, 375–402. Heritier, A., Lehmkuhl, D., 2008. The shadow of hierarchy and new modes of governance. Journal of Public Policy 28, 1–17. Jessop, B., 1990. State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in its Place. Polity, Cambridge. Jessop, B., 1999. The changing governance of welfare: Recent trends in its primary functions, scale, and modes of coordination. Social Policy and Administration 33, 348–359. Jessop, B., 2002. The Future of the Capitalist State. Polity, Cambridge. Jessop, B., 2003. Governance and meta-governance: on reflexivity, requisiste variety and requisite irony, in: Bang, H. (Ed.), Governance as Social and Political Communication. Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp. 101–116. Kingdon, J., 1984. Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies. Little Brown, Boston. Kjær, A.M., 2011. Rhodes’ contribution to governance theory: praise, criticism and the future governance debate. Public Administration 89, 101–114. Kooiman, J., 1993. Modern Governance. Sage, London.

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Kooiman, J., 2000. Societal governance: levels, models and order of social-political interaction, in: Pierre, J. (Ed.), Debating Governance. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 138–166. Kooiman, J., 2003. Governing as Governance. Sage, London. Kooiman, J., 2010. Governance and governability, in: Osborne, S.P. (Ed.), The New Public Governance. Emerging Perspectives on the Theory and Practice of Public Governance. Routledge, London, pp. 72–86. Kothari, U., 2005. Authority and expertise: The professionalisation of international development and the ordering of dissent. Antipode 37, 425–446. Larner, W., Laurie, N., 2010. Travelling technocrats, embodied knowledges: globalising privatisation in telecoms and water. Geoforum 41, 218–226. Liese, A., Beisheim, M., 2011. Transnational public–private partnerships and the provision of collective goods in developing countries, in: Risse, T. (Ed.), Governance without a State? Columbia University Press, Columbia, pp. 115–143. Lindblom, C., 1979. Still muddling, not yet through. Public Administration Review 39, 517–526. Lipsky, M., 2010. Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public services (expanded ed.). Russell Sage Foundation, New York. Mayntz, R., 2004. ‘Governance im modernen Staat’, in: Benz, A. (Ed.), Governance – Regieren in komplexen Regelsystemen. Eine Einführung. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden. Mayntz, R., 2016. Steering, in: Ansell, C., Torfing, J. (Eds.), Handbook on Theories of Governance. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 259–266. Mignolo, W., 2007. Delinking. Cultural Studies 21, 449–514. Mignolo, W., 2010. Cosmopolitanism and the de-colonial option. Studies in Philosophy and Education 29, 111–127. Mignolo, W., 2011. Geopolitics of sensing and knowing: on (de)coloniality, border thinking and epistemic disobedience. Postcolonial Studies 14, 273–283. Mörth, U., 2009. The market turn in EU governance – the emergence of public–private collaboration. Governance 22, 99–120. Newman, J., 2004. Modernizing the state: a new form of governance?, in: Lewis, J., Surender, R. (Eds.), Welfare State Change: Towards a Third Way? Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 69–88. Newman, J., 2005. Remaking Governance: Peoples, Politics and the Public Sphere. Policy Press, Bristol. Newman, J., Clarke, J., 2009. Publics, Politics and Power: Remaking the Public in Public Services. Sage, London. Osborne, S.P., 2010. The New Public Governance. Emerging Perspectives on the Theory and Practice of Public Governance. Routledge, London.

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Sørensen, E., 2013. Institutionalizing interactive governance for democracy. Critical Policy Studies 7, 72–86. Sørensen, E., Torfing, J., 2007. Theoretical approaches to meta-governance, in: Sørensen, E., Torfing, J. (Eds.), Theories of Democratic Network Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Sørensen, E., Torfing, J., 2009. Making governance networks effective and democratic through metagovernance. Public Administration 87, 234–258. Sørensen, E., Torfing, J., 2018. Governance on a bumpy road from enfant terrible to mature paradigm. Critical Policy Studies 12, 350–359. Stattman, S.L., Gupta, A., 2015. Negotiating authority in global biofuel governance: Brazil and the EU in the WTO. Global Environmental Politics 15, 41–59. Torfing, J., 2016. Metagovernance, in: Ansell, C., Torfing, J. (Eds.), Handbook on Theories of Governance. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 525–537. Vaughan, S., Rafanell, I., 2012. Interaction, consensus and unpredictability in development policy ‘transfer’ and practice. Critical Policy Studies 6, 66–84. Wagenaar, H., 2011. Meaning in Action: Interpretation and Dialogue in Policy Analysis. M.E. Sharpe, Inc, New York. Wedel, J., 1998. Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe, 1989–1998. Macmillan, Basingstoke. Weible, C.M., Cairney, P., 2018. Practical lessons from policy theories. Policy & Politics 46, 183–197.

2. Regimes of governing practices, socio-political order and contestation Emma Carmel INTRODUCTION In this chapter, I outline a broad conceptualisation of governance, as regimes of governing practices that produce socio-political orders over time. This conceptualisation is intended to apply a ‘wide-angle lens’ to the study of governing, politics and public policy. Bringing together the two parts of this definition (‘regimes of governing practices’ and the ‘production of socio-political orders’) achieves several things. It enables us to interrogate and critique the central role of multifarious actors within and beyond the state, and even statehood itself, in governing and public policy. It also enables us to analyse how discursive and material practices of governing are combined by social actors to assert and contest their power over collective decision-making and rules. And finally, it enables us to examine how such contestations ‘always already’ have unequal, power-saturated dynamics and implications. This conceptualisation of governance enables us to attend to the ways in which policy goals and related efforts to steer social subjects are articulated with the means or processes adopted to achieve these goals. Treating governance as ‘regimes of governing practices’ brings into our field of vision questions of how governing practices reshape the objects to be governed and the conditions of possibility of their social action; and always at the same time, also shape how governing is done and political arrangements of power in governing are reproduced. I argue that debates of the last 20–30 years about governance, the state and policy, summarised in Chapter 1, in their rush to understand immediate changes have missed a trick or two. This chapter takes a different starting point. The governance debates of the early 2000s started from the question of ‘how has the state changed’, but the premise of this question depended on a universalised understanding of what the state is. As we saw, governance was used as a catch-all to describe these changes, or to promote a normative vision for a changed state and new ways of making policy. In contrast, this chapter starts from a decolonised and historicised understanding of statehood and 24

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rule, in order to problematise treating public policy as (only) a matter of state practice and politics. In the first section, addressing questions of rule and governance, I first outline the contribution of Michel Foucault’s understanding of governmentality as a key influence on understandings of the de-centred state. However, the valuable critical insights of his work on a range of concepts – from bio-power, governmentality, surveillance and knowledge/power – also rest on a narrative of statehood and the emergence of dispersed rule and power that is at best myopic. Postcolonial and decolonial readings of modern (European) statehood and its emergence clearly show the limits of governmentality as a focus for governance analysis. Turning to Bourdieu, Jessop and Sum, we can adapt some of the key tools and insights of governmentality analysis. Adopting the term ‘regime’ (of governing practices), our conceptualisation of governance neither privileges nor rejects the idea of statehood in generating policy. It rather treats statehood as an ambiguous set of attributes and structured processes. These may be articulated in diverse ways with the production of policy and attempts to steer social subjects. Governance analysis sets out to interrogate specific regimes of governing, their emergence, development over time and their implications for the distribution of power and resources in particular settings. In the second section, I focus on governing practices, and argue for a conceptualisation of governance that synthesises two aspects of policymaking: meaning-making on the one hand and material practices and actions on the other. I draw on literatures that show the importance of meaning-making as an attribute of policy (e.g. defining policy problems, deliberative processes and design-based policy solutions) and as politics (knowledge, expertise and meaning-production and distribution as a central feature of power). How we make sense of the world, and how this sense-making is produced in discourse, establishes conditions of possibility for action. Yet such conditions of possibility must also be interpreted to take effect. Governing – and meaning-making as part of governing – is something that is achieved by social actors who not only make sense of the world, but who act on it, creatively, strategically and with purpose. This acting on the world (governing practices) is not only about how we know the world, and acting on the world may have unexpected effects. From policy anthropology and institutional ethnography, we can see how relationships of power in policymaking and governing are always both structured and contingent. Treating governance as regimes of governing practices synthesises the discursive conditions of what actors think is possible with the material social action of creation that can challenge those conditions of possibility – even accidentally. Drawing on anthropological and political economy readings of statehood, I go on to argue that we might helpfully consider how such regimes of governing practices produce socio-political orders, as well as how they are

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contested and re-shaped by social actors, over time. This perspective enables us to explore the structured, hierarchical and patterned relationships of power that are so important for reproducing socio-political orders within and between societies. But importantly, it also enables us to explore how specific actors, making sense of political action in specific complex contexts, make these relationships of power contingent, particular and contestable, as they re-work and even transform their relationships and possibilities for political action. Taking these three arguments together, I conclude with a conceptualisation of governing and public policy that is at once both properly ‘political’ (concerned with relations and practices of power) and properly ‘social’ (concerned with the wider production of social inequalities and their meaning over time).

REGIMES: DECOLONISING GOVERNING, ‘TECHNIQUE’ AND RULE Drawing on decolonial understandings of ‘the’ state and statehood, in this section I argue that the production of ‘policy’ in states is a form of governing practice, but that governing may be only loosely coupled to statehood, public policy and state regulation (Mignolo, 2007, 2010). I examine how some of the theoretical ambiguity in terminology of ‘governance’ discussed in Chapter 1 reflects a more deep-seated conceptual problematic that concerns the ontology of the state and its place in society, politics and governing. Rather than searching for an elusive object called ‘the state’, or even specific states with concrete institutions, and modes of governance, I also draw on Jessop’s theoretical work on the (general or abstract) strategic-relational state; Bourdieu’s discussion of the ‘illusory state’; and states in action (Mitchell, 1991). Foucault’s ‘governmentality’ perspective, and Bourdieu’s ‘illusory’ state are both reliant on particular historical narratives about the historical emergence of l’état and, in the case of Foucault, especially its disciplinary, individuating transformation as ‘liberal government’, during the nineteenth century. This narrative is widely shared, and evident in much ‘whiggish’ teleological thinking about ‘governance’ discussed in the previous chapter (Carmel, 2017a; Davies and Chorianopoulos, 2018), so deserves conceptual and analytical attention – and critique. Governmentality, Statehood and Social Order Chapter 1 revealed how discussions of governance have had at their heart an attempt to decentre the state in governing and policymaking. Foucault’s late interest in statehood and the emergence of liberal government has been extraordinarily influential and led to a flourishing and rich seam of work exploring governmentality, bio-power, techniques and technologies of gov-

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ernment and, more recently, cultural political economy. It is among his work on governmentality that some of the most influential and robust theoretical readings to decentre the state and its role in governing can be found. For Foucault, ‘the state has no essence’ (Gordon, 1991, p. 3); the state is what is practised (Mitchell, 1991). Central to this claim is the contention that ‘liberal government’ developed in nineteenth century Europe, to supplant sovereign power of the monarch as a personalised rule and expression of statehood. Under sovereign rule, authority was periodically evident and visible in spectacular, violent, but irregular expressions of authority over social subjects. State tax collection was not always regular or consented to, and required the assertion of common names, measurements and recording of distances (for land), and weights (for goods). In day-to-day life, local rules, languages, non-codified social relationships of ownership and power stemming from custom and practice, and shared ‘moral economies’ shaped the variably structured social experiences of individuals as well as their scope for political action (Scott, 1998; Thompson, 1971). The emergence of complex forms of social organisation in the wake of industrialisation, urbanisation and population growth, meant the emergence of a new form of rule. Liberal government, according to this narrative, was specifically a response to the late eighteenth century/early nineteenth century emergence of ‘society’ as a complex social formation; and the availability of material technologies and knowledge practices that enabled such government. Rather than a specific set of institutions called the state, governmentality was concerned with how social relations are understood, organised and acted on. Government shifted from personal (monarchical) rule of territory, to the government of ‘a complex and independent reality that has its own laws and mechanisms, its regulations as well as its possibilities of disturbance. This new reality is society’ (Foucault, 1994[1982], p. 352; discussed also in Donzelot, 1991, pp. 171–174). What if the state were nothing more than a way of governing? … what if all these relations of power that gradually take shape on the basis of multiple and very diverse processes, which gradually coagulate and form an effect, what if these practices of government were precisely the basis on which the state was constituted? (Foucault, 1994[1978], p. 248)

Foucault’s insights ‘decentre’ the state, as a central unitary institution, by focusing on (liberal governmental) techniques of rule that are dispersed along ‘capillaries’ of social relations and in which the knowledge/power nexus is central to how ‘the social’ is organised, ordered and acted on. Liberal governmental rationalities are at once ‘individualising and totalising’, evidenced in ‘calculations of the possible and the probable’ (Gordon, 1991: pp. 35–36). Governing is technique and practice, and there are specific ‘technologies’

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of government associated with the emergence of ‘society’ in the nineteenth century. Among technologies of calculation, those of division, classification and individuation among social subject categories are used as a ‘technique of power and procedure of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1994[1982]) to generate conditions of possibilities for (governing) action (discussed in Dean, 2003, pp. 132–135, 2007; Rose, 1999). Stemming from this narrative of the emergence of society and social relations (‘the social’) as an object to be governed, is a particular interest in rationalities of government; that is, in how we think about governing. It is a matter of interrogation as to what is, or can be, included in government and what not: as Dean (2007) argues, governing requires that the subjects to be governed must be within a ‘field of visibility’ in which governing is imaginable. In turn, this field of visibility requires the deployment of ‘rationalities of government’. Rationalities of government are those ways of thinking that ‘are capable of making some form of that activity thinkable and practicable both to its practitioners and to those upon whom it was practised’ (Gordon, 1991: p. 2). For Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 2014[1990], p. 10), although he has a more anthropological, and statist perspective, the ‘mysterious reality’ of ‘the state’ is also an ‘illusory reality’. It ‘exists through its effects and through the collective belief in its existence, which lies at the origin of these effects’. The authorised categorisation of social subjects – with ‘the whole force of the social order behind it’ – is the most central ‘acts of state’ (Bourdieu, 2014[1990], pp. 11–12). The symbolic violence of the state exerts ‘durable dispositions, through all the constraints and disciplines that it imposes uniformly on all agents’ (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 175). In contrast to Foucault, however, for Bourdieu, ‘the state’, through its acts and effects, is nonetheless the locus of resource, authority and misrecognised power that can structure all social relations (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, pp. 94–115; Swartz, 2003, pp. 150–153). From this discussion of government and its rationalities, then, we can view governing as combinations of techniques of rule and ways of knowing that institute ways of ordering and organising societies. There are a further three aspects of this work on governmentality that generate insights into the complex relationship of governing, society and politics. First, that the combinations, or ensembles of such techniques and practices can, but need not, emanate from ‘state’ institutions, including ‘policies’. Second, that governmentality is emergent in diverse processes that assume, and reproduce, dispersed relations of power. Third, that government is contingent because it is historically instituted through a specific historical narrative (Fraser, 1989, p. 19). In respect of each of these important insights, however, there are significant unresolved problems. I address these conceptual problems by way of their origin in Foucault’s – and Bourdieu’s – historical narratives, which, despite revisionist intent, reflect myopic dominant narratives about the emergence of ‘modern’

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(Western/European) statehood and government; narratives reproduced in the discussions of ‘governance’ reviewed in the previous chapter. Decolonial Government and Statehood – Foucault and Beyond Such historical narratives blindside three key aspects of governing, each of which sustains a postcolonial misrecognition of the role of statehood in governing. Each of these aspects has implications for our theorisation of political decision-making and the production and contestation of collectively organised rule in contemporary societies. The conceptual problems fall into three broad categories. Governmentality (a) misreads, or ignores, the persistence of asymmetries of power and political economy and the material dimensions of what Foucault calls ‘liberal government’. In consequence, (b) it misreads the importance of contingency and the role of specific actors that produce such ‘liberal government’. Finally, (c) the unitary narrative of the emergence of statehood in Europe subsumes and disguises significant diversity among forms of rule, the emergence of state systems and their complexity and contestedness both historically and today. Examining these problems alerts us to key aspects of governance as a regime that we might otherwise miss. First, the very emergence of ‘governmentality’ was predicated on statist practices for the suppression of, and inequitable imposition of social orders on, colonial populations. Foucault describes techniques of rule and liberal government that hierarchise and enumerate populations in space, ‘making a division between good and bad circulation, eliminating its dangerous elements’ (Foucault, 2007(1977–1978), p. 18). His historical narrative confines his examination of these dispersed techniques of government to the industrialising metropolitan centres of Western Europe that overthrew personalised rule and authority of the king. Yet the governmental and dispersed techniques of ‘bio-power’ that enumerated populations were first deployed as techniques of colonial rule in European powers’ imperial territories (Mitchell, 2000, pp. 2–4, 11). In some cases, long before what Foucault describes as the ‘death of the sovereign power’, colonial rule adopted the first forms of ‘governing at a distance and the intensification of a specific kind of operations of abstraction’ to govern populations – and their circulation in space (Hibou, 2017, p. 205). As Bhabha (2004, pp. 355–356) argues from Fanon, Foucault ‘disavows’ and so erases the colonial and racist governmentality that underpinned his conceptualisation of liberal government, because he was unable or unwilling to accommodate it in his unitary historical narrative (also evident in Bourdieu’s more state-centric view – see Bourdieu 2014[1990]). This is theoretically important. It shows that liberal governmentality is, in the end, not about the ‘conduct of conduct’ where dispersal of power through surveillance is a contrasting alternative to the visible, spectacular power of

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kingly rule, as described in Foucault’s narrative of the emergence of the modern state (2007[1977–1978]). Liberal governmentality is a product of, made possible by, and itself also reproduced, visible asymmetries of power. In colonial rule, moreover, liberal governmental techniques were combined with the exertion of ‘direct unmediated violence upon the bodies of colonial subjects’ (Fernández and Esteves, 2017, p. 143). The techniques were brutal, and deliberately and spectacularly violent; but also both patterned and contingent; personalised and étatist; and racialised and sexualised (Bhabha, 2004; Stoler, 2010). So, such practices of governing did, can and do co-exist with dispersed techniques of liberal government. Indeed, it is their very co-existence, their changing forms and dynamic interaction that constitutes a ‘regime’ of governing practices that decentres ‘the state’. But it must not theoretically displace the idea of statehood and claims to stateness in governance. Power in governance is neither wholly dispersed in structurally reproduced and dispersed techniques of rule, nor wholly concentrated in a state apparatus or system. Rather, power in governance is highly structured. It involves the heterarchical distribution and mobilisation of power resources over time (Jessop, 2016, pp. 18, 123–147; also Bourdieu 2014[1990], pp. 9–10), as well as being contingent on political action by concrete actors in specific settings, as we see below. Policies and policymaking are both an outcome and an effect of this distribution of power in a regime of governing practices. Concentrations or dispersal of power resources, and universalising claims to statehood in such regimes, are matters for investigation and critique. Second, the emergence of European liberal government, with its bureaucratic practices of calculation and enumeration, division and classification was also dependent on, and emerged out of the imperial political economies of capitalist Western states. This is an aspect of socio-political order that is simply not intelligible under the framing of Foucauldian ‘liberal governmentality’, which erases the role played by changing economic relations in the emergence of modern societies and their hierarchical socio-political orders. Liberal government required the political economy of imperial rule and all its associated material practices to organise – and exert domination over – trade, labour and resources extraction across dispersed places (Rodney, 2017[1972]; Bhandar, 2018). Diverse and innovative economic and military processes of governing were adopted in conquests that were articulated with the shifting imperial projects of the emerging European states in dynamic and complex institutional arrangements (Bhandar, 2018, esp. pp. 78–113). (Most famously the East India Company and the Dutch East Indies Company, but also the establishment of monopolies in the Atlantic slave trade.) Indeed, these changing practices also eventually brought ideas of economic production and measurement to the invention of fictitious ‘national economies’ (actually imperial), and of the

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adoption of GDP as a ubiquitous tool of governance (Gottweis, 2003, p. 259; Mitchell, 2002, 2008). The persistent deployment of hybrid state/corporate arrangements in colonial projects of Western statehood (in petroleum companies and mining companies especially) were authorised as private national economic production. And, in their own turn, these governance regimes made imaginable the revolutionary anti-imperialist projects of economic nationalism from the 1920s onwards (Mitchell, 2011). Such structured but dynamic governance arrangements were not consistently coherent with the emerging ‘state apparatus’ or even the ‘state idea’ in Europe (Blanning, 2007; Darwin, 2007). Nonetheless, these practices of imperial economic government were integral to the emergence of the ‘social’ as a space to be governed within Western Europe. As such the social was governed not only as an enumerated space of self-governing individuals, but had strongly classed, ethnicised and territorialised characteristics. Imperial terms of trade, supported by racialised and violent forms of political rule that devastated colonial economies, at the same time sustained industrial growth and the emergence of ‘liberal government’ in the transatlantic metropoles from Manchester to Paris and New York. Such governing practices pre-figure, and should normalise, the critical assessment of complexities of how particular places are governed as if they are ‘global’ spaces under conditions of globalisation, whether global enclaves of food production (Medland, 2019), former colonial territories reinvented as tax havens to service metropolitan financial centres (Sassen, 1998), or refugee camps – formal and informal, walled and otherwise (Nyers, 2013; Sigona, 2014) (see also Chapter 1). Theoretically, then, acknowledging the political economy of governance requires us to attend to how power resources are organised, among which social and political actors in a regime. We should treat ‘the state’ and statehood – those systems and processes that bear the characteristics of ‘stateness’ – as neither illusory nor historically or socially fixed (pace Bourdieu, above). More than this, however, treating governance as a regime enables us to see how governing can have effects that are structured, and result from asymmetrical relations of power, but they are not necessarily statist. Third, the emergence of the European state that underpins the Foucauldian and Bourdieusian understanding of governing and governance is, in another profound sense, fictional. The co-terminous development of territorial rule and the emergence of national peoples had to be imagined and created, along with their territorialised rule. The enactment, contestation and political (re) claiming of territorial spaces as the ‘national state’, has been symbolically and materially violent. However, national states are also neither territorially nor ethno-culturally fixed (Zürn, 1998, pp. 27–45). And of course, the ‘national state’ can also be invoked as a rallying cry to oppose forms of rule that gener-

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ated the domination of excluded or subordinated ethno-cultural groups (Dikeç, 2005; Elden, 2007). This argument is linked to, but is not only concerned with, Anderson’s (1983) idea of nationhood as an imagined community, produced through discursive and material practices – from national language to stories, songs, buildings and flags. After all, it was only the end of the civil wars in Europe that followed the First World War that established national state territorial structures across Europe. They did so at a cost of enormous population movement, violence and genocide in concerted efforts to attach national peoples to national states. Even then, these state territorial structures left the imperial projects of the victorious powers untouched (Gewarth, 2016; Immerwahr, 2019). The territorial integrity of national statehood is an unstable, open project of coherence that is organised in a field of tension with arrangements for governance at different scales, whether these arrangements are imperialist, global or regional (Hansen and Jonsson, 2014; Mazower, 2012). As Jessop (2016, p. 131) notes, ‘territorialisation’, that is, the territorial articulation of governing in particular places ‘involves a continuing reorganization of political borders, boundaries and frontiers’. The cartographic assertion of naturalised geographies of the national state (Escolar, 2002, pp. 44–50) coexists with ‘variegated boundaries’ of international governance (O’Dowd, 2001, pp. 106–107), and uneven political economies of development. Jessop’s description of the ‘state apparatus’ as an assemblage, where assemblage denotes ‘an emergent, contradictory, hybrid, and relatively open system’ (2016, p. 84) is resonant here, even if his use of the term ‘system’ leaves little room for discussion of how power is exerted in these complex governing contexts (also Rosenau, 2000, pp. 181–185). Both the origins and effects of governing, then, move between scales, or traverse several scales at once in entangled regimes of governance that policy and political actors must make sense of, as well as negotiate (e.g. Harlock, Farr, Morgan-Trimmer, and Kan, Chapters 7–10, this volume). For Gottweis (2003, p. 257), regimes of government are ‘systems in which people, individuals, nature and artefacts interact and are transformed into objects of intervention and become “governable”’. This formulation acknowledges the importance of discursive power to ‘transform people into “objects of intervention”’, and, in this context, also echoes work in discourse theory that links politics, power and policy (Howarth, 2010). Yet, these post-structuralist positions are not easily able to theoretically accommodate the role (rather than the positions) of actors, as I discuss in Chapter 3 (also Farr, Chapter 8). While regimes can change, in discourse theory it is the contestation between regimes, rather than contestation in or through political practices, that matters. Regimes ‘have a structuring function, in the sense that they order a system of social practices, thus helping us to characterize the latter’ (Glynos and Howarth, 2007, p. 106).

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We lack an analytical ‘way in’ to assess actors’ struggles as they purposefully and creatively generate interventions, change their conditions of possibility, to shape the meaning and practice of policy and political action. So conceptualising governance as a regime enables us to interrogate the articulation of politics, policy, the state and rule. I have suggested that this articulation is dynamic – changing over time; structured – stemming from and resulting in asymmetries of power, authority and domination, and complex – it can involve dispersed rationalities of government, statist claims to universality and public interest, and multiple arrangements of social actors. What has remained rather implicit so far is the conceptual positioning of agency and political action in shaping governance regimes and their reproduction. This is directly linked to the question of how to conceptualise what constitutes governing practices. This question is the subject of our next section.

GOVERNING PRACTICES: POLITICS, GOVERNING, AND POLICY Our definitions of governance as a regime that produces socio-political order should not let slip from view the social and political actors through whose understanding and action these regimes are generated. It is in the dynamic relations among actors, how they identify their subjectivity, and act on these understandings, that governing practices are produced, but also contested, ruptured, side-stepped or re-worked. And it is in these dynamic relations among actors that the implications of regimes of governing practices are materialised, shaping distributions of power and authority. The centrality of understandings and action of specific actors to our perspective cannot be underestimated. Similarly to our discussion of governmentality, the influence of post-structuralist thinking on the importance of language has shaped our approach. In particular, interpretivist policy analysis (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, 2014), Bourdieu’s privileged role for symbolic capital and the state; and the cultural political economy (CPE) (Sum and Jessop, 2013) perspective – itself influenced by Foucauldian work on knowledge/power and discourse – all emphasise the importance of meaning-making as an expression of political power that shapes conditions of possibility for others. However, by privileging discursive and symbolic power, in the production/reproduction of governing, such analysis also displaces the role of action in shaping policy and politics – even unintentionally. In contrast, institutional ethnography and policy anthropology emphasise the materiality of practices and social action among actors, constantly negotiating, contesting and mediating the implications of meaning-making.

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Governing and the Politics of Meaning It is common to start discussion of the role of meaning-making for politics with the question of representation, and the particular contribution of post-structuralist studies of government. Gottweis (2003, p. 249) argues that the meaning of social phenomena and the structures of the social world are not fixed, and are ‘constantly moving, changing and shifting in various directions’. This position accommodates the importance of semiosis in shaping the social world – ideas are not epiphenomenal to ‘reality’, but partially constitutive of it (Jessop, 2009; Jessop and Sum, 2006, pp. 159–160). More than this, the very characteristic of ‘statehood’ is produced through our ideas about states and statehood, made possible through our ways of thinking, our ‘categories of thought’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 35; Jessop, 2016, pp. 86–90). Drawing inspiration from both Gramsci and Foucault, and Jessop’s own work on the ‘strategic relational approach’ to structure and agency, Jessop and Sum (2006, pp. 167–168) outline three ways in which discourse and meaning-making organise and structure relations between social ‘forces’ and ‘blocs’: through the variation, selection, and retention of discourses in different settings. Sum (2009) and Sum and Jessop (2013, Chapters 8–10) also show how this variation, selection and retention might unfold in particular cases. Their detailed empirical examples clearly demonstrate the role of individual actors, and of contingency and political contestation in this process. They do so, however, largely in order to illuminate discourses as a strategically selective structure (e.g. Sum and Jessop, 2013, pp. 390–392, 419–439). The emphasis, both theoretically and empirically, is on selection and selectivities of discourse, in a wider hegemonic political economy arrangement (Jessop and Oosterlynck, 2008, p. 1157). ‘Agential’ selectivity (i.e. how social actors act) is separated from the production of discourse, structure and technologies of government (Sum and Jessop, 2013, pp. 102–123, esp. 120). Despite the intention in CPE to account for both structure and agency in shaping how semiotics contributes to the structuring of social relations, we still lack an account that conceptualises how this is done, by whom, and, above all, when and why it might matter. Ideas, including knowledge, data and their material representations move not just through structures, but they are translated by social actors and their actions: semiosis is not an a priori abstract structure into which agents assert their interpretations. Semiosis changes through these translation practices (Clarke et al., 2015). Meaning-making, then, is integral to how we seek to politically shape the actions, status and relationships of ourselves and others. Meaning-making, the production of categories of thought and recognition, is central to the political process of making governing thinkable and practicable (Foucault, 1994[1982]; Miller and Rose, 1992). However, such

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meaning-making processes, including for policymaking, can be haphazard and patchy, as well as reproducing existing governance heterarchies (Carmel, 2017b; Seabrooke and Wigan, 2017; Stone, 2013). Policy figures in these processes in three important ways. First, meaning-making is a central task in defining what is legitimately political, and thus amenable to being governed, as opposed to marked out as private or domestic (Fraser, 1989), or simply unrecognised and outside our understanding. Our determination of who has what authority to govern, of the social spaces and objects to be governed, and of how this can be done are all produced in our knowledge about the world. Second, policy is produced in contestations about this knowledge and meaning of the social world, both in defining ‘the policy problem’ (Bacchi, 1999; Colebatch, 2009, p. 64–65) and in arguing about its meaning, solutions and deliberation (Fischer, 1998, 2009; Majone, 1989). Third, policy-in-practice instantiates how we make sense of the world, it establishes or shifts socio-political relations of power by the terms that it seeks to establish (Wagenaar, 2011; see also Bevir and Rhodes, 2010, especially p. 90ff). Overall, then, we can see that meaning-making in governance is not best understood as primarily a structural condition or discourse. Rather, meaning-making is integral to governing as a practice. Governing, and the Politics of Practice I argued above that treating governing as practice(s) means bringing our analysis of agency and political action into relation with an interrogation of how specific and concrete regimes of governing practices might be (re)produced. A governance regime does not just emerge as an assemblage of discourses, institutions and policies that shapes the conditions of possibility and space for social action; it needs assembling. To assemble governance requires both discursive strategies and also material practices of social actors to construct governable terrains (Carmel and Harlock, 2008) – combining not only how we think about the world but also how we act on it and create its material forms (Li, 2007; Shore, 2006; Shore and Wright, 2011). These are in part produced in everyday politics at the level of individual and small-scale interactions. In micro-level politics, meanings, understandings and discourses are highly structured by the context within which they are produced. But we must nonetheless place social actors at the centre of these processes. (This is in some way addressed by all the contributors to this book.) Policy meaning (made through argument) is a result of action and effort, and meaning-making is a social practice (Dryzek et al., 1993). As Hajer and Wagenaar (2003, p. 14) suggest, discussing this earlier work: ‘worldviews are not made out of whole cloth, but are shaped, incrementally and painfully, in

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the struggle of everyday people with concrete, ambiguous, tenacious, practical problems and questions’. However, practices are not just micro-politics. Struggles to establish common and/or dominant meanings can also involve efforts to hide, or misrecognise, their politics – that is, to naturalise meanings by disguising their origins in such struggles, to assure their dominance by making them appear commonsensical, exerting what Bourdieu calls ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu, 1991). These struggles and the efforts to disguise them both have material effects. In particular, they contribute to the structuring of ‘conditions of possibility’ as experienced and interpreted by social actors. Wagenaar (2011, p. 206) offers an explanation of how and why this process happens: ‘Problem definitions … represent ways of mastery, often arrived at with great effort, which we are therefore loath to give up for an uncertain alternative.’ Despite having influenced our work more generally, this is one area in which our approach to governance analysis differs from the ‘strategic relational approach’ Sum and Jessop use in CPE and in Jessop’s work on ‘the state’. Sum and Jessop (2013, pp. 48–54) are rather dismissive of the idea of ‘practice’ as a way of explaining how social actors engage with social (or state) structures, and use instead the idea of a ‘dialectical duality’ between ‘strategically selective structures’ and ‘strategically calculated structurally-oriented’ action (also Jessop, 2008). Both in theory and practice, this ‘duality’ privileges structure in its explanation; the (socially constructed, reflexively produced) personhood of social actors is given short shrift in their account. In our work, we treat social action – including but not confined to meaning-making – as neither necessarily ‘structurally-oriented’ nor only as strategically calculated. After all, much social and political action is driven by affect and/or ethics (i.e. normatively constructed precepts about acceptable action), as much as calculation. And our understanding of affect, ethics and calculation are of course themselves subject to interpretation in different places and times. Social and political action can also be strategic or non-strategic, or more likely involve a messy mix of all these (see Morgan-Trimmer, Chapter 8; Harlock, Chapter 7; and Morgan, Chapter 4). The material effects of action on social structures (or, in our case, political action on governing regimes) need not be the intended result of purposeful action: accidents happen and contingency shapes our action, and our interpretation of conditions of possibility. Governing is thus imagined in words and discourse, but it is also enacted, embodied and enfolded in objects, artefacts and processes; in ‘ways of being and doing’ (Bourdieu, 1998) that are structured by a regime and shape the reproduction of that regime over time. It is in ‘practices’ that we express the idea that actors fuse meaning-making and action as two dimensions of the same process. In our case, we are concerned with practices, produced in the interactions among individual and collective actors, oriented to the steering

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of collective life and the distribution of power and authority (‘governing practices’). Actors adopt an array of processes to oversee and make sense of the complex policy and political terrains they face – and to navigate sometimes contradictory structural constraints. This leads to flexible, contingent governing alliances and the application of ‘rules of thumb’ to make policy work, and to assert authority and control in governing and policymaking. Governing also comprises ‘the irrelevant, the routine, the ordinary … it involves the unnoticed effects of analytical forms’ of governing (Mosse, 2011b, p. 55). These ordinary practices also involve the materialisation of meanings, knowledge and ideas in concrete objects, institutions, and in the relations between objects (Latour, 2000; Mosse, 2011a). It can include government documentary artefacts like contracts, annual reports, budgets, the demarcation of papers as ‘draft’ or ‘secret’, as well as the data visualisations, organograms of management consultants and international organisations (Åkerström and Jacobsson, 2019; Broerse, 2019; Li, 2011; Vike, 1997). The materialisation of governing practices and regimes is also evident in larger artefacts like buildings; or in the arrangement of infrastructure, computers, cables and data that all organise and visualise relations of power and authority (Bellanova, 2016; Graham and Henman, 2018). One might think of the legendary white jeeps that transport both United Nations (UN) and International Governmental Organisation (IGO) staff around developing countries ‘in crisis’, and then back to international community compounds. These signal both differentiation from the local communities and the classed, often racialised, equivalence created among international organisations and their staff. In contrast, the legendary black vans with darkened windows, of the US secret service and CIA’s ‘war on terror’, signal a more specific form of global political power, both visible and invisible. This can also be illustrated by reference to the argument outlined in the first section that statehood is a potential characteristic of governing, particularly through public policy, but it is not a given. Importantly, the instantiation of statehood does not emerge. Nor is it primarily a matter of semiotics or a category of thought. Statehood is, rather, generated by concrete actors engaging in specific governing practices across a range of social settings over time (Jacobsen and Gupta, 2010; Mitchell, 1991). It can take many forms and have different degrees of intensity, and the ‘stateness’ of actors involved in generating these collectively understood and generally applicable rules is a matter of work. Micro-politics between social actors intersects with macro-politics of status and power resources to enact governing practices. These can be seen in negotiations between in global and national policymakers over development policy to assert a status of legitimate statehood and authoritative government (e.g. Gupta, 1995; Kuus, 2014; Randeira and Grunder, 2011; Stattman and

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Gupta, 2015). They can also be observed through dully and persistently repeated acts of power in localised settings (Hansen, 1997), ‘ossified’ ways of talking (Feldman, 2011) and routinised informal behaviours that assert control over governing processes. Statehood, and the stateness of particular actions (policies) or governing processes are things that have to be imagined, done, made and re-worked by multifarious actors, in complex processes, traversing a range of settings and contexts over time (Brissette, 2017). For example, Durrant (Chapter 4, drawing on Sum and Jessop’s CPE) uses the term ‘statework’ to explore how corporate actors, both market (companies, interest groups and trade unions) and publicly funded (education institutions), along with government actors all contested the meaning of policy, where it should be made, what it meant and its place and what is the role of ‘the state’ in the policy space of vocational training. In this process, these actors were also both contesting and reproducing a specific relationship of statehood, and the ‘stateness’ of this policy area. Harlock (Chapter 7) draws on a Foucauldian perspective but addresses the roles of concrete non-governmental and local authority actors to show that generated and re-worked; contingent but organised and patterned relations of statehood slipped ambiguously between social objectives and market-based forms of calculated governing practice. Kan (Chapter 10) also attends to ambiguity to show that ‘national statehood’ (the UK, the Netherlands) slips between concrete practices of negotiation in the non-state space of transnational informal networks in the European Union. By way of contrast, in Paul (Chapter 5, using CPE and a Bourdieusian approach) and Morgan (Chapter 6, discussing social risk), ‘stateness’ materialises as dense and historically developed and relatively uncontested relationships of power. In these studies, statehood emerges as a centripetal concentration of – often opaque, complex and contradictory – rules, techniques and practices that organise social relations in ways that generate patterns of social exclusion and hierarchies. We can by now specify some of the dynamic attributes of governance conceptualised as a regime: it is emergent and contingent, produced by governing practices. Regimes are structured in ways that link to, but are not coherent with, the discursive structuring of governing arrangements that, in turn, contribute to their complexity. The governing practices of social actors generate unpredictability in complex environments, and their practices, in turn, depend on negotiating contingent events through action and through meaning-making. Governance as regime is produced over time through the combined effects of both how we imagine governing, and also of how we do governing, including how policy features in these dimensions.

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BEING SOCIAL AND POLITICAL: REGIMES OF PRACTICE AND SOCIO-POLITICAL ORDERS As we saw above, the practices of calculation, statistical identification and categorisation so associated with the European nineteenth- and twentieth-century state (Bourdieu, 1998; Miller and Rose, 1992; Rose, 1999) were not just techniques of individuation. Such ‘acts of state’ rest on misrecognition of the arbitrariness of the symbolic and material power being invoked through them (Bourdieu, 2014[1990], p. 116–118; Mitchell, 2000, p. 25). They were adopted to purposefully generate structured and unequal social relations among subordinated social subjects. They were forms of rule that asymmetrically applied techniques of domination to geographically dispersed colonised and colonial populations. Governance is a regime of governing practices that exerts, reproduces and can make invisible its ordering effects. The wider premise that this idea rests on is that governing practices are concerned with attempts to institute social orders. In doing so, governance analysis foregrounds the ungovernability of social life. It assumes that attempts to order, organise and manage populations are struggles to impose sense-making that frequently face their limits with workarounds, mediation, resistance. Governance analysis takes the ungovernability of the social world seriously. How do diverse social, political and economic actors act in the world to make it ‘legible’ and facilitate their action within it? Scott’s (1998) work, in particular, argues that state projects of public policy are doomed to ‘fail’: formal order … is always to some considerable degree parasitic on informal processes which the formal scheme does not recognize, without which it could not exist, and which it alone cannot create or maintain. (p. 310)

Using many diverse geographical and historical examples, he makes the argument that practice, or practical knowledge (‘mētis’) is what produces social order (or policy outcomes). While states attempt to specify policy goals and outcomes, what creates those outcomes is the more messy and complicated aspects of social interaction. The (modernist) state that Scott investigates seeks to make the world intelligible (generating governable terrains, we might say), in order to codify, organise and order it. Yet the social subjects and worlds to be organised and ordered are always bubbling away, working in ways that resist codification, changing rules and their meanings. Sometimes they do this, as attempts to make the world ‘legible’ for governing must be translated to ‘make sense’ in practice. ‘The more general the rules, the more they require in the way of translation if they are to be locally successful’ (Scott, 1998, p. 318). But, as we saw in the opening discussion on governmentality, rules and codifi-

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cations can also be buried, invisible or absent, generating opaque but still significant dynamics of power, and they can be contradictory and idiosyncratic. Governance analysis seeks to identify such projects of legibility and codification, but also how these can be specific, local and divergent as actors in particular settings re-works such projects of legibility. Broadly speaking, this position is aligned with Lipsky’s (2010) work on ‘street level bureaucrats’ in policy, insofar as he showed that policy ‘happens’ at the point it is experienced by the client, citizen, migrant, pensioner and prisoner. Still, for Lipsky, the division between policy-as-produced-intention and policy-as-implemented ‘on the ground’ was blurred rather than considered jointly. Our focus on policy as a governing practice, contributing to regime(s) of governance offers a wider and power-sensitive perspective. It enables us to see the ways in which policy-in-practice is contingent, produced by social actors who enact it, giving ‘policy’ meaning in discourse and social action, but also the ways in which ‘policy’ is structured, and is itself a governing practice that structures the social action of others. As Mitchell (1991) argues (talking about ‘the state’), we can see the state (or governance) best by seeing how it is enacted, and by examining its effects. Governing practices shape hierarchies, relationships and dynamics of inclusion/exclusion among social subjects. ‘Public policy’ is one such governing practice that contributes to this production. Conceptualising governance as variable and overlapping ‘regime(s) of governing practices’ enables us to theoretically displace, but not dispense with, the idea of the ‘state’ in governing. Governing practices involve activities and processes which take place in time and in particular places. They involve struggles over the political ordering of social relations through public policy and related attempts to steer social subjects. Governance analysis is then a lens to make the politics of governing visible, by analysing and evaluating the dynamics of such struggles among actors and institutions in this (attempted) political ordering of social relations through public policy.

CONCLUSION Governance is constituted from regimes of governing practices that structure social, economic, geographical and political spaces, now and in the future. Politics and governance reside in highly structured and unequal relationships across diverse spaces and in practices that instantiate, challenge or reproduce the inequalities that shape experiences and possibilities for social action. But even while regimes of governing practices are determinant (shaping both how governing is done, and what is governed), they are not fixed: they are subject to political contestation and struggle, and vulnerable to rejection and transformation. States, and ‘statehood’, are not the conceptual originators of policy

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and governance. Statehood – and policy – are both constituted through specific relationships of power and authority that materialise in regimes of governing practices to establish collectively understood and generally applicable rules of social political order in concrete settings. This perspective on governance then frees us to attend to the wider context and structural conditions in which governing is enacted, and with what implications for socio-political orders and inequalities in power. In doing so, this creates a conceptualisation of governing and public policy that is both properly ‘political’ (concerned with relations of power) and properly ‘social’ (concerned with the wider production of social inequalities and meanings). The purpose of governance analysis, then, is to interrogate and explain the relationship of structure and actors in formal and informal governing processes, specifically in order to critically assess how and with what effects the political ordering of social relations is achieved through public policy in and across a range of settings and scales. How we do this and what kinds of epistemological and analytical implications this approach entails, are the subject of the next chapter.

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3. Governance analysis: epistemological orientations and analytical framework Emma Carmel INTRODUCTION In this chapter, I develop the key parameters of our theoretical account of governance in order to propose governance analysis as a ‘mode of enquiry’ and analytical framework for empirical research. I show how governance and public policy can be studied together, for systematic and critical empirical research. Following our short review of governance literatures in Chapter 1, and our theoretical account of governance in Chapter 2, we are left with some questions. First, how to provide a critical account of governance which explains the politics and power dynamics of complex institutional arrangements underpinning public policy, but is not dependent on assumptions about statehood. Second, how to develop accounts of public policy and policymaking which are empirically rich and sensitive to context, but which are not technocratically oriented to the making of ‘better’ policy or over-determined by theoretical accounts of state transformation. Third, how to develop an approach to governance which moves beyond the description of governance systems to address their political (in the broadest sense) consequences – for public policymaking and for the distribution of political authority over decision-making. This last aspect reflects our concern to link the insights of public policy analysis, focused on policy content and aims, with governance studies, focused on systems and processes of governing, to wider contexts of power and the practices of socially situated political and policy actors. Our twin emphasis on providing in-depth analysis of particular empirical cases of governance on the one hand, and on examining the wider power relations instantiated in such cases on the other, really matters. Ontologically, governance analysis is premised on the need to account for the polyvalent ways in which regimes of governing practices unfold and transform, as well as the consequences of these in specific cases. Epistemologically, we need an analytical framework, research designs and methodological tools that can accommodate 47

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this need for both case-sensitive interpretation and theoretical elaboration. Indeed, the commitment to explaining governing practices and their consequences has further implications for epistemological considerations around power and agency, realism and interpretivism. As a result, in this chapter we examine how we can undertake contextualised, case-based governance analysis that also speaks to wider conceptual questions. I highlight the importance of research on meaning-making and action that illuminates and contextualises the relationships between actors, their complex environments, and their processes and organisation of decision-making in specific policy cases. This chapter outlines an analytical framework designed to achieve precisely that. In addition, the importance of contingency and context in critical interpretations of governing practices is explained. The chapter proceeds as follows: first, I orient discussion of our analytical framework as having regard to some broad epistemological assumptions. Second, I outline the analytical framework and its components, structures, actors and processes, and follow this by discussing the importance in governance analysis of treating this triptych relationally and holistically. Finally, I spend some time explaining the role of analytical contextualisation of governing practices across three dimensions: socio-economic, temporal and socio-spatial (or scalar) contexts. The chapter concludes by briefly discussing the consequences of this approach for developing research designs for empirical governance analysis research, and outlines how these are reflected in the contributions of my collaborators in the remainder of the book.

ORIENTATIONS TO OUR ‘MODE OF ENQUIRY’ The contributors to this book developed governance analysis as a mode of enquiry to explain and evaluate the emergence and form of particular governing practices in particular settings. Given the theoretical account of governance outlined in Chapter 2, the application of governance analysis to empirical investigation should address some key analytical challenges. These, and our perspective on them, are briefly summarised in this section. In order to analyse governance, we must interrogate, parse and re-present regimes of governing practices in ways which reveal more than the complex sum of their parts. Governance analysis of specific empirical settings should be able to see into, reveal and explain the complexity of political processes and relationships. It must be able to disaggregate the more or less significant factors which explain any one aspect of public policy governance and its consequences. As a result, complexity itself becomes an object of analysis. Rather than using complexity to explain social relationships and their emergence, a key purpose of governance analysis is to de-code the complexity of governing in concrete and specific settings. As discussed in previous chapters,

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our theoretical account of governance normalises the importance and role of complexity in governing, politics and policy. Complexity is also political in a more subtle way. Complexity in governing disguises the distribution of power resources and shapes the exercise of agency and political actors’ ideas about what is possible in policymaking. It is a structural feature of the political landscape; it is a political resource for actors; and depending on how it is treated in governing processes, it can exert socio-political ordering effects. As a result, our approach to empirical governance research in any one setting should embrace the messy complexity of political life that is produced in, and through, regimes of governing practices. However, in undertaking governance analysis, we also seek explain how complexity matters, to whom and in what ways. We have a wider interest in explaining if and how the pattern of complexity in one case of governing has the same effects on the distribution of authority, or socio-political outcomes, as in another. If we seek to explain both the practices and the unfolding implications of governing, we would do best to treat complexity and contingency as integral to governing, rather than as a context to it, or consequence of it. In consequence, governance analysis must be: analytical – making governance explicable; specific – making governance applicable in the explanation of empirical cases; and critical – making the politics of governance visible in specific settings. Before we turn to the first two, a brief word on the ‘critical’. Critique in Governance Analysis There is more than one tradition of critique, and it is not my intention here to offer an intervention into what are fruitful contemporary debates about critique and criticality (e.g. Dinerstein, 2017a; Fischer et al., 2016; Latour, 2004 and contributions to Forum in Critical Policy Studies, 2016). Rather I suggest a general position, which is also linked to our epistemological orientations. We start from Braun (2016, pp. 111–112), who argues that the purpose of critique is to ‘analyze, historicize and denaturalize hegemonic forms of thought and practice that stabilize existing relations of domination, injustice, subordination or exclusion’. However, our position of critique is not a retreat to universal truth and knowing, for example, about what relations of domination look like or how they matter. ‘Critique is always a critique of something, somewhere, and by some one: the norms under critique come to shape the very critique itself’ (Higgins, 2018, p. 195, original emphasis). Governance analysis treats politics as always materialised in fully socially situated practices. Social relations are multivalent and ubiquitous, and being social is both more than, and not determined by, ‘politics’ or discursive structures. Yet at the same time, to act politically is also to position oneself in a specific temporal, spatial and social context. Political practices (of which

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governing practices are a part) generate, reproduce and transform power, structural conditions, and normative principles of collective organisation and decision-making. Such practices are inscribed in, and can transform, the socio-political ordering of social relations, so the pursuit of political transformation is a product of action and meaning-making both individual and collective. Such action, to be political, must be both concrete and principled; it must be local, universal and relational. Critique, as a form of political practice, is no different. Determining when and how to critique, under what conditions and with what purposes, is both socially and politically conditioned. The practices of the scholar in research and writing are, then, always connected to power dynamics, governing practices included. The critical endeavour in scholarly research is to be both analytically rigorous and emancipatory. This endeavour fully positions the critical scholar in the social and the political world; it engages her in socially and politically situated critique (Hill Collins, 2000, pp. 31–38). Scholarly research has emancipatory potential because it can free us to see our world, ourselves and others, revealing privilege and oppression. It also has emancipatory potential because the freedom to see the world in new ways should also challenge the ethical, moral and political positions and actions of the scholar, including the wilful blindness, occlusion and silences that come from privileged position of the ‘insider within’ (cf Hill Collins’ ‘outsider within’ of Black women, 2000, 5–12, pp. 255–262). Not limited to a narrow ‘positionality’, this broader stance of situated critique also challenges how we think we know, as well as what we think we know (Hill Collins, 2000, pp. 269–271; Grosfoguel, 2010; Santos, 2014). Our stance of situated critique is also implicit in our intention to outline a theoretical and an analytical account of governance that is at once both social and political (cf Chapter 1). In examining regimes of governing practices, and in interpreting their implications for socio-political order, and the distribution of power and authority, a critical scholar judges the political action and social positions of others. She does so from her own socio-political position of power, historically and biographically embedded. But more than this, her research, critique and actions are themselves iteratively subject to transformation (Halvorsen, 2018). This position of critique is epistemological, theoretical and normative. Underpinning our stance of situated critique is the contention that critique, as a form of political practice, is expressed through creative and transformative agency in concrete settings. It is not an analytical lens that erases its own socially situated claim to knowledge, and it is not a claim to have better knowledge (facts) over fiction (non-facts) (Latour, 2004). Political critique treated as universalised ideation retreats to abstract intellectualism. But political action without a critical self-reflexive frame retreats into impotent noise. Eventually, our theoretical and political critique of governance needs an adequate account

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of agency and practical action in empirical cases (see Chapter 2; discussion in Farr, Chapter 8). If seeing politically and acting politically (the position of critique), is to be ‘eruptive’ (Swyngedouw, 2011, pp. 374–376), it must be enacted by humans, acting in, for and against particular socio-political circumstances and contexts. As such, we reject theoretical positions that would argue that the new governance and trends in Western statehood are ‘post-political’, even if they may be ‘post-democratic’ (in the temporally and geographically confined sense referred to in theorisations of the state discussed in Chapter 2) (Crouch, 2004). The politics of action, collective government and critique cannot be sought, resolved or re-enchanted by abstracting and separating the idea of government, governance and policy from ‘politics’ (contestation over normative principles and universalist claims) (Swyngedouw, 2011, esp. pp. 370–373, and Swyngedouw, 2014). Such arguments really only offer a retreat to old abstracted divisions between ‘high politics’: what is really political because evidently conflictual and therefore important; and ‘low politics’: the mundane, local and specific governing activities, and therefore unimportant, by an elaborate theoretical backdoor. Political practices, including critique as a specific kind of practice, thus inhere in the particular and the local at the same time as they inhere in abstract principles and claims (Brown, 2015; Burgum et al., 2017; Fraser, 2003, esp. pp. 63–79). It is in concrete practices and formations that universalised and normative claims (e.g. for wellbeing, democracy, justice, freedom, community) gain meaning, take form and are contested (Allen, 2008, 2015). As such, it is in the relationality between specific actions and universal claims that the politics of critique resides. Indeed, it is precisely in making this relationality and mutuality visible that critique engages with politics, and especially with the politics of emancipation and justice (Hill Collins, 2000, pp. 260–262; Lorde, 2017). This is an effortful task of long duration and continuing importance (Du Bois, 2016[1920], pp. 23–29; Motta, 2017). So, our position of critique in governance analysis also emphasises the possibilities of doing things (politics, policy, research) otherwise; of ‘prefiguring’ radical alternatives and ‘venturing beyond’ what we think we know (de Sousa Santos, 2012; Dinerstein, 2017b). Acknowledging the contingency of social and political life in governance is a political as well as a theoretical act. As I discuss later in this chapter, the question of how to identify the structured, but indeterminate, relationality between the ‘universal’ abstract components of ‘specific’ contingent regimes of governing practices is a central task of governance analysis and a key feature of our analytical framework.

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Epistemological and Methodological Orientations We can see from the preceding discussion that in empirical investigation, it is all very well talking about the importance of politics of governing, but we should also not reify particular relationships of power that we identify, nor seek them solely in institutions or formal regulations. As discussed in Chapter 2, power relationships are enacted and given meaning through practices, but these are themselves structured; can be transformative and oppressive; and can be expressed in material objects both mundane (forms, filing systems and computer code) as well as spectacular (town halls, court-rooms and ceremonial objects). Our stance of critique in relation to empirical research is therefore one of critical interrogation and dialogue with all the evidence we generate, observe and elucidate. Ontologically and epistemologically, we emphasise the importance of meaning-making for political actors and their action. Holistic, case-based analysis emphasises the importance of linking data, interpretation and analytical contextualisation to reveal relationships between actors, complex environments and process in specific policy cases. Interpretive methods highlight the importance of explaining meaning-making in governing practices. These illuminate political actors’ selective interpretations of the relationships between structural conditions, actors and processes, and how these generate both specific conditions of possibility for political action and particular governing practices. In later chapters, this leads some contributors to emphasise their interpretivist epistemology, and several draw specifically on interpretive policy analysis for methodological and analytical insights (Yanow, 2000; Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, 2014). Across all contributions, we interpret the actions of participants as mediated by language and processes of sense-making, that draw on assumptions about political rationality, that are themselves framed by existing political discourse and socio-culturally produced ‘common-sense’. We as researchers, as much as research participants, also know the physical and social world through language and sense-making. Indeed, our position of critique, and of identifying politics and power in regimes, is also relationally produced through our own discursive repertoires and meaning-making. Yet interpretivism on its own does not provide the critical and analytical grip we need to investigate governing practices, political action and the production of regimes in accordance with our theoretical account. Governance analysis is well-aligned with critical realist epistemology, and several of our contributors have explicitly used critical realism in their work. Our experience of the material and social worlds is reproduced in patterns over time, which are socially constructed and historically and spatially contingent. In our case, of course, we are particularly interested in patterns of rule, order, and the distribution of authority, as well as how this is contested and ‘transformed’ by

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actors (Room, 2011). Further, we can also analyse political and policy action and investigate its material effects, acknowledging, but not being bound by, the inter-subjective meanings given to this action and its effects, by political actors themselves, and by us as researchers. Having briefly outlined the general parameters of our approach, we can rehearse the implications for empirical analysis. Our analytical framework should systematise and orient empirical investigations that are concerned with explaining: the role of complex environments, the diversity and contingency of statehood(s) in shaping public policy and their specific wider institutional, social and political effects. In addition, however, as discussed in Chapter 2, governance analysis is also fundamentally concerned with political actors: the policymakers, practitioners, and those who are the targets of policy, and how their (selective) interpretations of structural and institutional conditions shape actions, choices and the development of particular governing processes over time. Explanation of governing practices (and regimes of such practices) are not only sought in macro-level theoretical explanations of state transformation, but also in the ways in which political/policy actors in specific empirical cases interpret, manage and resist such developments. Explanations of particular regimes focus on the relationship of structural conditions, political actors, and the processes of contention, negotiation and agreement through which they act. It is our view that it is in the specific empirical case that the political and power dynamics of complex environments can be understood and their significance explained. Our account emphasises that governing practices and regimes are contested and contingent; they are actor-dependent and temporally limited. Yet they are also embedded in wider socio-economic and political landscapes. Governing practices are shaped by, and themselves generate, hierarchies and inequalities in resources and power. So, our first step is to disaggregate the complexity of governing, and apply a consistent analytical framework. At the same time, this framework should enable us to explore the implications of regimes of governing practice for the political ordering of social relations in all their messy and contingent complexity: for social subjects, social and political action, and for orders of rule and distribution of authority. Following our theoretical account of governance outlined in Chapter 2, when analysing governance, we are seeking to identify and explain: 1. regimes of governing practices that are generated in particular settings through a mobile, dynamic and recursive set of relationships among actors, structures and processes; and 2. their contingent ordering effects on the distribution of political authority and wider social relations.

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Our response is to adopt an analytical framework which integrates structure, actors and processes as the collective object of analysis. The explanation for, and evaluation of, governance and its social and political consequences is sought in the mobile, dynamic and recursive relationships between structures, actors and processes – the three key dimensions of governing practices.

ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK: STRUCTURES, ACTORS AND PROCESSES OVER TIME In application to empirical research, governance analysis seeks to explain how the conditions, rationales, purposes and processes of governing are articulated together in specific contexts, and how these generate implications for the production of (contingent) socio-political orders. At its most general level of abstraction, governance analysis as a mode of enquiry is concerned with questions of: • Who governs (whom)? How? Under what conditions? • With what implications for the political ordering of social relations? We address how particular ways of governing shape the conditions under which public policy is made, who makes it, and how the distribution of political authority over decision-making is determined. This links the insights of public policy analysis and policy process studies, focused on policy content and aims, with governance studies, focused on systems, and processes of governing. We develop a framework for governance analysis that keeps our attention on why, how and with what implications governing is done. We adopt an analytical framework to investigate how regimes of governing practices are assembled and given meaning at specific times and places. Our framework orients our enquiry to enable us to see, as well as to investigate, governance as a regime: both ‘systems’ oriented and actor-oriented. There are three elements to governing practices: the interacting effects of actors, structural conditions and processes adopted to pursue political goals. In Figure 3.1, I have presented these components in relation to one another. It is in the interaction and relationship between all three elements that governing practices are constituted, and that over time sediment into regimes. Shortly, I will consider how this relationality affects how we approach the analysis of specific cases of governance, and the problems it poses for considering what counts as a case of governing and what counts as its context. First, however, I consider each component in turn, and its relationally embedded characteristics.

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Figure 3.1

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Basic elements of governance analysis framework

Actors and Contingency of Structural Conditions There is no particular insight to be generated describing and analysing political and policy actors in terms of their formal and institutional roles. Indeed, given our emphasis on action and meaning, the identification of who counts as a policy actor, in what ways, in which processes and under which conditions, is a key aspect of governance analysis. Meanings are deployed – directly or indirectly, inadvertently or strategically – as actors collaborate, negotiate and contest together over political goals and processes. They also decide who is a policy actor. For example, in some cases of governance, one might want to treat the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as materialising or expressing the structural conditions faced by domestic (national or sub-national) policymakers. In others, ‘the’ World Bank appears as a direct institutional actor whether this is expressed in the actions of specific officers in particular national contexts, or ‘the institution’ in international negotiations. And, of course, ‘the World Bank’ comprises individual social actors whose own effects on policy and governing are shaped by the regime(s) of governing practices that constitute the Bank as a specific type of historically instituted and politically governed institution. Thus the assessment of actors

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in governance implies two inter-linked and iteratively determined analytical steps in empirical research. The first step is the identification of actor-ness among a set of likely or possible political actors, including how they are identified by, and treated as, social subjects with agency. (This refers to their capacity for political action and/or of acting with purpose in shaping goals and actions of others that can also be contested and transformed.) The second step is to identify and assess the relational power positions of such actors in processes of negotiation, contestation and transformation. It is important to observe, of course, that, in keeping with our epistemological orientations, the status, role or authority of actors in governance cannot be determined prior to empirical research. Iterative identifications are integral to the process of governance analysis. In this light, the salience of conditions for governance is in turn shaped by how actors make sense of them and selectively interpret their possibilities for action. Examining these sets of meanings also shows the emergent possibilities of governing: those possibilities for shaping public policy or political practice that are not realised in particular circumstances. Governing practices are shaped by, and themselves generate, hierarchies and inequalities in resources and power. Over time or at different scales of action, governing practices can be reproduced in interlocking, overlapping regimes of practices, both within and across different policy, institutional or geographical settings. These regimes of governing practices inscribe, and are inscribed by, sedimented interpretations of what is possible for political action, subject to ‘external’ events and changes over time. In doing so, the regimes of governing practices generate, shape and demarcate new structural conditions of their own and contingently reproduce political ordering effects on the distribution of power and wider social relations. Complex Environment and Structural Conditions When analysing specific cases of governance, then, the specific structural conditions in which actions are deemed to make sense for each specific actor really matter as they navigate complex political terrains in negotiation, contestation and struggle with other actors, and under conditions of uncertainty. In governing practices, a range of economic, institutional, political and ethical conditions might be drawn upon by different actors to make sense of the ‘structural conditions’ that shape their political action. As such, these interpretations, and their materialisation in specific political actions and processes, are highly context dependent (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012, pp. 49–51). Yet they are not just sui generis, explicable by reference to the case itself. Meaning-making is also significant in shaping actions and sedimenting governing processes over time. This might occur through the interpretation of

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past experiences re-articulated with present circumstances; through expectations of others’ interests, motives and powers; or simply through the everyday repetition of procedures. In such sedimentations, these interpretations and their materialisation generate new meanings and understandings about what is possible in political decision-making and action (Wagenaar, 2011, p. 206); that is, they generate and reproduce the conditional and structured limits of political action. As Wagenaar contends (2011, p. 218): ‘Rules do figure … but in multiple, unexpected ways: as constraints on doing the right thing, or, conversely, as action channels, as justifications-after-the-fact, as ethical guidelines, as guardians of the organization’s integrity’. As we saw above, over time the contingent ‘figuring of rules’ becomes sedimented, contributing to the distribution of political power and authority. Governing is neither epiphenomenal events nor reified system, but socially produced practices which express relations of power and authority in processes of decision-making, and that over time reproduce or challenge relations of power and authority. Processes and Emergent Patterns of Rule The more dynamic, process-oriented aspects of governance are frequently written out of empirical analysis and theoretically. This most obviously and typically occurs in the theoretical imposition of models and types of governance as abstract descriptors of governance (necessarily under-emphasising the contingency, dynamism and power relations which are central to understanding any social or political process). For our governance analysis, then, explanations and evaluations of the emergence, form and implications of particular governing processes are central, and they are sought in the relationship of structural conditions and policy actors. Analogous to the identification of actor-ness in particular cases of governance and the accommodation of both contingency and structural conditions, the processes that are adopted to achieve policy/collective goals, must be closely examined as part of governance analysis. For example, processes of co-production and co-design (or perhaps of marketisation, contracting-out, participation or automation) are a good starting-point to investigate ‘how governing is done’ and ‘with what implications’ in a particular case, place or setting. But such conceptually identified processes are indeterminate and unfold in diverse ways. Processes of governing take different forms; they produce and are shaped by distinct structural conditions and by the relational positions of different actors (following our co-production example, see: Blomkamp, 2018; Brewer and Grabosky, 2014; Ewert and Evers, 2014). Furthermore, when we undertake empirical research, the characteristics and implications of such processes can be elusive and/or occluded by our expectations, or by contingent events. And of course they are always dependent on our investigative tools and data. As a result,

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when we undertake governance analysis, we are seeking to assess the indeterminate and contingently produced relationships between structural conditions, actors and processes in which governing practices inhere. Relationships and the Whole: Structured Contingency Linked to Patterns of Rule Given our interest in tracing the relationship(s) between the structural conditions, socio-political processes and actors in governing, we are left with some important empirical questions. How is the relationship produced? Why does the relationship take this form rather than another? How does it change over time or in different contexts? Earlier, I referred to this relationship as mobile, dynamic and recursive. It is mobile because it changes over time (temporally contingent) and is shaped by our own theoretical lens. Our view of who constitutes the key actors, what are the characteristics of processes and which are the structural conditions change according to the setting and context of analysis. The relationship is dynamic because it is not given – there is not a model or an ideal type of ‘governance’ which assumes a particular arrangement of structures, actors and processes in governance analysis. The relationship is recursive because it shapes and is shaped by political ordering of social relations, and by actors’ interpretations of these social relations. Regimes of governing practices are emergent, not fixed or determined. This emergence is a result of how unpredictability plays out and matters for how complex environments are for actors in each specific case. In any one policy domain or institutional setting, a range of possible relationships of actor, process and structural conditions is immanent, even in those settings framed by similar political purposes. Yet in each specific case of governing or of public policymaking, undertaking governance analysis enables us to identify and explain the specific relationships between actor, process and structural conditions which are produced in particular governing practices (and those which are not). Thus the empirical exploration of what are the analytically relevant structural conditions, actors and processes is case-contingent and highly contextualised. It is to the question of case and context that we now turn.

GOVERNANCE ANALYSIS AND CONTEXT Of course, all empirical work using qualitative methods depends significantly on the contextualisation of the objects of analysis and scope of investigation to be efficacious and insightful. Context is central to understanding and explanation, in making ‘evidence’ and action meaningful. In developing our framework for governance analysis, we extend this basic condition of

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case-based research to consider the question of what counts as context, and how we investigate contexts and their effects. In doing so, we attend to contextualisation as an explicit and consciously analytical step in our research. ‘Analytical contextualisation’ expresses the purposeful examination of how regimes of governing practices are specified through their relationally defined components (structure, actor, process) and how this specification is produced in particular contexts. As such, the conduct of governance analysis involves a joint and iterative process of specifying governing practices; critical assessment of a regime and its implications; and contextualisation. Analytical contextualisation enables us to identify the specific characteristics of complexity, and the conditions of possibility for political action that it permits, as well as providing a holistic and empirically robust political sociology of actors and processes in each case (on cases and contextualisation, see Carmel, 1999). The process of analytical contextualisation is also vital to offer a rigorous account of the implications of particular governing practices. So what is it and how is it undertaken? The first observation is to note that, just like the working-out of relationships between structures, actors and processes in which governing practices are produced, contexts are not given, but must be identified. For example, consider if a decision-maker in a social security office says in a research interview that they regularly reject applications for benefit that are complex in order to meet process performance indicators. In this case, it is not ‘a given’ that the complexity is a contextual feature, structural condition or part of meaning-making rationales for particular policy decisions. To determine its place in shaping governing practices would require further investigation and, crucially, critical reflection on other data, on the object of analysis, and wider scope of the research project, in order to determine the explanatory position or role of ‘complexity’ in this case. Analytical contextualisation is not straightforward: as in all empirical research, it does not proceed neatly forward in clearly delineated steps or stages of analysis. Our insights, assessments and conclusions in governance analysis, just like in other research, can come in fits and starts, in bursts of clarity, and in the hard persistent graft of writing and thinking. Our purpose in discussing the process of analytical contextualisation as an explicit task is not to suggest that the messiness of research and thinking can be overcome by imposing a particular process, called a particular name (‘analytical contextualisation’). Rather it is to alert us to consider the task of contextualisation as imbricated in the analytical and research process, rather than as following, prior or epiphenomenal to it. To assist in this explicitly iterative approach to governance analysis, we have identified three types of contexts of particular significance for governance: socio-spatial, socio-political and temporal. I address these briefly in turn before reviewing and revising our governance framework in light of this discussion.

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Socio-spatial Contexts That governing proceeds at particular, as well as across different, scales is well-understood (e.g. Jessop, 2002, esp. Chapter 5; Skelcher, 2005). Indeed, it is central to the debates about ‘new governance’ as an empirical phenomenon, discussed in Chapter 1. It was also implicit in the earlier discussion in this chapter about identifying and assessing how the relationship between political actors and the structural conditions of political action is constituted in particular cases of governance (where I used the example of the World Bank). For our current purpose of elaborating how socio-spatial settings contextualise governance, we can note their importance in shaping the implications of governing practices enacted in concrete institutional and geographical settings and scales. The implications of regimes of governing practices for the production and transformation of socio-political orders depend both on the particular scale at which governing is done, and over which social subjects’ particular practices distribute power and authority (e.g. Shaffer, 2013; Stephenson, 2013). Just as important is that the relationship between those scales must be contextualised in order to interpret the limits to and political consequences of (regimes of) governing practices. In my own work, for example, I refer to the ‘joint production’ of migration governance between European Union (EU) rules and member states, as well as to the entangled governance of migrants’ rights (Carmel, 2013, 2014). Attending to, and interrogating, the socio-spatial contexts of governance enables us to see how the concepts we use to describe these contexts themselves shape regimes of governing practices (continuing with the EU example, Bhambra, 2017; Hansen and Jonsson, 2014). In this volume, Farr, Chapter 8, and Kan, Chapter 10 show how explicit analysis of the socio-spatial contexts within which governing is done enables us to attend to the limits and the possibilities of governing practices, and how and why they vary. Socio-economic Contexts In Chapter 2, we saw that governing practices involve the instantiation of (contingent) socio-political and socio-economic orders, and the distribution of powers and authorities and resources among actors and institutions. The socio-political ordering implications of a regime are not neutral for those who are to be governed, nor in how the regime affects other governing processes. Governance analysis seeks to explain the implications of governing practices in terms of their effects on social, political and economic inequalities. This is in part about taking political economy seriously in governance. This analytical demand requires a contextualisation of those socio-economic forces and attributes that intersect with actors’ engagement in governing

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practices, and how they make sense of them, and assess the degree to which they fix conditions of possibility for action and determine their consequences. Regimes of governing practices and their effects on distributions of power and authority are not economically determined, but they intersect with, and are affected by, ownership and access to economic resources, the characteristics of economic production, and the ways in which distributions of power and authority are classed in ways that articulate closely with the distribution of economic resources. And, of course, in governance, such socio-economic contexts are mediated by institutional arrangements, inter-personal dynamics and legal frames. Following our inductive/abductive approach to theory-building, the precise role of socio-economic conditions in shaping the relationship between structural conditions, actors’ identifications and actions, and institutional processes must be both conceptualised analytically, and also worked-out empirically (see, for example, Durrant, Chapter 4 and Paul, Chapter 5). Time and Temporal Contexts As I have already emphasised in this chapter, governing is a temporally variable and temporally dependent process. Governing takes place in time, and, in this sense, it is contingent. The consequences for the political ordering of social relations will depend on the time and timing in which governing takes place. However, temporality is also a means to govern, a way to shape the dynamics between actors, structures and processes and their outcomes (Anderson, 2010; Goodin, 2010). This is not just about setting a particular case of governing at a particular ‘point’ in time. Much more than this, temporal dynamics are integral to answering our governance questions (how is governing done, by whom and with what implications?). Timing of decision-making, setting deadlines, keeping people waiting, controlling timetables and following institutionalised rhythms/seasons of decision-making all exert control. This control is exerted on processes of governing (Hom et al., 2016; Opitz and Tellmann, 2015); the political actors engaged in them (Cram, 2011; Dyson, 2009; Grabham, 2016); and perhaps especially on those social subjects to be governed (Fitzpatrick, 2004; Pascucci, 2016; Walters, 2017). In consequence, assessing and considering the temporal contexts to governing is especially significant for explaining the socio-political implications of governance. (This can be seen in how policy actors dealt with time and timing pressures in Morgan, Chapter 6; Harlock, Chapter 7; and Morgan-Trimmer, Chapter 9). But it is not just processes and actors that are subject to temporal variation. Furthermore, over time, intersecting subjectivities and inequalities among actors become embedded in how governing processes unfold. We might think of how actors can garner authority, deflect decisions, or alter the terms or timetable for discussion with a different pace at particular times. Temporal

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contexts can be used by political actors, they can undermine formal processes, and/or generate commonly understood but informal structural conditions for policy and political action. Furthermore, our interest in meaning-making alerts us to the importance of historical memory – or its absence – within and beyond institutions. The experiences among a group of political actors over time shape their engagement in particular processes, what they think is possible, ‘how things are done’ or ‘get done’ in a particular context (Bevir and Rhodes make this case well, but extend it too far, to the point of equating tradition with a kind of power of itself, 2010, pp. 74–76 and Chapter 8). The writing and rewriting of institutional memory is commonly deployed in the framing of collective goals. And, of course, the contingencies of policymaking and political processes can themselves change these interactions – and the individual and collective interpretations of historical memory. Elaborated Analytical Framework for Governance Analysis Given the discussion of the importance of contextualisations, and different types of context, we should revisit our analytical framework, represented in the diagram in Figure 3.2.

Figure 3.2

Governance analysis: an elaborated framework

In our revised diagram, we have inserted a note to place the role of our three types of context in shaping governance. In addition, we have chosen to represent the three key components of governing practices as porous. This is to indicate that they are subject to inflection, interpretation and re-definition

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depending on their contexts, as well as the ways in which different contextual features have an overall effect on a regime of practices. Reflecting the discussion in this section of the chapter, our visual representation of the framework also indicates the ongoing effect of both the regime as a whole and its component relationships in shaping the distributions of power, authority and resources that make the (contingent) political ordering of social relations emergent over time. Having set out this summary framework, I conclude this chapter with a short ‘forward review’ of the contributions in Parts II and III of this book and how they engage with the arguments and approach proposed so far.

CONCLUSION In governance analysis, explanations and evaluations of the emergence, form and implications of particular governing processes are central, and they are sought in the relationship of structural conditions and policy actors. Governance analysis provides us with clear framing to assess public policy and how it is made. It accommodates an analysis of effects of policy and policymaking while explaining governing practices in the conditions of uncertainty and complexity, which governance literatures identify as significant. It explains how governing is done, by whom, in what contexts, and with what consequences. As such, governance analysis articulates public policy and governance together in a way that is ‘always already’ systems-, process- and actor-oriented, and socially embedded. Governance analysis, as proposed here, combines a theoretical account and analytical framework. The authors in this book take a range of epistemological positions, but they are all broadly aligned with a spectrum between interpretivism and critical realism. The subsequent chapters apply governance analysis to case examples that show that the messy real life of policymaking can be analysed systematically, insightfully and with a critical eye to the implications of governing practices, both for policymakers and the targets of policy. As such, we offer a novel way of analysing and reflecting on the relationship between different perspectives on governance and public policy studies. We have outlined an analytical framework and orientations for our enquiry. Together these facilitate systematic, theoretically aware and empirically grounded research. The questions that guide any study in governance analysis, as identified in this chapter, are broad, and deliberately so. They purposefully accommodate policy and thematically specific theoretical concerns that are not confined to a meta-level interest in governance per se. Contributors to this book use governance analysis to explore a range of theoretical subjects. And these theoretical interests can themselves be policy-specific (about e.g. selectivity in

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labour migration, by Regine Paul, Chapter 5; social risk and informal caring, by Fiona Morgan, Chapter 6; policy learning in the EU, Hester Kan, Chapter 10) or on wider thematic issues (e.g. marketisation processes, Jenny Harlock, Chapter 7; co-production, Michelle Farr, Chapter 8; participation, Sarah Morgan-Trimmer, Chapter 9; policy learning, Hester Kan, Chapter 10). In addition, as these examples already hint at, governance analysis may also be oriented to more specific empirical investigations on particular aspects of governance (regimes of governing practices) as well. Specific empirical subjects for which governance analysis might be insightful include investigations into the impact of complex environments in structuring relations among political actors and the implications of specific governing practices for the distribution of political authority (e.g. Durrant, Chapter 4; Paul, Chapter 5). More actor-centred empirical research might use governance analysis to explain how actors negotiate complexity of political and policy environment to pursue public policy purposes or process, and/or achievement of political goals, and how these interactions generate political ordering effects (e.g. Morgan, Chapter, 6; Harlock, Chapter 7; Kan, Chapter 10). And there is a place for using governance analysis in research that explores how governing practices themselves contribute to the production of complex environments and transform or constrain possibilities for political action (e.g. Farr, Chapter 8; Morgan-Trimmer, Chapter 9). The empirical case examples are presented in the subsequent two parts of the book. In Part II, four chapters examine how particular states and statehoods are produced in policy, while also generating and/or (re)producing unequal social relations in diverse policy and institutional settings. In Part III, a further three chapters examine how governing practices are produced by social actors who work hard to negotiate, contest, re-work or reproduce existing socio-political orders through their creative and purposeful engagement in governing practices.

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Blomkamp, 2018. The promise of co-design for public policy. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 77, 729–743. Braun, K., 2016. Critique as a two-dimensional project. Critical Policy Studies 10, 110–112. Brewer, R., Grabosky, P., 2014. The unravelling of public security in the United States: the dark side of police-community co-production. American Journal of Criminal Justice 39, 139–154. Brown, W., 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Zone Books/MIT Press, New York. Burgum, S., et al., 2017. An interview with Wendy Brown: redoing the demos? Theory, Culture & Society, 34, 229–236. Carmel, E., 1999. Concepts, context and discourse in a comparative case study. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 2, 141–150. Carmel, E., 2013. Mobility, migration and rights in the European Union Critical reflections on policy and practice. Policy Studies 34, 238–253. Carmel, E., 2014. With what implications? An assessment of EU migration governance between Union regulation and national diversity. Migration Letters 11, 137–153. Cram, L., 2011. The importance of the temporal dimension: new modes of governance as a tool of government. Journal of European Public Policy 18, 636–653. Crouch, C., 2004. Post-democracy. Polity, Oxford. de Sousa Santos, B., 2012. Public sphere and epistemologies of the South. Africa Development 37, 43–67. de Sousa Santos, B., 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Routledge, London. Dinerstein, A.C., 2017a. The radical subject and its critical theory: an introduction, in: Dinerstein, A.C. (Ed.), Social Sciences for an Other Politics: Women Theorizing Without Parachutes. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 1–18. Dinerstein, A.C., 2017b. Social Sciences for an Other Politics: Women Theorizing Without Parachutes. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Du Bois, W.E.B., 2016[1920]. Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. Verso, London. Dyson, K., 2009. The evolving timescapes of European economic governance: contesting and using time. Journal of European Public Policy 16, 286–306. Ewert, B., Evers, A., 2014. An ambiguous concept: on the meanings of co-production for health care users and user organisations? Voluntas 25, 425–442. Fischer, F., et al., 2016. Forum. What is critical? Connecting the policy analysis to political critique Critical Policy Studies 10, 95–98. Fitzpatrick, T., 2004. Time and social policy. Time and Society 13, 197–219.

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Fraser, N., 2003. Social justice in the age of identity politics: redistribution, recognition and particpation, in: Fraser, N., Honneth, A. (Eds.), Redistribution or recognition? A political–philosophical exchange. Verso, London, pp. 7–109. Goodin, R.E., 2010. Temporal justice. Journal of Social Policy 39, 1–16. Grabham, H., 2016. Time and technique: the legal lives of the 26 week qualifying period. Economy and Society 45, 379–406. Grosfoguel, R., 2010. The epistemic decolonial turn: beyond political-economy paradigms, in: Mignolo, W., Escobar, E. (Eds.), Globalization and the Decolonial Option. London, Routledge, pp. 65–77. Halvorsen, S., 2018. Cartographies of epistemic expropriation: Critical reflections on learning from the south. Geoforum 95, 11–20. Hansen, P., Jonsson, S., 2014. Eurafrica. Bloomsbury, London. Higgins, M., 2018. Reconfiguring the optics of the critical gaze in science education (after the critique of critique): (re)thinking ‘what counts’ through Foucaultian prismatics. Cultural Studies of Science Education 13(1), 185–203. Hill Collins, P., 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (rev ed.). Routledge, New York. Hom, A., et al., 2016. Time, Temporality and Global Politics. Ebook. E-International Relations, Bristol, UK. Accessed 30 May 2019 at https://​ www​.e​-ir​.info/​publication/​time​-temporality​-and​-global​-politics/​. Jessop, B., 2002. The Future of the Capitalist State. Polity, Cambridge. Latour, B., 2004. Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry 30 (2), 225–248. Lorde, A., 2017. Your Silence Will Not Protect You. Silver Press, London. Motta, S.C., 2017. Decolonising critique: from prophetic negation to prefigurative affirmation, in: Dinerstein, A.C. (Ed.), Social Sciences for an Other Politics: Women Theorizing Without Parachutes. Macmillan, New York, pp. 33–48. Opitz, S., Tellmann, U., 2015. Future emergencies: Temporal politics in law and economy. Theory, Culture and Society 32, 107–129. Pascucci, E., 2016. Transnational disruptions: materialities and temporalities of transnational citizenship among Somali refugees in Cairo. Global Networks 16, 326–343. Room, G., 2011. Complexity, Institutions and Public Policy: Agile Decision-making in a Turbulent World. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA. Schwartz-Shea, P., Yanow, D., 2012. Interpretive Research Design. Concepts and Processes. Routledge, New York.

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Shaffer, G., 2013. Transnational legal ordering and state change, in: Shaffer, G. (Ed.), Transnational Legal Ordering and State Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 1–22. Skelcher, C., 2005. Jurisdictional integrity, polycentrism, and the design of democratic governance. Governance 18, 89–110. Stephenson, P., 2013. Twenty years of multi-level governance: ‘Where does it come from? What is it? Where is it going?’ Journal of European Public Policy 20, 817–837. Swyngedouw, E., 2011. Interrogating post-democratization: Reclaiming egalitarian political spaces. Political Geography 30, 370–380. Swyngedouw, E., 2014. Where is the political? Insurgent mobilisations and the incipient ‘return of the political’. Space and Polity 18, 122–136. Wagenaar, H., 2011. Meaning in Action. Interpretation and Dialogue in Policy Analysis. M.E. Sharpe, Inc., New York. Walters, W., 2017. Live governance, borders, and the time–space of the situation: EUROSUR and the genealogy of bordering in Europe. Comparative European Politics 15, 794–817. Yanow, D., 2000. Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis. Sage, London. Yanow, D., Schwartz-Shea, P., 2014. Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, 2nd ed. M.E. Sharpe, Inc., New York.

PART II

Governing practices, statehoods and social inequalities

4. Governing skills, governing workplaces: explaining the New Labour Skills Strategy for England Hannah Durrant INTRODUCTION This chapter draws on a study of skills policy in England under the centre-left New Labour governments (2003–2009). The original study (Durrant, 2012, 2016) sought to explain and account for an observed paradox within the New Labour Skills Strategy for England. This Strategy claimed to initiate a skills system that could respond better to the market-based demands of businesses and workers for higher-skilled workers. At the same time it would generate more demand from them for just such higher level skills (see also Wolf, 2007). Longstanding literatures on governance and public policy have a limited ability to explain this case due to their focus on modes of governing that downgrade the role of the state. As such, they misunderstand the more complex relationship between governing practices, public policy and statehood outlined here (Carmel, Chapters 1 and 2). In this chapter, I show how governance analysis facilitated a critical and historically contextualised explanation of New Labour governmental attempts to punctuate a longstanding commitment to voluntarism. This perspective in turn generated a critical evaluation of the ways in which diverse policy actors jointly, relationally and strategically assembled the economic and social structural conditions that they faced. It was on this basis that the ‘policy’ could be formulated and non-state actors organised in this policy space. First, the chapter outlines the context for the case of skills policy in England. Two aspects in particular make it relevant to governance analysis. First, the increasing complexity of the global political economy context to which ‘national’ (English) skills policy needed to respond, and, second, the related complexity of actors and processes in this traditionally ‘liberal’, voluntarist governance context. This section also details the limits of traditional governance literatures to adequately explain the New Labour Skills Strategy 69

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for England and our alternative analytical approach. I briefly summarise the particular policy (the New Labour Skills Strategy) concerned, before presenting the governance analysis applied in this case. The fourth section shows how government policymakers at the time presented the structural conditions to create (a) the rationale for a partnership of skills policy actors with shared skills ambitions in pursuit of higher skills, and (b) the justification to manage variation in skills ambition differently from previously. The fifth section demonstrates how non-state actors used policy variance to reinterpret and remake policy to better reflect their interests. In conclusion, I appraise the value of governance analysis in this case. Its main advantage is its ability to explain policy puzzles through a systematic focus on the interplay between structures, actors and processes in defining and binding the limitations of public policy.

A CASE FOR GOVERNANCE ANALYSIS: SKILLS POLICY IN ENGLAND’S ‘LIBERAL MARKET ECONOMY’ Policy initiatives in this area under New Labour governments principally proceeded from an assumption that the competitive strength of national economic interests in uncertain, dynamic and open economic conditions is dependent on improving the skills of the workforce (Leitch, 2006). There have been many critics of this ‘human capital theory’-inspired diagnosis (Becker, 1962). In particular, it overemphasises skills problems on the supply side of the labour market and underplays a notable lack of demand for high-skilled workers in a low-skills economy (see, for example, Keep & Mayhew, 1996; Lauder, 1999; Crouch et al., 2004). The UK economy is marked by a bi-furcation of skills, but dominated by lower-skill, low-wage and precarious employment in comparison to countries at similar levels of development but with different political economies and economic structures (Finegold & Soskice, 1988). Under conditions of globalisation, low-skill and low-wage employment is seen as vulnerable to competition where capital is more mobile (i.e. manufacturing) and can move to ‘cheaper’ locations with lower labour costs. Furthermore, in low-skill and low-wage sectors where capital/production is not mobile (i.e. services industries), economic growth, productivity and wage growth are seen as difficult to generate. From the later part of the twentieth century onwards, moving to a higher-skills economy was presented as critical to ensuring the longer-term competitiveness of businesses and the employment prospects of workers in the UK as in other ‘developed’ economies (Brown et al., 2001). The uncertain and dynamic conditions that structure the environment of skills policymaking are the same conditions that the governance literatures

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associate with an empirical shift in the form and function of advanced capitalist states (Jessop, 2002; Cerny, 2010). Indeed, as Stephen Ball (2007: 5) has noted, ‘education is itself now in almost permanent “crisis” as it has taken centre stage in the complex relations between the state and the “imagined economy”’. For Jessop (1998), the (UK) state has shifted away from a Keynesian concern with direct economic management, towards steering and mediating between economic logics. This mediation role seeks to define the vision and sets of objectives and set the rules that determine the terms of engagement for other (market) actors. In other words, the state is engaged in ‘metagovernance’, by establishing and managing the context within which multiplayer governing is done. The problem with these assessments of the changed form and function of the state is that we cannot explain changes in skill governance in England by claiming that states have lost the authority and capacity to govern directly. The UK state has never had a strongly directive role in the governance of skill formation. Comparative post-compulsory education and training literatures define the UK as the archetypical voluntarist model, in which the state absents itself from the regulation of businesses decisions. It limits its role to the overall management of the education and training system, steered to act for the imagined benefit of the economy (King, 1997; Thelen, 2004; Keep, 2006). Indeed, the persistence of voluntarism is to be expected given the UK’s classification within the varieties of capitalism literature as a liberal market economy (LME) (Hall & Soskice, 2001; Schmidt, 2007). In LMEs, the competitive strategies of firms and the employment strategies of workers are both said to rely on highly adaptable and transferable general skills exchanged via open market mechanisms (Estevez-Abe et al., 2001). The New Labour governments were firmly committed to voluntarism. Indeed, their Skills Strategy for England explicitly positioned the role of the state at some distance from direct economic coordination. However, the Strategy cannot be explained only by reference to this voluntarist context. Rather, the policy was marked by a determined interventionism, presenting an activist state purposefully responding to, and encouraging other economic actors to respond to, the external exigencies of economic globalisation (Durrant, 2012, 2016). This case then confounds the historical narrative and key assumptions of governance literatures in two contradictory ways (Chapter 1). First, we can observe the longstanding multiplicity of actors involved in determining skill policy, and the (at best) ‘steering’ role of the state in this policy area (Rhodes, 1996; Pierre & Peters, 2000). Second, ‘the state’, in this policy, is nonetheless articulated as a single, coherent, interventionist actor, in direct contrast to expectations from ‘governance’ narratives (Durrant, 2012, 2016). In

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explaining the emergence and implications of the New Labour Skills Strategy, governance analysis reveals how governing is practised and contested in this policy field. This analysis shows how the state, as the first actor among many, framed a particular ‘skills problem’ and sought to delimit the ways in which the solution could be conceived, by selectively assembling specific structural conditions. I observe what Jessop (2008: 20) refers to as the ‘performative force of the policy paradigm’. New Labour’s skills policy reminds us that things have become ‘complex’ as a consequence of the uncertain conditions associated with the global knowledge-based economy. The policy determined that complexity affects, in real and meaningful ways, the ability of both the state and other actors (notably businesses and workers in this case) to act in ‘old’ ways in relation to workforce skills development. The questions for us, as governance analysts, are what are the things that are portrayed as having become complex, how are they strategically and selectively presented and, crucially, what are the implications for what is to be governed, by whom and how? Using governance analysis to examine the implications of a particular instance of governing (New Labour’s Skills Strategy), I identified which actors were elevated to the position of ‘able to act’ in relation to policy objectives and by what processes (Carmel, 2017). I explain how this positioning of actors shaped and/or delimited the possibilities for political action by these actors in response. Finally, I examine the nuances of governing practices in this particular policy field to explain both the degree of active intervention by New Labour in a traditionally voluntarist system of skills development, and the limitations of this intervention.

SKILLS POLICY IN ENGLAND UNDER NEW LABOUR: 2003–2009 New Labour’s skills policy for England (2003–2009) was contained within a flexible, even virtual, construct known as the ‘Skills Strategy’. It was defined by government policymakers as encompassing their reforms since the major White Paper: 21st century skills: Realising our potential – individuals, employers, nation (Department for Education and Skills (DfES), 2003). However, the suite of documents that comprised the government’s written communication on the practices and process of governing skills in England until 20091 was more extensive (see Table 4.1). It included some important background reports published before 2003 that informed the Skills Strategy White Paper. The central aim of the Skills Strategy was to address comparatively low levels of skills attainment and utilisation in the English education/training system. Following the Leitch Review of Skills (Leitch, 2006), the government set out a commitment to meet a series of qualification attainment goals in

The New Labour Skills Strategy for England

Table 4.1

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Index of core documents: the New Labour Skills Strategy for England

Title of document

Author

Type of document

Date

In Demand: Adult Skills in the 21st

Performance and Innovation

Report

2001

Century

Unit (PIU)

In Demand: Adult Skills in the 21st

Strategy Unit

Report

2002

HM Treasury

Report

2002

21st Century Skills: Realising Our

Dept. for Education & Skills

White paper

2003

Potential – Individuals, Employers,

(DfES) White paper

2005

White paper

2005

White paper

2005

White paper

2006 2005

Century – part 2 Developing Workforce Skills: Piloting a new approach

Nation Getting on in business, getting on in

Dept. for Education & Skills

work – part 1

(DfES)

Getting on in business, getting on in

Dept. for Education & Skills

work – part 2

(DfES)

Getting on in business, getting on in

Dept. for Education & Skills

work – part 3

(DfES)

Further Education: Raising Skills,

Dept. for Education & Skills

Improving Life Chances

(DfES)

Leitch Review of Skills – Skills in

Leitch

Commissioned report:

the UK: The long term challenge

(HM Treasury)

interim report

Leitch Review of Skills – Prosperity

Leitch

Commissioned report:

for all in the global economy: world

(HM Treasury)

final report

World Class Skills: Implementing

Dept. for Innovation,

White paper

2007

the Leitch Review of Skills in

Universities & Skills (DIUS) Consultation document

2008

Prospectus

2008

Consultation document

2008

Report

2007

2006

class skills

England Time to Train: Consulting on a new

Dept. for Innovation,

right to request time to train for

Universities & Skills (DIUS)

employees in England Shaping the future: a new adult

Dept. for Innovation,

advancement and careers service for

Universities & Skills (DIUS)

England Raising Expectations: Enabling the

Dept. for Children, Schools &

system to deliver

Families (DCSF) Dept. for Innovation, Universities & Skills (DIUS)

Train to Gain: A plan for growth –

Learning & Skills Council

November 2007–July 2011

(LSC)

Governance analysis

74 Title of document

Author

Type of document

Date

Empowering Employers: Building

UK Commission for

Guidance document

2008

Employer Influence – Relicensing

Employment & Skills

Sector Skills Councils

(UKCES)

Empowering SSCs: Employer

UK Commission for

Guidance document

2008

driven skills reform across the UK –

Employment & Skills

A Relicensing Framework for Sector

(UKCES)

Skills Councils

England. This commitment became known as the ‘2020 ambition’ (Department for Innovation, Universities & Skills (DIUS), 2007: 9). The goals included: • • • •

95% of adults to achieve basic skills of functional literacy and numeracy; more than 90% of adults qualified to NVQ level 2 or above;2 1.9 million more adults to achieve an NVQ level 3 qualification; and 40% or more adults to achieve an NVQ level 4 qualification or above.

One assessment calculated that achieving these goals would amount to over 22 million additional qualification attainments. At the time this represented more than one additional qualification attainment for half the working-age adults in the UK (UKCES, 2009: 42). The most prevalent theme was the need to (re)establish the rights and responsibilities of the various policy actors engaged in delivering, acquiring and utilising skills in and for the workplace (Durrant, 2012, 2016). These actors included: government, employers, employees and the (publicly funded) agencies of skills delivery. New Labour established several new organisations and initiatives, and revised the terms for those already delivering post-compulsory education and training. Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) were introduced from 2003, replacing 73 former National Training Organisations. The SSCs were initially overseen by the Sector Skills Development Agency (SSDA), itself replaced in 2008 by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES), on the recommendation of the Leitch Review. Train to Gain was introduced in 2006. This programme offered free or subsidised training for lower-skilled employees, and support for employers to translate their skills needs into relevant packages of study and qualifications for their workforce (DfES, 2006). In 2007 the government further introduced the ‘Skills Pledge’. Also recommended in the Leitch Review (Leitch, 2006: 4), this would encourage employers to commit to training their workforce to a minimum qualification level (DIUS, 2007), and enable government to measure commitment among employers towards the ‘2020 ambition’. To complement the Skills Pledge, the

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government introduced a statutory right for employees to request time off for training, known as ‘time to train’ (DIUS, 2008). These organisations and initiatives were described as having a role to meet business and worker demand for higher skills, and also to persuade or compel them to increase this skills demand. The SSCs, and the bodies that oversaw them, were described in policy documents as part of a new skills system driven by employer and employee demand (DfES, 2003; Leitch, 2006). They would raise ambition and promote increased investment in skills (DIUS, 2007). Similarly, Train to Gain would enable employers and employees to exercise choice in a demand-led system (DfES 2006; DIUS, 2007), and also encourage them to see the benefits of higher-skills attainment (DfES, 2005). The Skills Pledge would identify those businesses that were taking responsibility for raising skills at their workplace (DIUS, 2007), and by implication, shame those that weren’t. ‘Time to train’ would provide employees with rights in the workplace to challenge the irresponsibility of employers (DIUS, 2008).

EXPLAINING SKILLS GOVERNANCE: THE STRATEGIC ASSEMBLY OF STRUCTURES, ACTORS AND PROCESSES IN NEW LABOUR’S SKILLS POLICY The original empirical study (Durrant, 2012) was motivated to understand and account for policy variation. It did this through a combination of document analysis (n = 42) and analysis of semi-structured interviews with policy elites representing government policymakers, employers, employees and those responsible for skills delivery (n = 29). Representatives of businesses included: the Confederation of British Industries (CBI), the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), the Institute of Directors (IoD) and the Chambers of Commerce. Workers’ representative organisations included: the Trade Union Congress (TUC), Unionlearn and the National Institute of Adult and Continuing Education (NIACE). I employed a specific branch of interpretive policy analysis (IPA) concerned with exploring policy narratives ‘as conveyors of meaning … for the purposes of argument or claims-making’ (Yanow, 2000: 57ff). In this section, I show how policy selectively interpreted and articulated the paired contexts of economic dynamism and labour market volatility together to provide a rationale for policy action. This selectively assembled context gave meaning to, and fixed understandings of, the complex structural environment faced by businesses and workers. Investment in higher levels of skills was presented as the best means of managing the complexity associated with high structural uncertainty, and as also simultaneously in the interests of government, businesses and workers/citizens. Government constructed both a rationale for a partnership of actors engaged in a project for higher-skills

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acquisition, as well as delimiting what forms of policy and political action would be aligned with mutual higher-skills aspiration. Setting the Scene: Constructing the Complex Structural Conditions for Higher Skills Throughout successive New Labour administrations, the urgent need for higher skills levels was premised on a concern for the competitive strength, employment potential and social prosperity of the nation. These premises were based on perceptions about, and selectively presented experiences of, the importance of a ‘knowledge-based’ economy in open, technologically advanced and dynamic markets (widely shared in the academic literature, discussed above). Indeed, higher skills were fervently and repeatedly described by New Labour governments as uniquely fundamental to sustaining business productivity and individual employability in the complex, volatile and highly competitive conditions associated with globalisation. Policy documents, and government policymakers in interviews, described businesses as needing a higher-skilled workforce, able to adapt to and implement new production technologies, systems of work organisation, and ways of working. Indeed, higher skills were often presented as the only means whereby businesses would be able to outpace the competition and excel at the cutting edge of perpetually shifting conditions for economic success. Economic and industrial change increasingly demands a workforce that is flexible and adaptable. For business, retraining and redeploying employees to support more efficient and effective operations, and integrating new technologies, will be crucial to remaining competitive. (PIU, 2001: 56)

Such recurring policy statements underpinned an imperative for businesses to pursue higher-skills strategies. This was strenuously reiterated by government policymakers as an urgent economic need. In our rapidly-changing world, having a highly skilled workforce isn’t an optional extra; it’s an economic necessity. (DIUS, 2007: 4)

In turn, worker/citizens were described as experiencing a highly unstable and uncertain labour market, particularly for low skills. Policy documents presented data showing growth in the workforce in managerial, professional and associated professional occupations, and a relative decline in elementary or routine manual jobs. The implication was that, whatever way the economy evolved, higher skills would be the means for workers to best navigate the trajectory of this structural shift. First, being better skilled would enable them to innovate at the workplace, thus contributing to the basis of business productiv-

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ity and longer-term prosperity. Secondly, they would be able to adapt and find alternative sources of employment should the business fail. In this way skills were presented as providing employability security (PIU, 2001:6) (distinct from employment security). This was in turn presented as the most credible form of social welfare and wellbeing in the context of complex economic uncertainty. Indeed, skills were presented as ‘the most important lever within our control to create wealth and to reduce social deprivation’ (Leitch, 2006: 2). In the new century, improving and updating skills is the best way to help people make the most of change. (Leitch, 2006: 27) In the old days the problem may have been employment, but in the next decade it will be employability. If in the old days lack of jobs demanded priority action, in the new world it is lack of skills. And that means our whole approach to welfare must move on. (Foreword by Gordon Brown – Department for Work and Pensions, 2008:2)

As we would expect in voluntarist LMEs, what counted as ‘skill’ was not substantively defined. However, our governance analysis revealed that policy actors presented a selectively demarcated picture of the uncertain and complex structural conditions faced by business and workers. Such conditions were then used to link the idea of ‘higher skills’ to workers’ ‘ability to adapt to change’. Contrary to the ‘varieties of capitalism’ literature, my analysis shows that this is not necessarily an outcome of the preference of firms (Estevez-Abe et al., 2001). Rather, it was the deliberate objective of skills policy and purposeful government intervention. ‘Raising skills levels’ was presented as a fundamental dimension of statework, to secure and enhance national economic competitiveness and a specific version of social justice. Furthermore, policy narratives facilitated the pursuit of higher skills in ways that cohered seemingly different agendas and reconciled the interests and ambitions of multiple actors. Governance analysis alerts us to the specific ways in which policy works to present and discursively assemble the agendas and interests of actors in order to portray consensus between them. This apparent consensus was then used to construct a partnership of actors and shape their ways of acting in the higher-skills project. A Partnership for Prosperity: Creating the Skills Actors and the Ways they Should Act Policy documents and government policymakers described a higher-skills project for prosperity that would be achieved through ‘a partnership of government, employers and employees’ (Foreword by Tony Blair, Strategy Unit,

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2002: 3), based on ‘joint endeavour’ (DfES, 2005: 25); and ‘common action’ (Leitch, 2006:17). Skills are central to achieving our national goals of prosperity and fairness. They are an essential contributor to a successful, wealth creating economy. They help businesses become more productive and profitable. They help individuals achieve their ambitions for themselves, their families and their communities. (DfES, 2005: 5, emphasis added)

The realisation of higher skills would cohere the interests of the state and the interests of businesses and workers as a national whole, thus reconciling different private interests at the site of the workplace. Shared interest in more and better skills would meet the mutual needs of businesses and workers. Business needed useful and usable workers, capable of applying their skills and knowledge to raise productivity. Workers needed the means to attain personal goals of ambitious employability (DfES, 2005). Policymakers promoted the equivalence of skills for the public ‘we’ and the private ‘you’. Skills were about ‘helping businesses boost their profitability and improving our productivity so we are fit to compete successfully with China, India and other emerging economies’ (DfES, 2005: 1, emphasis added). Worker/citizens were reminded that ‘having large numbers of people in the workforce with low skills levels limits the prospects of individuals and firms as well as negativity affecting national productivity and increasing wage inequality’ (HM Treasury, 2002: 7, emphasis added). Figure 4.1 summarises these policy narratives. Governance analysis facilitated the explanation of how policy is enacted and materialised in governing practices. In this case ‘policy’ came in the form of bounded political communication (Ball, 2008) that sought to strategically create legitimate subject positions in relation to policy problems and goals, and invite people to identify with them and take them up. Particular subject positions and particular relationships of power, authority and interest were attributed to workers, businesses and the state. These positions directly engaged these actors as active allies in processes of governing, but on the terms set by the policy. In addition, policy statements articulated degrees of deviation from such ideal-type subject positions, in order to manage non-compliance with policy goals. In this case non-compliance was portrayed by reference to some actually existing – less than ideal – aspirations and behaviours of some businesses and workers. Elsewhere (Durrant, 2016) I have outlined how New Labour’s skills policy described discrete types of businesses and workers that differentiated categories of workplaces according to their imagined degree of compliance with the policy agenda.

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Source: Author’s analysis, compilation and design.

Figure 4.1

The policy narratives of high-skills consensus in the context of structural uncertainty

Responsible and enlightened workplaces – where businesses and workers fully understood the compelling need for higher skills to mitigate uncertainty – were met by an empowering state. This state would steer the providers of education and training, and therefore the instruments and processes of skills formation, in accordance with this ‘enlightened’ demand. In contrast, workplaces described as having deficient high-skills ambitions – where businesses and workers found themselves unable or unwilling to engage in the higher-skills project – were met with a compelling state. Compulsion would steer education and training providers, and the instruments and processes of skill formation, to overcome this lack of demand.

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In my case, processes for governing emerged from a differentiated construction and positioning of actors in particular and selectively presented structural conditions. Policy documentation, institutions and resources generated governing practices that categorised and arranged actors in relation to each other, to the state and to the policy purpose – in this case higher skills as the basis for collective prosperity. These governing practices were then used to manage the terms and conditions of their engagement in governing, and, as such, to politically order the key social relations in this field (Carmel, Chapter 2).

ACTORS TALKING BACK Representatives of businesses and workers were actively and politically engaged in (re)interpreting and responding to the New Labour Skills Strategy for England. These actors re-constructed the rationale for skills by selectively restating the nature of the complex and uncertain structural environment. In doing so, they redefined the roles, responsibilities and actions of the actors involved in governing the move to ‘higher skills’. They were able to undo the government’s policy intentions in real and meaningful ways. Interrogating the interplay between structures, actors and process to explain public policy avoids the trap of concentrating on the narratives and actions of the state alone, and straightforwardly reading from that the policy ‘content’, direction of change and reform, and the bounds of its possibility. Nor is the role of all public policy actors assumed to relate directly to putative externally determined interests. Rather, the public policy itself, and the wider possibilities for political action, can be negotiated, reinterpreted and undone. Governance analysis in this case shows how this was done, with real and material consequences, by the full range of actors operating in the policy space. Here I deliberately emphasise our analytical interest in the limits to non-state actors’ ability to struggle within and over the terms of policy. These actors both shape and are constrained by the state/government actors’ narratives of public policy reform. Resetting the Scene and Re-creating the Actors: The Narratives of Business Representatives Business representatives presented their members as the driving force behind awareness of skills shortages. They aligned with government policymakers and recognised the need for higher skills in structural economic circumstances characterised by dynamic uncertainty. In interview, they were quick to voice support for an urgent policy focus on skills. This focus would underwrite progressive business strategies to ‘keep pace’ and ‘excel’ in the global economy

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and to mitigate associated risks. In short, they constructed their members’ role as ‘enlightened’ partners in the skills project. We have been very supportive of the Government’s focus on skills as an issue because of what we know about how that impacts on our members’ growth strategies, and just how they can do business. So I think that is very positive. (BR1) Well our members tell us that it is crucial. If you don’t keep up with the skills agenda, don’t keep up with up-skilling your workforce and skilling even the employer themselves, you’re going to lose ground on your competitors. (BR2)

However, by subtly restating the rationale for skills as a predominantly economic need, they also repositioned the role of their members as ‘customers’ in the Skills Strategy. Employers would be the beneficiaries of skills policy that would deliver those skills that employers ‘demand’. In doing so, they recast the actual production of these higher skills as outside the scope of their members’ responsibility. Business representatives equally focused on skills as the best way to meet both government’s economic and social ambitions for the nation, and also the private ambitions of businesses and workers. However, they retold this coherence with strategic emphasis on the primary need to improve businesses’ productivity and competitiveness. They relegated social ambitions (such as workers’ improved prospects, employability and labour market inclusion) to secondary consequence. It [the Skills Strategy] comes back to competitiveness and economic growth, and the fact that to have sort of all the things we’d like for the UK economy – both in terms of opportunities in terms of social welfare and standard of living – all those things come back to competitiveness. (BR5) They [policymakers] have accepted the Leitch targets, in doing so they wish not only to improve economic competitiveness but also social inclusion and individual’s development. It’s a very holistic strategy … but as a fundamental goal – recognising that skills are absolutely fundamental to productivity and therefore to our competitiveness – absolutely support it. (BR1, emphasis in original)

Business representatives emphasised ‘getting the balance right’ (BR3) between the coexisting but asymmetrically important messages in policy. They cautioned against ‘strategic drift’, that is, allowing the higher-skills project to become diverted by welfare-oriented concerns. The principal goal was to support competitive business performance, as ‘the bigger picture’ (BR1). They were quick to draw out and elevate the policy narratives that ‘enlightened’

Governance analysis

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Source: Author’s analysis, compilation and design.

Figure 4.2

Remapping the narratives of high-skills consensus: the voice of business representatives

workers should share this perspective. Workers should want to be skilled, in order to innovate in the workplace and contribute to business productivity. It’s absolutely vital that individuals have got the opportunity and access to developing their skills, particularly up to a certain level to really make sure they get a foot in the labour market; get a good job. But … I think we would argue that the focus has got to be on skills that are going to improve economic performance, because that’s the best way of improving employment opportunities and so on. … We have to remember that businesses need to keep running. (BR3)

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This finding contradicts existing explanations of skill formation governance in voluntarist LMEs. Business representatives presented their members as ‘enlightened businesses’, strongly supporting progressive market-shaping strategies like investment in higher skills. However, they carefully recast the argument for higher skills to prioritise economic need. They selectively extracted the discursive threads from policy documents and statements that supported their agenda, that is, economically viable skills for business sustainability and prosperity. Skills weaknesses in the workforce were evidence that their own demand for improved skills had not yet been met. I mean it’s a cliché but there’s no job for life. Employees now are going to have to adapt to changing economic circumstances; you know changing roles, changing jobs. So I think it’s [the Skills Strategy] just making sure they’ve got the skills to do that really. (BR3)

Figure 4.2 summarises how business representatives reworked the narratives of high-skills consensus. This governance analysis revealed how policy actors outside formal policymaking selectively drew together elements of the structural conditions in which policy is formulated, in order to recreate new legitimate subject positions that better align with their interests. They achieved this within the boundaries of possibility prescribed by formal policy. No formal contention or interest representation or change of policy was required. This significantly limited the effectiveness of the policy and state action in steering businesses to assume responsibility for higher skills. Resetting the Scene and Re-creating the Actors: The Narratives of Workers’ Representatives Representatives of workers were also engaged with the New Labour Skills Strategy for England. They too made strategic use of the interplay between structures, actors and processes in making sense of public policy intentions and effects. They aligned with policymakers in recognising higher skills as a way to mitigate risks of labour market volatility in conditions of intense structural uncertainty. In interview, worker representatives were quick to characterise members as actively participating in the higher-skills project, positioning them within the positive image of workers as ‘enlightened’ partners. However, they also sought to rebalance the rationale for skills. For them, the higher-skills project reflected a predominantly social need for more progressive business practices on skills development. Such businesses would be better able to respond to the challenges of open, global markets. Workers, then, were

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recast as the primary beneficiaries of the skills project, while responsibility for producing higher skills belonged with other actors. Worker representatives presented themselves as recognising the value of improved skills in cohering different agendas and multiple interests – and therefore as ‘everybody’s concern’. Yet they strategically selected and repeatedly stressed available governmental narratives to promote their interpretation that ‘raising the skills level is particularly about social justice’ (ER4).3 They presented policy initiatives and programmes as ‘empowering people to actually access training and development and to actually enable them to move up the career ladder’; and as ‘all about social justice’ (ER5). Emphasising the link between skills and social justice, the coherence of stakeholder agendas and interests is again reworked. Selecting from ideas and rationales expressed in formal policy goals, worker representatives privileged the importance of a looming problem of low-skilled unemployment, and social ambitions to improve employability and employment chances. You can see what the Skills Strategy tries to do is to say, well, for a substantial swathe of the people who are missing out in all of this there is a win–win between the wider economic interests of the country, and the interests of individuals in having choices in their lives if we can give them the skills for employability. All that I absolutely am behind. (ER1) There are lots of aspects of the Government’s policy that we support. I mean the Government has had a focus on actually how do you help the most disadvantaged; the people who are not able to access training and skills at the workplace generally. (ER5)

They described government policymakers as ‘alive to the challenges facing people most excluded from the system’ (ER1), and as having ‘no apologies to make for helping people in work who didn’t have chances, get chances’ (ER1). Skills were a way of addressing ‘the prospects of the individual’ and their chance for a ‘decent experience at work’ (ER3). Indeed, worker representatives could interpret the New Labour Skills Strategy as principally about enabling workers to ‘unlock their potential’ through skills for ‘better employment’, even where such opportunities were not available at their current workplace (ER3). Employee representatives noted that this should be of concern to ‘good’ employers (ER3, ER4). Thus, worker representatives counselled against losing sight of the priority social ambition. They drew on counter-narratives that the economic focus of skills policy was ‘strategic drift’ and warned against a narrowing of policy focus on the needs of business. This way of talking undermined the coherence between skills for national economic competitiveness, and skills for individ-

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Source: Author’s analysis, compilation and design.

Figure 4.3

Remapping the narratives of high-skills consensus: the voice of worker representatives

ual businesses (ER2), and focused responsibility for skills enhancement on employers, government and the providers of education and training. Figure 4.3 summarises worker representatives’ reworking of the narratives of high-skills consensus. Again, we find these non-state actors articulating and re-creating their legitimate subject positions and ways of acting within the policy. Utilising the breadth of concerns and considerations authorised by the parameters of the formal policy, they played up available narratives to elevate their members as primary beneficiaries of skills policy. This finding also does not conform to traditional accounts of skill governance in voluntarist LMEs. There is little evidence to suggest that representa-

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tives of workers are satisfied that their members prefer low-level but highly portable skills. They highlighted the politics of skill, and supported investment in education and training as an issue of progressive economic modernisation and for social justice in a knowledge-based economy.

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS: APPRAISING THE GOVERNANCE ANALYSIS APPROACH This section reflects on the main contributions of our governance analysis approach to explaining policy puzzles. In this case its principal advantage is its ability to explain the contradictions contained within the New Labour Skills Strategy for England. This Strategy involved a historic multiplicity of actors and a longstanding commitment to the tradition of voluntarism of private decisions to train (or not), as well as a determined interventionism on the part of an active state responding to, and seeking to encourage others to respond to, a changed economic context. To explain this set of policies and its contradictions, governance analysis highlighted how structural conditions are drawn upon selectively and purposefully in policy in order to create actors and their relational positions, and also what processes are afforded for political action by non-state actors. How Structural Conditions are Drawn upon Selectively and Purposefully in Policy One of the strengths of the governance analysis in this case is that it allowed for a meaningful discussion of ‘complexity’ (Carmel, Chapter 3). This is not just in terms of what is complex, but also in terms of how this complexity was selectively drawn upon to shape policy objectives, define the actors, determine policy processes and practices, and thus delimit the possibilities for political action. In other words, why complexity mattered. In doing so, we avoided reducing the conclusions of our empirical enquiry to a description of a contingently thorny case. This case is not only an instance of governing that is complicated by its context or where policy contradictions are symptomatic of the inability of states to respond effectively to a political problem. Rather, governance analysis enabled me to explain the attributes and structure and implications of this complex policymaking environment as an object of my analysis. This framework highlighted how governing practices shaped and altered policy complexity, and how this in turn mattered for the role of different actors in promoting, reducing or hardening particular relations of power and interest in that policy field. Any public policy actor must, as part of their role, render complexity manageable in order to act upon it (Jessop, 2009), but policy actors

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need to render a space governable, and different policy actors have an unequal ability to legitimise their accounts (Carmel & Harlock, 2008; Gottweis, 2003). For New Labour, the idea of ‘complexity’ captured the dynamic nature of economic uncertainty. It served as shorthand for the multifaceted, grand epochal changes in international political economy that were reshaping the conditions under which governing could be done. In this case, the power to define what these changes mean, through the use of narrative colour, shading and texture, as well as resources and policy infrastructure, belongs first and foremost to the state (Jessop, 1998, 2008). This was so even as the state’s authority and capacity to act was eroded by the same forces of uncertainty that rage through, and affect the governability of, that very environment. Governmental depiction of the policy problem and policy solution specified the roles of the different actors in policy. Our governance analysis allows us to illuminate not just what is intended to be governed, but also by whom. The Creation of Actors and their Relational Positions: The Political Ordering of Social Relations Governance analysis alerted us to how higher skills is defined in policy as the basis for collective prosperity, and, as a result, which actors are called to participate in this policy, and on what contingent (and highly contested) terms. I exposed the roles that are ascribed to non-state actors, and the relationships between them, as the regulation of social subjects (Carmel & Papadopoulos, 2003: 32). Governing practices are distributional devices (Durrant, 2012) that determine who does what, who gets what, and how (under what conditions and by what processes). In this case, government policymakers presented a ‘skills partnership’, involving government, employers and employees, as absolutely intrinsic to success. Drawing on their selective presentation of the structural conditions for policy, they stressed the inability of governments to act alone; constructed the possibility of satisfying everybody’s interests through higher skills; and used this logic to present skills as everybody’s business. But it was everybody’s business in very particular ways and on very specific conditions. This chapter showed how policies ‘speak’ their subjects and invite them to take up the image of themselves that is articulated in governmental policy and discourse (Ball, 2007; Newman, 2007). These governing practices created contrasts between authoritative and subordinated voices and actions. They generated relational political positions from which these other actors could speak or answer, and act or perform (Clarke, 2004; Ball, 2008). We call this the political ordering of social relations. We see that order is not always sought by the barking of authoritative commands to settle political struggles, but is effectively pursued through efforts to discursively produce intersubjective

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meaning – associated with socially constructed imperatives – and by seeking to subordinate the expression and mobilisation of alternative viewpoints (Gottweis, 2003; cf Carmel, Chapter 2; Harlock, Chapter 7; Farr, Chapter 8). The analysis unpicked seemingly straightforward relationships (between the state, businesses and workers), and extricated how businesses and workers are imagined and brought into alignment with different forms of statework, whether to empower or compel higher-skills aspirations. The Role of Non-state Actors from within Policy: The Possibilities for Political Action It is worth ending with a reflection on the unequal ability of actors to engage in processes of refining, remaking and undoing policy. State policymakers described a partnership to produce higher skills, based on the notionally shared ambitions of government, employers and employees. However, by attending to the practices of actors beyond the state, this governance analysis revealed the limits of New Labour’s endeavours to raise skills levels through its formal Strategy. Business and worker representatives engaged in a second-order strategic selection. They each drew together partial elements of the structural conditions presented by the government, and recast policy objectives and alternative ‘legitimate’ subject positions for themselves. These non-state actors struggled to negotiate, reinterpret and revise policy claims by other actors – about what should be done, by whom and how – from within the bounds already established in the policy. However, given how the economic and social rationales for higher skills were knitted together as mutually beneficial, the demand-led system could be (re)presented as employer-led. As a result, it was easier for business representatives to challenge policy objectives and to resist accepting responsibility for higher-skills production and utilisation (Durrant, 2012). This had important implications for the politics of skills. Workers’ representatives were unable to re-work the skills strategy to achieve their goals, despite the opening apparently offered in the policy of ‘partnership’. It was very difficult to realise their ambition of framing and organising skills policies as a matter of social justice. This would have had rather different implications for the responsibility for, and distribution of, financial, educational and regulatory resources. New Labour’s skills policy has, in the end, had little effect on employer demand for higher levels of skills or the creation of the type of socially decent work that would utilise such skills (Keep & James, 2012). Nonetheless, this was not just about reasserting a typical ‘voluntarist’ mode of policymaking expected in a LME. State support for the (predominantly low-skill preferences) of employers went considerably further. It has consequently had wider structuring effects on the relations among relevant actors.

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State policymakers’ and employers’ perspectives were articulated as mutually supportive and aligned, while interests of individual workers and citizens remained subordinated. These structuring effects have further implications for ongoing policymaking in this policy domain, given the hierarchical ordering of such key political actors. Governance analysis can account for the reproduction, even hardening, of these hierarchies in the distribution of political authority. This chapter has shown: how governing practices provide specific spaces for action and contestation while closing others; and also that these practices have real and material consequences for the unfolding of policy objectives, processes and political action.

NOTES 1. When fieldwork for the study was completed. 2. National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) is a ranked system of ‘skills’ assessments across all skill types and occupations. More advanced or in-depth skills are recognised by higher levels (e.g. NVQ 4 or 5). 3. Where quotations from interviews are used the abbreviation BR stands for business representative and ER stands for employee representative.

REFERENCES Ball, S.J., 2007. Education plc.: Understanding private sector participation in public sector education, Abingdon: Routledge. Ball, S.J., 2008. The education debate, Bristol: Policy Press. Becker, G., 1962. ‘Investment in human capital: a theoretical analysis’, Journal of Political Economy, 70(5–2), pp. 9–49. Brown, P., A. Green and H. Lauder, 2001. High skills: Globalisation, competitiveness and skill formation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carmel, E., 2017. ‘“Bringing the social back in”: governance analysis as a mode of enquiry’, in R. Paul, M. Mölders, A. Bora, M. Huber and P. Münte (eds.), Society, regulation and governance: New modes of shaping social change, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 38–58. Carmel, E. and J. Harlock, 2008. ‘Instituting the “third sector” as a governable terrain: partnership, procurement and performance in the UK’, Policy and Politics, 36(2), pp. 155–171. Carmel, E. and T. Papadopoulos, 2003. ‘The new governance of social security in Britain’, in J. Millar (ed.), Understanding social security, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 31–52. Cerny, P.G., 2010. ‘The competition state today: from raison d’État to raison du Monde’, Policy Studies, 31(1), pp. 5–21.

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Clarke, J., 2004. Changing welfare, changing states: New directions in social policy, London: Sage. Crouch, C., D. Finegold and M. Sako, 2004. Are skills the answer? The political economy of skills creation in advanced industrial countries, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Department for Work and Pensions, 2008. Transforming Britain’s labour market: Ten years of the new deal [online], London: DWP. Available from: http://​dera​.ioe​.ac​.uk/​7487/​7/​PMNewDeal2​-01​-08​_Redacted​.pdf [Accessed 03 August 2017]. DfES, 2003. 21st century skills: Realising our potential – individuals, employers, nation (Cm 5810), London: HMSO. DfES, 2005. Skills: Getting on in businesses, getting on at work – Part 1 (Cm 6483-I), London: HMSO. DfES, 2006. Further education: Raising skills, improving life chances (Cm 6768), London: HMSO. DIUS, 2007. World class skills: Implementing the Leitch Review of Skills in England (Cm 7181), London: HMSO. DIUS, 2008. Time to train: Consulting on a new right to request time to train for employees in England, London: DIUS. Durrant, H., 2012. Governing skills, governing workplaces: State-steered voluntarism in England under New Labour. PhD Thesis, University of Bath. Durrant, H., 2016. Governing good, bad and ugly workplaces? Explaining the paradox of state-steered voluntarism in New Labour’s Skills Strategy. Journal of Education and Work, 29(4), pp. 373–401. Estevez-Abe, M., T. Iversen and D. Soskice, 2001. ‘Social protection and the formation of skills: a reinterpretation of the welfare state’, in P.A. Hall and D. Soskice (eds.), Varieties of capitalism: The institutional foundations of comparative advantage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 145–183. Finegold, D. and D. Soskice, 1988. ‘The failure of training in Britain: Analysis and prescription’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 4(3), pp. 21–53. Gottweis, H., 2003. ‘Theoretical strategies of poststructuralist policy analysis: towards an analytics of government’, in M.A. Hajer and H. Wagenaar (eds.), Deliberative policy analysis: Understanding governance in the network society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 247–264. Hall, P.A. and D. Soskice, 2001. ‘An introduction to varieties of capitalism’, in P.A. Hall and D. Soskice (eds.), Varieties of capitalism: The institutional foundations of comparative advantage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–68. HM Treasury, 2002. Developing workforce skills: Piloting a new approach, London: HM Treasury.

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Jessop, B., 1998. ‘The rise of governance and the risks of failure: the case of economic development’, International Social Science Journal, 50(155), pp. 29–45. Jessop, B., 2002. The future of the capitalist state, Cambridge: Polity Press. Jessop, B., 2008. ‘A cultural political economy of competitiveness and its implications for higher education’, in B. Jessop, N. Fairclough and R. Wodak (eds.), Education and the knowledge-based economy in Europe, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Jessop, B., 2009. ‘Cultural political economy and critical policy studies’, Critical Policy Studies, 3(3), pp. 336–356. Keep, E., 2006. ‘State control of the English education and training systems – playing with the biggest train set in the world’, Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 58(1), pp. 47–64. Keep, E. and S. James, 2012. ‘A Bermuda triangle of policy? “Bad jobs”, skills policy and incentives to learn at the bottom end of the labour market’, Journal of Education Policy, 27(2), pp. 211–230. Keep, E. and K. Mayhew, 1996. ‘Evaluating the assumptions that underlie training policy’, in A.L. Booth and D.J. Snower (eds), Acquiring skills: Market failures, their symptoms and policy responses, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. King, D., 1997. ‘Employers, training policy, and the tenacity of voluntarism in Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 8(3), pp. 383–411. Lauder, H., 1999. ‘Competitiveness and the problem of low skills equilibria: a comparative analysis’, Journal of Education and Work, 12(3), pp. 281–294. Leitch, S., 2006. Prosperity for all in the global economy: world class skills, London: HM Treasury. Newman, J., 2007. ‘Governance as Cultural practice: texts, talk and the struggle for meaning’, in M. Bevir and F. Trentmann (eds.), Governance, consumers and citizens: Agency and resistance in contemporary politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. PIU, 2001. In demand: Adult skills in the 21st century, London: Cabinet Office Performance and Innovation Unit, pp. 49–68. Pierre, J. and G. Peters, 2000. Governance, politics and the state, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rhodes, R.A.W., 1996. ‘The new governance: governing without government’, Political Studies, 44(4), pp. 652–667. Schmidt, V.A., 2007. Bringing the state back into the varieties of capitalism and discourse back into the explanation of change, Boston: Boston University Center for European Studies Program for the Study of Germany and Europe (Working Paper Series 07.3).

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Strategy Unit, 2002. In demand: Adult skills in the 21st century – part 2, London: Strategy Unit. Thelen, K., 2004. How institutions evolve: The political economy of skills, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. UKCES, 2009. Ambition 2020: World class skills and jobs for the UK, London: UKCES. Wolf, A., 2007. ‘Round and round the houses: the Leitch Review of Skills’, Local Economy, 22(2), pp. 111–117. Yanow, D., 2000. Conducting interpretative policy analysis, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

5. The political ordering of migrant workers through labour admission policies Regine Paul INTRODUCTION This chapter appraises the governance analysis employed in a comparative study of European labour migration policies. The study sought to explain variation in contemporary migrant classification processes in the UK, France and Germany, which feature both systematic commonalities and marked differences across cases (Paul 2015). It relied on governance analysis to interrogate how this complex variation of migrant worker admission policies can best be explained. This chapter illuminates how governance analysis enabled a systematic disentanglement of the complex relationships between (a) the processes by which policies in three different countries categorize migrant workers to select those who should be ‘legal’ workers; (b) the institutional structures in which these categorization processes are set; and (c) the explanation of complex variable policy outcomes. The chapter starts with a brief record of policy variation in defining migrant worker ‘legality’ in the UK, France and Germany and a review of existing policy studies’ limited potential to explain this variety in a comprehensive manner (second section). Having problematized these studies, it then details its comparative governance analysis of labour migration policies (third section). This highlights how UK, French and German policymakers utilized and negotiated the various structural conditions in their country’s wider institutional setting that regulate admission processes. In particular, it revealed how governments’ variable recourse to contextual factors in capitalist coordination structures, welfare state regimes, and dominant citizenship models accounted for the complex variation in labour migration policies. The fourth section reflects on the analytical contributions of governance analysis in the field of migration policy, and specifically in comparative policy research. I argue that it facilitates explanations of complex cases as empirical wholes due to the 93

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focus on complex relationships of actors, processes and structures, particularly supports systematic ideographic (or case-oriented) comparative policy research, and facilitates explanation and evaluation of the political ordering effects of policies.

VARIETIES OF MIGRANT WORKER LEGALITY: AN UNSOLVED RESEARCH PUZZLE Migration policies define the requirements a person must fulfil in order to count as ‘legal’ on a given territory. In European labour migration policies, this concerns the conditions for authorized residence for employment purposes that apply to all non-European Union (non-EU) workers. I sought to explain the coexistence of both strong similarities and also striking differences in UK, French and German definitions of ‘legal migrant workers’ in admission policies. Such admission policies have profound effects on migrants’ rights to enter, stay and work in particular countries, with attendant significant economic, social and political implications for both migrants and citizens, as well as for sending and receiving societies. I explain these policy similarities and differences first, before reflecting briefly on the limited ability of existing studies to explain cross-national policy variation comprehensively and with sufficient contextual depth. This critique informs my choice of a comparative governance analysis, applied in the empirical case of labour migration policies in the third section of the chapter. Varieties of Migrant Legality in UK, French and German Policies My examination of policies started with an analysis of all laws and decrees which regulate labour migration and were in force in the UK, France and Germany as of May 2011. Only a few key features of policy variation will be provided here. (See Paul 2015 for historical embedding of each case and the detailed policy analysis with overview charts, tables, and references to policy material and secondary literature.) Two common principles feature in the three countries’ definitions of ‘legal’ migrant workers: positive selection by (high) skill level and by assumed labour scarcity (also see Paul 2012a). Entry rights were most benevolent for highly skilled workers of at least graduate degree level or those with longstanding professional experience and high earning potential. The most beneficial regime for highly skilled foreign workers can certainly be seen in Germany’s permanent residence permit; but the French multi-annual route for ‘skills and talent’ and the UK tier 1 ‘exceptional talents’ of the points-based system equally offered relatively secure residence and easier access to employment than other routes. Academic qualifications and professional experience were the most

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common requirements for someone to be considered a ‘high-skilled’ migrant, and earnings thresholds were also used to earmark particularly high qualifications. Access to a foreign labour market was further facilitated for those with scarce job market qualifications, say in engineering or medical services. All three countries used similar two-pronged policy tools to select ‘scarce’ skilled workers. These were shortage lists of professions with recruitment difficulties, to prioritize entry of migrants in such professions and resident labour market tests to establish the availability of any national, EU, or already legally residing worker to fulfil a given job, before allowing a migrant to do so. In contrast to their high-skilled peers, skilled and lower-skilled migrant employees could not change jobs or employer, at least initially, and they could usually only reside for the duration of their work contract. Any change of employer required consent of employment and migration authorities – a requirement most pronounced in the UK sponsorship certificate system. Low-skilled migration faced the highest levels of restriction, with additional labour market protection clauses (Germany) or the complete suspension of entry routes (UK). This clear distinction of entry routes by skill level transcended national policy cases (also see Ruhs 2013). Indeed, all three countries broadly structured the regulatory terrain as follows: • high-skilled professional routes, including post-study job search and intra-company exchanges; • shortage routes for skilled workers; • lower-skilled routes which were frequently inactive or phased out as EU mobility expanded (for this last point, see Paul 2013). Policies privileged high-skilled workers and imposed much tighter entry requirements and residence control on lower-skilled workers, with skilled workers being positioned somewhere in between these poles. However, far from painting a picture of cross-national policy consistency, my qualitative document analysis also exposed striking differences in UK, French and German definitions of legal migrant workers. This was most marked for the relevance of migrants’ origin. Selection by migrant origin marked a departure from the economic rationalities which dominate selection by skill level or scarcity assessments. The definition of ‘legality’ with reference to origin highlights the importance of models of citizenship in the receiving country, historical ties with certain sending countries, and the position of a country in the EU labour mobility regime. Furthermore, selection by origin varied considerably across the three cases, both in importance and kind. French policies displayed the most explicit and wide-ranging selection by origin, mostly in a postcolonial context. Algerians are excluded from labour

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migration policies and are covered by specific bilateral provisions. France further operated a range of bilateral migration management agreements mostly with former colonies – among others Senegal, Tunisia, Gabon or Congo-Brazzaville1 – which specify country-specific shortage lists, annual quotas for work permits and agreement on the return of informal residents. The shortage lists, for example, display a great degree of variation by country of origin in terms of number and skill level of the listed professions: only nine rather high-skilled additional professions are available to applicants from Gabon and 15 to Congolese, while Tunisians can enter 77 and Senegalese 108 occupations, some of which require lower skills. In return for privileged access to the French labour market for their own nationals, ‘partner’ countries consent to fighting irregular flows. Despite its own colonial history (Howard 2009), the UK did not follow the French example of defining ‘legal’ migrant workers by their origin from the former empire. There was a strong focus on EU-internal recruitment in the lower-skilled job market segments that entailed de facto entry restrictions, but, in any case, origin is not used as a formal criterion for selection in the UK. Germany exclusively selected workers from within the wider European labour pool, for example in the recruitment of care workers exclusively from Croatia before the latter country’s EU accession. Germany also offered special provisions for major ‘guest worker’ sending countries of the past – most importantly Turkey – and entertained reciprocal liberal labour mobility agreements with a few hand-picked rich Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Lastly, migrant workers with certified qualifications from German schools, vocational training, or higher education institutions were treated relatively benevolently, so that the origin of qualifications thus also mattered in selecting legal migrant workers. One final striking comparative difference concerned the operation of annual migration caps in the UK. The cut-back of annual net migration figures was a core topic in the 2010 general election campaign, and the Coalition Government (2010–2015) implemented annual limits swiftly in autumn 2010. Since April 2011, ‘tier 1’ admissions for persons ‘with exceptional talent’ were capped at 1,000, and tier 2 – high skilled – limited to 20,700. While France and Germany defined quotas for some entry routes in bilateral agreements, neither set a numerical limit on overall labour migrant entries. Analytical Limitations of Existing Labour Migration Policy Accounts Comparative policy analysis of the labour migration domain must be able to account for the complex variation charted above. By adopting an often unidimensional focus on either actors, processes or structures, many existing labour migration policy studies are unable to explain such complex policy

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variation. I outline this analytical critique briefly here (more details in Paul 2015) as a backdrop in order to justify my choice of governance analysis as an alternative approach. Several studies excel in analysing the governance processes by which migrants are defined as ‘legal’ in policies. Legal scholarship has offered valuable accounts of the normative foundations of migrant selection processes, for example in analysing the EU’s legal framework (e.g., Baldaccini et al. 2007; Guild 2005; Peers 2001). Yet, such accounts tend to disregard the wider socio-economic structures that shape the emergence of such selection processes. Most legal studies further tend to leave unexplored those sources of variation that stem from the agency of individual institutional and political actors, thereby stopping short of explaining how and why particular governing processes shape public policy (see Carmel, Chapter 2). The role of actors is better addressed in studies that illuminate preference formation and decision-making processes between political parties, trade unions, employers and non-state actors towards liberal migrant recruitment (e.g., Cerna 2009; Devitt 2011; Menz 2009, 2010; Menz and Caviedes 2010). Beneficial entry regimes for high-skilled migrant workers are explained, for instance, by reference to the specific interests of employer groups, and the alliances of business-friendly parties and humanitarian-driven parties or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (e.g., Berg and Spehar 2013; Cerna 2009; Menz 2010). Yet, actor-centred labour migration policy analyses also present socio-economic structures as a rather static backdrop for actors’ preference formation and power struggles, and tend to oversimplify complex processes of policy definition. In particular, for example, the idea that high-skilled migration is a booster for competitiveness may be identified as a common feature in many European countries. However, the meaning of competitiveness is reworked in different contexts with diverse notions of social and cultural belonging. These meanings, and the political choices and action they imply, need due attention to the governance of policy context (see Paul 2012a). Other studies have provided more insights into how specific macro-economic and political structures interact with policymaking processes concerning foreign workforce admissions. Ruhs and Anderson (2010) explain who needs migrant workers in the UK by showing how public funding shortages for social care reinforce the need for cheap migrant labour in this sector. Evidence from a comparative analysis of policies in six EU countries indicates that ‘different models of political economy shape distinct strategies for labour recruitment from abroad’, with an overall tendency of putting labour migration policies at the service of the competition state (Menz 2009: 261). This reveals the close interaction of labour migration management with the rationalities of the post-Fordist political economy and its promotion by business-friendly actors and the EU. However, similarly to Ruhs and Anderson, Menz somewhat

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downplays the processes whereby the policies, enacted in governing practices themselves, mediate and challenge the weight of economic structures, for example by conflating skills-based with culture-based admission criteria or by challenging dominant modes of firms’ migrant recruitment strategies in times of perceived ‘crises’ (see Paul 2015, 2016). Governance analysis alerts us to the public policy conditions in flanking fields such as social care services highlighted so aptly in Ruhs and Anderson’s volume (2010) or the capitalist varieties which Menz (2009) and Menz and Caviedes (2010) rightly establish as sources of policy variation. These are not stable or deterministic structural contexts for the selection of ‘legal’ migrant workers. Instead, migration policies are likely to involve processes of political decision-making which enact judgments about how the national economy, labour market, welfare state, European labour mobility for EU workers, and other structures of belonging, should contribute to defining migrant legality. This critique rehearses the wider methodological cleavage in public policy analysis between positivist and interpretive approaches. Governance analysis investigates the relationship between actors, structures and governance processes in policymaking, and allows us to systematically reconstruct the norms which guide policy choices. Indeed, norms can be understood as emerging from the interplay of structural preconditions (e.g. specific forms of welfare provision or economic coordination in my example) and the processes by which some of these contextual features are selected as policy-relevant2 in governance processes (see also Paul 2015, 2016; Carmel 1999 and Chapter 3, this volume; Stone 2012). Anderson’s (2013) account of UK immigration control is illustrative: by imposing onto the population the normative vision of a ‘community of value’ which is law-abiding and hard-working, far-reaching effects on the rights of aliens and citizens alike unfold. Similarly, Hansen and Hager (2010) show how EU citizenship policies were generated by purposeful attempts to form increasingly utilitarian and Euro-ethnicized models of belonging. This problematization shows that policies have not been adequately disentangled as attempts to govern labour inflows according to policymakers’ specific normative visions of who should count as a ‘legal’ migrant worker and why. Policies are deployed in ways that mediate and selectively rework the structural conditions for migrant worker recruitment. They (re)arrange competing institutional frameworks in ways that enable the achievement of multiple and competing policy goals at once, including goals that at first glance seem rather distant from the allegedly economic rationality of foreign labour recruitment, and these aspects of migration governance have been underestimated in existing studies.

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GOVERNANCE ANALYSIS AND COMPARATIVE LABOUR MIGRATION POLICIES Responding to the analytical shortcomings of existing labour migration policy accounts, governance analysis aided my study to contribute a systematic appreciation of: how, in their attempts to govern the admission of migrant workers in complex classification processes, policy actors in different countries utilize and negotiate the various structural conditions in the wider institutional setting. I was able to show how the variable recourse to these contextual factors can explain variation in labour migration policies. Governance analysis highlights that policy complexity is not random but becomes explicable in examining the specific and contextualized interactions of multiple structural conditions and the governance processes by which policymakers strategically select some of these structures to guide the combinations of norms which are vested in particular policies. In this study (Paul 2015) the key analytical relationship in the governance analysis framework (see Chapter 3, Figure 3.2) concerned processes and structures. Actors – in my case the governments of three different EU member states – were rather treated as analytical contexts in which processes of migration policymaking are governed and negotiated in interaction with institutional structures. In other words: the study sought to identify and explain the complex variation in labour migration policies across three analytical contexts (the governments of the UK, France and Germany serve as accrued units of actors3 to be compared) by examining in-depth the interactions between: migrant classification processes in policies, as described in the previous section, and the institutional structures of the respective economy, welfare state and wider model of civic belonging. This section reconstructs my governance analysis of labour migration policies in Europe in two steps: first, comes a theoretical elaboration of the expected relationships between the structure of the economy, welfare state and citizenship regime, and the three countries examined here. Second, I reconstruct key relationships between those structures and migrant worker classification processes. Overall, I explain how UK, French and German policymakers justify these relationships as attempts to order politically a whole range of issues through their selective definition of migrant worker ‘legality’. The original study relied on document analysis of all effective legislation as of May 2011 and the analysis of interviews with leading policymakers in Berlin/Bonn, London and Paris who justified the choice of specific selection processes and policy tools. The study’s results do not address more recent developments and equally exclude non-work-related admissions.

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Structural Features as Labour Migration Policy Contexts across Cases My study identified an economic, social and civic dimension of ‘borderdrawing’ (Paul 2015). It extracted the relevance and role of each country’s economic coordination model, welfare state arrangements, and citizenship regime in its migrant worker classifications. This approach highlights that it might not only be the labour needs of a liberal vs. a coordinated market economy that explains policy variation (as largely assumed in the studies reviewed above). This opens the analytical space for considering hypothetical non-economic drivers of labour migration policies, which seem better suited to explaining migrants’ selection by origin or annual caps, for instance. A brief summary of key structures in the UK, France and Germany and their hypothetical influence on policy norms founds the theoretical basis for then discussing how these structural conditions are actually employed (and potentially also ignored or challenged) in migrant classification processes. Economic structures diverge considerably across the three cases under scrutiny. For example, the UK has been associated with market-based modes of economic coordination (e.g. Schmidt 2002), with UK ‘market capitalism’ being expected to concentrate more on generic and also lower skills in migrant admission policies (Menz 2009; also Durrant, Chapter 4). The government’s ‘liberal arbiter’ function in this case (Schmidt 2002) would entail a focus on simple satisfaction of economic demands without recourse to other socio-political agendas. Further, the UK’s deregulated labour market involves few long-term commitments, high turnovers, and limited social entitlements for workers (Hall and Soskice 2001; Schmidt 2002). This then entails lower social costs of liberal labour migration approaches. In contrast, Germany is widely regarded as an archetypical coordinated market economy (CME) in ‘varieties of capitalism’ theory (Hall and Soskice 2001). This mainly suggests high and specific skills recruitment and facilitating companies’ recruitment of such workers through labour migration policies (Menz 2009). France, lastly, shares some CME characteristics with Germany: a focus on high and specific skill recruitment, trust relationship between firms and sectoral coordination patterns (Amable 2003). Its ‘state-enhanced’ model of capitalism suggests a stronger role for statutory management of the economy in which French governments acting as ‘interventionist leader’ actively shape conditions for firms’ competitiveness (Schmidt 2002). Social structures, mainly those of welfare provision, seem to exacerbate such economic conditionalities for migrant worker admissions. The UK is usually classified as a liberal-residual type of welfare state regime (e.g. Esping-Andersen 1990) with residual welfare provisions, meagre social insurance plans, and means-tested ‘basic safety net’ benefits informing low levels of decommodification and relatively high social stratification. In the

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UK, migrant workers do not usually gain substantial social entitlements through their employment. The Conservative–Corporatist model of welfare provision in my other two cases (Esping-Andersen 1990) chooses social insurance of the Bismarckian kind over tax-funded social assistance to create contribution-based social entitlements, although this has been subject to recent change. If they access insured employment, workers’ social status is maintained in times of illness, old age or unemployment via entitlements to fixed wage replacement rates which are founded on public pension, unemployment or health insurance contributions paid directly from workers’ wages. In turn, given relatively secure employment and social rights in CMEs, tight regulation of initial labour market entries is likely, to avoid migrants’ accrual of relatively extensive social rights. In the liberal UK regime, where welfare entitlements stem less directly from labour market participation, initial entry-control is less likely to be problematized (cf Ruhs 2013). Civic notions of migrant inclusion serve as a third structural context of policies. Here, France and the UK seem closer to one another, while Germany is the odd one out. According to citizenship scholars (e.g., Howard 2009; Joppke 2005), the former two have traditionally featured ‘civic’ models of migrant inclusion with territorial citizenship (ius soli) and political belonging. Germany has long relied on ‘ethnic’ integration and descent-based citizenship (ius sanguinis), especially in facilitating the inclusion of the German Diaspora from former Soviet territories (Aussiedler and Spätaussiedler). In these accounts, colonial history is a key backdrop for the design of policies. In the absence of strong lasting colonial bonds, Germany had neither experienced relevant population exchanges, yet neither did legal principles of an early liberal democracy demand an expansion of rights beyond ethnic bonds (Howard 2009). This dual integration pressure was much higher in the UK and France and has informed the civic non-origin-based approaches to nationality law. Despite their common historical goal of formally recognizing ‘foreign’ residents from the respective colonial empires (subjects were not considered ‘foreign’ in legal terms until the mid-twentieth century), the UK and France have developed rather different sets of citizenship policies. In UK multiculturalism, specific group identities were actively preserved and promoted with the goal of preserving ‘moral public order’ and social cohesion based on a consensus around ‘good’ race relations and tolerance (e.g. Favell 2001). In French assimilationism, the creation of a shared national identity is a normative goal of civic citizenship policymaking. Overcoming group differences becomes a key target of migrant integration policies (Favell 2001). A further complication stems from European integration. As ‘free movers’ under EU law, EU-nationals are also exempted from labour market controls and do not fall under member states’ migration and integration policy rules. EU rules then ‘exercise an important constraint on member states’ national

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prerogatives in the area of migration policy’ (Boswell and Geddes 2011: 200). We can see that economic, social and civic institutions in each country need not always pull in similar policy directions. Many labour migration policy studies assume rather straightforward connections between economic coordination models and policy design, only subject to challenge by trade unions’ labour market protectionism (Cerna 2009; Devitt 2011; Menz 2009, 2010; Menz and Caviedes 2010). Yet such connections are significantly complicated by their interaction with social and civic integration structures. Relationships between Structures and Migrant Classification Processes The study in this case was conducted in a two-step interpretive framework (e.g. Wagenaar 2011; Yanow 2000; Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2006). First, it reconstructed from legislation the classifications entailed in definitions of migrant legality (e.g. sets of conditions for entry such as ‘high skill level’ or ‘non-reliance of welfare benefits’ or ‘origin from country X’). Secondly, it inquired about the structural backdrops which have guided the strategic selection of such norms in interviews with policymakers by asking them for policy justifications and rationalities. Some key examples follow to highlight how the selective arrangement of migrant worker ‘legality’ works across cases. Migrant selection processes in the initial points-based system in the UK, as instigated in 2008, largely reflected expected logics of the liberal market economy. Scarcity and skill level evaluations established migration workers’ points and enabled mainly supply-driven entries. Since the introduction of an overall cap on entries, this logic is challenged, as policy comprises economic competitiveness and labour shortage arguments (Paul 2012a) inflected with distinctly UK social cohesion concerns and numerical migration control. Interview data suggested that high levels of Eastern European mobility since 2004 and the related experience of ‘adverse effects’ of free movement on the public infrastructure (schooling and housing were particularly mentioned) muted the liberal market economy’s openness to labour migration since 2010 (more in Paul 2016), and this, of course, has become more evident in the post-referendum period. The earlier liberal promotion of EU mobility has first come to justify policymakers’ deliberate restrictions of the liberal economic labour supply model for non-EU workers, and ultimately (Br)exit from the free movement regime altogether. This tough border control mode, however, coincided with a resounding silence on postcolonial residence and migration. On the one hand, liberal EU mobility and simultaneous restrictions for non-EU workers have, in practice, substituted for the empirically highly relevant postcolonial labour market links and thus fuelled an apparent detachment from the former empire (McDowell et al. 2009). (The discriminatory practice that such detachment hid, however,

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was revealed in the 2017 postcolonial ‘Windrush’ scandal about the legal status of very long-term residents.) On the other hand, the ‘wilful negligence’ of the huge pool of unauthorized migrant workers in official UK policymaking (Wilkinson and Craig 2011) – in contrast to its explicit discussion in France, for instance – suggested that the logics of cheap and flexible labour recruitment so typical of the liberal market economy structure might continue to unfold underground. In the UK case, governance analysis was able to explain and evaluate the distinct normative choice to ignore the ongoing presence and utility of informal migrant workers in formal policymaking. The French ‘chosen migration’ approach rather works in an opposite direction to that in the UK. Policymakers largely justified immigration choisie as an attempt to establish economic rationalities as the leading logic in migrant admissions. Admission criteria for labour migration would signal desirability and undesirability far beyond the realm of work, and especially to migrant residents of postcolonial descent who were contextualized as less ‘useful’ economically speaking. I identified a melange of migrant ‘legality’ definitions by economic utility, including scarcity and high or specific skills and by (non-) origin from former colonies. The competitiveness norms of a dirigiste or interventionist state4 discussed above could account for admission routes such as the ‘skills and talents’ permit (Paul 2012a). But this explanation required further contextualization to explain the coexistence and amalgamation of these norms with ethnic selection processes in a postcolonialist setting (see Spire 2005). Governance analysis, by contrast, clearly revealed how the targeted treatment of nationals from former colonies in bilateral migration management agreements combined with the Sarkozy government’s emphasis on economic classification processes operated to deliberately silence postcolonial notions of belonging (see also Morice and Potot 2010). In Germany, the perceived labour demands of the CME, especially for higher skilled workers and specific professionals in engineering, social care or medicine, were catered for with a skills-based differentiation in admissions. In addition, policies’ strong focus on domestic qualifications sets the case apart from France and the UK. As interviewees argued, the marked selection by the origin of workers’ qualifications was not just meant to shield the German vocational education system and its coordinated institutionalization from foreign (assumed sub-standard) competition. Rather, the emphasis on domestically acquired skills was also underpinned by the assumption that certified education and training in the receiving country opens a viable pathway to successful socio-economic integration in the Bismarckian welfare state and CME setting. Most strikingly, legal residents with insecure status (Geduldete: rejected asylum seekers who cannot be expelled) can gain access to secure residence based on prior economic or educational performance. This would then trump their formal lack of legal status. Consequently, migrant selection processes in

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Germany do not just cluster around the structural features of the CME. Instead they couple economic classification by skill level and scarcity with the social integration logics of the Bismarckian welfare state (see Paul 2012b). Lastly, selection by origin has no postcolonial flavour, and Germanic descent has equally lost its importance in civic inclusion processes, as incoming ethnic Germans from Russian territories were increasingly subjected to Bismarckian demands for ‘earned integration’ just as every other newcomer. However, interview data suggested that an ethno-centric and geopolitically motivated model of belonging has not been abandoned in Germany. Instead it has rather been expanded to include nationals of the enlarged EU (see also Hansen and Jonsson 2012; Hansen and Hager 2010; Schönwälder 2004). Overall, for the German case, governance analysis of the relationship between structures and processes of migrant classification revealed two dynamics at play. The strategic use of Bismarckian welfare state integration logics as an available ‘repertoire’ for defining the economic desirability of migrant workers (Paul 2012b), and also the ‘strategic contextualization’ of German labour migration policies in direct interaction with the EU mobility framework (Paul 2013). My comparative governance analysis concluded that cross-nationally shared processes of defining migrant ‘legality’ by common economic norms interacted with nationally distinct social and civic classification processes, deeply enshrined in the interwoven histories of colonialism and migration in each case, and that these jointly explain complex policy variation. I was able to show that the specific interactions of structures and migrant selection processes in each case are neither random nor functionally predetermined. They are strategically vested into public policies as policymakers take normative decisions about what structural features should and should not co-shape migrant selection processes and why.

APPRAISING COMPARATIVE GOVERNANCE ANALYSIS: THE POLITICAL ORDERING OF MIGRANT WORKERS This section discusses the analytical contributions of governance analysis to comparative (migration) policy analysis. Its main strengths are identified in the ability to explain complex cases as empirical wholes, especially founded on its potential to expose the relationship between structures and the norms vested in migrant classification processes, its associated usefulness in case-sensitive comparisons, as well as an in-built reflexivity on the political ordering effects of policies. First, governance analysis aided a systematic identification of the specific relationships between migrant classification processes, their normative underpinnings, and entrenched institutional structures across three countries. It was

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this attribute that enabled me to explain cases as complex empirical wholes. By reflecting on the divergent structures of capitalist economies, welfare states or citizenship regimes first and then reconstructing from document and interview analysis how these structures simultaneously inform and are challenged by labour migration policies, the study avoided collapsing process and structural analysis. For example, a careful analysis of the specific impact of economic contexts on the meaning of ‘high-skilled migration’ highlighted that such an analytical conflation is misleading. Instead, I found the appeal of high skills being structurally embedded in highly variable ways. To exclude the political struggle over context itself from the analysis would have reduced complex public policymaking to the rather technocratic design of policy mechanisms which simply respond to the labour ‘needs’ of the post-Fordist capitalist economy. Indeed, governance analysis clarifies the hitherto dominating economic (positivist) explanations within labour migration policy analysis by elucidating how social and civic classification norms consistently interact with and challenge the ‘legality’ even of the ‘best and brightest’ migrant workers who these countries allegedly need so desperately. Consequently, I was also able to explain variation in what competitiveness, ‘skill’ and ‘talent’ mean across countries (and across time and subsequent crisis frames – see Paul 2016) and how these concepts were limited by competing norms. By emphasizing the structural features of state-managed capitalism as relevant for admissions and simultaneously minimizing the weight of Republican citizenship in France, or by amalgamating the norms of the CME with Bismarckian welfare provision in Germany, states govern not just entry conditions for migrant workers but also always redefine notions of citizenship, legitimate welfare entitlements or economic utility through public policymaking (for a similar point see Anderson 2013) that in turn then reproduces or transforms these conceptual framings. Second, with its analytical focus on the complex relationships of actors, processes and structures, governance analysis proves to be suitably sensitive to context without compromising on analytical parsimony in case-oriented comparative explanations. Ideographic comparisons are known to be ‘better suited to consider historical and political contingency of macro-social units’ than are large-n, variable-oriented studies (Ebbinghaus 2005: 149), precisely because they seek to be ‘sensitive to the complex and conditional causal [or rather: constitutive] relationships and intertwined levels of analysis that most closely approximate our intuitive understanding of how the political world really works’ (Coppedge 2006: 105). Governance analysis offers an especially promising venue in that regard. For example, the analytical separation of classification processes and structural context and the subsequent analysis of their specific interaction in each country was crucial in explaining the coexistence of similar patterns of select-

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ing workers by their economic utility with strikingly diverse classifications by their origin (e.g. explicitly postcolonial in France, silenced postcolonial in the UK). This was probably most evident in the three countries’ greatly diverse recourse to the EU mobility regime in their design of non-EU admission policies. The shared preference for Eastern Europeans in response to most skilled and all lower-skilled labour shortages has been amalgamated with national migration control aims that target restrictions to workers and residents of very specific origins (say Turkish minorities in Germany or residents from the Maghreb in France). These reflections resonate with a methodological choice encapsulated in governance analysis (see Carmel, Chapter 3). The analytical dedication to policy context informs a methodological commitment to interpretive policy analysis, suggesting that ‘[t]o explain something in an interpretive manner is to situate it in its proper context. By grasping the context, I make sense of whatever it is that needs to be made sense of’ (Wagenaar 2011: 23, my emphasis). Governance analysis has aided such a thick contextualized analysis by paying specific attention to the complex and multidimensional structural backdrops of the highly selective migrant admission processes. Governance analysis has shielded this study against ignoring important structural contexts, and thus against overestimating the economic or downplaying the postcolonial and ethnicizing selection rationalities of admission policies. This leads to my last reason for embracing (comparative) governance analysis. Unlike other accounts, a governance analysis of labour migration policies has as its chief analytical purpose the exposure of political ordering effects of public policy arrangements. This highlights, for instance, that the specific interaction of economic utility claims in admission processes with the socio-civic norms of belonging in each country is by no means mundane. To the contrary, it entails severe consequences for the exact set of entry requirements which migrants must meet in different European countries and thus unfolds specific powers of stratification and distribution of rights (cf. Carmel and Paul 2013). The exact demarcation line between legal and ‘illegal’ labour migration in each case is constituted in complex interactions of structures, processes and state actors which governance analysis helped untangle. If you happen to be a Senegalese engineer seeking admission in France, your nuclear technology doctorate is necessary but not sufficient for admission, as a bilateral agreement limits the number of entries. If you are Mongolian or Brazilian, however, your qualification alone determines your access to the French ‘skills and talents’ permit. If you are unfortunate enough to be the 20,701st applicant in tier 2 of the UK points-based system, your specific engineering skills might match a shortage route profile perfectly, but your application will nonetheless be in vain as the annual cap has already been reached.

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With its proximity to scholarly traditions of investigation and critique (Carmel, Chapter 3), governance analysis illuminated that this complex and multi-faceted, but always very specific, ‘border-drawing’ activity (more on this concept in Paul 2015) constitutes a key practice to achieve the political ordering of migrant workers. (The political ordering effects of this specificity can also be contrasted with the deployment of ambiguity as integral to governing practices and their ordering effects. This is discussed by Durrant, Chapter 4; Morgan, Chapter 6; and Harlock, Chapter 7.) The charted selectivity makes the muddled and contradictory field of labour migration governable in the first place. As interview data highlights, multidimensional border-drawing offers policymakers a way of pursuing multiple, and even competing, goals by splitting up the policy domain into different regulatory realms (e.g. into three skill levels, see Paul 2012a), and by choosing and combining different structurally informed entry criteria for migrant workers in different realms. Governance analysis warns us that the real-life ordering effects of these diverse constructions of migrant ‘legality’, or any policy arrangement, must be integrated into our explanation and evaluation. As Carmel (Chapter 2) states, governance analysis ‘frees us to attend to the wider context and structural conditions in which governing is enacted, and with what implications for socio-political orders and inequalities in power’. This ambition entails the demand to consider the effects of specific patterns of governing practices. The migration case indicates that public policies govern migrant rights based on largely non-transparent intersections of their economic utility, their origin, the origin of their qualifications, their ethno-cultural background, or simply their number on a waiting list. In addition, it indicates that these intersections of rationalities matter greatly for the rights and livelihoods of those who are being governed by them. It is also clear that migrant classification processes exhibit the potential for renegotiating the very economic, social and civic structures which they have drawn on when designing policies. And, in a further critique, such reflections on the consequences of public policies also prompt the insight that, rather than operating as a source of rights, labour migration management establishes skills-based and origin-based hierarchies of privileges for migrant workers. It is thus likely to deepen the bifurcation between rich and formally educated peoples of the globe and poorer peoples with less formally high-skilled ‘human capital’. By linking the careful analysis of interactions between actors, processes and structures with a focus on the consequences of specific policy arrangements, governance analysis expands and critically substantiates the often rather narrowly defined boundaries of labour migration policy studies.

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NOTES 1. Since 2011 these agreements have also covered Russia, thus breaking with the postcolonial logics somewhat. 2. The selection and accentuation of some norms as policy relevant, as well as their specific combination, is what I refer to as ‘strategic’ governance here. This conceptualization is inspired by the work of Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop (2013). 3. This is a highly simplified concept of agency, of course, and other contributions to this volume offer much more nuanced analyses in that regard (see, e.g. Durrant, Harlock, Farr, Morgan-Trimmer and Kan). My interest in a comparative governance analysis able to account for complex variation across countries led to an analytical emphasis on the relationships between classification processes and institutional structures. It turned countries’ policy-making actors – ministers, influential civil servants, policy advisers in parliament committees, employer and trade union representatives, etc. – into an accrued ‘actor’, providing an analytical and methodological backdrop for exploring how relations between governance processes and structures explain policy variation on a macro level of comparison. There were important political and institutional nuances among actors, too, that shaped normative and strategic selectivity, and I have discussed these in other work cited in the reference list. 4. Grand state rhetoric promoting the ‘shining of France throughout the world’ has accompanied the introduction of the ‘skills and talents’ permit in 2006, for example. At the same time, business representatives in interviews did not see the economic need for constructing high-skilled permits and suggested that these new permits might ‘be more in the interest of the French state than employers, really’ (interview with Medef representative, Paris, May 2010).

REFERENCES Amable, B., 2003. The Diversity of Modern Capitalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anderson, B., 2013. Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baldaccini, A., E. Guild, and H. Toner (Eds.), 2007. Whose Freedom, Security and Justice?: EU Immigration and Asylum Law and Policy, Oxford/ Portland: Hart Publishing. Berg, L. and A. Spehar, 2013. Swimming against the tide: Why Sweden supports increased labour mobility from within and from outside the EU, Policy Studies, 34(2), 142–161. Boswell, C. and A. Geddes, 2011. Migration and Mobility in the European Union, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Carmel, E., 1999. Concepts, context and discourse in a comparative case study, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 2(2), 141–150.

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Carmel, E. and R. Paul, 2013. Complex stratification: understanding the European Union governance of migrant rights, Regions & Cohesion, 3(3), 56–85. Cerna, L., 2009. The varieties of high-skilled immigration policies: coalitions and policy outputs in advanced industrial countries, Journal of European Public Policy, 16(1), 144–161. Coppedge, M., 2006. Thickening thin concepts and theories: combining large N and small N in comparative politics, in: A. Sica (Ed.), Comparative Methods in the Social Sciences, London: Sage, pp. 94–107. Devitt, C., 2011. ‘Varieties of capitalism, variation in labour immigration’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37(4), 579–596. Ebbinghaus, B., 2005. When less is more: selection problems in large-N and small-N cross-national comparisons, International Sociology, 20(2), 133–152. Esping-Andersen, G., 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press. Favell, A., 2001. Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Guild, E., 2005. Who is entitled to work and who is in charge? Understanding the legal framework of European labour migration, in D. Bigo and E. Guild (eds), Controlling Frontiers. Free Movement into and within Europe, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, pp. 100–139. Hall, P. and D. Soskice (Eds.), 2001. Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hansen, P. and S.B. Hager, 2010. The Politics of European Citizenship: Deepening Contradictions in Social Rights and Migration Policy, Oxford/ New York: Berghahn Books. Hansen, P. and S. Jonsson, 2012. Imperial origins of European integration and the case of Eurafrica: a reply to Gary Marks in: ‘Europe and its empires’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 50(6), 1028–1041. Howard, M.M., 2009. The Politics of Citizenship in Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Joppke, C., 2005. Selecting by Origin: Ethnic Migration in the Liberal State, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McDowell, L., A. Batnitzky, and S. Dyer, 2009. Precarious work and economic migration: emerging immigrant divisions of labour in Greater London’s service sector, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33(1), 3–25. Menz, G., 2009. The Political Economy of Managed Migration: Nonstate Actors, Europeanization, and the Politics of Designing Migration Policies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Menz, G. 2010. Employers, trade unions, varieties of capitalism, and labour migration policies, in: G. Menz and A. Caviedes (Eds.), Labour Migration in Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 25–53. Menz, G. and A. Caviedes, 2010. Introduction: patterns, trends, and (ir)regularities in the politics and economics of labour migration in Europe, in: G. Menz and A. Caviedes (Eds.), Labour Migration in Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–22. Morice, A. and S. Potot (Eds.), 2010. De l’Ouvrier Immigré au Travailleur sans Papiers. Les Étrangers dans la Modernisation du Salariat, Paris: Édition Karthala. Paul, R., 2012a. Limits of the competition state: the cultural political economy of European labour migration policies, Critical Policy Studies, 6(4), 379–401. Paul, R., 2012b. Managing diverse policy contexts: the welfare state as repertoire of policy logics in German and French labour migration governance, in H. Vad Jønsson, E. Onasch, S. Pellander and M. Wickström (Eds.), Migrations and Welfare States: Policies, Discourses and Institutions, Helsinki/Jyväskylä: Bookwell, pp. 139–174. Paul, R., 2013. Strategic contextualization: EU free movement, labour migration policies and the governance of foreign workers in Europe, Policy Studies, 34(2), 122–141. Paul, R., 2015. The Political Economy of Border-Drawing: Arranging Legality in European Labor Migration Policies, New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books. Paul, R., 2016. Negotiating varieties of capitalism? Crisis and change in contemporary British and German labour migration policies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 42(10), 1631–1650. Peers, S., 2001. Aliens, workers, citizens or humans? Models for Community immigration law, in: E. Guild and C. Harlow (Eds.), Implementing Amsterdam. Immigration and Asylum Rights in EC Law, Oxford/Portland: Hart Publishing, pp. 291–308. Ruhs, M., 2013. The Price of Rights. Regulating International Labor Migration, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ruhs, M. and B. Anderson (Eds.), 2010. Who Needs Migrant Workers? Labour Shortages, Immigration, and Public Policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schmidt, V., 2002. The Futures of European Capitalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schönwälder, K., 2004. Why Germany’s guestworkers were largely Europeans: the selective principles of post-war labour recruitment policy, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 27(2), 248–265. Spire, A., 2005. Étrangers à la Carte, Paris: Édition Grasset & Fasquelle.

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Stone, D., 2012. Policy Paradox. The Art of Political Decision-making, 3rd edition, New York/London: Norton. Sum, N-L. and B. Jessop, 2013. Towards a Cultural Political Economy: Putting Culture in its Place in Political Economy, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Wagenaar, H., 2011. Meaning in Action: Interpretation and Dialogue in Policy Analysis, New York: M.E. Sharpe. Wilkinson, M. and G. Graig, 2011. Wilful negligence: migration policy, migrants’ work and the absence of social protection in the UK, in: E. Carmel, A. Cerami, and T. Papadopoulos (Eds.), Migration and Welfare in the New Europe: Social Protection and the Challenges of Migration, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 177–190. Yanow, D., 2000. Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Yanow, D. and P. Schwartz-Shea (Eds.), 2006. Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, New York: M.E. Sharpe.

6. Understanding the complexity and implications of the English care policy system Fiona Morgan INTRODUCTION This chapter explores public policy affecting informal care in England. The governance analysis explains and evaluates how the English state treats the informal care of people aged 65 and over, in public policy practice. ‘Informal care’ describes the care and support delivered by people well known to the care recipient, such as relatives, spouses, partners, friends or neighbours. Together, these make a ‘caring dyad’. Older people may require a wide range of support to address their long-term care needs including personal care; domestic help; health care; social and emotional support; support with managing finances; advocacy and supervision (Bittman et al., 2004; Wolf, 2004). In requiring, and providing, informal care support, the caring dyad may experience inter-related poverty and welfare risks, individually and jointly. As noted in Morgan (2018), caring can give rise to increased expenditure on care-related costs (Carers UK, 2014) and affect working-aged carers’ labour market participation, which then lead to current and future income deficits (Evandrou and Glaser, 2003; King and Pickard, 2013; Milne et al., 2013). Care-giving can also have physical and mental health impacts (Tommis et al., 2009; The NHS Information Centre, 2010), and create time-poverty risks as informal carers attempt to reconcile their caring role with other responsibilities and pursuits. Informal care was once considered a private domestic issue, the responsibility of the family to manage and intentionally excluded from state intervention (Fraser, 1989). However post-industrial welfare states increasingly recognise the need to implement public policy to support those in need of long-term care and those engaged in informal care provision. Indeed, I have argued (2018) that informal care is a universal social risk and consequently states must provide social protection against these poverty and welfare risks through implementing appropriate care policies. Population ageing is increasing the 112

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necessity of taking policy action due to the unprecedented numbers of people surviving into old age and experiencing chronic health problems (Eurostat, 2011; Vlachantoni et al., 2011). Moreover, the number and diversity of informal carers is also projected to increase (Pickard et al., 2012). Together these factors explain the case being made for informal care being recognised as a crucial societal issue, and one for political intervention. They also highlight that complexity is a key characteristic of this policy area because states must implement a wide range of care policies if they are to address the diversity of informal carers’ characteristics, circumstances, and their care-related risks together with those of the older people they care for. The qualitative case study discussed in this chapter analysed the extent to which the English state treats informal care as a social risk through its care policies. This required a detailed empirical analysis of the policy context to expose how the English care policy system is constructed and operates in practice. Governance analysis facilitated a systematic examination of the multi-dimensional structural complexity of this public policy area, and the implications of governing practices for the statutory entitlements of the caring dyad and the social relations of the actors engaged in the policy system (Carmel, Chapter 3). This perspective enabled me to examine the characteristics of the care system’s institutional structures, which cut across multiple policy domains, including cash benefits, social care services and employment support. In turn, I was able to explore the institutional processes in each policy domain and their interactional dynamics, which determine the statutory protection care relationships can access. The ambiguity and contradictions inherent in the design and delivery of care policies meant that decisions based on statutory entitlements were resolved informally by practitioners, managers and by the caring dyad themselves. The analysis showed how front-line practitioners and managers engage in these processes and can shape the practice of public policy through their negotiations and decision-making. By examining policy-in-practice as a wider set of governing practices (Carmel, Chapter 2) this analysis showed how states can affect social relations at the level of individual relationships, not least between informal carers and the older people they care for.

ANALYSING THE ENGLISH CARE POLICY CONTEXT To assess the extent to which the English state treats the care-related risks of different types of care relationships as social risks, the study undertook a comprehensive analysis of the care policy system, incorporating two key elements. The first of these involved exploring three distinctive policy domains: social security benefits; employment; and social care services. The second involved acknowledging that care policies involve two inter-related risk-bearers – the

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informal carer and the care-receiver – on account of the relational nature of care (Morgan, 2016, 2018). Both members of the caring dyad may require financial support to compensate them for the costs incurred in requiring or providing care (Glendinning et al., 2009). Moreover, informal carers who need a break from caring to either have a rest, or participate in the labour market, may require replacement care services to be provided to the care-receiver (Burau et al., 2007). Informal carers may also need support, either to enable them to take time out of the labour market, e.g. through the provision of care leave or flexible working rights, or to enable them to re-enter the labour market via Jobcentre Plus (JCP) support (Glendinning et al., 2009). To understand the variability in statutory entitlements that different care relationships can access, the study had to engage with the institutional complexity of the English care policy system by investigating both formal and operational dimensions of governance (Carmel and Papadopoulos, 2003). This required a comprehensive analysis of institutional structures, processes and practices and their interactional dynamics to be undertaken (Carmel, 2017; Chapter 3). The structural complexity of the system is evidenced by the number of government departments responsible for operationalising the legislative rights and policy mechanisms associated with informal care in England (see Morgan, 2018). The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) oversees both the cash benefits system and the JCP agency that provides employment support for informal carers seeking work. At the time of the study the Department of Health covered state provision of social care; and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills oversaw employment-related support for informal carers working in the labour market. Individual policy mechanisms are in turn administered by a range of government bodies, and third sector and private sector agencies, including employer organisations, may be commissioned to deliver statutory support or have delegated responsibilities. An implication of the fragmented nature of these institutional structures is that the organisations concerned have self-contained institutional procedures. These are in turn associated with divergent eligibility criteria that determine individuals’ access to different types of statutory support. A range of distributive principles may be used to determine entitlement, including need, desert and citizenship (Fraser, 1994), as well as status, economic and time-related characteristics (Österle, 2001). A further structural feature which exacerbates this procedural fragmentation and generates entitlement disparities stems from how individual policy mechanisms are operationalised. The centralised administration of most cash benefits promotes national territorial equity in the financial support provided to adults with disabilities and informal carers (Bell, 2010). However, other responsibilities are devolved to local authorities, local JCP offices and employers to administer. This contributes to postcode and workplace ‘lotteries’, that is, arbitrary effects on individuals’ statutory

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entitlements depending on where they live and work (Commission for Social Care Inspection, 2008). Further disparities exist in the statutory entitlements of even similar types of individuals, on account of how policies are interpreted and realised in everyday practice by practitioners (Lipsky, 1980; Ellis, 2011). Furthermore the individualising effects of ‘personalisation’, a key government policy in employment and care services, augments the diversity of individuals’ entitlements, because statutory support should now be tailored to the outcomes each individual wishes to achieve (Department of Health, 2010b, 2016). Governance analysis supports a more nuanced understanding of how such ambiguous and incompatible eligibility criteria and policy interactions force practitioners and managers to make sense of the policy terrain through their own meaning-making and negotiations when determining individuals’ statutory entitlements (Yanow, 2000) and the implications of this for social inequalities (Carmel, Chapter 2; Harlock, Chapter 7). It is by the examination of these inter-related elements of governing practices that this research exposed how ‘policy’ is produced as governing practices on the ground in this complex policy environment. Eventually this analysis revealed significant exclusionary ordering effects of these governing practices, demonstrating that informal care-related risks are not treated as social risks in public policy in England. Methodological Approach The empirical research conducted during 2012–2013 used a policy simulation technique to analyse the treatment of different care relationships by English care policy. This qualitative methodological approach involved designing a set of ‘model care relationship matrices’ (see Morgan, 2016, 2018). Each matrix listed the policy mechanisms in each of: the cash benefits; care services; and employment support domains. These mechanisms were then examined to see how they applied to 13 ‘types’ of care relationship, presented in the form of vignettes. Each care relationship type featured an informal carer and an older person, but the caring dyad in each type had different configurations of characteristics to assess how these characteristics would affect their entitlements in each policy domain. The selected characteristics were informed by statistical data about informal carers in England, and the eligibility criteria of existing care policy mechanisms. The policy domain matrices thus provided a systematic framework capable of recording and comparing the statutory entitlements of each care relationship across multiple dimensions, including policy domains, policy mechanisms, localities and practitioners. A wide range of data sources were used to complete the matrices. These included legislation, policy regulations, government statements, papers and

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agency-provided information. These documentary data were verified and supplemented by data from 26 participants, including front-line practitioners and managers from statutory and third sector agencies, who either participated in a semi-structured interview or completed a questionnaire where requested. National-level data were used for the cash benefits and in-work employment support. Meanwhile, two localities were selected for collecting data on care services and JCP, as these were subject to local decision-making and varying degrees of discretion. Interviews were undertaken with equivalent institutional actors across the two localities, and multiple front-line practitioners in each local authority. As noted in Morgan (2016, 2018), the matrix data were analysed qualitatively using an interpretive policy analysis, which seeks to expose policy meanings (Yanow, 1996). This helped to reveal which care relationship types are deemed eligible to receive social protection and which are left unprotected. The interview data were also analysed thematically to explore trends within and across policy domains and practitioners in how informal care and care relationships are treated.

UNDERSTANDING THE COMPLEXITY OF THE CARE POLICY DOMAINS’ GOVERNANCE PRACTICES I discuss the application of governance analysis to the English care policy system case in distinct phases. First, I contextualise the complexity of the overarching care policy system by analysing the construction and operation of each care policy domain and their implications for the statutory support that people in informal care relationships can access. Second, I assess how governing practices intersect and interact across the policy mechanisms and domains. It is only by examining how actors, processes and structural conditions were related across these dimensions that the implications of the care policy system’s multi-faceted complexity can be understood. The key implications for the political ordering of social relations are: first, that systemic complexities undermine care relationships being able to access statutory protection from the state; and, second, they impact on the social relations of actors engaged in the care policy environment, including the lived experience of informal carers and the older people they care for. Cash Benefits: Structural Fragmentation and Opacity with Procedural Consistency The statutory entitlements of similar care relationships were the most consistent in the cash benefits domain. The predictability in determining individuals’ entitlement to access statutory outputs such as Carer’s Allowance, Carer’s Credits and Attendance Allowance is a product of the structural conditions

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found in this policy area. These include: the centralised administration of each benefit agency, and their uniform procedures whereby administrators use the same prescriptive DWP regulatory guidance to process claimants’ benefit applications. These institutional conditions prevent territorial inequalities from emerging. They also generally limit inconsistent statutory decision-making in individual cases. One exception to this is Income Support, a means-tested benefit for individuals on a low income, which required administrators to determine whether a potential claimant is ‘regularly and substantially caring’ (Department for Work and Pensions, 2012). As Morgan (2016) notes, decision-makers had to subjectively interpret these ambiguous regulations, with substantive implications for the treatment of carers. Access to Income Support formally acknowledged informal carers’ roles. It provided informal carers with additional monies via a carer premium and offered them limited protection from having to enter the labour market. Meanwhile exclusion from entitlement consigned ineligible claimants to the far more punitive and conditional unemployment benefit, Job Seeker’s Allowance (see Morgan, 2018). Despite the relative predictability in determining claimants’ eligibility, access to multiple benefits is undermined by the domain’s fragmentation and opacity. First, each cash benefit falls under the remit of its own designated agency, operating as an independent institutional silo with separate application processes and eligibility criteria. As this fragmentation is both structural and procedural, it also undermines transparency of entitlements for potential claimants. According to one third sector benefits advisor, this opacity is exacerbated because decision-makers for specific benefits are under no obligation to advise claimants about their potential benefit entitlements elsewhere. Second, interacting and incommensurate benefit rules and incompatible entitlement principles exist across various cash benefits (Morgan, 2016). This in turn has implications for the caring dyad’s awareness of their potential entitlements and their ability to claim them. This can affect an individual’s own benefit claims, as they are not permitted to receive two earnings-replacement benefits concurrently, such as Basic State Pension and Carer’s Allowance. These conditions can also affect entitlements within care relationships, because members of the caring dyad may each be subject to benefit eligibility rules purposefully designed to make mutually exclusive benefit entitlements, such as Carer’s Allowance (for carers) and Severe Disability Premium (for adults with care needs). In turn this excludes one member of the dyad from additional forms of statutory protection that each entitlement would otherwise bring (e.g. Carer’s Allowance protects carers from having to enter employment) (Morgan, 2018). Moreover, while the UK welfare system is predicated on a means-tested logic, certain cash benefits’ eligibility regulations treat economic characteristics anomalously. Such anomalies, which run counter to generalised

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assumptions of the welfare system, can increase the opacity of the system and consequently exacerbate people’s ignorance of their potential entitlements. For example, Morgan (2016, p.15) notes that Carer’s Allowance regulations exclude carers earning more than a set amount each week, but permit those with unlimited savings or unearned income to access this financial support. Moreover, personal allowances are more generous for individuals of pension age than working age, and this can affect entitlements to means-tested benefits, as well as claimants’ expectations: If you think about Mr Average in the street they are going to do some gate-keeping, they’d say there’s no way I’d get anything because I’ve got … a reasonable state pension, I’ve got some occupational pension … but they do because the [personal] allowances [for people over 65] are generous. (Third sector benefits advisor)

Employment Support: Structural and Procedural Fragmentation and Inconsistency In relation to employment, the statutory rights and support provided to informal carers in paid work are characterised by inconsistency. Informal carers’ entitlements to flexible working and care leave is institutionally affected by two factors; the structural fragmentation of employer organisations that operationalise the legislation; and vague procedural conditions that prescribe weak legislative rights. In terms of the former, the sheer scale and diversity of employer organisations implementing the legislation with no governmental regulatory oversight permits the level and types of support provided to informal carers to proliferate. Meanwhile, indeterminate procedural conditions mean that the operationalisation of the legislation by employers is more susceptible to the influence of organisational culture and size. These effects are visible in the case of the ‘right to take time off in an emergency’, because the legislation only requires employers to provide employees with unpaid emergency leave as the prescribed legal minimum (HM Government, 1999). However, some larger organisations voluntarily provide informal carers with more generous quotas of planned and paid care leave (Department of Health, 2010a). In contrast, a national third sector representative noted how smaller businesses can lack even an awareness of their basic statutory responsibilities: I think … it can be very difficult for businesses, particularly very small businesses to really read through all the legal jargon and actually understand what they are supposed to do.

Furthermore, there are only weak legal rights to flexible working (Morgan, 2018). Employees are only granted a statutory right to request flexible working (HM Government, 1996, 2006; Acas, 2014). Meanwhile employers only have

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a duty to consider the request seriously, can choose which types of flexible working arrangements, if any, to allow, and have the right to refuse employees’ requests on the basis of eight stipulated business reasons (HM Government, 2006, 2011). This permits institutional variations in the statutory support informal carers can access in different workplaces. Informal carers may also be treated inconsistently within individual organisations because decisions are affected by the knowledge and awareness of operational managers: [P]eople’s experience can be very, very, varied even in a really good employer that wins … top working families awards, you can still get examples of individual carers who will have a difficult experience because they are in a particular location with a line manager who doesn’t get it. (National third sector manager)

JCP support for informal carers seeking to enter work is also subject to inconsistency on account of structural and procedural conditions. The decentralisation of agency policies and procedures to JCP districts and local offices to administer permits significant territorial differences to emerge across localities: [D]istrict managers and advisors now have more flexibility about the provision they make available and how they allocate money from their budget to meet local priorities, so the support on offer may vary from district to district. (DWP Manager)

The discretionary decision-making of managers could therefore affect the extent to which informal carers are recognised, and so treated as a group of jobseekers with specific support needs at a strategic and operational level. For example, only some local JCP offices still had ‘carer champions’ who provided specialist advice to carers and permitted front-line advisors to access specialist carer training. Elsewhere there was a ‘move away from specialist advisor roles towards multi-skilling’ (DWP manager). Local policies and processes also varied, with significant financial implications for carers as they affected carers’ eligibility to access the Flexible Support Fund to assist with job-searching costs, and how much they would be charged for attending training courses. According to one local authority manager, for a small annual fee informal carers could attend further education college courses free of charge in one locality, while in the other locality informal carers in receipt of Income Support had to pay for ‘back-to-work’ training: have to pay an upfront commitment payment I call it, it’s £75, which if they finish the course successfully they get back. (JCP practitioner)

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The subjective decision-making of front-line practitioners, their strategic use of negotiations with managers, together with personalisation objectives, could also affect the consistency of support provided to informal carers: [E]very case [needs to] be looked upon on its merits [to] weigh up what was being asked for, the cost of what was being asked for, and the likelihood of that person moving into work as a result. (JCP practitioner) I do think that if an advisor … really felt that it was important and necessary it would be down to our negotiating skills to persuade the manager to allow it. (JCP Practitioner)

Whether JCP practitioners would seek to mitigate punitive institutional procedures (means-tested benefit claimants can be referred for financial sanctions if they are not deemed to be actively seeking work) was considered by one third sector benefit advisor to depend on their ‘kindness and discretion’. One JCP practitioner commented: I don’t really think that anybody has really got any excuse because they are never caring 24 hours a day.

Another sought to protect claimants by providing suggestive advice: well can you not try and do 35 hours [of care] and claim Carer’s Allowance? You can still look for work but without the pressure.

In this role of gatekeeper, the practitioners’ comments constitute a governing practice that significantly affects the caring dyad. These same comments also reproduced the bureaucratic rule as an unquestioned source of power and authority, to which interpersonal life must be adjusted. We can see in the employment support domain how fragmented institutional structures and processes combined with the inconsistent practices of institutional actors to produce unequal treatment of, and support for, informal carers, with significant implications for their wellbeing. Care Services: Structural and Procedural Fragmentation, Plus Opacity and Inconsistency In the care services domain the consistency of statutory support provided to care relationships across localities is also undermined by the fragmentation of local authorities’ decentralised governance arrangements. At the time of the study (prior to the implementation of the Care Act 2014), the national legislative framework permitted significant variation to emerge across local authorities in how they interpreted and operationalised their statutory functions.

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Consequently, territorial differences emerged on: local authority eligibility thresholds; the type and range of care services they provided to care relationships; and whether, or how much, they would charge individuals for this support (Department of Health, 2003, 2010b). Even people with similar levels of need could experience unequal access to statutory support, and inconsistent levels and types of support, with variable financial ramifications, on account of where they live. A unique feature of structural fragmentation and opacity in care services concerns the design of local authority procedures, and how they disaggregate the members of the caring dyad. There is no equivalence in legal rights to (a) have ones needs assessed and (b) receive care services. This historically allowed local authorities to develop separate processes for needs assessment and for resource allocation for informal carers and adults with care needs (HM Government, 1990, 2000). Designing local authority processes in this way promotes the separation of the caring dyad rather than acknowledging the inter-relational nature of caring. This procedurally enforced disaggregation could have significant implications for the wellbeing of care relationships. For example, one local authority used its adult social care team to conduct the older person’s needs assessments, but delegated its statutory responsibilities for carers’ assessments to a third sector carers’ organisation. One local authority manager suggested that the consequent ‘communications gap’ had undermined the inter-related needs of the caring dyad from being recognised, and had prevented holistic support being provided: How do you know as a social worker you are setting up the right care package if you haven’t talked to [the carers’ assessor] about what the carer’s needs are, because you haven’t spoken to the carer. And then saying to [the carers’ assessor] you’re saying the carer needs this, this and this, actually a lot of that is resolved if the care plan is right for the cared-for, so talk to the social worker and try and have some influence over the care plan.

Local authorities may also use separate resource allocation processes to authorise requests for statutory funding. Such diverse institutional processes, which lack internal transparency, served to marginalise informal carers’ needs within decision-making processes, and prevented the available support from addressing the collective wellbeing of relationships. Consequently one local authority had decided to channel all future funding requests via the same resource allocation panel in the hope that: [by] integrat[ing] carers’ needs into the bigger community care picture, decision-makers should reflect more on whether … we are doing enough in terms of care packages to cared-for people because we can’t expect carers to keep doing what they’re doing. (Local authority manager)

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Care services also show clearly how institutional actors’ subjective meaning-making and negotiations, combined with the individualising effects of personalisation, to undermine the consistency of statutory support provided to care relationships within, and across, local authorities. This further augmented the opacity and unpredictability of the policy domain. Moreover the extent to which practitioners, who assess the needs of informal carers and older people, and managers, who decide how local authority resources are spent, seek to mediate institutional processes and conditions varies considerably. This is more significant when perennial resource shortages are exacerbated by austerity-related budget cuts (Lymbery, 2012). Their practices could facilitate or hinder the caring dyad accessing statutory support at different stages of decision-making. At the time of the study, local authorities had a duty to offer a carer’s assessment to individuals providing a ‘substantial amount of care on a regular basis’ (HM Government, 1995). This judgement required the impact of the caring role overall to be considered, not solely the time spent caring (Department of Health, 2001). However, the use of ambiguous characteristics permitted practitioners to apply divergent and sometimes erroneous interpretations to the legislation. This resulted in inconsistent access to carers’ assessments both within and between local authorities (Morgan, 2016, p.14, 2018): substantial care is if the carer is living with the person they care for and are providing 24 hour care support. Regular care is if the carer is popping in every day. 10 minutes a day could be regular and substantial to someone who’s got … other commitments.

Meanwhile, the ‘personalisation approach’ requires practitioners to work in partnership with carers and older people in order to identify how they would prefer their needs to be met (Department of Health, 2010b). This approach clearly has individualising and diversifying effects on individuals’ levels of statutory support. However, practitioners also subverted these person-centred practices, and, in doing so, directly affected the statutory support provided. They intentionally withheld information from the caring dyad on account of their own assumptions about which services would most effectively meet their needs: Most people that we go and see we wouldn’t even mention the carers’ personal budget to them if we didn’t think that it was something they needed. (Third sector carers assessor)

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Or they did it in order to gate-keep statutory resources: because at the end of the day … we still have a responsibility for the public purse and you know it’s not a bottomless pit … and while you are giving everything to one person you can’t always give to the next … so you’ve got to weigh up needs. (Local authority practitioner)

Finally, resource allocation processes formed a key negotiation ‘battleground’ between managers and practitioners, with each side adopting their own, often conflicting, strategies in asserting their judgement and authority. The result was significant and unpredictable variations in the level of statutory support care relationships received, highlighting the importance of contingency in interpreting the implications of how governance works on the ground in this field (Carmel, Chapter 2). Practitioners were generally physically absent from the formal decision-making. This took place at resource allocation panels, staffed by local authority managers who act as budget holders; and by local authority administrators operating as resource brokers, who identify available support in the local care market. Practitioners who had undertaken the assessments instead supplied a written summary detailing the level of support required to meet individuals’ assessed needs. Resource allocation decisions lacked transparency because (1) they were dominated by institutional actors with no direct knowledge of the caring dyad; (2) codification of the needs assessment in formal documentation hides, rather than illuminates, the social context and professional understanding of the caring dyad; and (3) needs assessment was an object of contestation for the panel rather than a record of professional judgement. The resource panel members, whose primary objective was to gate-keep resources, could significantly affect the support the caring dyad received by amending the practitioners’ original request. One local authority manager acknowledged: I think like most local authorities the actual budget we have is … very tight … and so we are having to manage it differently … I think what you could possibly have gained authorisation for a few years ago … you wouldn’t get through now, you’d be challenged more.

Meanwhile practitioners described how resource brokers: may reduce what I am asking for … They will say ‘well actually it doesn’t take that long to do that, you can have this [instead]’. … what they are saying [is] 15 minutes for hoisting. Well you can’t do it.

Some practitioners sought to subvert these anticipated responses by using overt or subversive ‘sales pitches’ in their written funding requests. Their

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strategies included; ‘up-rating’ the amount of care requested to ensure individuals are provided with the actual level of support they need, or emphasising certain factors in the carers’ situation to increase the likelihood of support being provided: We could probably get three calls per day … because the carer’s at work … so they can’t be there at lunch time … If you were trying to sell it to panel you would sell it that way. If you’re expecting the daughter to do that it will probably break down. And that’s what you’ve got to keep saying, that it will probably break down.

However, other practitioners did not seek to mitigate resource allocation decisions, opting instead for passive strategies entailing less emotional labour: The main thing to do is to write your background information form to panel to get your services and they can make their minds up.

THE CARE POLICY SYSTEM AS A COMPLEX GOVERNING ENVIRONMENT So far in this chapter governance analysis has been used to decode the complexity of the care policy terrain and bring some semblance of analytical order to what constitutes an extremely messy policy area by: delineating the individual governance components of each care policy domain; identifying the key characteristics of complexity underlying governing processes; and showing how policy is produced by actors, in each area. It is to considering the implications of fragmentation, unpredictability, opacity, ambiguity and inconsistency for the wider functioning of the care policy system as a whole that we now turn. To fully understand the implications of the fragmented structure of the care policy system we focus on how the three policy domains interact. If care relationships are to be adequately protected against the range of care-related risks they experience, the care policy system needs to be aligned across policy areas and complementary policy conditionality needs to be ensured. However the siloed nature of institutional structures and processes, which operate according to different regulatory frameworks, prevents this. Moreover, ambiguous governance parameters permit organisations to determine the extent of their responsibilities and adopt protectionist attitudes towards agency budgets. These structural conditions hinder the co-production of multi-agency solutions to address informal carers’ needs. For example, informal carers seeking work or in employment face statutory support vacuums across policy domains: JCP only supports them during the job-seeking process; employer organi-

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sations face no legal requirements to subsidise the provision of replacement care services for their employees (Department of Health, 2010a); while local authorities may not fund back-to-work training for informal carers and are unlikely to provide sufficient daily care for carers to go out to work (Morgan, 2018). Elsewhere, I have shown (2018) how the complex structure of the care policy system requires informal carers to invest significant levels of physical and emotional labour into finding out what statutory support is available and negotiating access to it. People in care relationships must piece together their statutory entitlements, making separate applications for individual entitlements, which are serviced by different agencies, institutional processes, and practitioners. These structural conditions and their associated time and wellbeing impacts can undermine the caring dyad accessing statutory protection to address their care-related risks (see Morgan-Trimmer, Chapter 9 on social actors’ strategically selective engagement in governing). Variable eligibility criteria across policy mechanisms, together with opaque regulations and decision-making processes, mean the caring dyad are unable to predict whether their applications will be successful (Morgan, 2016, 2018). This unpredictability is exacerbated by complex and opaque policy interactions that can have significant implications for the caring dyad’s statutory entitlements due to their potentially conflictual nature. For example, carers have a legal right, as part of a carer’s assessment, to be supported by the local authority to engage in employment and education (HM Government, 2004, 2014). Yet their decision to do so could have implications for claiming Carer’s Allowance, which entails restrictions relating to earnings and time spent in education (Carers UK, 2018). Meanwhile, informal carers who are directly employed by the care-receiver to provide their care using a local authority direct payment may have to forfeit all other care-related entitlements including Carer’s Allowance, a carer’s assessment and access to carers’ services due to this changing their economic and employment status. A further implication of this complexity is that it can undermine the knowledge and awareness of policy practitioners about how the wider policy system functions, thereby limiting their ability to advise care relationships about the most suitable course of action to take. The ambiguities, contradictions and vacuums found within the care policy system’s regulatory frameworks, together with austerity-related budget cuts, force institutional actors to resolve these systemic uncertainties and inadequacies informally to determine care relationships’ eligibility and statutory entitlements. The care services domain, in particular, illustrates how these structural conditions produce a fertile environment for adversarial practices to develop. The high levels of scrutiny and

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modifications that resource allocation panel decision-makers subject funding requests to could produce resentment among practitioners: You do your assessment, that should be it really, but you have to go and talk to brokers, see what they suggest … Then it goes to panel and gets knocked back, you put it back to panel, it gets knocked back … So by the time you’ve done all that you’re thinking, why did I even bother going out?

To counteract the possibility of a funding request being rejected some practitioners invested significant levels of physical and emotional labour in advocating for care relationships within resource allocation negotiations, using terms like ‘battle’, ‘fight’, ‘plead’ and ‘argue’ to describe their interpersonal interactions with managers (cf Morgan 2018): At one time you could ask for 30 minutes for a lunch call … Now they are cutting it down to 15 minutes. You have to plead to get meal preparation.

Relational tensions also existed between the local authority and third sector organisations commissioned to undertake carers’ assessments. The latter perceived their primary role to be one of advocating for informal carers as opposed to gate-keeping local authority resources. We are not social services and we will come down on the side of the carer every time. (Third sector manager)

However, one local authority manager was critical of commissioned agencies not adhering to local authority practices: Issues can arise where you have got workers carrying out that commissioned work but their identity is so ingrained with the third sector provider that … they may not always represent the local authority in the best light and they may not appreciate their responsibilities as indirect employees of the local authority.

Third sector agencies perceived these tensions to have longer-term implications because they often relied on local authority funding, but recognised that their non-conformist stance in the context of scarce resources might place their organisations in a precarious financial position (see also Harlock, Chapter 7). This governance analysis clearly exposes how care policy is ultimately produced in real time through the informal practices and struggles of institutional actors navigating structural conditions and constraints. This in turn exacerbates the system’s complexity and inconsistency with implications for the statutory protection the caring dyad can access. It also serves to create adverse personal and organisational relations due to the power dynamics emerging from these complex governance practices (Morgan, 2018).

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IMPLICATIONS OF THE CARE POLICY SYSTEM FOR CARE RELATIONSHIPS’ SOCIAL RELATIONS Governance analysis provides the opportunity to extend our insights into ‘care policy’ as a messy and complex policy area to consider the relational impacts of the complex governing environment for the key policy targets of the care policy system – informal carers and the older people they care for – viewed as actors in governing processes. The methodological application of model care relationships allowed the state’s treatment of the caring dyad to be placed at the heart of the analysis. This helped expose how policy regulations, institutional processes, and practitioners treat the relational nature of care, and shape social relations between, and among, carers and the older people they care for. There are multiple ways in which the English care policy system does not take into account the relational nature of care, all of which have the potential to affect the caring dyad’s relations and wellbeing. The failure to recognise the inter-related nature of their needs was demonstrated most clearly in a case where the local authority had designed the carer personal budget’s regulations so the funding could solely be used to pay for support that only the informal carer (and not the care-receiver) would benefit from. Consequently, in a case where the members of the caring dyad lived together, a request for funding to clean the injured carer’s kitchen was refused because this service would also: benefit the cared-for person because it was a kitchen which she [the carer] had to use to prepare him food. (Third sector manager)

This perverse regulatory outcome left unmet the otherwise recognised needs of the care relationship, with potentially harmful consequences for their wellbeing and relationship. The governance analysis was able to highlight the implications of care policy and governing practices, by showing how the English state was able to shift risks between informal carers and care-receivers. It did so by designing policies which allow the care-related risks of only one risk-bearer to be socialised, while simultaneously generating or maintaining financial costs, time costs or welfare risks to be borne privately by the other. The potential for policy regulations to shift risks and generate relational tensions extends across the wider care relationship network because the Carer’s Allowance regulations permit only one carer per care-receiver to claim this statutory protection, even if several individuals meet the eligibility criteria for caring for the same person in their own right (Carers UK, 2018). Meanwhile in the care services domain, local authorities are lawfully entitled to subject care-receivers to a financial charge for the replacement care services provided to give their informal carer a break. Consequently, one local authority manager

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stated that the amount of statutory support provided to a care relationship would: ‘really be shaped by how much [the care-receiver] would be willing to pay’. Practitioners noted how some older people had refused replacement care services due to the financial costs they would incur, which had in turn left their informal carer without a break from their caring role (Morgan, 2018). These incommensurate and conflictual policy designs force people in caring relationships to negotiate with one another about their rights, to resolve policy-induced dilemmas. They must decide which of them will have their poverty or welfare risk alleviated by receiving support, and who will forfeit their own entitlement and accept ongoing or potentially increased risks for themselves. One third sector interviewee noted how informal carers may feel forced to be more explicit about the negative impact that the caring role is having on their lives during a social care assessment in an attempt to persuade the care-receiver to accept and pay for care services. Or else they may feel unable to publicly acknowledge the difficulties they are experiencing, thereby leading to resentment and/or exhaustion because their own needs are unmet.

CONCLUSION Despite the informal care of older people being an important ‘policy issue’, it is not subject to a clearly defined ‘policy domain’. Consequently it provides a very suitable policy area for governance analysis in this complex governing environment. Its application to this study enabled me to show that the informal care of older people is not treated as a social risk by the English state. It also enabled me to show how the care policy system provides inconsistent and inadequate statutory protection to people in care relationships and how this can augment the care-related risks they experience. Adopting the governance analytical framework helped to disentangle the overarching complexity of the English care policy environment in a systematic way. It revealed how the interaction of its structural components, conditions, institutional processes and practices used to navigate this policy environment shape the limits and possibilities of individuals’ accessing statutory support. A further strength of this analytical approach lies in the conceptualisation of policy as a social practice (Carmel, Chapter 2). This extended the scope of the care policy analysis to reveal the intended and unintended consequences of policy design and practice for the social relations of institutional actors, including the caring dyad as policy recipients. Breaking down the multi-faceted complexity of the care policy environment helps to deepen our understanding of how the system functions overall and with what effects. Not least it exposes how the care policy system itself can add to the harms facing care relationships by ignoring the relational nature of care and leaving caring dyads’ informal care-related risks unaddressed.

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REFERENCES Acas (2014), The Right to Request Flexible Working: An Acas Guide, London: Acas Publications. Bell, D. (2010), The Impact of Devolution. Long-Term Care Provision in the UK, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Bittman, M., J.E. Fast, K. Fisher and C. Thomson (2004), ‘Making the Invisible Visible. The Life and Time(s) of Informal Caregivers’, in N. Folbre and M. Bittman (eds), Family Time: The Social Organization of Care, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 69–89. Burau, V.D., H. Theobald and R.H. Blank (2007), Governing Home Care: A Cross-National Comparison, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Carers UK (2014), Caring and Family Finances Inquiry, UK Report, London: Carers UK. Carers UK (2018), What is Carer’s Allowance? accessed 10 December 2018 at www​.carersuk​.org/​help​-and​-advice/​financial​-support/​help​-with​-benefits/​ carers​-allowance​#sec0. Carmel, E. (2017), ‘“Bringing the Social Back In”: Governance Analysis as a Mode of Enquiry’, in R. Paul, M. Molders, A. Bora, M. Huber and P. Munte (eds), Society, Regulation and Governance: New Modes of Social Change? Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 38–58. Carmel, E. and T. Papadopoulos (2003), ‘The New Governance of Social Security in Britain’, in J. Millar (ed.), Understanding Social Security: Issues for Policy and Practice, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 31–52. Commission for Social Care Inspection (2008), Cutting the Cake Fairly. CSCI Review of Eligibility Criteria for Social Care, London: Commission for Social Care Inspection. Department for Work and Pensions (2012), Decision Makers’ Guide, accessed 22 May 2013 at www​.dwp​.gov​.uk/​publications/​specialist​-guides/​decision​ -makers​-guide/​#vol4. Department of Health (2001), Carers and People with Parental Responsibility for Disabled Children: Practice Guidance, London: HMSO. Department of Health (2003), Fairer Charging Policies for Home Care and Other Non-Residential Social Services. Guidance for Councils with Social Services Responsibilities, London: HMSO. Department of Health (2010a), Recognised, Valued and Supported: Next Steps for the Carers Strategy, London: HMSO.

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Department of Health (2010b), Prioritising Need in the Context of Putting People First: A Whole System Approach to Eligibility for Social Care – Guidance on Eligibility Criteria for Adult Social Care, London: HMSO. Department of Health (2016), Care and Support Statutory Guidance Issued under the Care Act 2014, accessed 25 July 2016 at www​.gov​.uk/​guidance/​ care​-and​-support​-statutory​-guidance. Ellis, K. (2011), ‘Street-Level Bureaucracy Revisited: The Changing Face of Frontline Discretion in Adult Social Care in England’, Social Policy & Administration, 45 (3), 221–244. Eurostat (2011), Healthy Life Years and Life Expectancy at Age 65 by Gender, accessed 5 September 2011 at epp​.eurostat​.ec​.europa​.eu/​portal/​page/​portal/​ statistics/​search​_database. Evandrou, M. and K. Glaser (2003), ‘Combining Work and Family Life: The Pension Penalty of Caring’, Ageing & Society, 23 (05), 583–601. Fraser, N. (1989), Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, Oxford: Polity. Fraser, N. (1994), ‘After the Family Wage: Gender Equity and the Welfare State’, Political Theory, 22 (4), 591–618. Glendinning, C., F. Tjadens, H. Arksey, M. Morée, N. Moran and H. Nies (2009), Care Provision within Families and its Socio-Economic Impact on Care Providers, York: Social Policy Research Unit, University of York. HM Government (1990), National Health Service and Community Care Act, London: HMSO. HM Government (1995), Carers (Recognition and Services) Act, London: HMSO. HM Government (1996), Employment Rights Act, London: HMSO. HM Government (1999), Employment Relations Act, London: HMSO. HM Government (2000), Carers and Disabled Children Act, London: HMSO. HM Government (2004), Carers (Equal Opportunities) Act, London: HMSO. HM Government (2006), Work and Families Act, London: HMSO. HM Government (2011), Consultation on Modern Workplaces: Flexible Working, London: HMSO. HM Government (2014), Care Act, London: HMSO. King, D. and L. Pickard (2013), ‘When is a Carer’s Employment at Risk? Longitudinal Analysis of Unpaid Care and Employment in Midlife in England’, Health & Social Care in the Community, 21 (3), 303–314. Lipsky, M. (1980), Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Lymbery, M. (2012), ‘Social Work and Personalisation’, British Journal of Social Work, 42 (4), 783–792.

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Milne, A., C. Brigden, A. Palmer and E. Konta (2013), ‘The Intersection of Employment and Care: Evidence from a UK Case Study’, European Journal of Social Work, 16 (5), 651–670. Morgan, F. (2016), ‘The Treatment of Informal Care as a Social Risk in England: Conceptual and Methodological Innovations in Undertaking Comparative Care Policy Analysis’, paper presented at ESPAnet Annual Conference, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 3 September. Morgan, F. (2018), ‘The Treatment of Informal Care-related Risks as Social Risks: An Analysis of the English Care Policy System’, Journal of Social Policy, 47 (1), 179–196. Österle, A. (2001), Equity Choices and Long-Term Care Policies in Europe: Allocating Resources and Burdens in Austria, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Pickard, L., R. Wittenberg, A. Comas-Herrera, D. King and J. Malley (2012), ‘Mapping the Future of Family Care: Receipt of Informal Care by Older People with Disabilities in England to 2032’, Social Policy and Society, 11 (4), 533–545. The NHS Information Centre (2010), Survey of Carers in Households 2009/10, Leeds: The Health and Social Care Information Centre. Tommis, Y., C.A. Robinson, D. Seddon, B. Woods, J. Perry and I.T. Russell (2009), ‘Carers with Chronic Conditions: Changes Over Time in Their Physical Health’, Chronic Illness, 5 (3), 155–164. Vlachantoni, A., R. Shaw, R. Willis, M. Evandrou, J. Falkingham and R. Luff (2011), ‘Measuring Unmet Need for Social Care amongst Older People’, Population Trends, 145, 60–76. Wolf, D.A. (2004), ‘Valuing Informal Elder Care’, in N. Folbre and M. Bittman (eds), Family Time: The Social Organization of Care, London and New York: Routledge, pp.110–129. Yanow, D. (1996), How Does a Policy Mean? Interpreting Policy and Organizational Actions, Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. Yanow, D. (2000), Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis, London: Sage.

7. Understanding the state–third sector relationship in public services delivery Jenny Harlock INTRODUCTION This chapter focuses on one particular type of actor, the third sector, and its role in public services delivery in England. It applies a governance analysis perspective to the third sector’s relationship with the state. In doing so, it offers a reconceptualisation of this relationship, as being constituted in the struggles between actors over the changed conditions of public service provision. It also reveals and explains the implications of those changed conditions for the actors involved. In order to do this, this chapter draws on evidence from a wider study into the changing relationship between the third sector and the state in public services delivery in England.1 The study involved analysis of national policy and developments in third sector–state relations over a 12-year period, 1998–2010, combined with in-depth interviews with social service commissioners and third sector organisations (TSOs) in two local authority areas in southern England. Following our thesis set out in Chapters 1–3, I argue that undertaking this governance analysis allows us to: 1. Identify the changed conditions under which TSOs are expected to operate in the provision of public services; 2. Examine how those changed conditions are negotiated and shaped in practice by TSOs and public sector commissioners; and 3. Explain the effects of these changed conditions and their implications for TSOs involved in public services delivery. The first section of the chapter explains recent key developments in the third sector’s role and relationship with the state in public services delivery in England. I discuss insights from previous research and reflect on some of the limitations and questions posed by these approaches. I argue that previous research on the third sector in public service delivery has revealed only ‘half the story’ by concentrating on the role and experiences of TSOs. Governance 132

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analysis brings the role and experiences of state actors in establishing the conditions for public services delivery into the picture, and examines how these are negotiated in practice with the third sector in the process of public services provision. Next, I turn to a discussion of our governance analysis perspective. I analyse recent policy developments towards the third sector in public services delivery, and explain how these national policies and their associated instruments strategically institute a marketised relationship between public sector commissioners and TSOs. I show how the governing processes (market mechanisms and instruments) for public service delivery that are promoted in these policies shape both TSOs’ relationships with public sector commissioners and also their space for action in the provision of public services. Governance analysis allows us to evaluate the implications of these policies and governing processes on TSOs – that is, how they privilege market-like behaviours, ways of working and types of organisation. In so doing I therefore also show the internal organisational effects of these governance processes on TSOs, as TSOs restructure themselves around the behavioural logics and adopt the business-like practices promoted by these policies. We find that TSOs that do not adopt market practices and business-like behaviours are likely to struggle to survive, particularly in a wider context of austerity. Governance analysis further allows us to capture and explain the relationship between changes in conditions established by national-level policies, discourses and instruments on the one hand, and how these are experienced, enacted and interpreted by local public sector commissioners in the provision of public services on the other. This perspective allows us to see that ‘the market’ governing TSO public service delivery is not a pure ‘mode’ of governance, but is better understood as dependent on and constituted by the variable and uneven practices implemented by public sector commissioners. The chapter shows how public sector commissioners adopt and adapt the instruments prescribed by national policy for market management – contracting, grant funding, and commissioning processes – to strategically shape and structure their market in ways that fit with their own goals for local public services provision. TSOs meanwhile adopt and adapt their practices in response to these changes in order to pursue and achieve their own ends for the provision of services to older people. In the conclusion I argue that the examination of structures (the changed conditions of public services delivery), actors (TSOs and public sector commissioners) and processes (the practice of public service provision) prompted by governance analysis enables a holistic investigation and conceptualisation of the state–third sector relationship. This perspective furthermore exposes the political character of the state–third sector relationship: that the relationship is constituted by the struggles between state and third sector actors over the changed conditions of public services delivery. These struggles are experi-

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enced and played out in the daily practice and process of providing public services, and the outcomes of these struggles have material implications for the actors involved. I conclude that the holistic approach adopted in governance analysis therefore allows us to see how the outcomes of public policies (in this case, the role of the third sector in public service delivery) are an effect of the interactions between structures, actors and processes, and makes visible the material implications and consequences for actors of those outcomes (see Carmel, Chapter 3).

THE THIRD SECTOR IN PUBLIC SERVICES DELIVERY: WHY PREVIOUS RESEARCH HAS REVEALED ONLY ‘HALF THE STORY’ Recent Developments in the State–Third Sector Relationship The third sector has played a central role in consecutive government efforts to reform public services in England over the last two decades. The third sector was a central focus for New Labour’s Third Way politics, linked to its policy goals to develop a new approach to welfare provision that went beyond the dichotomy of state and market, and was rapidly incorporated as a key partner in New Labour’s public service modernisation agenda (Carmel and Harlock, 2008). More recently under the coalition and subsequent Conservative governments, the third sector has been lauded as a generator of contestability and competition in an increasingly pluralist public sector in a time of welfare state austerity (HM Government, 2011). More widely, trends towards the increasing utilisation of TSOs in public services delivery have been witnessed across Europe as welfare states struggle to meet increasingly diverse and complex social needs (Evers and Laville, 2004; Brandsen et al., 2014). Particularly in adult social care – the focus of this study – concerns about an ageing population and a growing proportion of people with complex conditions has led to a search for alternative models of provision. ‘Disorganised welfare mixes’ (Bode, 2006) have emerged, with welfare now provided by a myriad of organisations coordinated via a variety of partnership, network and market arrangements. In response to these developments, a growing body of academic research has considered the changing nature of the relationship between the state and third sector in public services delivery, and the impact(s) for the third sector. The effects of changes in the role of the third sector in public service delivery have been interrogated in the wider third sector literature through the notion of hybridity, and the conceptualisation of the third sector as a ‘tension field’ which exists between the state, market and community in the welfare mix (Evers, 1995, 2005). Scholars have focused on the blurring of boundaries

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and lessening of differences in the structure and characteristics of TSOs vis-à-vis state and commercial organisations in public services delivery. In response to changed conditions of public services delivery it is argued that TSOs have taken on more state-like organisational characteristics, evidenced by formalisation and professionalisation. At the same time, they have also become more market-like, evidenced by maximising their competitiveness and cost-efficiency (Brandsen et al., 2005). Evers (2005) and Brandsen et al. (2005) have referred to such changes as processes of hybridisation, described as coping strategies of actors and organisations to changes in their external environment and conditions. In public service delivery, TSOs adopt the characteristics of other sectors and change their practices as they are subjected to the influences of contractualism and quasi-markets as new means for coordinating and organising public services delivery. TSOs are thus seen as adapting and moving along a trajectory towards either the state or market sectors. In the specifically English context, debates about the third sector’s role in public service delivery have been shaped mainly by questions of whether a closer relationship with the state is a virtue or a vice, and on what terms (for example The Baring Foundation, 2015). Since the late 1990s concerns have centred on the third sector maintaining its independence and autonomy from the state, as government funding to the sector to provide services on its behalf has waxed and waned during the last two decades (Clark et al., 2012; Rees and Mullins, 2016). Concerns have also centred on changes in commissioning arrangements with the third sector, and the shift away from traditional grant aid funding of TSOs, towards formal, quasi-competitive contracts and service specifications as part of an emerging market for public services (Taylor, 2002). Scholars have questioned the effects of such developments on the third sector both in terms of the third sector’s ability and integrity to lobby, criticise and influence public policy, as well as the consequences for organisations of increased competitive contracting: mission drift, the loss of voluntarism, and the redirection of organisational resources to meet the demands of contracting have all been highlighted as key potential consequences for TSOs (Lewis, 1993; Deakin, 1996; Buckingham, 2009; Nevile, 2010). Developments in state–third sector relations in England in the late 1990s and early 2000s under New Labour have been referred to as a process of ‘hyperactive mainstreaming’ (Kendall, 2009) of the third sector in public policy and service delivery, characterised by a (political) emphasis on partnership and the interdependence between the state and third sector in the pursuit of mutual, shared goals (Home Office, 1998). Since 2010 scholars and commentators have pointed to a ‘decoupling’ of the state and third sector under the consecutive coalition and Conservative governments (Macmillan, 2013): the so-called ‘interdependence’ between the state and third sector that characterised relations under New Labour has been purportedly replaced by a ‘separate spheres’

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view under the coalition and Conservative governments. This is evident most notably in policy and speeches regarding the Big Society, which established the 2010 government’s vision of a smaller role for the state (in terms of both funding and regulation) and a greater role for civil society in providing public welfare (Cameron, 2011). In this context, concerns are now focused on the impact of austerity politics on the third sector as it faces what has been called the ‘double whammy’ of needing to ‘do more with less’ (Milbourne, 2013). Insights and Blind Spots from Previous Research Accounts have thus described the third sector’s relationship with the state in public service delivery as oscillating over time between one of independence and interdependence, and have sought to understand the precise nature of that independence/interdependence. Such accounts have been underpinned by understandings of the state and third sector as conceptually distinct, and this conceptual distinction has framed much wider existing research on the third sector. The influence of this conceptual distinction is evident in Evers’ (1995) aforementioned analysis of the third sector as a tension field between the state, market and informal sectors, and in welfare state regimes/typologies which draw attention to changes in the balance of the welfare mix across different service areas and contexts (Ascoli and Ranci, 2002; Taylor, 2002, 2004). In the English context historical changes in the balance of provision have been articulated in terms of a ‘moving frontier’ between the state and third sector (Finlayson, 1990). These approaches provide important insights into the experiences of TSOs and for identifying the various associated empirical changes in TSOs, their practices and structural features in response to their changing involvement in public service delivery. Such approaches have facilitated the development of typographies of organisations, and can even help us predict how particular organisations may respond to, and cope with, shifts in public service delivery governance (Buckingham, 2011). However, these perspectives also have a number of blind spots. They have emerged from a tradition concerned primarily with empirical classification and conceptualisation of the third sector and its constituent organisations in the welfare mix. Furthermore, the tensions experienced by TSOs and public sector actors as a result of changes in their role and relationship are not examined within this literature (cf. Salamon and Anheier, 1998; Kendall and Knapp, 1996). These studies thus take as their object of analysis the third sector itself. In starting from this conceptual reference point, they therefore only reveal ‘half the story’ of the third sector’s role and relationship in public service delivery. Adopting a governance analysis perspective, this study brings the role of the state back into the analytical framework. It takes as its object of analysis the relationship between the state and the third sector;

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the processes through which this relationship is produced and experienced; and with what consequences. The voices and experiences of both state and third sector actors therefore take centre stage in my analysis. Key to governance analysis is also the examination of the changing conditions of public service delivery – which are alluded to, but do not form objects of analysis per se, in the aforementioned perspectives. The focus on actors and their practices in governance analysis (cf. Chapter 2) specifically contributes to existing analyses of the third sector in public service delivery. It brings into closer examination how changes in conditions of public services delivery are experienced, negotiated and managed by public service commissioners and TSOs, both internally and in relation to one another. Whilst the literature on third sector hybridity provides a perspective to conceptualise changes in organisational practices and features in response to changed external conditions, questions remain about the lived experience of those changes, and the role of actors in producing them. In particular, the hybridisation thesis tends to normalise and naturalise the adoption of particular behaviours and practices as a response to external changes. In contrast, governance analysis explicitly articulates the tensions and dilemmas that are experienced by actors as a result of those changed conditions, and makes visible the struggles that are played out in the process of public service provision. In governance analysis, then, the state–third sector relationship is therefore conceptualised as constituted by these struggles between state and third sector actors in the practice of public service delivery.

APPLYING GOVERNANCE ANALYSIS This chapter thus promotes a novel approach to analysing the state–third sector relationship in public service delivery. Our perspective facilitates an analysis of how the conditions under which TSOs are operating is enabled (in the delivery of public services). In particular, this case is concerned with how such conditions are established through national policy, discourses and associated instruments, which I argue interact to produce modes of regulation and institute particular kinds of relationship(s) between the actors and organisations involved. These ensembles of policies, discourses and associated instruments institute the third sector as a business-like service provider in a generic public services delivery market. They also institute public sector commissioners as managers of this market. Our interest is then in how this process is negotiated, managed and/or potentially contested at the local level by public sector commissioners and TSOs in their practices of social care service delivery to older people. Our perspective importantly highlights the political nature of governing in local and ground-level contexts. That is, that actors and their space for action

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are shaped by governance processes (in this case, the market mechanisms and instruments instituted in national policies), and they promote particular market-like behaviours and practices. In doing so, governance processes politically (re)order social relations, in this case between TSOs and state actors. We can therefore understand the competitive contracting and commissioning arrangements for TSOs as mechanisms through which their activities and relationships in public service delivery are governed. Importantly, then, governance analysis allows us to see that these contracting and commissioning mechanisms are not neutral or mundane administrative arrangements, but are the means through which the state–third sector relationship is ordered and structured, and through which struggles over the allocation and distribution of resources for public service delivery are enacted, with material consequences for TSOs. How public sector commissioners implement these policies and new commissioning arrangements, and their experiences of doing so, reveal the ‘other half of the story’ of the state–third sector relationship. Focusing on the experiences of TSOs and public sector commissioners as they negotiate their role and relationship(s) in the provision of social care services to older people, our approach provides a lens for understanding how actors may resist, subvert or, alternatively, adopt the processes and practices promoted by particular governance processes for their own ends. We are able to explore the agency of the actors involved: actors are not simply passive recipients of changes in policy and external conditions but actively shape those conditions – both individually via their own responses but also mutually via their relationship. TSOs and public sector commissioners purposefully negotiate and manage contracting and commissioning processes in order to meet their own particular goals. Thus my analysis shows that TSOs redistribute resources and reallocate roles internally in order to meet the combined demands of commissioning and contracting processes, and their own goals for frontline service delivery. Public sector commissioners meanwhile implement and adapt commissioning and contracting processes accordingly in order to meet their own organisational and wider service delivery needs. Methodology A discursive analysis of national policy towards the third sector in public service delivery alongside interviews with key policymakers was the starting point for the investigation. The analysis focused on the terms, concepts and categories employed in policy to construct the third sector’s role and relationship(s) in public service delivery, alongside associated policy instruments and mechanisms for governing this role and relationship(s). Two local authority areas were then selected for study in order to elucidate common themes and experiences around TSO responses to competitive contracting.

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Semi-structured interviews (lasting approximately one hour) were conducted with representatives of a total of seven TSOs providing social care services for older people (four in the first local authority (A) and three in the second (B)) in 2009–2010. A further four interviews were conducted with relevant social service commissioners in each of the local authorities in order to provide a context to the investigation of TSO responses to competitive contracting. The TSOs interviewed were selected from data provided by the local authority and local third sector infrastructure organisations about local providers in the area. TSOs were chosen for their diversity in terms of their size, income levels and levels of volunteer involvement. They thus had different profiles. TSOs provided a range of social care and support services to older people including: shopping, transport, home-help (for example property maintenance, gardening and cleaning), advice, information and advocacy, befriending and peer-support, as well as personal care and a range of activities under the general term of ‘day care’, such as meals and social activities. These services were funded and managed through a variety of grant and contracting processes with the local authorities, which are described in more detail below. The interviews were designed to gain an understanding of the effects of change on TSOs, exploring interviewees’ experiences and perceptions and identifying processes and impacts associated with those changes. Interviews with local authority commissioners explored the implementation of policy and contracting changes, and the management of the relationship with TSO service providers. In both parts of the empirical analysis, cross-cutting discourses, themes and issues were identified by repeatedly revisiting data to build up conceptual links.

CHANGED CONDITIONS FOR PUBLIC SERVICE DELIVERY: INSTITUTING A MARKET Here I explain how national policies and their associated instruments and discourses establish the role of the third sector in public service delivery. I identify these instruments and discourses as attempts to govern TSOs, and their relationships, in the delivery of public services. National policies set the conditions for the conduct and structure of the relationship between TSOs and public sector commissioners in public services provision. As such, these conditions are not neutral, technical arrangements for the practice of public service provision. Their analysis makes visible how these policies shape public sector commissioners’ and TSOs’ space for action, and position these social actors in certain ways vis-à-vis each other in the process of public services provision. Between 1998 and 2010 there was a remarkable attempt to institute competitive contracting as the key mechanism to govern TSOs in public service delivery. A 2002 review (HM Treasury, 2002) of the role of the third sector

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recommended that procurement contracts, rather than grants, be used as the main mechanism to coordinate and ensure service delivery, with providers subject to market-style discipline in offering their services. Contracting acts as a disciplinary governance mechanism over a wide range of relationships and grant-funding arrangements that have hitherto existed with TSOs. Competitive contracting means that the same process is adopted for contracting-out service provision from all providers, irrespective of differences in ability, willingness or appropriateness of engaging in competitive contracting as means to deliver public services. TSOs are thus rendered as generic service delivery organisations alongside commercial organisations, to be governed by the same processes, disregarding their distinct social origins and aims (Carmel and Harlock, 2008). Furthermore, procurement also acts as a disciplinary mechanism over the behaviour of commissioning authorities (HM Treasury, 2006a: 25–26). Indeed, there was considerable emphasis in government documents on getting public authorities to behave in a more market-oriented manner (e.g. National Audit Office (NAO), 2005; Cabinet Office, 2006: 57). This included the provision of guidance and exhortations on how to procure and commission TSOs (e.g. HM Treasury, 2006a, 2006b), and the responsibility of local authorities and commissioning departments to manage market development (HM Treasury, 2006b: 17). Through the development and opening up of public service markets, the role of the third sector in public service delivery was to be expanded. How these policies were implemented, negotiated and shaped in practice by public sector commissioners on the ground is a key insight of governance analysis, and I explain this in the following section.

ACTORS NEGOTIATING THE CHANGED CONDITIONS OF PUBLIC SERVICE DELIVERY Public sector commissioners and TSOs pursued strategies and adopted practices that enabled them to fulfil their distinctive goals for public service provision. However, rather than focusing exclusively on the experiences and practices of TSOs conceptualised as a process of organisational hybridisation, here these practices are interrogated as part of a process of (joint) production of public services. I reveal how TSO practices interact with the practices of commissioners in this production of public services, and how these are shaped by the conditions established through national policy: the structural context in this case.

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The Responses of Commissioners Although national policy prescribed a shift towards competitive contracting to govern the third sector’s role and relationship(s) in public service delivery, such processes were only partly adopted by commissioners in practice. Instead, the interviews revealed that a ‘hybrid’ (commissioner A-1) system of various grant and contracting processes was in place in both local authorities. Commissioners made strategic choices about which funding mechanisms to use when commissioning particular provision from the third sector. Commissioners’ choices depended first on the nature of the service being commissioned. Thus grants were used instrumentally to stimulate new service providers: ‘pump priming’ or ‘seed funding’ the local market (commissioner B-1); to pilot new services and models of provision with TSOs; and to fund short-term specialist activities and projects. In some instances, grants continued to be used for core services (e.g. day care and home-help). Contracts, which entailed more prescriptive funding conditions and service specifications, were meanwhile used increasingly for more sensitive services, such as the provision of personal care for people with complex needs. Yet contracts were also used instrumentally for ‘soft’ (commissioner B-1) and ‘preventative’ (commissioner A-3) services such as shopping, transport, advocacy and advice, where service specifications were expected to change very little. The lengths of grants and contracts, and their monitoring and service review requirements, typically varied according to the level of funding for a service and the degree of regulation and safeguarding required for service users, with contracts overall more widely used for sensitive services. Commissioners’ choices of funding mechanisms depended secondly on the perceived ability of TSO counterparts to engage in competitive contracting procedures. A view shared by all the commissioners was that competitive contracting processes inappropriately assumed homogeneity of providers, and failed to distinguish not only between commercial/for-profit organisations and TSOs, but among TSOs themselves. Smaller and less experienced TSOs were seen to be at a disadvantage, and there was concern that contracts for services would be awarded on the basis of providers’ ability to manage the particular commissioning process, rather than on their ability to deliver the service: they are extremely diverse in their maturity so it’s how do you engage in a market that can span such a wide … you know, it’s about being able to, to pitch that at the right level so you’re engaging with the whole … sector, and you’re providing a fair opportunity to all of the sector to respond and it’s how you gauge that. (Commissioner B-2)

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‘Partially competitive’ (commissioner B-1) and ‘quasi’ contractual processes (commissioner A-3) were therefore used strategically by commissioners, in order to improve accessibility for TSOs and retain particular TSO services – often because of their perceived specialist and/or niche expertise in service provision. However, commissioners’ choices to use different funding processes were also frequently constrained by the wider external context and conditions around commissioning and procurement legislation, thus they looked for ‘ways to get round’ procurement rules (commissioner A-2). One commissioner expressed their frustration animatedly: we’ve got to be competitive, go out to tender … you know, and it just doesn’t fit with this part of the services, they [TSOs] are different … it’s like all we want to do is develop good bloody services, and you’re telling us we’ve got to do it like – most of these [third sector] organisations do good services. (Commissioner A-1)

Despite the mixed use of grants and contracts there was nevertheless a general consensus among commissioners that TSOs needed to start behaving as businesses and developing their skills and procedures to respond to competitive contracting. Both local authorities thus offered various training schemes to TSOs and encouraged ‘cluster working’ and ‘partnership’ building between organisations (commissioner A-3) to build their capacity and share back office functions for larger scale contracting opportunities. Crucially, the latter also served to reduce the number of TSOs with whom commissioners had to contract in conditions of resource scarcity: I think we have too many voluntary organisations competing for too few funds … (Commissioner B-1) the potential is you know unless you do this … you could have any number of organisations across [area] … (Commissioner A-3)

This section has shown that commissioners pursue strategies to overcome the structural constraints (of procurement conditions and resource scarcity) they face themselves in the process of public services delivery. Commissioners adopted strategies in the implementation of competitive contracting with the third sector (that is, their choice of funding mechanism and tool) in order to shape their local market of providers. Thus we can see commissioners as active agents engaging in struggles to construct and shape the local market to meet their goals for public services provision under the structural conditions of competitive contracting and resource scarcity.

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The Responses of TSOs TSOs had mixed responses to the changing conditions of their role in public services provision. The use of grants and quasi-contractual processes by commissioners was – paradoxically – perceived as unfair by some TSOs, even though this represented an attempt by commissioners to level the playing field for some organisations. Some TSOs were resistant to the pressure to engage in competitive contracting and operate their services on a contract basis. One interviewee suggested this was because adopting such practices undermined their particular view of what it was to be a third sector organisation: we’d just be like the commercial sector then wouldn’t we? It would be, you know, we’d be bidding for contracts on par with anybody else in the world, and I do think that’s part of our, part of the fact that keeps us, like, separate. (TSO A-1)

Other TSOs expressed concerns over their organisational capacity (financial resources and staff time) and capability (skills) to respond to competitive contracts. Others, meanwhile, saw changes in commissioning processes as an opportunity to professionalise, upskill and expand their operations. Frequently these organisations were already engaged in contracting for services with local authority commissioners, and had capacity and experience in competitive contracting processes. Where resources allowed, some TSOs responded by recruiting staff who had experience and skills in contracting, or by training up existing staff for example. Other TSOs responded by attempting to diversify their income and pursue alternative strategies, such as charging service users directly or identifying new markets for their services, in order to reduce their reliance on local authority funding for services. TSOs were therefore operating from different starting points, and some TSOs felt better placed than others to respond to the changing conditions of service delivery. However, all the TSOs perceived a risk in ‘staying the same’, not doing anything (TSO B-1), and they adopted a survivalist stance in this market-like environment. Crucially, TSOs’ mixed responses to competitive contracting were also informed by the perceived strengths and weaknesses of grants and contracts for managing the provision of services, and how TSOs used grants and contracts in order to fulfil service delivery goals. Grants were viewed favourably by some organisations for the freedom and flexibility they implied, allowing TSOs to pursue ideas and to experiment with services and activities. These TSOs shifted grant funds across different services in order to make up shortfalls in funding for particular activities, or where demand for services was particularly

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high. In this way TSOs were able to use grants innovatively to respond to conditions of resource scarcity and fulfil their own goals for service provision: it has allowed us to use the money where we think it’s, rather than rigidly being ‘this has got to pay for 40 places of that’, when we haven’t got that or we don’t need that, we can sort of direct it somewhere else … we can channel some of that money somewhere else and start developing other things, which is what we did with the social integration project which is now a stand-alone project … we’d never have been able to do that really if we’d been under some kind of strict contract. (TSO A-1)

At the same time, TSOs stressed the unpredictability and uncertainty of grant funding, describing it as ‘short term’, ‘shoe string’ and ‘hand to mouth’ (TSO A-3). In this context, personal relationships with commissioners were seen as important for TSOs in order to manage the insecurity around funding. For some TSOs, contracts could therefore offer greater stability and longevity. TSOs also reported that through contracting they had become more adept at calculating the full costs of service provision and that they were less inclined to underestimate costs and/or stretch resources beyond contract specifications. Indeed, two organisations reported instances where they had challenged local authorities over the lack of detail or inaccurate information in specifications: some of them [service users] had really challenging behaviour, and that wasn’t in the contract that they would be exhibiting that behaviour, so my staff weren’t – and some of them were really quite needy … and I said to them [the local authority] look this wasn’t here in your specification. (TSO A-2)

The transparency offered by contracts was therefore seen to be a positive benefit to these organisations, and TSOs used contracts to their advantage in their negotiations with commissioners. TSOs are therefore not simply passive recipients of changes in the conditions of service delivery, but rather seek to respond to changes in the conditions of their role in ways which allow them to continue to fulfil their mission and goals. This section has revealed that TSOs were at different starting points for the negotiation of their role and relationship, however, and faced constraints in the ways they can respond according to their resources, capacity, experience and existing relationships with commissioners. Significantly, some TSOs are therefore more likely to struggle than others under changed conditions of service delivery. This section has begun to shed some light on the consequences and effects of changing conditions of public service delivery on TSOs, and this is discussed in more detail below.

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IMPLICATIONS FOR THIRD SECTOR ORGANISATIONS Despite the mixed responses of TSOs to this new environment, the interviews revealed some common internal organisational effects among the TSOs. Differences in work and responsibilities between volunteers, paid staff and managers had intensified in some organisations, with resources being rebalanced and roles being reformed around the activities of contract negotiation, administration and management, and direct service delivery. The precise degree of change experienced across TSOs varied according to existing and/ or prior work arrangements, and the demands of the contracted service(s). However, a common concern was that ‘more management time’ (TSO B-2) was being devoted to ‘increasing amounts of paperwork’ (TSO B-2) and ‘administration’ (TSO B-1) for contract negotiation and management. Pressures were compounded where TSOs were in receipt of both grants and contracts for different services, with various arrangements and requirements for monitoring, reviewing and renewal processes. TSOs remarked upon the ‘bureaucracy’ (TSO A-2) associated with contracting procedures – both at the initial outset and once funds had been received. For example, one TSO likened responding to a contracting opportunity as ‘jumping through hoops’ (TSO B-3), and another organisation explained: we looked at one hefty contract and I mean for the amount of paperwork getting through it for the value of the funding, it just wasn’t worth it. (TSO B-1)

TSOs also stressed the ‘heavy handed’ (TSO A-3) and ‘incredibly intensive’ (TSO A-2) nature of monitoring and reporting requirements once funds had been received, and these requirements were often viewed as disproportionate by TSOs. In order to meet the competing demands on TSOs’ resources for both frontline service delivery and contract negotiation and management, TSOs reported that staff ‘pitch[ed] in’ (TSO A-1), ‘help[ed] out’ (TSOs A-3) or were ‘a bit of a jack of all trades’ (TSO A-2). Thus whilst greater role differentiation was taking place formally on the one hand, organisational pressures meant staff were required to be more flexible on the other hand. Contract agreements meanwhile generally required paid workers and volunteers to provide more detailed information about activities and hours undertaken, for example through the use of timesheets, and nearly all volunteers were subject to some screening and training processes. This was seen to have a negative effect on volunteer recruitment and retention by some TSOs, who reported that their volunteers were ‘put off’ (TSO A-2) by the increased formality.

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A key concern of these TSOs was the greater cost of volunteer training and recruitment, which went unrecognised in contract agreements. TSOs explained they also found it increasingly difficult to use volunteers to provide contracted services because they were required at regular or specific times of the day and some volunteers were unable to make such commitments. TSOs were thus expanding their pool of paid employees and staff to deliver frontline services, with volunteers only taking on support functions or ‘specific jobs’ (TSO A-1). This section has shed light on the effects of governing processes on TSOs: the pressure to formalise and marketise and the increased administration and bureaucracy that ensues, distracting resources away from frontline service delivery. Furthermore the findings discussed here suggest that TSOs’ ability to negotiate and manage changes in their relationship is likely to be tempered considerably by their reliance on local authorities for funding: those with limited capacity and resources are particularly likely to feel the strain of change, and struggle to preserve and enact their goals. The governance analysis perspective adopted in this chapter therefore sheds light on the dynamics of a relationship where resources are unevenly distributed between actors – that is, between TSOs and commissioners, but also among TSOs themselves. Access to resources influences the extent to which TSOs can manage and shape their role and relationship(s), and is an object of struggle in the process of public service provision as TSOs compete and negotiate for (scarce) resources from public sector commissioners.

CONCLUSION This chapter has argued that governance analysis is helpful to understand the relationship between the state and third sector in public services delivery. It has emphasised the interactions between structures (the changed conditions of public service delivery), actors (public sector commissioners and TSOs) and processes (the practice of public service provision) in constituting the relationship between the state and third sector in public service delivery. In so doing it has enabled a holistic examination of the state–third sector relationship, which is missing from previous analyses of the third sector’s role and experiences of public service provision. It has given us insight into the lived experience and negotiation of the relationship, revealing the struggles between state and third sector actors over the changed conditions of public service delivery and the processes through which these struggles are played out. Finally, it has demonstrated the effects of the outcomes of these struggles on the state and third actors involved. This case has illuminated how governance processes are enacted and experienced in practice, and has made visible the political nature of governing: in this case, attempts to (re)order relationships between TSOs and state actors

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in a notional market. I have revealed how public policies on the role of the third sector in public service provision attempt to steer the behaviour of TSOs and constitute them as generic, market-like service providers, and to establish a particular set of relationships between TSOs and local authority commissioners based on market mechanisms and processes (competitive contracting and commissioning). This study has shed light on how these processes are implemented and enacted unevenly and variably in practice by commissioners, who shape them according to their particular contexts and purpose. Governance analysis therefore enables us to see that the market (as a mode of governing the state–third sector relationship) is not fixed or given, nor can it be ‘read off’ from public policies. It is actively shaped by the practices of actors and I have demonstrated how actors’ practices are profoundly shaped by – and provide space for the enactment of – other goals, purposes, contexts and constraints, which may or may not be commensurate with the goals of public policies (cf Chapter 2). This chapter has shown how commissioners and TSOs therefore contest dominant discourses and market-like conditions of public services delivery through their practices: processes of commissioning and contracting are worked around by commissioners and techniques of organisation such as staffing systems, and monitoring and reporting are reworked by TSOs, in order to successfully deliver services. Significantly, this reworking of governance processes has internal organisational (material) effects on TSOs. This chapter has demonstrated that governance analysis is beneficial for wider analyses of public policy as it reveals, first, that the achievement of public policy goals are contingent on the practices of actors charged with implementing them, and, secondly, how actors’ use the spaces afforded by governance processes to pursue social and political action related to other aims, interests and contexts. Actors, practices both therefore shape, and are shaped by, governance processes, and their position within these processes. The outcomes of public policy depend, therefore, on the interactions between the practices of actors, structure and process.

NOTE 1. Some quotation excerpts are taken from: Harlock, J., 2014. ‘Diversity and ambiguity in the English third sector: Responding to contracts and competition in public service delivery’, in T. Brandsen, W. Trommel and B. Verschuere (eds), Manufacturing Civil Society, IIAS Series: Governance and Public Management, Palgrave Macmillan, reproduced with the permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

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REFERENCES Ascoli, U. and C. Ranci (eds), 2002. Dilemmas of the Welfare Mix: The New Structure of Welfare in an Era of Privatization, New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Bode, I., 2006. ‘Disorganized welfare mixes: voluntary agencies and new governance regimes in Western Europe’, Journal of European Social Policy, 16 (4), 346–359. Brandsen, T., W. van der Donk and K. Putters, 2005. ‘Griffins or chameleons? Hybridity as a permanent and inevitable characteristic of the third sector’, International Journal of Public Administration, 28 (9), 749–765. Brandsen, T., B. Verschuere and W. Trommel, 2014. ‘Manufacturing civil society: an introduction’, in T. Brandsen, W. Trommel and B. Verschuere (eds), Manufacturing Civil Society: Principles, Practices and Effects, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–14. Buckingham, H., 2009, ‘Competition and Contracts in the Voluntary Sector: Exploring the Implications for Homelessness Service Providers in Southampton’, Policy & Politics, 37 (2), 235–254. Buckingham, H., 2011, ‘Hybridity, diversity and the division of labour in the third sector: what can we learn from homelessness organisations in the UK?’ Voluntary Sector Review, 2 (2), 157–175. Cabinet Office, 2006. Partnerships in Public Services: An Action Plan for Third Sector Involvement, London: The Stationery Office. Cameron, D., 2011. ‘PM’s speech on Big Society’, accessed 25 January 2017 at https://​www​.gov​.uk/​government/​speeches/​pms​-speech​-on​-big​-society. Carmel, E. and J. Harlock, 2008. ‘Instituting the “third sector” as a governable terrain: partnership, procurement and performance in the UK’, Policy and Politics, 36 (2), 155–171. Clark, J., D. Kane, K. Wilding and Bass, P., 2012. The UK Civil Society Almanac, London: National Council for Voluntary Organisations. Deakin, N., 1996. ‘The devil’s in the detail: some reflections on contracting for social care by voluntary organizations’, Social Policy and Administration, 30 (1), 20–38. Evers, A., 1995. ‘Part of the welfare mix: the third sector as an intermediate area’, Voluntas, 6 (1), 159–182. Evers, A., 2005. ‘Mixed welfare systems and hybrid organizations: Changes in the governance and provision of social services’, International Journal of Public Administration, 28, 737–748. Evers, A. and J-L. Laville (eds), 2004. The Third Sector in Europe, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing.

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Finlayson, G., 1990. ‘A moving frontier: voluntarism and the state in British social welfare 1911–1949’, Twentieth Century British History, 1 (2), 183–206. Harlock, J., 2014. ‘Diversity and ambiguity in the English third sector: responding to contracts and competition in public service delivery’, in T. Brandsen, W. Trommel and B. Verschuere (eds), Manufacturing Civil Society: Principles, Practices and Effects, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 34–53. HM Government, 2011. Open Public Services White Paper, London: the Stationery Office. HM Treasury, 2002. The Role of the Voluntary and Community Sector in Service Delivery: A Cross-Cutting Review, London: The Stationery Office. HM Treasury, 2006a. Improving Financial Relationships with the Third Sector: Guidance to Funders and Providers, London: The Stationery Office. HM Treasury, 2006b. Guide to Government Assistance to the Third Sector, London: The Stationery Office. Home Office, 1998. Compact on Relations between Government and the Voluntary and Community Sector in England, London: Home Office. Kendall, J., 2009. ‘The third sector and the policy process in the UK: ingredients in a hyperactive horizontal policy environment’, in J. Kendall (ed.), Handbook of Third Sector Policy in Europe: Multilevel Processes and Organised Civil Society, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Kendall, J. and M. Knapp, 1996. The Voluntary Sector in the UK, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lewis, J., 1993. ‘Developing the mixed economy of care: emerging issues for voluntary organisations’, Journal of Social Policy, 22 (2), 173–192. Macmillan, R., 2013. ‘Decoupling the state and the third sector? The “big Society” as a spontaneous order’, Voluntary Sector Review, 4 (2), 185–203. Milbourne, L., 2013. Voluntary sector in transition: Hard times or new opportunities? Bristol: Policy Press. NAO, 2005. Working with the Third Sector, London: The Stationery Office. Nevile, A., 2010. ‘Drifting or holding firm? Public funding and the values of third sector organisations’, Policy and Politics, 38 (4), 531–546. Rees, J. and D. Mullins (eds), 2016. The Third Sector Delivering Public Services: Developments, Innovations and Challenges, Bristol: Policy Press. Salamon, L.M. and H.K. Anheier, 1998. Defining the Nonprofit Sector, A Cross-national Analysis, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Taylor, M., 2002. ‘Government, the third sector and the contract culture: the UK Experience so far’ in U. Ascoli and C. Ranci (eds), Dilemmas of the Welfare Mix: The New Structure of Welfare in an Era of Privatization, New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum, pp. 77–108.

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Taylor, M., 2004. ‘The welfare mix in the United Kingdom’, in A. Evers and J-L. Laville (eds), The Third Sector in Europe, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 122–143. The Baring Foundation, 2016. An Independent Mission: The Voluntary Sector in 2015: the panel’s fourth and final annual assessment, accessed 17 December 2018 at http://​baringfoundation​.org​.uk/​wp​-content/​uploads/​ 2015/​02/​IP​-Mission​.pdf.

PART III

Governing practices, social politics and contestation

8. Participatory governing through co-production and co-design Michelle Farr INTRODUCTION Developments in governance and policy have highlighted the importance of citizen involvement, and how service users and staff can contribute to innovations and improvements both in policy and public service provision. Centralized decision-making and traditional approaches to public policy are viewed as less effective due to the complexities of issues that public services are required to tackle (Daglio et al. 2014). There are a vast range of different theories, tools and techniques that promote this participation, including participatory budgeting, empowered participatory governance (Fung and Wright 2003; Fung 2004), co-production (Bovaird 2007), design (Ansell and Torfing 2014) and co-design (Bate and Robert 2007), collaborative dialogues (Hajer and Wagenaar 2003), co-creation (Bason 2010) and citizens’ councils (Davies et al. 2006). Participation using such mechanisms is intended to develop better policy, enhance accountability, drive up standards and shift power from providers to users (Newman 2001). This chapter studies co-production, co-design and co-creation processes as forms of participatory and collaborative governing in two case studies: one using experience-based co-design (Bate and Robert 2007) in health services, and one in local government using a range of co-production, co-creation and co-design techniques. This chapter uses Bovaird’s (2007, p. 847) broad definition of co-production, understood as ‘regular, long-term relationships between professionalized service providers (in any sector) and service users or other members of the community, where all parties make substantial resource contributions’. Within this wide definition both co-creation and co-design can be understood as specific forms of co-production, where citizens and service users get involved in producing changes to public services through particular participatory techniques. This chapter undertakes a comparative analysis of the two case studies and explores how collaborative governing processes and participation interact with institutional structures and social, policy and political 152

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contexts. It also explains the effects of these processes on the distribution of power and authority within decision-making in each case. Empirical investigation using governance analysis sensitizes us both to case specifics and the wider political and policy context in which governing establishes rules and processes, distributing resources and power that can impact upon the political ordering of social relations. This chapter illustrates that governance analysis can add to existing work in co-production and co-design processes in two ways. First, rather than a normative approach that understands co-production processes as valuable in themselves (e.g. Boyle and Harris 2009), governance analysis provides a framework to understand their contingent effects on how power is distributed, and what this means for social inequalities. These effects are dependent upon particular processes, actors, institutions and policy contexts, which may be reproduced rather than transformed, and can disguise wider structural inequalities. Second, the chapter contributes to the theoretical perspectives that have been adopted to analyse participatory governance. It provides a theoretical approach that enables an analysis of the relationships between structure and agency, without emphasizing one element over another. This is done using the work of Margaret Archer (1995, 2000, 2003) going beyond interpretivist, post-Foucauldian and post-structuralist governance perspectives. The morphogenetic approach (Archer 1995) conceptualizes how structure, culture and agency interact and interweave with each other over time. This theorization provides a stronger analytic grip on agency and renders human action and its consequences visible within complex public policy terrains. However, it does not prioritize agency and recognizes the complex and contingent nature of human action within policy and political constraints. These contributions are illustrated through the presentation of the two case studies, structured in three sections. First, the actors within processes of governing are examined. In this section, I explore how people interacted within the co-design and co-production projects, and analyse the dynamics of agency within these participatory spaces. Second, the effects of governing processes are reviewed. In this section, I analyse the consequences of these participatory governing processes for the people involved; the relationships between them; and the extent to which the processes enabled empowerment and wider system changes within their specific contexts. Third, the structural conditions of participatory governing are explored. Here, I examine how co-design and co-production processes interact with their wider policy and political contexts, to explore how power is distributed within these processes, and the implications of this for social inequalities.

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PARTICIPATORY GOVERNANCE Participatory governance can be defined as the development of spaces where the state and citizens can engage with each other to develop and enhance public policy and its execution, making decisions about issues that concern them (Stewart 2009; Fischer 2006). The participation of a range of different actors within governance emphasizes ‘collective, pragmatic, participatory, local problem solving’ (Hajer and Wagenaar 2003, p. 7). Within these approaches the importance of ‘local knowledge’ and ‘lived experience’ are especially significant (Yanow 2003, p. 236). Local knowledge and experience can enable insight and generate solutions through dialogue (Fung and Wright 2003). Theoretically, empowered participatory governance is based on deliberative democracy through the work of Habermas, Cohen and Dryzek, as well as pragmatism through the work of John Dewey (Fung 2004). First-generation scholars of deliberative democracy, for example Habermas, emphasized normative conditions of deliberation (Elstub et al. 2016) where external power relations are ‘bracketed’, and all citizens can contribute equally, relying on rational discourse and argumentation without ideology, focussing on common goods. However, second-generation deliberative democracy scholars expand these styles of deliberation to take greater account of social inequalities (Elstub et al. 2016). Dryzek (2000) questions whether institutionalized space can create the necessary conducive context where people can share opinions as free and equal citizens and contest state agendas. Young (2001) encourages storytelling, rhetoric and greetings into deliberative discussions, and argues that attempts to ‘bracket’ power relations within a deliberative sphere can never be truly achieved due to structural inequalities that adversely impact both the process and outcomes for those who have less powerful social positions. Third-generation deliberative democracy scholars have further focussed on the practices and methods of deliberation (Elstub et al. 2016). Fung’s (2004) work on participatory governance used deliberative democratic techniques in areas of social and economic deprivation and illustrated clear patterns of social change with improvements in schools and community safety. More recent fourth-generation deliberative democracy scholars explore how to secure deliberative systems at a wider system scale (Elstub et al. 2016); however, Mendonça (2016) highlights that these systems may reinforce asymmetries of power rather than alleviate them. Applying governance analysis can help us to further explore these contingent processes and the specific effects of participatory governing on power dynamics and social inequalities.

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CO-PRODUCTION, CO-DESIGN AND CO-CREATION It is important to understand how participatory governing techniques, such as co-production and co-design, are implemented and with what effects on the ‘political ordering of social relations’ (Carmel 2017; Chapter 2, this volume). Whether co-production can lead to empowerment, or to further ingrained social inequalities, is a matter of empirical investigation, exploring how such processes affect different power inequalities (Farr 2018). Co-production, co-design and co-creation processes can be seen as a means of pragmatic problem solving rather than as a political process (Bason 2010). These processes often take place within an institutionalized context where organizations may define the terms of reference, participants tend to be framed as ‘everyday makers’ who are ‘project-oriented and want to deal with common concerns concretely and personally rather than abstractly and ideologically’ (Bang 2005, p. 167). Empirically, the concepts of co-production, co-design and co-creation have been used interchangeably (Voorberg et al. 2015); to support conceptual clarity, the next three sections overview the theoretical roots of each concept in turn. Within public administration literature, the concept of co-production has become widespread since its initial development in the 1970s and early 1980s (Ostrom 1996; Parks et al. 1981). Co-production illustrates how citizens may be involved in policy implementation (Brudney and England 1983; Alford 2009) rather than just decision-making about the content of policy (e.g. Arnstein 1969; Pateman 1970). In this chapter co-production is analysed with respect to its role in public policy as a means to involve users and staff in improving services, rather than as part of the innate nature of all service delivery (Osborne and Strokosch 2013). Co-production literature (grey and policy orientated) often celebrates co-production as ‘a normative policy good’ (Osborne et al. 2016, p. 644) to improve public services, increase accountability, develop social capital and empower users (e.g. Boyle and Harris 2009). However, problems within co-production processes have increasingly been explored (Steen et al. 2018). Authors have illustrated its ‘dark side’ (Williams et al. 2015) where new forms of social control have developed (Fledderus et al. 2014, p. 436). Public accountability may be diminished within co-production, with fatal consequences in one case of a neighbourhood watch volunteer shooting an innocent citizen (Brewer and Grabosky 2014; Williams et al. 2015). Potential pitfalls of co-production include lack of mutual respect and trust, stereotyping, imbalanced power relationships, accountability failings and increased costs (Williams et al. 2015; Steen et al. 2018). The concept of co-creation derives from the fields of innovation, marketing and open source information technology (IT) communities and can be seen as

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a specific form of co-production. Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004) are often credited with developing the concept, where shared learning and communication occurs between consumers and organizational employees. This process is governed by the organization that defines the ‘ground rules for participation’ (Sawhney and Prandelli 2000, p. 25). Within co-creation collaboration occurs ‘on a more equal basis’ (Murray et al. 2005, p. 17), where citizens are ‘equal partners in design and delivery’ (Bason 2010, p. 173). However, it is questionable whether power relations can ever be equalized in practice, especially in institutions with knowledge and resource differentials. Indeed, the extent of this equality can be clearly bounded by policy and the organizations themselves, for Bason (2010, p. 153) notes that involvement ‘is about finding better solutions to achieve politically defined visions of the future’. Co-design methods can also support collaborative governance (Ansell and Torfing 2014). The philosophical roots of co-design come from design principles that involve a range of stakeholders within the design process (Sanders and Stappers 2008). Based on a pragmatist philosophy (Battarbee and Koskinen 2005), co-design engages service users to understand their experiences to help to inform service development (Bate and Robert 2007). Within experience-based co-design (EBCD) in health, service users have been filmed sharing their personal and emotional experiences of particular services (e.g. Bate and Robert 2007; Pickles et al. 2008; Tan and Szebeko 2009). Films of service users’ experiences are used to mobilize both service users and staff into action, through a series of co-design workshops and service improvement meetings (Bate and Robert 2007). Co-design attempts to develop ‘equal partnership’ (Bate and Robert 2007, p. 9) between service users and staff. However the extent to which power is equalized amongst participants within co-design spaces is unclear, alongside how their interaction is itself constrained by particular discourses, time and resources (see also Morgan-Trimmer, Chapter 9). Robert and Donetto (2015, p. 407) note that ‘we know little of the circumstances’ in which power relations are equalized between staff and service users. To summarize, co-production, co-creation and co-design literature can contain ‘an implicit assumption that involvement of citizens is a virtue in itself’ (Voorberg et al. 2015, p. 1341). This approach is problematic as more recent studies highlight the ‘dark side’ of co-production (Steen et al. 2018). In addition, these collaborative processes often take place within relatively confined political agendas and spaces. Governance analysis provides a framework to understand their complex and contingent nature, analysing how social actors create, utilize and politically act within participatory governing processes and to what effects in relation to political and social inequalities.

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THE ANALYSIS OF PARTICIPATORY GOVERNANCE Bovaird (2005) suggests that research that explores the interweaving of power relations between the government and different stakeholders within networked forms of governance is underdeveloped. Some literature tends to avoid an analysis of the interplays of power and how social relations are politically ordered (Evans et al. 2013). There are some theoretical approaches that have been developed in this field; in this chapter I suggest that these perspectives tend to over-emphasize either agential ability or ‘power as domination’. What is needed is an analytic approach that does not prioritize one element over the other, but is sensitive to their complex and contingent relationships. Bevir and Rhodes’ (2005) interpretivist approach within governance studies accounts for agency within social structures by using the concepts of ‘tradition’, ‘dilemma’ and ‘situated agency’. ‘Situated agents’ find themselves in pre-existing social structures and cultures (‘traditions’). It is through ‘dilemmas’ that new beliefs are adopted, following experiences that contradict someone’s inherited traditional ideas (Bevir 2011), leading to processes of social change. People can adopt new ideas and practices, but these are always set within social contexts (Bevir 2011). Nevertheless Glynos and Howarth (2008) argue that Bevir and Rhodes’ (2005) approach does not account for the unequal distribution of material and social resources that agents can draw upon to adjust, develop and discard particular traditions. Such resources are dependent upon agents’ social positions and different actors are situated within different social relations and positions of power. Glynos and Howarth (2008) critique Bevir and Rhodes (2005), asking how ‘some aspects of traditions exert greater appeal than others, or why might some aspects resist modification’ (p. 161). They draw in the importance of hegemony and the analysis ‘of various relations of domination’ (Glynos and Howarth 2008, p. 165; also discussion in Carmel, Chapter 3). Studies that explore power relations within participative structures have often illustrated its dominating effects, reinforcing institutional power relations and mirroring wider inequalities (Hodge 2005; Atkinson 1999). Post-structuralist debates take up these issues of power, and argue that participatory mechanisms are a way of drawing people into the state in line with its needs (Rose 1999). Foucault’s theory of governmentality has been used to conceptualize power as facilitative, where governmental power is reproduced by individuals who subject and govern themselves within social spaces according to discursive principles, standards, expectations and morals (Taylor 2007; Swyngedouw 2005). In her analysis of community participation, Taylor (2007) uses governmentality as a framework to illustrate how state power is prevalent in spite of the devolution of governing to communities. However, she shows ‘there are still opportunities for communities to become “active subjects” within them

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and thus to shape and influence the exercise of government’ (Taylor 2007, p. 311). Mckee (2009) accounts for time, space and contingency within actual governing processes, developing a ‘realist governmentality’ approach, where people can adapt and resist discourses. However there is a question of how to conceptualize agency within such an approach. Glynos and Howarth (2008, p. 163) argue that structural dominations are never complete, and it is the contingency of these social structures that provides spaces for ‘the emergence of radical subjectivity’, thus illustrating how post-structuralists enable space for aspects of human agency (see also the discussion of governing practices by Carmel in Chapter 2). This explanation of agency is built within the ‘gaps’ and ‘incompleteness’ of social structures; however, this chapter argues that such an approach does not provide a full account of the experience of ‘being human’ (Archer 2000). A critical analysis of power relations needs to be able to understand not only power as domination, but how individual and collective empowerment may occur, alongside how these different power dynamics may interconnect (Allen 2008). It is to Archer’s (1995) conceptualization of structure, agency and culture that this chapter now turns, to illustrate its utility in exploring both structural constraints and active agency. Archer’s (1995) morphogenetic approach is a theoretical framework which allows analytic distinctions between pre-existent structures (which derive from and exist as a result of the activities of past agency), and an active but constrained agency who can, through reflection upon their practices, engage in and instigate forms of social changes. Time is a central tenet which allows analytic distinctions between: 1. Pre-existent, conditioning structures which distribute structural and cultural resources, and which condition and create ‘situational logics’ (Archer 1995, p. 218), but do not determine human actions; 2. Social interactions which can emanate both from conditioned and active agency; and 3. Resulting in either structural stasis or genesis (Archer 1995, p. 91). The morphogenetic approach supports an analytic dualism, exploring how agency causally interweaves with structure and culture (Archer 1996), focussing on the interplay of different strata and their emergent properties through time. Through analytic dualism it is possible to discern the conditions that may enable change within particular structural and cultural contexts. All social change ‘comes in a SAC’ (Archer 2013, p. 5), whereby: structure (S) can be defined as material resources and social resources such as roles, rules and systems; culture (C) can be understood as ideas, theories, values and beliefs; and agency (A) is conceived as active and reflective, mediating structural and cultural constraints. This approach brings agency back into our analysis, where

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‘being human is our gift to society – certainly with society, through society and in society – but it can never be society’s gift to us’ (Archer 2000, p. 305). It provides a stronger model of being human that is more than a conceptualization of agency only growing amidst the cracks of structural incompleteness (Glynos and Howarth 2008), like hardy weeds finding sustenance in the gaps between the concrete slabs of social structure.

A ‘GOVERNANCE ANALYSIS’ OF PARTICIPATORY GOVERNANCE Archer’s (1995, 2000, 2003) work on structure, culture and agency and the dynamics between them, provides a strong theoretical framework upon which to develop a governance analysis approach. Using the governance analysis triangle (Carmel, Chapter 3) this chapter focuses upon the dynamics and interrelationships between: 1. Structures: institutional structures, policies, regulations, resources, roles, and social systems 2. Actors: public service staff, service users, policymakers, consultants and co-ordinators 3. Processes: the co-production and co-design processes and techniques adopted. Within these dimensions there are an additional three aspects that need to be considered. First, there is a wider social and political dimension that understands governing as part of a political order, involving the distribution of resources and power. Second, time is a central feature of a governance analysis approach, studying governing as a ‘temporally variable and temporally dependent process’. Third, the scalar and locational dimension refers to a need to understand how governing processes take place within specific institutional and geographic locations that set the context for actors and governing processes (Carmel 2017; Chapter 3, this volume). Using these analytic tools to understand co-design and co-production processes helps us to tease out the specific complexities and contingencies of these processes. Methods and Cases My detailed empirical research focussed on projects that sought to involve both staff and service users collaboratively to develop public services, using co-production, co-design and co-creation techniques. I conducted two ethnographic case studies as an independent researcher and evaluator. One focussed on a project that used EBCD (Bate and Robert 2007) within National Health

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Service (NHS) hospital-based breast cancer services and the other on a local government programme that developed projects using co-production and co-design techniques, studied over a period of just under two years. Visits to other projects and involvement in a practitioners’ co-production network augmented this in-depth work, to understand broader issues in the implementation of these techniques through different public services. Through these connections I also conducted eight expert interviews with a range of facilitators and co-ordinators who had been involved in a number of co-production and/or co-design projects within health and social care, local government, education and the criminal justice system. Within the NHS case I acted as an independent evaluator of an EBCD project based in breast cancer services at two large hospitals that closely followed the methodology set out in Bate and Robert (2007). I observed the co-design process, which started with staff and service users separately sharing their experiences of providing and receiving services. With consent, the EBCD implementers developed a patient film which shared narratives of their service experiences. This was initially shown to patients, then a co-design event was held where service users and staff both viewed the film and shared their experiences. Priorities for improvement were voted on, with the most popular areas forming the focus of further work. Staff and service users then developed and redesigned services together through co-design groups who met to implement improvements. When these improvements had been implemented and a celebration event had been held I then interviewed people at the end of the process to understand their perspectives, experiences and reflections on being involved. I conducted 23 interviews with seven patients and 15 different staff (one person was interviewed twice) who had been involved in the EBCD process. Within the local government case I also acted as an independent evaluator where I evaluated an innovation programme that involved both staff and local citizens in developing person-centred public services and informing strategic policymaking. The project engaged staff and citizens in collaborative projects and worked in policy and service areas such as housing, public health and social services, working with local communities, families on low income and people who had been in prison. I also used documentary analysis to track the beginning of the project and follow the different projects that they had been involved in. I conducted 18 interviews with 17 different staff (one person was interviewed twice), alongside two focus groups, one with three community/ service user participants and two members of staff, and another focus group with three members of staff. In both cases data was analysed using realist evaluation techniques (Pawson and Tilley 1997) to understand the contexts and mechanisms of the processes and their effects. The use of Archer’s work on morphogenesis (Archer 1995) and reflexivity (Archer 2000, 2003, 2007)

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deepened the theoretical aspects of this analysis. Further details of the study are available from Farr (2012).

FINDINGS This analysis develops through three sections. First, it assesses how different staff and service users interact within the projects: actors within processes of governing. Using a scalar and locational analytic dimension it illustrates how the design of different participatory processes enables different people to get involved within specific contexts. Second, it explores the effects of these projects on shaping services and the ‘political ordering of social relations’: the effects of particular governing processes. Third, it illustrates how these processes interact with institutional structures and policy contexts: the structural conditions of governing. Here, particular attention is given to wider policy and political dimensions. Actors within Processes of Governing The way in which co-production projects were set up had an impact on how these participatory processes could challenge usual practice and social inequalities, potentially creating different conditions of possibility to make changes to public services. Within the EBCD project patients shared their own experiences of services on film. After separate staff and patient events (where patients first saw the film), a co-design event was held where the film was shown to staff with patient consent. This had a substantial emotional effect both for patients and staff: For the staff, it’s shocking, it’s like, we’re hoping that we have done a really good job and you hear that in some places we are getting it hopelessly wrong. That’s just gutting. (NHS Staff Interview 08)

After this event staff and patients formed ongoing co-design groups to discuss and implement service improvements. One patient spoke of having to revisit difficult experiences of treatment through their discussions in the co-design process. There was a particularly difficult time in a co-design group, where she unexpectedly met a staff member whom she had not expected to be there, which affected her ability to participate. However, service users did not feel the need for their own ongoing group and wanted to be heard by staff: I didn’t want it to be something where it was just a chance for everybody to tell their story … I didn’t want to tell any part of it unless it was going to make a difference to something else in the future. (NHS Patient 01)

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Exploring the scalar and locational dimensions of these processes helps us to understand if power relations could be ‘equalized’, and between which participants, and how interactions are shaped by wider spatial and discursive conditions. Within the NHS case, after the initial co-design events when staff and service users met, ongoing co-design groups were facilitated where specific improvement work was discussed and agreed between staff and patients in structured meetings within the organization, which attracted patients who had strong professional skills. In contrast to this more institutionalized format, the local government programme successfully engaged with diverse populations, working with people who were heard less within deliberative forums. Here participation could take the shape of a ‘pizza and beer’ evening or a morning get together in a local café. Using governance analysis, we can see that the contingent nature of participatory processes and how they are designed and located geographically directly affected different actors’ ability or motivation to get involved. Different processes and practices of participation are needed that acknowledge the diverse structural positions of different citizens. However, this seemed to impact on different staff’s ability or willingness to get involved. In the NHS case, institutionally formatted meetings were attended by a wide diversity of staff. In the local government case, participatory spaces were more community based, and were sometimes less incorporated into organizational decision-making structures. The local government project aimed to integrate their work into the policy team; however, service users had less direct contact with policy staff members and did not discuss the content and development of policy face to face. Instead, their experiences and project findings fed into the organizational process of policy development. Facilitating service user groups in the community had an impact on which professionals got involved and how. It increased the diversity of community participants, but potentially reduced communication channels with different staff groups who were the ultimate decision-makers. Community projects flourished, yet communications between these communities and decision-makers were more limited so there were fewer changes to organizational policies and practices as a result of participatory processes. The Effects of Participatory Governing Processes Despite various structural constraints, the two projects were successful in bringing about changes at an agential, cultural and structural level. Turning first to the level of agency, the process of participation itself could have a significant impact. NHS staff spoke of how their own practice had changed as a result of seeing things from patients’ perspectives. Two patients discussed how it had supported their own recovery and helped them come to terms with

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their experiences of having cancer. Another spoke about how their difficult experiences could be turned to positive effect, so that others might have a more positive experience in the future. Another spoke of how being filmed enabled her to share her experiences with members of her own family that she had not felt able to do before: Seeing the film was very good and my family’s seen it and my friends have seen it and quite a few people have seen it … To be honest with you now, lots of my family and my friends they didn’t know half of what I was going through. So when they saw the film … my daughter was crying … ‘you kept all these things to yourself and you didn’t tell us, all of the time you were feeling so bad, so terrible’, but sometimes it is like, your secret. Sometimes you don’t want to talk about it with somebody because you feel that you might upset them. (NHS patient 04)

The local government programme facilitated empowering changes at an individual and relational level. The confidence, self-esteem and skills of community participants grew considerably, alongside increasing community networks and resources. For staff, the projects facilitated meaningful and purposeful relationships with service users. I can actually say for once in my life, in my job history, that I have made a difference, even if it is just for one person, I can see a change, I can see a change in [Name], I can see a change in [Name], I can see it … I think that I have never had that in a job before, so I know that we are doing good and I know what we do is good. (Local government staff 02)

Community projects initiated structural changes at a local level; however, participants were aware that projects could be critiqued for this: The involvement and activism of families involved … it is a massive story for them as individuals, and for what that makes a difference to as a community … You can’t say across a county, getting on for 1.5 million people that that is a big thing but it is 100% for those people. (Local government staff 07)

In the NHS case improvements included: better systems that supported privacy and dignity; improvements to the appointments system and systems to support continuity of care; further staff training; better communications between different staff; more patient-centred practices in surgery and significant changes to day-surgery practice; and better patient information. Conversely, issues based on resources such as waiting times were harder to tackle due to increasing demand and financial pressures. Staff spoke of how structural changes took far more time, longer than the lifespan of the project. Cultural influences could be traced in both cases where service user involvement was further established as an important process in service development

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and sometimes policy development. Improvements were often aligned with wider organizational strategies and trajectories. In the local government case, community projects could be endorsed as examples of the ‘Big Society’ that UK politicians were promoting at the time. Wider organizational policies and resources had an influence upon which areas were changed, and which were not impacted. Projects operated within politically defined boundaries rather than contesting wider structural power relations and political and policy trajectories. There was little change in the political ordering of social relations, yet the changes made within the projects did affect and improve some people’s lived experiences (see also Morgan-Trimmer, Chapter 9).

STRUCTURAL CONDITIONS OF PARTICIPATORY GOVERNING Turning to a broader political perspective, public service reforms have often been based on the adoption of private sector practices into the public service arena. Conceptually, both co-creation (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004; Von Hippel 2005) and co-design (Sanders and Stappers 2008) come from private sector practices associated with innovation, marketing and design. Co-design techniques have been promoted by different private service design companies, social enterprises and charities offering consultancy and methods in social innovation and service design. Various organizations including The Design Council, NESTA, and the New Economics Foundation alongside trade unions such as Unison and the Trades Union Congress (2008) and think tanks such as Demos (Parker and Heapy 2006) and Compass (Gannon and Lawson 2008) were all considering the importance of these approaches. Internationally there are similar practices and organizations including in the US, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Finland (Bason 2010; Molloy 2018). Expert interviewees helped to trace the implementation of co-design in the public services arena: We started to look around and said ‘ok, what, who else is a service and how do they look at linking in with their users’. And we looked at airports, we looked at hotels, and the retail industry. And actually what came to us while we were looking at those is that there is a common denominator of an organization that works with all of those people and that was service designers. (Expert interview 01)

Within a neo-liberal context, it was private sector user-centred practices that were adopted and adapted. The opening up of the public sector to private sector

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practices meant that many service design companies were increasingly looking to the public sector as a new context within which to apply their methods. It seems that designers have come into fashion and everybody would like to have designers because now design methods seem to be what is hyped by organizations and I think that design companies profit a lot from that trend right now. (Expert interview 06)

The adoption of private sector design discourses and practices into public services follows neo-liberal political trajectories. Private sector design companies had the potential to profit from these new trends. Service design practices may aim to improve services for users, but they are not rooted within political movements that contest inequalities, or work toward social justice and democratic rights. Conversely policy debates surrounding co-production are diverse, and whilst co-production is promoted as a way to promote equal partnerships between service users and providers (Boyle and Harris 2009), discourse on co-production and innovation is also associated with making public service cuts. There is a slightly hard-nosed, mean version of this which is that the better people are at self-resilience, the less of a drain on the tax payer they are going to be. So you can play that to a very hard line Conservative audience and you can say much the same things from an empowerment point of view to different sorts of audiences. (Local government staff 13)

Within a neo-liberal political context, design companies may be contracted as facilitators of innovation within public services, rather than the distribution of resources and money going to work with welfare service user movements and user-led organizations who may contest public policies, and create politicized and collective alternatives to dominant political debate (Farr 2013). However, these design techniques can still have important effects on people’s lived experiences. Conversely, co-production might be used to promote self-resilience, becoming a mask for cuts (Fotaki 2015). These dynamics highlight the contingencies and complexities of such approaches. A post-structuralist perspective might miss the empowering tendencies of these practices, whereas a focus on elements of agency may over-emphasize its transformative potential. A governance analysis approach provides us with a set of tools to examine these specific contingencies and complexities, examining how specific participatory processes shape, reproduce or challenge existing governing practices.

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CONCLUSION This chapter has emphasized that there is a need for governance theory to encompass both the roles of social actors and institutional structures and the interactions between them within a more integrated and complete viewpoint (Carmel, Chapter 2; Peters 2011). The chapter has critiqued different governance approaches, going beyond interpretivist, post-Foucauldian and post-structuralist perspectives. It has illustrated the value of governance analysis to facilitate an understanding of social processes within an open complex system, examining how different elements of policy, institutions, culture and agency combine to create particular emergent properties. In this chapter, the governance analysis framework has been used to understand participatory governing processes including: the actors within processes of governing; the effects of governing processes; and the structural conditions of governing. These are set within a wider socio-political dimension, where governing establishes rules and processes, and involves the distribution of resources and power. This governance analysis approach has examined specific co-production and co-design processes within different institutional structures, exploring the role of agency alongside how the processes lead to specific effects, both in terms of the outcomes of participatory processes and the political ordering of social relations. This contributes to participatory governance and co-production and co-design literature in three ways. First, specifically within this chapter with its focus on actors, governance analysis has been combined with realist social theory to conceptualize agents as active and reflective, mediating structural and cultural constraints, yet with some potential to change these. This provides a theoretical approach with which to analyse the relationships between structure and agency, without emphasizing one element over another. Second, it enables a focus on specific structural and contextual elements that shape governing processes. For example, the content of participative processes could be both limited, and caused, by wider structural, policy and political issues. As an example, one of the areas where most changes were made within hospital cancer services was within day-surgery, closely aligned with wider policy trajectories and their focus on reducing length of stay within hospitals. Governance analysis focuses on what aspects of context actors themselves refer to, and those aspects that shape particular ‘situational logics’ (Archer 1995, p. 218), either creating structural and cultural constraints or enablers that lead to processes of social change within a socio-political context. Third, a particular focus on the effects and outcomes of governing processes enables us to explore both the outcomes of collaborative processes and their impacts upon the political ordering of social relations. The study’s findings resonate

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with Bang’s (2005) concept of ‘everyday makers’ where the issues tackled were more localized than challenging political discourses and trajectories. Our approach highlights how participatory processes may be enabling or constraining, and how reflexive actors may act and develop participatory practice to challenge social inequalities and make differences to people’s lived experiences. Governance analysis allows us to interrogate under what conditions co-production and co-design processes have contingent effects as opposed to promoting their normative good. It allows us to explore the outcomes and effects of collaborative processes on the political ordering of social relations. Whilst co-production and co-design promote the principle of equalizing relations between service users and organizations, this chapter illustrates some of the power dynamics that may affect these processes. The processes tended to follow Allen’s (2015) image of more mobile power relations, where some emancipation and social change can occur within uneven structural inequalities, produced by what Carmel (Chapter 2) refers to as a ‘regime of governing practices’. Adopting a governance analytic approach helps us to see the specific contextual elements that may enable and constrain changes, and how processes may be developed that take account of structural inequalities and how these may be mitigated or changed.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks to the organizations and people who facilitated this research, and the participants of this study for giving their time and sharing their views and experiences. This work was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council: +3 Quota Award number ES/FO23588/1. Michelle Farr’s time is supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care West (CLAHRC West) at University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust.

DISCLAIMER The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of the case organizations, the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care.

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9. Participatory governing at the margins of the state Sarah Morgan-Trimmer INTRODUCTION This chapter presents an application of governance analysis to a case study of a participatory urban regeneration programme. The chapter first outlines how a governance analysis approach overcomes some of the limitations of the existing literature, including an over-emphasis on structure rather than processes, governance outcomes or the agency of actors. To address this problem, the chapter draws on Lister’s ‘poverty and agency quadrant’ to analyse the different ways in which residents exercised agency. I also explain the importance of analysing governing processes as being inscribed in power relations; this perspective was critical for the aim of the case study, which was to understand whether residents were empowered by a participatory urban regeneration scheme, and if so how. The application of governance analysis to the urban regeneration programme is then presented. Our governance analysis approach involved a detailed, empirical study of actor–process–structure configurations in order to capture the complex dynamics of governing and their outcomes. A case study methodology, using a critical realist perspective, was conducted over one year and included in-depth interviews, observations of local meetings and document analysis (Morgan-Trimmer, 2010). The analysis addressed: how governing happened as a process producing specific governing outcomes; the interplay of agency, process and structure; and the implications for resident empowerment as an aspect of the political ordering of social relations. The chapter ends with reflections on the benefits of adopting a governance analysis approach.

WHY ‘GOVERNANCE ANALYSIS’? The case study discussed in this chapter was a ten-year urban regeneration programme – New Deal for Communities (NDC) – which invested resources in specific regeneration projects in a socioeconomically disadvantaged area, but 173

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was also designed to reconfigure and improve local public services. ‘Resident participation’ in local decision-making was a core value of the national NDC programme. In the case study programme, this was promoted not only through capacity-building for local resident participation, but also through supplementing existing local governing structures with its own participatory governance groups. The programme was also partially integrated with existing governance groups for local public services, often through public sector staff and residents attending both regeneration and local public service meetings. The addition of local governing groups and the inclusion of residents were important structural features of the reconfigured governing arrangements in the programme; they created a potential opportunity for local residents to influence both the newly introduced programme and also how existing local public services were governed to a greater degree than previously. The aim of the case study was to understand how residents might influence local decision-making, and become more empowered though this type of participatory programme. This required an approach that also took account of governing very specifically as a process through which influence might occur, and the role of diverse local actors interacting as part of this process. The key concepts of ‘structure’, ‘process’ and ‘actor’, and the dynamic relationships between them, were therefore essential for the analysis. A ‘governance analysis’ approach was also adopted because power and empowerment were at the heart of the analytical focus of the study. Power is a notoriously difficult phenomenon to examine; the approach taken for this study was to explore resident ‘influence’, for example how resident aspirations might result in changes in local public services. This involved examining both the processes of how governing happened, and the associated outcomes of governing. Outcomes are a critical aspect of understanding governing since ‘governing’ is partly defined by its purpose to produce decisions, usually about how to design and implement public policy, and how to allocate public resources (Carmel, Chapter 2, this volume). The outcomes of governance, in terms of policy impact, are important for residents who usually participate because they want to change something in their local area. Therefore, the concepts of resident ‘participation in governing’ and ‘empowerment’ employed here incorporate the idea that it is not just process that is important but also what is achieved for residents through processes of participation. Our concept of ‘governance analysis’ makes assessment of these implications of governing a central feature of our analysis. Analysis of governing and power in a public policy context is also inherently concerned with the ‘political ordering of social relations’. Governance analysis frames participation within the social and political context of decision-making processes for public policy, rather than as an apolitical activity. Our concept of ‘governance analysis’ seeks to expose and explain the implications for power

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relations of sociopolitical structures and governing processes, and their interactions. In this case study in particular, this speaks to broader social concerns about the empowerment of residents of socioeconomically disadvantaged areas who have historically been excluded from political life at different levels. The participation of residents in regeneration has traditionally been explored in the participation literature as ‘community participation’ and has been influenced by the field of community development, with its emphasis on the concept of ‘empowerment’ (Parsloe, 1996). Community participation creates, in principle, spaces for marginalised groups to influence local policy decisions. This is in contrast to perspectives which, for example, evaluate community participation in terms of the educational or confidence building benefits to local residents; this has only tangential relevance to governing, since it measures changes in participants rather than changes in policy. Furthermore, in addition to the direct political implications of participation is the potential effect on economic marginalisation. Participation in governing can be significant in regeneration programmes for material reasons: the participation of local residents in local decision-making may improve access to public goods and services on which they depend. This perspective draws on the ‘livelihoods’ approach to economic marginalisation that emphasises the variety of resources or capital that people draw on, rather than just financial resources (Serrat, 2010). It recognises the importance of access to or claims upon public services, not just income or physical resources, for people’s material well-being. Thus participation in governing is not just a social good or an extension of Western democratic processes. Participation has direct implications for the material well-being of local residents in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas, since participation in governing can potentially improve their access to and quality of public services and resources. Therefore, while improved governing processes may include local residents and thereby improve their political position, the ‘political ordering of social relations’ is also relevant for the material outcomes of governing, since outcomes can affect the economic position of marginalised groups.

STRUCTURE, PROCESS AND AGENCY IN URBAN REGENERATION This section outlines resident participation in urban regeneration through an examination of three constructs: structure, process and agency. It discusses the existing governance and participation literature and highlights gaps that governance analysis addresses: governing processes, the role of actors and their agency in governing processes, and governing outcomes. Participatory urban regeneration programmes present opportunities for local residents to become involved in local governing, since residents participate

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in local governance groups for the regeneration programme which make decisions about the allocation of public resources for their area. This is an example of a re-formed governance structure, where actors beyond the state are included in governing processes and the state’s monopoly on governing is thereby reduced (Kjær, 2004). These forms of governance, such as a participatory regeneration programme, can be contrasted to centralised, hierarchical, ‘top-down’ modes of governing, where policy decisions are made by a centralised state and decisions are cascaded to lower levels. One of the rationales for the inclusion of new actors in governing is to expand the efficiency and effectiveness of welfare service delivery and to address complex social problems which governments cannot address alone (Kooiman, 2003; Kjær, 2004). Regeneration programmes are an example of this: a common rationale for resident involvement includes improving the relevance and effectiveness of programme spending and public services in order to overcome socioeconomic disadvantage. Several analyses, however, have pointed out that, while the inclusion of new actors may seem to result in governing occurring at a greater distance from the state, what occurs is rather an adaption in how the state exercises power, taking on a new role with respect to governing, rather than withdrawing from governing (Newman, 2001; Ball, 2008). The state’s role remains through ‘steering’ rather than ‘controlling’ (through stipulating performance targets, for example) and therefore the shift from ‘hierarchy’ is not complete. Changes in governance have therefore created a field of tensions between different types of governing rather than a complete transformation (Newman, 2001). In UK regeneration programmes, the hierarchical aspects of governing are visible through centralised performance management regimes and programme funding structures. While residents may have been included in local decision-making structures, they tend to be excluded from strategic-level decisions which shape programmes, lack significant control over programme finances and also tend to be involved after major decisions have been made; in these ways their position in governing is peripheral. The state remains a powerful actor in regeneration partnerships and resident empowerment is limited; the ‘hierarchy’ mode of governance is still present despite the participatory ethos of such programmes (Whitehead, 2007). The community participation literature has also highlighted limitations though an examination of both structures and processes in various types of participatory initiatives, and has drawn attention to the significant constraints for marginalised groups. As well as identifying structural factors such as centralised financial control, much of this literature has made a contribution to an understanding of how processes of participation may be difficult for residents because of various factors such as co-option, cliques, inconvenient timetables, technocratic language, and knowledge and skill requirements for adequate participation (Perrons and Skyers,

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2003; Taylor, 2003; Beresford and Hoban, 2005; Purdue, 2005; Taylor, 2005; Wright et al., 2006; Bristow et al., 2008; Jarvis et al., 2011). These difficulties in processes of participation also work to keep residents on the periphery of governing because they may be reluctant to attend governance groups, or, if they do attend, their aspirations and opinions are less likely to be voiced, acknowledged or included in local decision-making discussions. These accounts largely describe the limitations of reconfigured governing arrangements; in doing so they also somewhat obscure possibilities of where resident influence may occur. A governance analysis approach is more comprehensive in that it addresses governing in terms of a set of processes that produce outcomes rather than highlighting main constraints or limitations (significant though they may be) (see Carmel, Chapter 2, where she discusses how ‘governing practices’ are produced by diverse social actors who both act in the world and give meaning to that action). This is important for understanding resident participation and empowerment because governing structures and processes create both opportunities and constraints for actors (Kooiman, 2003). Governing may be characterised by instabilities and tensions, through the combination of state-dominated hierarchy and participatory initiatives, for example; residents may be able to engage in governing in new ways through these reconfigured structures and the ‘opportunity gaps’ they may create (Newman et al., 2004). These may be shaped by various factors such as local governance structures and how these change over time, the expectations of different groups of actors participating in governing, the resources available to different participating groups, institutional histories in an area and the pressures (not necessarily in agreement with each other) exerted by national government. Therefore, although participation in regeneration tends to be limited in its empowering potential for marginalised groups, opportunities may nevertheless exist and these may be important for understanding governing processes and what outcomes they produce. In order to capture potential outcomes, a governance analysis approach has to produce a detailed account of how governing occurs with sensitivity to these small gaps of opportunity and what might result from them. How opportunity gaps are exploited in governing in a regeneration context depends partly on how residents exercise agency: the role of actors and how they exercise agency in governing is a critical aspect of explaining the detail of governing processes. Actors are motivated by a range of factors and often have various options for how to participate in governing, within structural constraints: Understanding how and why people participate, in turn, requires that we take a closer look at how would be participants … construct their own engagement and

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entitlements: what spaces they are given, and what spaces they occupy as theirs. (Cornwall, 2002: 51)

This can be usefully understood using Lister’s ‘poverty and agency’ quadrant (Lister, 2004), which summarises responses to socioeconomic disadvantage along two axes: personal–political and everyday–strategic. Her approach emphasises strategic coping behaviours adopted by people in the face of challenges that are exercised in the context of and in response to structural constraints: people experiencing poverty are actors in their own lives, but within the bounds of frequently formidable and oppressive structural and cultural constraints … (Lister 2004: 157)

The everyday–personal domain of the quadrant ‘getting by’ refers to the way individuals manage and juggle financial, personal, social and other resources to manage them optimally on a day-to-day level. Residents may use local governance groups to access public resources at this level on occasion. The strategic political domain – ‘getting organised’ – refers to trying to bring about societal change through collective self-help or political action for example, including through participation in a regeneration programme. Lister also notes that the exercise of agency carries costs, such as stress, which requires psychological coping resources. Residents may respond to a regeneration programme strategically to maximise benefits potentially acquired through new opportunities, but also act to minimise potential costs incurred. These costs are often overlooked but can be significant. The costs of attending local decision-making meetings could include: the time involved in travelling to and attending meetings; language and documentation that are not easily understood; having to adapt to local authority culture (such as formal minute-taking) not familiar to everyone; and stress when controversial decisions are made about local areas, when conflict occurs between participants or when meetings just become boring (Dinham, 2005). Minimising costs is normal behaviour for any group; it has particular relevance for socioeconomically disadvantaged areas where residents may have fewer time, educational, psychological or other resources required for participating in governing. They may also have previous experience of local participatory initiatives and their outcomes, and base a cost–benefit calculation on this experience. Residents may be aware that their likely position on the periphery of governing will limit their influence, but the costs of this sort of involvement might also be considered lower than other types of more confrontational political engagement, which might require more time and incur more stress. These opportunities and costs must also be calculated in a wider framework: the costs of not becoming involved in local

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decision-making groups may reduce the levels of activity or effectiveness of public sector efforts to improve a local area. Considerations of how to exercise agency might therefore involve strategic decisions about where to exercise it (towards the centre of governing, at the town hall for example, or more peripherally at a local park meeting) and how to exercise it (some methods, such as a public demonstration, are quite confrontational; others such as attending a meeting, usually less so). In these ways, governing processes are likely to be influenced by the strategic exercise of agency by residents calculating costs and benefits, in the context of opportunity gaps on the periphery of governing. To summarise the above discussion of the literature, urban regeneration and community participation programmes have typically presented local residents with limited opportunities to influence governing because of constraints in governing structures and processes. However, the field of governing is dynamic because of the tensions between ‘participation’ and hierarchical governing, and because of the interaction of the various actors and groups involved; this creates ‘opportunity gaps’ for resident empowerment. Resident participation in these ‘gaps’ will be partly shaped by their exercise of agency within a set of relationships with other actors, and this agency will be shaped by the resources they can draw on and the costs that participation may incur. A ‘governance analysis’ of an urban regeneration programme must therefore take account of not only structural constraints but also how processes occur and how agency is exercised within the new environment of reconfigured governance structures, and what they might produce, in order to fully understand governing in this context.

APPLYING GOVERNANCE ANALYSIS This section presents the application of our governance analysis approach to the case study, outlining findings on how actors, process and structures operated as a related and dynamic set of phenomena and the implications of this for the ‘political ordering of social relations’. Resident influence was analysed as the primary governing process of interest; this included attention to the outcomes that resident participation produced. This required an approach sensitive to empirical complexities which could capture interactions between structure, process and agency enacted by multiple groups of actors over time. The study focused on environmental services in particular, as these were a key area of interest to local residents and were recognised as a problem in the area (East Manchester NDC, 1999).

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Structure and Actors The purpose of the regeneration programme was to distribute regeneration funding to improve the local area, through new housing and improving parks for example, over its lifetime of ten years, but also to reorient and improve the way local public services were run in the longer term by engaging local public services in the programme. Resident participation was a core value of the programme. The pathways of participation and resident influence were implicitly theorised in NDC policy documents as occurring through the attendance of local residents at regeneration and other local meetings. This was a fairly broad model with unspecified mechanisms. The case study NDC programme’s main early effort, with respect to local resident participation, was to provide capacity-building for local resident groups, often formed of residents from one or two streets. Residents were supported to develop local groups; the local concerns and aspirations expressed in these groups would be represented at NDC governance meetings. Some resident groups in the area had existed before the introduction of NDC, but NDC increased the number and capacity of local residents groups with the support of a Resident Liaison Officer, who provided advice and training. The case study NDC established three main governance groups for the regeneration programme: a strategic forum, the NDC board and a ‘Residents’ Forum’. Residents were represented in all three groups, as well as in ‘Task Groups’ which were formed at the beginning of the programme to make decisions about priorities for project funding in different thematic areas such as education. The national NDC programme required that at least 50 per cent of NDC board members were local residents, a requirement that the case study programme met (not all NDCs managed this). The NDC board comprised 12 members with voting rights: six residents, four people from the public sector, one from the voluntary sector, and one business representative (more people than this could attend board meetings but these were the only voting members). The Residents’ Forum was less formally run than the NDC board and had a relatively wide remit which covered the progress of Task Groups, information about local organisations, services or initiatives, and any local concerns or problems brought up by residents. Residents had various routes to influence public services through the NDC: residents could participate in the network of NDC groups at a variety of levels, and could also maintain informal contact with NDC through local consultations and events. The NDC programme was also embedded in existing local governance structures through links to small local authority area groups that contributed to decision-making for the local authority area. During these meetings, which residents could attend, discussions were held about local development, local problems and what could be done to improve the area. Local residents also

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attended meetings organised by police and environmental public services in the area, which were already running in the local area but were linked to the programme through the same public service employees and residents often attending both types of meetings. There were also other forms of resident involvement in the area through groups, such as school governors, church groups, tenants’ associations, Homewatch, Friends of Parks and local steering groups for neighbourhood planning and housing redevelopment. Some groups had connections with NDC but were not formally represented at the Residents’ Forum. In these ways, the regeneration programme introduced new structures and opportunities, embedded within a context of existing governance structures, for resident involvement in local governing and influence over public services. The inclusion of local residents in decision-making in the area was limited in ways common to participatory initiatives. Typically, only a small proportion of residents participated in local meetings regularly. Furthermore, the organisation of the regeneration partnership, although it did include 50 per cent residents on the board, had less representation of residents at the strategic-level forum. Staffing and financial control was administered by the local authority, while overall thematic areas and targets for the NDC programme were defined by national government. Furthermore, the regeneration programme was relatively autonomous and separate from the local authority; there were connections but as long as programmes were running successfully they were ‘left alone’ by the local authority. This had benefits, such as greater autonomy and efficiency of the programme, but made links to central decision-making in the local authority more distant. In addition, the regeneration programme only introduced temporary resources and structures to promote resident involvement in decision-making. Furthermore, the engagement of public services, while variable across different services (in terms of attendance and engagement of staff, especially at the more senior level), was recognised as challenging (East Manchester NDC, 2002), an issue which was typical across NDC programmes (Lawless, 2007). Therefore, residents could be said to have remained at relatively peripheral locations of lower-level meetings of the regeneration programme and other local governance structures; this is typical of participatory initiatives, where low numbers of residents participate and, for those that do, their influence is limited. However, while residents occupied peripheral areas of governing, this was not unproductive. Residents engaged strategically with governance structures in the local area in two ways. First, some residents who were active and engaged in groups used their resources such as increased contact with and

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knowledge of local governance structures selectively and strategically, by using multiple routes of influence depending on the concern: They might come to me. They might use the local ward councillor if they thought that that might be beneficial. They might write directly to [NDC Officer]. They might make a complaint to the paper. Or if it was a big issue go maybe to Channel M [local TV channel] or something like that. They might bring issues up at the forum or use platforms where they can raise issues. So I would say they’re aware of strategies and methods to use. And some might adopt a completely different approach. It might be about like ‘Hiya, how are you doing, not seen you for ages, do you know you might be able to help me out with this because I’ve got a right problem with such and such’ So, yeah, they know how to get things done. (Interview, NDC Officer 4)

Residents selected different types of engagement according to their different costs, benefits and likely outcomes. They were primarily motivated by outcomes rather than political ideals, sometimes expressing a wish that public services would operate sufficiently well in their area without needing local resident input. Residents tended to use informal networks (discussed below) often, as these were less costly in terms of time and effort, but also had ‘reserve’ methods if these failed. For example, meetings were time-consuming but could be used if other methods had failed. Meetings had benefits in that they had a formal structure and record keeping, and were spaces where service representatives could be addressed directly in a public arena and would be accountable: I think they respond better because it’s on the minutes, isn’t it? So if you go to the next, if it doesn’t happen it’s on the next minutes, you can pick it up on matters arising, and you can keep at it, can’t you, until the person will get it done. (Interview, Resident 7)

The strategic actions described above are of residents who were attending local meetings and were engaged; typically for NDC a very small proportion of the local population participated. A second strategic behaviour was non-participation, which is sometimes characterised as apathy or passivity in local residents. However, reasons for non-participation can include cynicism and low expectations of benefits, particularly if residents have experienced initiatives in the past which have not produced any results. Other residents only temporarily participated in meetings to resolve a particular problem or to gain immediate benefits for themselves: A resident group came in for one reason. To see what was in it for them, if they could get anything out of it. And once they got what they wanted they would leave and they wouldn’t come back. (Interview, Resident 4)

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Minimising participation through non-, peripheral or temporary engagement to minimise costs may have been a strategy to preserve scarce personal resources to concentrate on ‘getting by’, and may also have been motivated by avoiding disappointment if residents had experienced ineffective public initiatives in the past. These residents engaged in governing in a limited way at the periphery, but were not passive. They exercised strategic agency in ways that maximised their chances of influencing decision-making or gaining material benefits while preserving resources. Thus, residents were able to locate points at which to engage productively (for themselves) in governing, through choosing different routes of influence or levels of engagement. Actors in Processes Governing also occurred outside of formal structures, through actors interacting with each other and thereby creating additional governing processes. This often occurred in informal settings outside governance meetings. Relationships between local residents and public service employees were initially facilitated by regeneration officers who developed contacts with local residents during the early stages of the regeneration programme. A small number of these residents participated in the formal governance meetings of the regeneration partnership. Building on these contacts, networks of relationships then developed between residents and public service employees. These relationships often developed through further one-to-one contact outside meetings, through telephone calls for example. Contact with public services could also be developed via direct contact on the street: Respondent: Yeah, I mean we have a website so they can email us with any problems if that’s the need be, phone calls, we deliver and stuff and obviously we’re on patrol. Interviewer: Do people come up to you and talk to you? Respondent: Oh yes, yes, certainly, yeah, they’ll, they’ll, they’ll grab you straightaway. Interviewer: And which, is there one of those ways that’s more significant? Respondent: Probably the, the pulling you in off the street. They do, I mean they phone the office regularly … but you are always stopped as you’re walking around and you know, and people do talk to you, yeah. (Interview, Public Service Employee 1)

These relationships enabled residents to communicate with and influence public services about very local issues, particularly as trust and accountability in these relationships developed (Morgan-Trimmer, 2013). This type of informal communication and influence was relatively low-cost and efficient for residents in terms of time and effort, since it did not require attendance at

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meetings and residents could communicate their concerns directly and briefly. For those public service employees who were known and trusted, the benefits of this type of contact were also fairly high, since the employees were likely to respond to their concerns: I’ve got three quite, well four [resident groups] … three that are very strong that I work with in [local area]. But the thing with them is they usually come to me with jobs that they know I can do and sort out for them. Or at least get a job put on and chase it up. And due to that, ’cos they know that I’ll do something when they ask me to, I think we’ve just built up a trust between us really. (Interview, Public Service Employee 6)

These relationships enabled residents to address local issues, such as crime, open spaces and parks, that were often of significant and immediate concern to them. In this way, residents used informal networks to ‘get by’, to improve local public services and resources which had a direct impact on their material well-being. This mirrors the informal social networks that socioeconomically disadvantaged groups often use to get by, through the provision of psychological and material resources (Lister, 2004). Informal networks did, however, have limitations apart from the lack of strategic-level influence, since they were dependent on key individuals being present locally and on the continuity of their position, which could not be guaranteed. For example, residents could move away from the area or public service employees could change their job. Some residents were also involved in these informal networks but at a more peripheral level. Some non-participating residents knew a local resident who was involved in governance groups or who had contacts with public service employees, and would communicate with public services through this intermediary, often passing on information about a problem or getting information from them about how the problem was being addressed. Their concerns were generally very limited to local or personal concerns, asking participating residents about: quite minor things. They’re not normally, but bigger things like what’s going on at the stadium, they won’t ask me things like that. But they might: ‘why’s this not happened that was supposed to be happening?’ They’re more interested in their small community. (Interview, Resident 5)

These residents engaging through informal contacts could be regarded as participating on the periphery of governing, as they had a link with decision-making processes through intermediary residents whereas the majority of residents had no links at all. This type of participation presented opportunities to participate in governing with very low costs, as residents did not have to engage with a formal and possibly intimidating environment but could talk to a neighbour.

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This was influence at a very local level and so was limited in this respect, but sometimes solved immediate problems for residents and without significant costs. Governing, in this instance, can be understood as processes enacted by actors in informal spaces, on the periphery of formal governance structures, which brought material benefits to the local community. Processes and Structure The contacts between residents and public agencies, as well as being used by residents to ‘get by’ for specific issues, developed over time into informal networks; the repeated contacts between individuals developed into semi-stable structures through which residents could improve their local area through engaging with public services. These informal networks also extended to residents who did not attend meetings but who either had direct contact with public service employees (on street patrols, for example) or who knew well-connected local residents. This network of contacts was viewed by residents as a resource that could help them maintain communication with and influence over local public services: Everybody has their [public services] number so they can phone them up, which they didn’t do before. But they do now … If somebody just gives you a telephone number and you don’t know who to ask for, you’re going to be, you’re going to give up on the phone. ’Cos you must know, you phone up an agency, any of ours and you’ll get, the first, the first one on the phone will say ‘Well they’re not here at the moment, can I, what is it you need?’ and you tell them and they go ‘I can’t help you, you need that person you’re ringing for’. You think ‘For crying out loud’. So, the right name, the right telephone number, the information you need, that is, I don’t like the word empowerment, but I think the capacity, the capacity-building of the community. (Interview, Resident 4)

In this way, residents could achieve improvements in local public services through a network of direct contacts as well as through attending formal meetings; this informal network could be regarded as an extended governance space because residents were able to repeatedly use contacts to influence public services as well as formal governance meetings. The development of informal networks could also be regarded as a form of ‘getting organised’ to improve the local area and public services, even though it was not a conscious collective action or a specific planned strategy. Informal networks partially emerged from and were overlaid on the formal arrangements of the regeneration programme, its governance groups and local authority meetings, since some residents and public service employees were active in both types of governance space. Both had a direct utility in promoting resident influence over local public services in ways which, although very local level, were

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significant to them. In addition, the development of this type of network was potentially useful in the longer term, as the governing structures introduced and supported by the regeneration programme were only temporary, and some residents thought public services would be less responsive to residents once the programme had finished. Residents needed therefore their own, alternative structure after NDC had gone: Resident: At the moment it’s handy because we can call round; they [NDC] know the people to contact, and that’s fair enough. But when they’re gone we’ve got to do it ourselves. So it’s building that structure where we know, even if it becomes phone numbers and people we can approach on issues. Interviewer: Would you be happy with just that? Resident: Yeah, yeah. It’s information, and sometimes information is a little bit of power! I mean that’s half the battle. If you know the right person to talk to rather than having to go through six different cut-outs. If you can find somebody that can deal with the situation then hopefully you can go to them and at least launch your complaint or whatever it is you want to try and resolve. (Interview, Resident 8)

It should also be noted, however, that informal networks could also be unstable since they were reliant on key individuals (residents or public sector employees) acting as contacts. This analysis of structure, agency and process reveals how residents operated within the structural constraints of governing, and how the processes of governing and governing structures themselves were shaped by the strategic exercise of agency of actors (Chapter 1, Figure 1.1). Residents strategically engaged with governing structures in ways they thought would best meet their needs, and also avoided, withdrew or maintained a distance from formal governing spaces to protect limited resources and capacities at times. Residents also developed contacts with public service employees to secure additional resources, especially where benefits could be gained while minimising costs. Additionally, residents were able to re-order the structures of governing on the periphery through developing the additional, overlaid informal networks through which resident influence occurred over local services, as well as through formal governance meetings. Therefore, while this participatory programme was typically constrained for residents, they maintained some control over the governing processes they engaged in and the types of governance structures and spaces they operated in. Residents used strategic engagement and informal networks to ‘get by’ and ‘get organised’ to improve their area and local public services. They achieved influence in decision-making in that they achieved some of the benefits they wanted through making efficient use of opportunity gaps in local governance. In this case study, while governing structures remained relatively restricted for marginalised groups, residents were not passive victims of structural constraints but achieved some measure

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of influence to secure the governing outcomes they wanted, in order to address the economic marginalisation of their area.

REFLECTIONS ON GOVERNANCE ANALYSIS The use of governance analysis in this case study has demonstrated that describing limitations of governing structures was not sufficient for a complete analysis of resident participation or empowerment. Understanding governing and its outcomes required an approach that addressed governing inherently as a dynamic process, as actors exercised agency, within contextual constraints (Newman, 2005; Carmel, Chapter 3, this volume). The interaction of structure, processes and agency of actors engaged in governing occurred in a complex series of events over time; our approach does not treat each as a static artefact but acknowledges that each of these elements may evolve over time, often in response to each other. By paying close attention to these three constructs and how they interacted, the analysis revealed how residents managed their engagement with governing structures; how actor agency led to processes of informal networking and how these developed into informal networks, thus creating new, peripheral governing structures. At the heart of governance are questions about power and about redistributing power away from the state to other actors in society. The findings presented here indicate that the question of how empowered residents are through ‘new’ governance arrangements is more than one of network structures or institutional arrangements but is also about how processes actually happen, how agency is exercised, the relationships that actors have with each other in networks, and what effects these have on governing outcomes. Residents participated in a reconfigured structural environment, partly created through their own agency in developing informal networks; as a result of this some effects on public services were observable. The governance approach adopted was detailed enough to pick up the nuances of governing processes and the interactions between agency–structure–process to explain how governing outcomes were achieved. The question of how excluded actors can become empowered through new governance arrangements is also multi-faceted, since excluded actors can be both limited to the periphery and able to exercise agency and strategically pursue their own interests with some effect. A governance terrain can also be uneven, since a centre–periphery distinction can be made and engagement will also vary within a community: some residents will get by and some will get organised; some may act according to certain cost–benefit calculations and only engage very peripherally; some residents will not engage at all. Governance analysis also addresses governing as a process that is inscribed in power relations which are reflected in governing outcomes. Residents achieved social and material outcomes of relevance and importance to them,

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even if they did not achieve all their goals or increase their power over more centralised decision-making processes. It is worth noting here how important governing outcomes were; residents were motived by achieving material gains for their local area rather than becoming part of local political processes per se. Empowerment for residents occurred where governing processes resulted in the outcomes that they wanted in terms of improvements to the area and to local public services. The political ordering of social relations was not fundamentally changed in this case study regeneration programme because residents remained on the periphery of governing, and the routes to influence they used – the regeneration programme and their informal networks – lacked stability and permanence; however, there were subtle shifts and the periphery was not an inactive area. Residents made use of the opportunity gaps on the periphery of governing that were available to them. This case study reveals that local residents are not necessarily passive victims of state power or unequal societies but that they can act strategically and make decisions to promote their own needs within a context of marginalisation from central power structures. These findings could have been missed if data collection had only focused on the formal processes and structures of governing (in local meetings) rather than the aspirations of residents and how they exercised agency in order to achieve them. This case study demonstrates how, applied empirically, governance analysis can help understand and explain how governing occurs and the implications for public policy outcomes. The constructs of ‘actors–processes–structures’, their dynamic interactions over time, and how they produce governing outcomes, comprise a useful approach to analysing governing. Furthermore, understanding a complex, political and sometimes opaque phenomenon such as resident participation and empowerment requires a comprehensive and sensitive analytical approach oriented towards power relations; governance analysis is such an approach.

REFERENCES Ball, S., 2008. ‘New philanthropy, new networks and new governance in education.’ Political Studies 56(4): 747–765. Beresford, P. and M. Hoban, 2005. Effective Participation in Anti-Poverty and Regeneration Work and Research: Overcoming Barriers and Creating Opportunities. York, JRF. Bristow, G., et al., 2008. ‘New spaces for inclusion? Lessons from the “three-thirds” partnerships in Wales.’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(4): 903–921. Cornwall, A., 2002. ‘Locating citizen participation.’ IDS Bulletin 33(2): 49–58.

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Dinham, A., 2005. ‘Empowered or over-powered? The real experiences of local participation in the UK’s New Deal for Communities.’ Community Development Journal 40(3): 301–312. East Manchester NDC, 1999. Delivery Plan. Manchester, East Manchester NDC. East Manchester NDC, 2002. Beacons for a Brighter Future Annual Review 2002. Manchester, East Manchester NDC. Jarvis, D., et al., 2011. ‘Evidencing the impact of community engagement in neighbourhood regeneration: the case of Canley, Coventry.’ Community Development Journal 47(2): 232–247. Kjær, M., 2004. Governance. Cambridge, Polity Press. Kooiman, J., 2003. Governing as Governance. London, Sage. Lawless, P., 2007. ‘Continuing dilemmas for area based urban regeneration: evidence from the New Deal for Communities programme in England.’ People, Place and Policy 1(1): 14–21. Lister, R., 2004. Poverty. Oxford, The Polity Press. Morgan-Trimmer, S., 2010. ‘Governing through networks: the dynamics of participation in New Deal for Communities.’ PhD Thesis. Bath, University of Bath. Morgan-Trimmer, S., 2013. ‘“It’s who you know”: community empowerment through network brokers.’ Community Development Journal 49(3): 458–472. Newman, J., 2001. Modernising Governance: New Labour, Policy and Society. London, Sage. Newman, J., 2005. Remaking Governance: Peoples, Politics and the Public Sphere. Bristol, Policy Press. Newman, J., et al., 2004. ‘Public participation and collaborative governance.’ Journal of Social Policy 33(2): 203–223. Parsloe, P., 1996. Pathways to Empowerment. Birmingham, Venture. Perrons, D. and S. Skyers, 2003. ‘Empowerment through participation? Conceptual explorations and a case study.’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27(2): 265–285. Purdue, D., 2005. ‘Performance management for community empowerment networks.’ Public Money and Management 25(2): 123–130. Serrat, O., 2010. The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach. Washington, DC: Asian Development Bank. Taylor, M., 2003. Public Policy in the Community. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, M., 2005. ‘Community participation in the real world: the opportunities and pitfalls in new governance spaces.’ Paper presented at the Civil Society and New Forms of Governance in Europe Conference, 17–19 October, Bristol.

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Whitehead, M., 2007. ‘The architecture of partnerships: urban communities in the shadow of hierarchy.’ Policy & Politics 35(1): 3–23. Wright, J., et al., 2006. ‘Assessing the participatory potential of Britain’s New Deal for Communities.’ Policy Studies 27(4): 347–361.

10. Governing, politics and policy contestation within European networks Hester Kan INTRODUCTION In this chapter governance analysis is applied to the institutional territory of the European Union (EU). The EU consists of multiple institutional levels with different actors engaging in a wide variety of processes. The holistic approach of examining structures, actors and processes helps us to illuminate and discuss the various dimensions and underlying complexities of European governing processes in a multiscalar context. Furthermore, and crucial for this chapter, the relationship between European governing processes on the one hand, and the direction of European public policy on the other, are investigated and analysed together. More understanding is needed of how specific public policy content and goals within the EU are shaped by actual governing processes among actors. This chapter examines particular institutional arrangements within the EU: networks of an informal nature, constituted between national-level actors. The focus is on two networks that define themselves as co-operation networks, and that operate within the domain of public services. They are concerned with the European Public Administration Network (EUPAN network) and European Network of Public Employment Services (PES network). The networks are composed of civil servants and their formal purpose is to foster processes of learning and information exchange in the respective domains of public administration and public employment services. Research on these institutional arrangements has been given more attention recently as part of a wider shift in the EU towards ‘experimentalist governance’. This type of governance is concerned with a recursive process of framework goal-setting and revision through comparative review of implementation experience in diverse local contexts (see Marcussen and Torfing, 2007; Sabel and Zeitlin, 2010; Zeitlin, 2016). There is, however, very little understanding 191

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of empirical processes going on in networks, and in co-operation networks in particular. This black box will be opened in this chapter. Using a qualitative methodology, I examine the interrelations among actors and institutions in network processes to acquire understanding of how processes shape the development of European public policy. I argue that despite their informal and politically neutral status (‘technocratic’ in EU jargon), network processes are highly politicised, but the politics plays out in ways that are rather disguised and hidden from view. Although actors are civil servants with supposedly minimal political stakes, network members are in practice engaged individually in double-level game playing. They are also collectively engaged in political struggles over the running of the network, in which status and power are used strategically to achieve political authority and policy goals. The direction of network processes is contested and, despite the lack of a policymaking mandate, influencing and developing policy is a central part of the agenda of these networks. The chapter starts with a brief discussion of the networks, placed in a context of a wider shift within European governance towards the use of networks to govern. From here I examine more closely the actual governing processes going on, adopting the governance analysis framework. I explain and evaluate the link between governing processes and the shaping of public policy goals, highlighting the views of actors from both networks. The chapter concludes by highlighting benefits of the governance analysis framework, and its role in exposing the political nature of network processes and the intersections between national and European governance, while also demonstrating the diverse but profound impact on the shaping of European public policy.

THE RISE OF NETWORKS WITHIN THE EU Networks are often equated with the emergence of governance (Rhodes, 2000) and regarded as prominent features of governance in contemporary societies. Networks are viewed as the appropriate coordination mode for dealing with a social and political world, a world which has become more fragmented, complex and dynamic (Kooiman, 1993; Sørensen and Torfing, 2007). The essential characteristic of networks is that they are centred on trust and co-operation rather than price competition as in markets or administrative orders as in hierarchies (Thompson et al., 1991: 15; also discussion in Carmel, Chapter 1, this volume). Within the EU, the emergence of networks is regarded as a result of growing interdependencies between policy actors and EU institutions, as well as the changing nature of policy problems. These problems are characterised by their uncertainty as well as being ‘wicked’ in nature, crossing separate policy domains (Kohler-Koch and Eising, 1999; Jordan and Schout, 2006; Marcussen

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and Torfing, 2007; Sabel and Zeitlin, 2010). The emergence of networks in governing practices is also a political choice, however. In 2001 the European Commission published a White Paper on Governance, in which it outlined its intention to promote good governance concerned with fostering openness, participation, accountability, effectiveness and coherence. Specifically, it called for a more systematic and proactive approach to working with key networks to enable them to contribute to decision shaping and policy execution (European Commission, 2001). The rise of ‘network governance’ in the EU needs to be understood in the light of wider changes. Traditionally, EU governance has primarily taken place through legislative means. In the last decades this so-called Community method, or ‘hard law’, has been complemented by other modes of governing (Wallace, 2005; Marcussen and Torfing, 2007; Esmark, 2007), with a new emphasis on policy learning. According to Sabel and Zeitlin (2010), a fundamental shift in EU governance took place, with legislative steering increasingly being replaced or complemented by governance modes that place emphasis on learning and deliberation among actors within a common framework. They classify this as ‘experimentalist governance’ or ‘directly deliberative polyarchy’. It is directly deliberative because it uses the concrete experiences of actors in problem-solving and polyarchic because it is a system in which the local units learn from, discipline and set goals for others (2010: 6). Nonetheless, as Börzel (2012) points out, the role and influence of ‘experimentalist’ and network governance should not be overstated, as it is often embedded in, and co-exists with, other modes of governance. In the case of the EU, this includes legislative procedures, supranational decision-making, intergovernmental co-operation/negotiation and market-based coordination (see also Sabel and Zeitlin, 2010; Zeitlin, 2016). One particular institutional design came to embody this shift towards softer modes of governance and experimental governance, the Open Method of Coordination (OMC). The OMC was adopted as a way to generate policy coordination on the basis of learning and benchmarking in a framework of incentives, action plans and reporting mechanisms, and has been applied in various areas of policymaking (see Trubek, 2000; de la Porte, Pochet and Room, 2001; Carmel, 2005; Radaelli, 2003; Zeitlin, Pochet and Magnusson, 2005; Büchs, 2007). In particular, for social policy, the OMC has been an important vehicle for bringing new policy issues onto the European level, even though its role diminished with the introduction of the Europe 2020 Strategy (see Armstrong, 2012). The case studies discussed in this chapter therefore reflect the broader contextual changes in European governance towards learning, experimentalist governance and new institutional processes. Both networks explicitly defined themselves as co-operation networks and are concerned with inter-

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governmental co-operation in policy domains where EU involvement has so far been limited: public administration and public employment services. Network members were national civil servants of various rankings, and with EU Commission Directors General playing a prime steering role. The networks aimed to foster learning and share knowledge but are even more informal than networks embedded within the OMC, as they have no formal policymaking mandate. However, they also show that the roots of learning and informal governance go deeper than the literature suggests. The EUPAN network has its roots in the 1970s and has provided a platform for learning and sharing practices among civil servants ever since. It has no direct institutional base within the OMC or the wider turn to ‘experimentalist governance’. The PES network, in contrast, has existed since 1997 and is embedded within the European Employment Strategy, so directly related to the OMCs. The OMC Employment Guidelines referred to Public Employment Services in a number of objectives and explicitly supported their modernisation. In both networks the Commission takes part, but within the PES network its role is more central, as it provides the institutional base, chairmanship, budget and agenda setting. In the EUPAN network these functions are located with the member state presidencies. As such there is a formal and regular rotation among member states – an important aspect of how actors engage with them, as we see below. The two networks are structured on the basis of formal meetings and working groups among network members. The intention of this case study is not so much to describe the formal features of these networks in institutional terms, but rather to examine the actual processes in these networks. So far there is not much empirical research on what happens inside European networks and how networks are shaped by the actors and institutions involved.

ANALYSING GOVERNING PROCESSES IN EUROPEAN NETWORKS The governance analysis framework consists of three crucial elements, treated relationally and jointly (Carmel, Chapter 3): actors, structures and processes. It is the inter-dynamics between these elements that provides us with a holistic understanding of actual governing practices. In this research, actors are the prime focus, playing an active role in steering and shaping governing around them. This is an important starting point, as most research on networks takes a dominant focus on the structures and institutions of networks, describing and assessing their features and institutional development. This tends to provide a limited focus, as it often prevents us from examining what really matters in governing: the actual governing processes taking place. Actors play a central

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role in steering these, and I approach network structures as the contextual setting of analysis. An actor-centred approach is crucial for the understanding of governing processes, as it sheds light on how actors are playing games as well as shaping their own institutional environment (Scharpf, 1997; Crouch, 2005). However, I do not assume actors to be purely or even boundedly rational actors, calculating their moves while overseeing those of others. Rather the behaviour of actors is derived from a complex constellation of beliefs, rational calculations as well as irrational motives (Hay, 1998; also discussion in Carmel, Chapter 2). With structures as context, and actors as prime drivers in governing, the analytical focus was to explain the governing processes in practice. I examined the goals that actors pursued and their strategies to do so, distinguishing between the behaviour of individual actors, as well as network members collectively. Distinguishing individual and collective agency is important, as it illuminates different sets of processes, in relation to and shaped by different institutional settings. The behaviour of individual network actors needs to be understood in relation to their own institutional and policy background, as they engage in networks from different organisational entities operating with different socio-spatial/scalar contexts. As we are dealing here with European networks, this entails that network members engage from different European countries, involving different national institutional settings. The behaviour of actors collectively needs to be understood with reference to the shared institutional context, concerned with the network surroundings on the European level. It is the intersection between national and European governance that this research sheds light on. This is important for exposing the complexities and tensions in EU governance. Of equal importance, however, are the implications of governing processes on policy steering and how policy is jointly produced by national and European actors. Governing shapes public policy, but how and in which direction is a matter of empirical investigation. This is especially relevant in the context of our networks where its purpose is relatively broadly defined. Research Design and Methods With the analytical locus on acquiring knowledge from the ground, a qualitative methodology has been adopted. The investigative emphasis was to explore the meanings of network members themselves and how they view the processes they engage in. The analysis of individual agency was based on two case studies: actors from the Netherlands and the UK who participate in the two networks. These two countries have been selected, as they contrast on two key factors expecting to shape individual agency: attitudes towards involvement in the EU as well as national administrative/governance struc-

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tures. Both these factors affect the meaning-making and social action inherent in governing practices (Carmel, Chapter 2). Whereas the UK has primarily been classified as a member state that is more sceptical and less embracing of European co-operation, the Netherlands has been known for its generally positive stance towards Europe (see Young, 1999; Andeweg and Irwin, 2002). The countries also differ in their modes and structures of national governance. The political culture of the UK emphasises hierarchical or coordinated steering: the administrative structure has a unified centre of authority and politically governments operate by majority rule. In contrast to the UK, the political culture of the Netherlands emphasises consensus-seeking and deliberation, incorporating a wide spectrum of interests into processes of policymaking. There is less tradition of hierarchical or coordinated steering than in the UK. In this chapter I use the case studies to make general statements about individual agency, and while I highlight the main findings I do not expand on their differences in detail. Within the two countries data were collected through 26 interviews from actors engaging in the two networks. The actual data collection took place in 2005–2008. For the EUPAN network this concerned actors from the Cabinet Office in the UK and the Ministry of Interior Affairs in the Netherlands. Network members from the PES network comprised actors from Job Centre Plus in the UK and the Centrum voor Werk en Inkomen (CWI; Centre for Work and Income)1 in the Netherlands. Their views also provided the core data on the collective interactions among network members. I further contextualised these data with the views of all network members through a network questionnaire on the key issues in the two networks.2 Given the lapse of time since the original data collection, the actual policy agendas are less of interest. This should not detract significantly from the wider illustration of ongoing features of actual processes on the ground that remain highly relevant to understanding governance as it is materialised in transnational regimes of governing practices (cf Carmel, Chapter 2).

DOUBLE-LEVEL GAMES AND COLLECTIVE STRUGGLES IN EUROPEAN NETWORK PROCESSES I found that within both EUPAN and Heads of Public Employment Service Network (HOPES) networks, individual actors played double-level and dual-purpose games, strategically pursuing their national organisational interests while equally steering their European network agendas. Furthermore, actors were collectively and purposefully engaged in struggles, competing over the direction and coordination of the network in each case (see Kan, 2013). This contradicts conventional notions that network processes are depoliticised, neutral, technocratic and ‘experimentalist’ in nature.

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Double-level Games Actors from both the UK and the Netherlands are politically involved in the two networks. First of all, they were actively involved in political positioning, with actors from both countries pursuing a leadership role. Respondent: When you say leader, you can debate whether that is leadership but that is the way we run our program. Interviewer: Is that the way the UK wants to present itself in the network? Respondent: Yes, I think we think that. I am sure we think that. We think that is a good way of running an unemployment system because it prevents a lot of fraud and politically that is an important thing for us. (UK representative PES network) Respondent: I don’t want to come across pretentious by claiming that we are the best in Europe, but I do think that our experience in these issues has helped a few other countries to develop a way of thinking. … And does that mean we lecture them? Like I said, I don’t want to be pretentious and it is possible that Ministers from other countries come without knowing what to expect, but I think I can conclude from the numerous visits we had that there is a special interest in us. Interviewer: On which aspect? Respondent: Well, on almost every aspect people came from different places and often very far to hear about different aspects of the organisation, such as IT, thinking on competence, services to the unemployed and employers, really a wide range of aspects. (Netherlands (NL) representative PES)

Second, actors from the UK and the NL each pursued their own strategies of engagement and built relations with others. Patterns of national games can be identified. Strategies from British network members can be classified as hard politics, actively involved in national positioning, explicitly pursuing their own agendas and making alliances. Dutch network members on the other hand are more involved in soft politics, focussing on discursive, subtle forms of influence.3 They emphasised the initiatives they take within the network, both of a policy and institutional nature. The outlook towards others is presented as open and altruistic, with actors expressing the need for and giving examples of stimulating less active members to engage in discussions. Delegates get the agenda … well in advance of the meeting. X, Y and me will go through the agenda and work out our position on these points before we go. I assume other countries do the same. Some of these may ring each other up. That has happened before. If we see something on the agenda we don’t like that much but we know that the Irish, or the Dutch have similar views we might ring them or email them beforehand. (UK representative EUPAN) The influence I can exercise is dependent whether you are holding the Presidency or not and whether you are part of the Troika, and this is not the case at the moment so our influence has clearly diminished, but furthermore it is dependent on your social contacts and whether you are able to arrange little clubs because it is an

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informal network so you can initiate a learning group or a smaller club of people and start doing things … We do that, for example we have initiated a learning group reduction of administrative burdens in which countries join who also experience this as a problem and they will come up with a report to the DG [Directors General] Conference. (NL representative EUPAN) Interviewer: Do you decide on a UK position when you go to a general meeting? Respondent: Absolutely, it is a decided position. Interviewer: What is the subsequent room for manoeuvre in a meeting? Respondent: The room for manoeuvre will depend on which way the debate goes. We certainly hold on director’s briefing points, unless it is a Whitehall policy position, I would try to ensure that we have three or four potential options depending on how the debate went. (UK representative PES) Respondent: We are constantly initiating new methods. We used a PC as a tool during a meeting in the Netherlands. We also try to get more time and attention to discuss new developments amongst the members. During which we give special attention to newcomers and we attempt to really involve them. Interviewer: But I can understand that the Netherlands differs in many respects from other countries. How does it deal with itself as a frontrunner? Respondent: We do not want to show this off. Because one is open and communicates in an open manner, one attracts people that are willing to come and have a look. (NL representative PES)

Crucially, actors in both networks are not only involved in managing their European network environment but equally the national organisational premises they are based in. National organisations are actively involved in institutionally coordinating network activities and agendas. This is an important finding for informal networks, as rather than individual and collective learning processes, we see a reflection of the national coordination in more formal modes of EU governance (see Kassim, 2003). In essence, network members are involved in strategic steering in a double-level structure, mirroring the notion of double-level game playing in high-level diplomacy in the field of international relations (see Putnam, 1988). In terms of agenda, each member state representative has a different agenda in terms of general interests and motives for European network engagement. Intriguingly, although the EUPAN and HOPES networks operate independently and consist of different national actors, actors in both countries pursue very similar motives. This indicates that the nature of interests transcends both individual agency and even the specific networks and is rooted and shaped on the national institutional level. The agenda of members from the UK is nationally oriented, with an emphasis on uploading its own models, pursuing and representing its own interests in the network. The Dutch agenda on the other hand is more European oriented, with Dutch actors presenting themselves as representatives and caretakers of the network and promoting their own visions on how European co-operation should unfold. In essence,

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the UK pursues realist motives for co-operation, placing prime emphasis on the pursuit of national interests whereas the Netherlands has equally institutionalist motives for co-operation, pursuing common interests (see Keohane, 1994). This does not imply, however, that Dutch actors disregard their own interests, but that they pursue their own agendas by framing them as common and European. More research is needed to examine whether and how other members pursue their own double-level games. However, if we extend the conclusions of the case studies, the overall implication is that European network processes are shaped by individual actors competing with their national interests and agendas. Struggles among actors are played out across a multiscalar institutional territory that comprises the various national organisational arenas of network members themselves besides the shared European network surroundings itself. Here we touch on the interactions among actors as a collective, which I will address below. Collective Struggles The picture of the collective dynamics among network members is a political one, which comprises multiple dimensions (see Kan, 2013). Although network members characterise the two networks as predominantly informal and consensual, we have already seen that Dutch and UK participants structure their participation in relation to clear understandings of ‘position’ (both status position and policy position). Perhaps unsurprisingly, in both networks conflicts exist. These are often masked, in minutes or the wordings of meeting resolutions according to interviewees. Furthermore, network processes are often regarded as fostering deliberation, but in practice discussions are guided by protocols. Internal network proceedings are structured in a formal manner, with a chair, an agenda, table ranking and meeting documents. Not all member states hold the same status and power in practice. The new accession states are still finding their feet. They don’t take very much part in resolutions. … They just do not feel confident. They are not totally sure about the process yet, they are still learning as the new members in Europe. [About which countries dominate the network:] The big ones are Germany, France, Luxembourg, the UK, Ireland, Sweden and Holland and Italy. (UK representative EUPAN) In general the new countries are talking less than other countries. I think the Netherlands, UK and Finland, to name a few countries without wanting to exclude others, are simply more active. (NL representative EUPAN)

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Actors explained this with reference to a number of political and institutional issues: how countries rank in the reputational hierarchy, experience of involvement in networks and the EU at large, expertise and development of public service, competencies in English language skills, and institutional and administrative capabilities. The findings confirm findings on the OMC that network members from the bigger and in particular older member states are seen to be more institutionally capable and hold more status and power than actors from smaller and newer member states (see Horvath, 2009) and, in other policy domains, where socio-economic and socio-cultural dynamics directly affect actors’ authority (e.g. Dodds, Kuus and Sharp, 2013). Crucially, the most explicit struggles in both networks were not between individual member states but involved conflicts over network coordination between the Commission and member states. Within the EU the balance between intergovernmental and supranational power has been a subject of intense debate since its emergence (see Stone Sweet and Sandholtz, 1997; Branch and Ohrgaard, 1999; Borrás, 2007). However, these arguments generally do not address the issue that the distribution of power among actors in a policy domain is not fixed, but is rather a continuously shifting balance. National and European actors compete and negotiate over ownership of power in diverse policy domains. In both networks, the Commission formally participated on an equal footing with member states even though it has its own role and functions. In practice, however, tensions existed between the Commission and member states over control of network coordination. These ownership battles manifested themselves in different ways in each network and the power balance fluctuated over time. Within the PES network the Commission was seen to be politicising processes by pursuing interests other than engaging in and promoting the exchange of information and learning. The Commission was seen as privileging topics on the agenda that were on the EU employment agenda, rather than the network (member states) as a whole. Some members accepted this Commission position whereas others, notably the older member states, aimed to reverse it by counter-steering, either through their own initiatives or through dialogue with the Commission. Member states need to take more ownership from the Commission to make them better and really to turn them from simply a top down policy dissemination forum to a proper best practice forum. … But it is about the Commission trying to ensure that the PES themselves are brought into broader EU environment. … I’m sure part of it is empire building, I’m sure part of it is about the broader influencing strategy of the Commission. (UK representative PES) The Commission has strengthened its agenda setting and steering of the network during the latest three to four years. We want to focus on learning from others and

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of exchanging information, whereas the Commission has its focus on the European dimension, e.g. achieving the Lisbon targets, introducing flexicurity etc. (Denmark representative PES)

Within the EUPAN network, the power balance lay more on the side of member states, given its strongly intergovernmental origins. Actors were concerned that the Commission had various faces in practice. These varied from being a peer, to having a special role as observer, to being an actor with its own aims and strategies. The Commission was seen as steering the network according to its own agenda and motives for regulation. The Commission should participate on equal terms as the other members of the network – i.e. being one member among us others. Sometimes, though, the Commission’s standpoints seem to be more political than administrative. Its influence is becoming increasingly stronger. Sometimes you may doubt if it regards itself as a member of the network or as a change agent in direction of current EU-policies. (Sweden representative EUPAN) The Commission has no ‘competence’ as it is called,4 but you also have competence with a small capital in my view. They have no competence with a capital C, so they cannot issue instructions. They cannot tell us what to do, although they try to. (UK representative EUPAN)

CONTESTATION OVER THE DIRECTION OF NETWORK PROCESSES So far we have examined governing practices within European networks, exploring the relationship between structures, actors and processes. The political nature of network processes has been exposed, concerned with double-level game playing as well as collective struggles among actors in a multiscalar institutional context. Understanding the nature of European governing is important in its own right, but more crucially in relation to its implications for the development of European public policy. The struggles among actors affect the aims, nature of political and policy action and the outcomes that are to be achieved. Examining the views of network actors reveals that the direction, as well as the practice, of policy steering is contested. In both networks, actors indicated that they were not only guided by the objective of learning in their involvement, but that they pursued a variety of other policy/political objectives influenced by specific national agendas and interests. This contestation is exposed in Figures 10.1 and 10.2. These highlight the variety of objectives network members pursue in each network, and the degree of priority actors attach to these, ranging from low, medium to high priority. The formal objective of learning and exchanging information was indeed

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Figure 10.1

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Objectives of EUPAN network members

given high priority by all network members. However, actors also gave equal priority to pursuing other objectives such as being updated on European developments, developing policy, networking, benchmarking, showing off their own successes to others, as well their involvement in the EU and influencing the policies of other member states and the EU. Network objectives are subject to continuous struggles among actors pursuing their own nationally instituted agendas and interests. This contestation was pronounced within these networks. Indeed, the figures and interview data show that both networks were actively involved in shaping and influencing public policy. In both networks 60 per cent of

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Figure 10.2

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Objectives of HOPES network members

network members attached ‘high priority’ to the objective of developing policy or other products. Furthermore, influencing policy was equally on the agenda of network members even though this objective received less priority. These objectives were not only most clearly related to policymaking but also need examination in the context of informal networks which are not meant to be involved in the making of policy.

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DEVELOPING POLICY AS AN OBJECTIVE The development of ‘policy’ appears to be a conventional objective in the domain of EU governance. Yet the networks under investigation in this case are meant to be informal and voluntary, lacking any formal mandate or role towards policymaking, concerned with fostering co-operation. One of the inherent features of co-operation networks is that their purpose is open and undefined. These networks are differentiated from other networks that have a well-defined role towards public policy, such as being of an advisory or consultative nature, or concerned with policy development or policy implementation (see Sørensen and Torfing, 2007). Co-operation networks are an empty undefined space, with the activity focus inherently contested. Despite this, the development of policy or other products was regarded as an important objective among network members. Exploring the views from actors of the UK and the Netherlands, it becomes clear that they diverged on the value of this objective. British actors stressed that they did not want to be involved in developing policy or products, but only in learning as a common intergovernmental activity. Unlike their British counterparts, Dutch members aimed for concrete achievements, concerned with developing policy or other products both on the national and European level. Most Dutch representatives expressed their dissatisfaction about the imbalance between discussions and deliverables in the network, and they aimed to steer for more content and concrete deliverables. This divergence in views was reproduced by network members from other countries. One of the most important factors is the exchange of experiences. But we also try to stimulate the development of benchmarking, to see how everyone scores and if there are common elements we can work on together. For example, policies on competence have so far been used by a limited group of countries and in the upcoming time we want to get more countries to join in. (NL representative PES) A lot of issues have passed [on the network agenda] of which I have to say that eventually the practical meaning is relatively little and that is still the case and that is also due to the fact that the network has insufficiently succeeded to make material concrete and develop something’. … At the same time you see that there is too little focus on the content, and too much on procedures. (NL representative EUPAN) There is a need to put in place measures to ensure that the work is focused on clearer and more concrete mandates, with specific tangible and intangible outputs/deliverables to be produced within specific timelines. Discussions do not always lead to specific deliverables. (Cyprus representative EUPAN) Too much focus on deliverables. Discussion should be more dominant. Mutual learning is a main objective. (Sweden representative EUPAN)

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It is more and more about policies and less about benchmarking and sharing good practices and any other necessary information ... The balance might be there for the representatives of the Commission, but not for most participants from member states. (Estonia representative PES)

Despite the divergence in views, the development of policy as an objective for a number of members implies that informal networks play a much bigger role in the arena of EU governance than so far has been presumed. This contribution to policymaking differs, however, from conventional notions of policymaking. The co-operation networks are concerned with the development of strategic policy or operational policy. Especially the latter is usually not defined as ‘policy’, as this domain is viewed to be concerned with merely technical and practical issues (called technocratic, or administrative in EU jargon). Influencing Policy as an Objective Via networks, actors are not only involved in developing policy together, but are also individually involved in influencing existing policies. This concerned attempts at influencing the policies of other member states and policies of the EU, as well as influencing EU competence in the policy domain in question. This objective is more controversial and obviously ‘political’, relating to issues of strategic power and national interests and agendas. These are objectives that are not a priority for all network members, but both actors from the UK and the NL attached high priority to the influencing aspect of their network involvement. Defining themselves both as frontrunners, they aimed to influence the agendas of their counterparts, European policies, and competences. They did so in their own ways. Dutch actors aimed to promote their own issues and concerns through engaging in discussions and interactions with other network members. British actors were more involved with exporting or imposing own positions and issues on others. I think the influencing side, like any private company, is for directors and for our board the hardest to measure and therefore the least tangible and therefore the least important. But it is quite critical and I say that with a kind of Foreign Office hat on if you like. It is important because there is a broader debate out there about the nature of labour market and it is a debate that is central to Lisbon5 and it is a debate not necessarily about unemployment, but about activity and employment. (UK representative PES) There are things we are involved in and like to show to others while on the same time aiming to influence the European agenda. An important theme for us is about administrative burdens … We think it is important to introduce this issue, as we want the European agenda eventually to correspond to the national agenda, in the sense that everybody is heading in a common direction without that everybody has

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to do the same thing. Besides it is important to develop some kind of standard, so it could be that you have a way of measuring which also gets accepted by other countries. The alternative is that in other countries things are developed in a completely different manner, and that at some stage you are confronted with a new European standard. (NL representative EU)

Influencing policies within settings of informal coordination and benchmarking of policies, has been referred to as ‘uploading’. The concept of uploading refers to how national actors are not only engaged on the European level with the intention to ‘download’ or ‘take’ from the European to the national level, but are also actively involved in ‘shaping’ European processes by ‘uploading’ their own models and policies from below. Within the field of the OMC, various studies have demonstrated that governments use uploading as part of their strategies in their involvement with the OMC (Büchs, 2008; Verschraegen, 2009; Graziano, Jacquot and Palier, 2011). It is revealing that these cases show that uploading is equally used as a strategy by civil servants within so-called informal and depoliticised spaces. Civil servants engage in strategic positioning as representatives of a specific member state vis-à-vis the Commission; among other member state representatives for strategic or power position; among groups of member states as a matter of alliance, habit or identification; to advance particular policy agendas; and in order to demarcate some decisions and activities as ‘technocratic’, and thus beyond the – ambiguously determined – realm of ‘policy’ and politics. Together, this analysis exposes the complex political nature of EU involvement and its implications for how its public policy is shaped, sometimes in rather hidden, ‘everyday’ governing practices (Carmel, Chapter 2).

CONCLUSION The benefits of governance analysis have been clearly laid out in this chapter. Focussing on the complex institutional territory of the EU, the focus has been on examining the role of structures, actors and processes in European networks to explain governing practices on the ground. This has been an illuminating exercise. We have gained insight into the nature of governing within informal European networks that are meant to foster learning among civil servants in the domain of public services. Instead of a neutral environment, it has been revealed how governing processes are characterised by political struggles among actors played out across a multi-level institutional terrain. The internal collective dynamics and nature of double-level game playing of individual actors was revealed along with how this differs across countries and networks. Whereas the Dutch are engaged in soft politics, British civil servants are involved in hard politics with actors from both countries pursuing their own

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national interests. In essence it is striking how political positioning and the pursuit of political agendas such as uploading is equally used as a strategy by civil servants within so-called informal and depoliticised spaces. This research also has implications for EU policymaking. This touches the heart of what governance is all about. This research has demonstrated that governing processes are not just about achieving formally agreed aims. In practice, actors use networks as a platform to pursue a multitude of objectives to shape both how something is done, and what is to be done, as well as shaping how each of these should be interpreted (as political, or as technocratic, for example). The nature of these objectives needs to be understood in relation to the complex institutional environment in which these are pursued, with actors simultaneously pursuing their European network interests as well as national organisational interests. Strikingly, these networks are clearly involved in influencing and shaping public policy within the EU. On the one hand it has become clear that the majority of network members attach high priority to developing policy as a common network activity despite the networks not having formal policymaking mandates. On the other hand, the findings reveal that actors furthermore participate in these networks as platforms to influence the wider ecology of European policymaking, guided by their own strategies and agendas. This all highlights the fluid boundaries between national and European governance, the hidden politics in informal networks intersecting these boundaries and, ultimately, the shaping of European public policy in unaccountable and non-transparent ways. Although the networks have developed and agendas might have changed since data collection took place, the data illustrate and highlight the essential struggles and games that drive these networks over time. Certainly, the economic crisis and Brexit will have given input to new developments in the two networks, but the key finding of co-existing, political and multi-faceted governing practice as identified in this chapter will have remained pertinent. The findings have implications for EU governance, but equally for other transnational networks. Many organisations, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and International Labour Organization (ILO), operate on an informal basis with actors engaging together to share and exchange information, but the findings here inform us that a critical investigative approach is needed to explore actual governing processes going on, exposing where politics is disguised, through which interrelations among actors and institutions and with which implications for public policy. The governance analysis framework of this book has proven extremely valuable in uncovering the empirical complexities, struggles and contestations within our two networks and could be applied to other objects of

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analysis in future research, both within the EU as well as in other international organisations.

NOTES 1. From 2009 the CWI organisation merged with the UWV (Uitvoeringsorgaan Werknemersverzekeringen- Executive agency Employee Insurances) under the new name of UWV WORK Company. As data collection took place between 2005 and 2008, here reference will be made to CWI. 2. The questionnaire was distributed in 2008 in both networks, and consisted of five essential questions on the views of network members on their own objectives and engagement as well as the collective interactions around them. 3. Soft power refers to the ability to obtain what one wants through co-option and attraction; hard power is more concerned with the use of coercion. These concepts have developed within the realm of international relations (see Nye, 2004; Leonard, 2005), but can equally be applied to actors involved within network governance. 4. ‘Competence’ in EU jargon refers to the policy and domains of political action in which the EU has legal authority to act (where it has ‘competence to act’), as opposed to policy areas which remain the primary purview of the member states. 5. The Lisbon Strategy was an EU-wide policy strategy agreed in 2000 that set an agenda until 2010 for the economy of the EU. Its aim was to make the EU ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’. It was succeeded by the Europe 2020 Strategy.

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Index Bovaird, T. 152, 157 Brandsen, T. 135 Braun, K. 49 Brexit 102, 207

accountability 13–14, 152, 155, 183, 193 actor-centred approach 2–3, 15, 53, 55–6, 58, 63–4, 97, 195 ageing population 134 agency 33–5, 48–51, 56, 74, 97, 108, 138, 153, 157–9, 162, 165–6, 173, 175–9, 186–7 agriculture 5 Allen, A. 167 analytical framework 3–4, 17, 47–8, 51, 53–8, 62–3, 128, 136 Anderson, B. 32, 97–8 anti-foundationalist theory 15 Archer, M. 153, 158–61 Attendance Allowance 116 austerity 122, 125, 133–4, 136 authority 4, 8–9, 11, 14, 16–18, 27–9, 33, 35, 37, 41, 47, 49–50, 52–3, 60–61, 63, 78, 87, 153 see also power

calculation 27–8, 30, 36, 39, 178, 187, 195 Canada 164 capitalism 71, 77, 93, 100, 105 Care Act (2014) 120 care policy 112–28 Carer’s Allowance 116–18, 125, 127 Carer’s Credits 116 carers 17, 112–28 Carmel, E. 107, 167, 177, 192 Caviedes, A. 98 Centrum voor Werk en Inkomen 196, 208 China 78 Chorianopoulos, I. 3 CIA 37 citizenship 12, 93, 95, 98–101, 105, 114 Clarke, J. 10 co-creation 152, 155–6, 159, 164 co-design 152–67 collective action 9, 12, 185 colonialism 11, 29–31, 96 commissioning 114, 126, 133, 135, 138, 140–43, 147 comparative policy analysis 93–4, 96 Compass 164 Confederation of British Industries 75 Congo-Brazzaville 96 contextualisation 58–63, 69

Bachrach, P. 6 Ball, S. 71 Bang, H. 167 Baratz, M.S. 6 Basic State Pension 117 Bason, C. 156 Bate, P. 160 Bevir, M. 9, 12, 14–15, 157 Bhabha, H.K. 29 Big Society 136, 164 bio-power 25–6, 29 Börzel, T.A. 193 Bourdieu, P. 25–6, 28, 31, 33, 36 211

212

Governance analysis

contracting 57, 133, 135, 138–45, 147 co-operation networks 191–208 coordinated market economies 100–101, 103–5 coping strategies/behaviours 135, 178 co-production 18, 57, 64, 124 critical realism 52, 63, 173 critique 49–51 cultural political economy 27, 33–4, 36, 38 Davies, J. 3, 12, 14 Dean, M. 28 decision-making 7, 9, 13–14, 24, 29, 47–8, 50, 54, 57, 61, 97–8, 113, 116–17, 119–23, 125, 152–3, 155, 162, 174–81, 183–4, 186, 188, 193 decolonising 24–33 deliberative systems 14, 154 Demos 164 Denmark 164 Department for Business, Innovation and Skills 114 Department for Children, Schools and Families 73 Department for Education and Skills 73 Department for Innovation, Universities Skills 73 Department for Work and Pensions 114, 117, 119 Department of Health 114 Design Council 164 Dewey, J. 154 Donetto, S. 156 Dryzek, J. 154 Durrant, H. 17, 38, 78 Dutch East Indies Company 30 East India Company 30 economic growth 8, 70, 81, 208 education 8, 38, 71, 73, 96, 125

empirical research 47, 52, 54, 56–7, 59, 64, 115, 159, 194 employment 8, 70–71, 74, 76–7, 82, 84, 94–5, 101, 113–20, 124–5, 191, 194, 200, 205 see also skills policy empowerment 153, 155, 158, 165, 173–7, 179, 185, 187–8 ethics 6, 14, 36, 50, 57 Europe 2020 Strategy 193 European Commission 193, 200–201, 206 European Employment Strategy 194 European governance 191–3, 195, 201, 207 European Network of Public Employment Services 191, 193–4, 196–201, 204–5 European networks 191–208 European Public Administration Network 191, 193–4, 196–202, 204 European Union 18, 38, 60, 64, 94–5, 97–9, 101–2, 104, 106, 191–208 Evers, A. 135–6 experience-based co-design 156, 159–61 experimentalist governance 194 Farr, M. 18, 64, 161 Federation of Small Businesses 75 Finland 164 Flexible Support Fund 119 flexible working 114, 118–19 Foucault, M. 25–31, 33–4, 38, 157 France 17, 93–6, 99–101, 103, 105–6, 164 Friends of Parks 181 Fung, A. 154 Gabon 96 GDP 31 genocide 32 Germany 17, 93–6, 99–101, 103–4, 106

Index

globalisation 3, 8, 11, 31, 70–71, 76 Glynos, J. 157–8 Gottweis, H. 32, 34 governance 2–18, 47 new governance 51, 60, 187 participatory governance 18, 152–67, 173–88 as regimes of governing practice 24–41 governance analysis 4, 16–18, 40 and care policy 112–28 and context 58–63 critique in 49–51 epistemological orientations and analytical framework 47–64 and the EU 191–208 and labour migration policy 93–107 participatory governance 18, 152–67, 173–88 and public services delivery 132–47 and regeneration 173–88 skills policy 69–89 governance failure 10 governance networks 12–14 governmentality 2–3, 26–30, 39–40 Gramsci, A. 12, 14, 34 Hager, S.B. 98 Hajer, M.A. 35–6 Hansen, P. 98 Harlock, J. 17–18, 38, 64 Heads of Public Employment Service Network 196 high politics 51 Homewatch 181 Howarth, D. 157–8 human capital 70, 107 hybridisation thesis 135, 137, 140–41 Income Support 117, 119 India 78 industrialisation 27, 29

213

informal care 17, 112–21, 124–8 informal networks 38, 182, 184–8, 198, 203, 205, 207 Institute of Directors 75 institutionalisation 5, 10, 61, 199 intellectualism 50 interest groups 38 International Labour Organization 207 International Monetary Fund 55 interpretive policy analysis 75 Italy 164 Jessop, B. 25–6, 32, 34, 36, 38, 71–2 Jobcentre Plus 114, 116, 119–20, 124–5, 196 Jobseeker’s Allowance 117 Kan, H. 18, 38, 64 Keynesianism 71 Kjær, A.M. 9 knowledge-based economy 72, 76, 86, 208 labour migration policies 17, 64, 108 Learning and Skills Council 73 legislation 5–6, 99, 102, 115, 118, 122, 142 Leitch Review of Skills 72–3, 81 liberal government 26–7, 29–31 liberal market economies 71, 77, 83, 85, 88 Lipsky, M. 6, 40 Lister, R. 173, 178 lived experience 116, 137, 146, 154, 164–5, 167 local authorities 12, 17–18, 38, 114, 116, 119–23, 125–8, 132, 138–44, 146–7, 178, 180–81, 185 local knowledge 154 low politics 51 marketing 155, 164

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marketisation 3, 8, 10–11, 57, 64, 133, 146 Marsh, D. 5 Mckee, K. 158 meaning-making 15–16, 25, 33–6, 38, 48, 50, 52, 56–7, 59, 62, 115, 122, 196 Mendonça, R.F. 154 Menz, G. 97–8 metagovernance 13–14, 71 migrant worker legality 93–8, 106–7 migration governance 60, 93–107 Mitchell, T. 40 Morgan, F. 17, 38, 64, 112, 116–18, 125 Morgan-Trimmer, S. 18, 64 morphogenesis 153, 158, 160 multiculturalism 101 National Health Service 159–63 National Institute of Adult and Continuing Public Education 75 national state 11, 31–2, 38 National Training Organisations 73 nationhood 32 neo-liberalism 7–16, 164–5 NESTA 164 Netherlands 38, 164, 195–9, 204–6 network governance 12–14, 191–208 New Deal for Communities 173–4, 180–82, 186 New Economics Foundation 164 new governance 51, 60, 187 New Labour 69–89, 134–5 New Zealand 164 Newman, J. 10 non-governmental organisations 14, 38, 97 Open Method of Communication 193–4, 200, 206

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 8, 96, 207 overload thesis 8 participatory governance 18, 152–67, 173–88 party politics 7, 14 Paul, R. 17, 38, 64 personalisation 115, 120, 122 personalised rule 27, 29–30 policy analysis 33, 47, 52, 54, 75, 94, 96, 98, 104–6, 116, 128 policy learning 64, 193 policy networks 12, 202 policy studies 6, 16, 63, 93, 96–7, 102, 107 policymaking 4–7, 9–13, 15–16, 25, 35, 37, 58, 62–3, 70, 86–7, 89, 93, 98–9, 101, 107, 192–4, 207 politics of practice 35–8 population ageing 112–13, 134 population growth 27 positionality 15–16, 50 postcolonialism 8, 11, 25, 29, 95, 102–4, 106 post-structuralism 2–3, 32–4, 153, 157–8, 165–6 poverty 112, 173, 178 power 2, 4, 6–7, 11–13, 15, 24–6, 28–31, 33, 37–8, 40–41, 47–8, 50, 52–3, 56–7, 60–61, 63, 78, 86–7, 107, 126, 152–7, 166, 173–4, 188, 192, 200 see also authority; empowerment Prahalad, C. 156 private sector 114, 164–5 privatisation 5, 8 privilege 14, 25, 33, 36, 50, 84, 95–6, 107, 133, 200 prosperity 8, 73, 76–8, 80, 83, 87 protectionism 102, 124

Index

public policy 3–4, 6–7, 9–10, 12–14, 24–6, 37, 39–41, 47–8, 53–4, 56, 58, 63–4, 69–70, 80, 83, 86, 97–8, 104–7, 112–13, 115, 134–5, 147, 152–5, 165, 174, 188, 191–2, 195, 201–4, 206–7 public sector 132–4, 136–40, 146, 164–5, 174, 179–80, 186 public services 17, 132–47, 152, 155, 159–61, 164–5, 174–6, 180–88, 191, 206 Ramaswamy, V. 156 rationalities of government 28, 33 realist social theory 52, 166 refugee camps 31 regeneration 173–88 regimes 3, 7, 15–18, 24–41, 47–56, 58–61, 63–4, 93–5, 97, 99–102, 105–6, 136, 167, 176, 196 resource allocation 121, 123–4, 126 Rhodes, R.A.W. 5, 9–10, 12, 14–15, 157 Robert, G. 156, 160 Roskilde school 12–14 Ruhs, M. 97–8 Sabel, C. 193 Sarkozy, N. 103 Scott, J.C. 39 Sector Skills Councils 73, 75 Sector Skills Development Agency 73 semiosis 2, 34, 37 Senegal 96 sense-making 25, 39, 52 Severe Disability Premium 117 Skills Pledge 74–5 skills policy 17, 69–72, 75–8, 81, 84–5, 88 Skills Strategy for England 69–89 slave trade 30 Smith, M.P. 5

215

social care 97–8, 103, 113–15, 121, 128, 134, 137–9, 160 social inequalities 15, 17, 26, 41, 115, 153–6, 161, 167 social risk 38, 64, 112–13, 115, 128 socio-economic contexts 60–61 socio-economic disadvantage 175–6, 178 socio-political order 2–3, 16–18, 24–41, 49–50, 54, 60, 64, 107 socio-spatial contexts 60 Sørensen, E. 13 sovereign rule 27, 29 state 2–3, 5, 7, 9–17, 25–6, 28, 30–31, 33–4, 40–41, 47, 69, 71, 78, 87–8 participatory governance at margins of 173–88 and third sector 132–47 state apparatus 30–32 state idea 31 statehood 4–5, 8, 11–12, 15–17, 24–7, 29–32, 34, 37–8, 40–41, 47, 51, 53, 64, 69 statework 38, 77, 88 statutory protection 113, 116–17, 125–8 steering 9, 176, 181, 194–5, 200 structural adjustment programmes 11 Sum, N.L. 25, 34, 36, 38 Sweden 164 symbolic violence 36 tax havens 31 taxation 27, 101 Taylor, M. 157 territorialisation 31–2 think tanks 164 third sector 13, 17, 114, 116–22, 126–8, 132–47 Third Way 134 time and temporal contexts 61–2 Torfing, J. 13 trade negotiations 11 Trade Union Congress 75

216

Governance analysis

trade unions 38, 75, 97, 102, 108, 164 Trades Union Congress 164 traditions 15, 62, 157 Train to Gain 75 transparency 107, 117, 121, 123, 144, 207 Tri-lateral Commission 8 Tunisia 96 Turkey 96 UK Commission for Employment and Skills 73 uncertainty 7, 36, 56, 63, 70–72, 75–7, 79–80, 83, 125, 144, 192 unemployment 8, 84, 101, 117, 197, 205 Unionlearn 75 Unison 164 United Kingdom 9, 14, 17, 31, 38 care policy 112–28 co-operation networks 195–9, 204–6 labour migration policies 93–103, 106 public services 134–6 regeneration programmes 176 Skills Strategy for England 69–89 United Nations 37

United States 31, 37, 164 urban regeneration 173–88 urbanisation 27 varieties of capitalism 71, 77, 100 voluntarism 69, 71–2, 77, 83, 85–6, 88, 135 volunteers 139, 145–6, 155 wage inequality 78 Wagenaar, H. 35–6, 57 war on terror 37 welfare 8, 77, 81, 93, 98–105, 112, 117–18, 127–8, 134–6, 165, 176 welfare states 93, 98–100, 103–5, 112, 134, 136 wellbeing 51, 77, 120–21, 125, 127, 184 Whitehall 15 wicked problems 192 Windrush scandal 103 World Bank 55, 60 World Trade Organization 55 Young, I.M. 154 Zeitlin, J. 193