User:Tim Cadman/Contemporary Governance Theory

Contemporary Governance Theory (1990-2010)

This is a working page, which covers developments in contemporary governance theory identified in comparative politics, public administration, international relations and political economy. It is currently under construction.

In the wake of globalisation, there has been an evolution away from government (“control exercised by the nation-state, through formal (usually elected) parties”) towards governance (“control exercised by a variety of public and private institutions that have been established at different spatial scales”). When it comes to explaining contemporary developments, conventional disciplines are not entirely compatible in their traditional form. This is especially so for international relations. The classical perspective that geopolitical cooperation takes place almost entirely in intergovernmental regimes and related agreements, pursued by means of state-based authority is seen as being out of date. Regime theory, previously highly influential, has a rival in the concept of multi-level governance. Governance itself is also more understood in terms of how it is manifested not merely at the national and international level, but at all spatial scales, demonstrated by the interactions between decentralised networks comprising multi-stakeholders active at all levels, from the local to the global, and vice versa. Global environmental governance exemplifies this development strongly. The substantive outcome of Rio, Agenda 21, formally recognised the participation of non-state interests, particularly non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the framework of international environmental policy and environmental decision-making at all levels. Participation has been identified as an essential component of citizen power, without which democracy is an empty and frustrating process. There is also an emergent body of theory in comparative politics (CP) that has arisen since the early 1990s, which argued for a broader understanding of state (i.e. governmental) and non-state relations, previously characterised by ‘top-down’, ‘command-control’ expressions of state authority. This lead to the coining of the term modern governance to describe relations as being essentially social-political in nature, and interpreted as consisting of recurrent processes of interaction between social actors within both public and private institutions. The idea of interaction is central to this analysis, which is described as a series of ‘co’-arrangements between state and non-state interests, built upon collaboration as a means of solving problems, often based on standards setting, or formulation of criteria. In such models deliberation is central to the task of dealing with the complexity and ambiguity of social, political, environmental, or other problems. Deliberation is described as a form of dialogue or discussion aimed at developing solutions through cooperation and joint agreement and in which rational discourse is at the heart of problem solving. These alternative models co-exist alongside more legalistic mechanisms, and are identified as constituting a new process of governing. It is also increasingly accepted that structure and process is central to evaluating the governance quality of institutions. In the light of research experience, this re-emerged a decade later the 2000s in terms of ‘governance as structure’, concerning the models of interaction utilised by various institutions, and ‘governance as process’, linked to the older theoretical idea of governance as steering or coordinating, but recognising the newer preference for ‘co’ arrangements, referred to above. In view of such these conceptual developments, there have been calls for researchers to make governance more effective by improving institutional design. In response more recent theorists in the have argued that contemporary governance is better interpreted as being based around the institutional relationship between participation as structure and deliberation as process. In this conception, there is a functional significance underlying the nature of participation and deliberation in different institutions; the type of institution is less important than how participation and deliberation occurs within it; it is these interactions, which determine the effectiveness, or quality, of its governance, and ultimately the degree of institutional legitimacy.