From "Big Government" to "Big Governance"
This paper explores the origins and various meanings of the concept of governance. It discusses governance as an interdisciplinary research agenda on order and disorder, efficiency and legitimacy all in the context of the hybridization of modes of control that allow the production of fragmented and multidimensional order within the state, by the state, without the state and beyond the state. The plurality of the modes of control reflect and reshape new ways of making politics, new understanding of institutions of the state and beyond the state and allow us to explore new ways for the control of risks, empower citizens and promote new and experimentalist forms of democratic decision making. It presents three prevalent approaches for the study of the relations between government and governance and suggest a fourth one which build on the regulation literature and emphasize the expansion of regulation both by government and by civil and business actors. Forthcoming in Levi Faur, David, Oxford Handbook of Governance, Oxford University Press, March 2012. Jerusalem Papers in Regulation Governance 2 (c) David Levi Faur W o rk in g P a p e r N o 3 5 J u ly 2 0 1 1 From Big Government to Big Governance Governance is said to be many things, including a buzz word, a fad, a framing device, a bridging concept, an umbrella concept, a descriptive concept, a slippery concept, an empty signifier, a weasel word, a fetish, a field, an approach, a theory and a perspective. In this handbook, Governance is an interdisciplinary research agenda on order and disorder, efficiency and legitimacy all in the context of the hybridization of modes of control that allow the production of fragmented and multidimensional order within the state, by the state, without the state and beyond the state. The plurality of the modes of control reflect and reshape new ways of making politics, new understanding of institutions of the state and beyond the state and allow us to explore new ways for the control of risks, empower citizens and promote new and experimentalist forms of democratic decision making. As the Oxford Handbook of Governance intends to demonstrate, governance is increasingly becoming a broad concept that is central to the study of political, economic, spatial and social order in general and the understanding of the dynamics of change of capitalist democracies in particular. While the origins, meanings, significance and implications of the concept of governance are often disputed, governance has become an important concept and indeed probably one of the most important manifestations of the rise of neoinstitutionalism in the social sciences (March and Olsen, 1984) Paradoxically, it is almost as popular to lament the multiple, and sometimes ambiguous, meanings of governance, as it is to employ the term in creative ways. The literature on governance contains narratives and analysis of democratic controls and challenges beyond the traditional institutional literature. In the spirit of Karl Deutsch's classic the Nerves of Government, it reflects an understanding that "it might be profitable to look upon government somewhat less as a problem of power and somewhat more as a problem Jerusalem Papers in Regulation Governance 3 (c) David Levi Faur W o rk in g P a p e r N o 3 5 J u ly 2 0 1 1 of steering" (1963, p. xxvii) Institutional technocrats (that is, people who preach the advantages of governance as the technology of control rather than an instrument of power) are often happy to endorse Deutsch's recommendation. Sometime they are successful in convincing even highly suspicious governments to adopt the approach, at least on the surface (Burns, 2010) 1 Yet, putting the political use of the concept aside for the moment, the scholarly value of the approach as a bridging concept is promising (Kersbergen Waarden, 2004, 143) Building on the various manifestations of neo institutionalism in the social sciences the governance approach to politics, institutions and policy offers an exciting and fruitful integrative theme for the ever more fragmented and decentered social sciences, with their disciplinary division of labor that is increasingly being called into question (Braithwaite, 2005; Hall, 2007) Why, and to what extent, governance can play out its scholarly, intellectual and normative missions is an issue that will be discussed here and throughout the Handbook's chapters. Let me start, however, by noting that it was not always the case. Governance, while not novel in the sense that it does not entirely reflect new practices and institutions, was for a long time marginal to the scholarly discourse of the social sciences (Pierre and Peters, 2000, 1; Kersbergen Waarden, 2004, 143) It is still in the process of being translated (and in this process transformed) into different languages. In most languages, I suspect, it is awaiting official translation. In Hebrew, for example, the term does not have yet an agreed translation. The Chinese academic community had by 2000 agreed that governance should be translated as zhili (Burns, 2010) 2 While still being adapted to new cultural and institutional contexts, governance is no longer marginal, neither in the policy arenas nor in scholarly discourse, as will be elaborated in this chapter, for good reasons. Consequently, it became a research agenda that unites scholars across the social sciences, many of whom recognize the growing gaps between the formal constitutional order and the way order is produced and reproduced in everyday life. Jerusalem Papers in Regulation Governance 4 (c) David Levi Faur W o rk in g P a p e r N o 3 5 J u ly 2 0 1 1 The notion of governance, which was rarely used and nearly incomprehensible before the 1980s, appears now in countless book and article titles, in the names of academic journals, educational and research institutions, and academic networks (Offe, 2009, 554) It is the subject of handbooks and a recognized focus of teaching programs, research, and institutional and public policy reform (Lynn, 2012) One could go on, and expose more evidence on the growth of the scholarly interest in governance across major fields and note its relative absence from others. Yet the most important issue that this chapter takes upon itself especially given the countless useful contributions that already exist in the field is to contextualize the study of governance in a more general framework of understanding of the processes of institutionalization and of a shift towards poly centered polities, politics and policy making. The chapter identifies four major ways of thinking about governance as complementary to or an alternative to states and governments. It then asserts the theoretical potential of one of these approaches in particular, that is to say, the one which emphasizes the parallel growth of state centered and society centered governance. This approach is grounded in arguments about the rise of the regulatory state and of the global diffusion of regulatory capitalism and brings the literatures of governance and regulation together. I. The Scholarly Origins and Growth of Governance The concept of governance probably stems from the Greek kybernan meaning to pilot, steer or direct, which was translated into Latin as gubernare. Our modern concepts of "government" and "governance" are indirectly related to this basic idea (Schneider Hyner, 2006, 155) 3 In the 1950s and the 1960s, the topic of governance was marginal to the production of knowledge in the social sciences and humanities (as reflected in the ISI Web of Knowledge databases) The small number of papers that were classified under this topic concentrated mainly on higher education and urban governance most probably demonstrating that hierarchical modes of control do not capture much of the politics of either universities or local government Jerusalem Papers in Regulation Governance 5 (c) David Levi Faur W o rk in g P a p e r N o 3 5 J u ly 2 0 1 1 While the notion of governance was always there, it played a limited role in shaping the discourse of the social sciences. The influence of the papers that were classified under this topic, until the end of the mid 1970s, is low when assessed by their impact. 4 The situation changed radically with the publication of Oliver Williamson's Transaction Costs Economics: Governance of Contractual Relations [1979] and with the growing interest in Law and Economics in corporate governance. Williamson's paper had a strong impact. It not only accounted for about 83 percent of the citations of papers on the topic of governance in the period 1975 1980 but it is also one of most cited papers in the literature so far. The period 1981 1985 is characterized by the dominance of issues of corporate governance both generally and within the narrower population of highly cited papers. Urban and higher education governance issues are still there but with low volume and with low number of citations. The ten highly cited papers that were publish between 1981 and 1985 received 74 percent of the citations and 8 of these 10 dealt with corporate governance in one form or another. The following five years (1986 1990) suggested a further spread of the concept. Yet it is only in the 1990s that governance became a buzz concept. In the 1980s only 349 papers were classified as dealing with the topic and these papers were cited altogether 3609 times; in the 1990s, the number of papers and the number of citations both grew more than ten times (3773 papers and 70,157 citations) Many more papers were influential in this period. Thus, the share of the 10 most cited ones in the total number of citations dropped to 25 percent in the first half of the 1990s and to 14 percent for the second half. The first decade of the second millennium saw further acceleration in the interest of the scholarly community in governance. The number of papers on the topic grew to 18,648 and they drew 104,928 citations