‘Modernisation’, ‘globalisation’ and ‘privatisation’ are each terms that signal profound shifts in the process of governance. Across Western Europe governments are seeking to dismantle the contract between state and citizen that was inscribed in the social democratic welfare state and to build a more ‘modern’ contract based on responsibility and choice. Governmental power is both retreating – with state institutions being slimmed down, ‘hollowed out’, decentred and marketised – and expanding, reaching into more and more of citizens’ personal lives: for example, their decisions about work, health and parenting. At the same time, actors – partnership groups, community organisations and citizens themselves – are...

European integration remains one of the most controversial political projects of the current period. It is the focus of much political conflict and considerable academic debate. Integration through the institutions of the European Union (EU) is often represented as the expression of an underlying European essence – a unity of place, people or culture. Such imaginaries have proved to be persistently unstable and contestable, providing an imperfect basis for conceiving of an integrative ‘European-ness’. In this chapter, the inherent problems of these imagined sources of unity are examined briefly, before attempts to define European-ness in contrast to its ‘Others’ are considered....

The past 10 to 15 years have seen a transformation in the European Union’s (EU) engagement with social policy issues – from the Social Protocol in the Maastricht Treaty to the initiation of a new mode of policymaking, the Open Method of Coordination (OMC). This is designed to allow the EU to engage with social policy issues ranging from employment services to immigration, social cohesion and pension systems. Originally used to manage the process of introducing the single currency and creating the Eurozone (de la Porte and Pochet, 2002a), it appeared to offer a solution to the EU’s frozen social policy...

Since 1989, Central Eastern Europe has faced continuous change. The transition from centrally planned to market economies was followed by European accession and subsequent integration into the wider process of European governance. These three processes (transition, accession and integration) are distinct, yet their interrelatedness forms a historically unique meeting point. This chapter explores the dynamics of integrating European and post-communist social policy, using a critical constructivist perspective to explore the dialogue between different social policy traditions that is taking place. As will be argued, the fragility of post-communist social policy manifests itself through dislocation, dissociation and the concept of control....

One of the strengths of governance theory is that it draws attention to flows of power that traverse the boundaries of state/society, public/private and economy/civil society. It recognises that processes of governing take place in and through families, workplaces, communities, schools and other sites beyond the domain of institutional politics. As such, it seemingly connects with strands of feminist analysis that have long problematised the distinctions between public and private and that have drawn attention to forms and flows of power beyond the state. However, the study of governance has remained relatively immune to a gendered analysis. This chapter highlights...

Dynamic change in the relationships between states and citizens is a feature of countries undergoing programmes of welfare reform and restructuring. Such changes involve new ways of ‘governing the social’ in which citizens are expected (or themselves expect) to play more active roles in handling risks and promoting their own welfare. In this chapter we trace the implications of active citizenship for welfare governance. Following Kjær (2004, pp 12–15), we define governance as “the setting, application and enforcement of the rules of the game” in a way that enhances legitimacy in the public realm. We use the term ‘dynamics’...

Participative governance is important in terms of our focus in this book on ‘remaking’ governance because it apparently offers not only a response to the problem of the legitimacy of government institutions, but also the potential solution to a range of social problems. It is linked to a decentred form of governance in which the role of the state – and the institutions of representative democracy on which it rests – is viewed as unable to deal with the complexity of policy problems and to respond to the differentiated needs and identities of citizens (Kooiman, 1993, 2000). This chapter examines the turn...

Changing discourses and practices of governance sit uneasily with ideas of democracy. On the one hand, the much-debated move fromgovernmenttogovernanceis seen to represent an opening up of decision-making to a wider range of actors (Stoker, 1998). On the other hand, governance is also associated also with increased institutional fragmentation at all levels, so that much public decision-making has unclear lines of accountability to the public, and is linked only tenuously to structures of representative government. At the same time, governments and other organisations seem to be experimenting with new, innovative participatory practices (see Chapter Six of...

All over the western world we have long been witnessing an individualisation of politics and a decline in the active support and membership of conventional modes of collective political organising through political parties, interest organisations, and (big) voluntary associations (Norris, 1999). Many stories have been written about the decline of civic engagement and the increasing numbers of individuals who are ‘bowling alone’ (Putnam, 1995; Boggs, 1997). Most stories describe how political participation as a collective activity has fallen prey to globalising market forces, transforming virtuous citizens into atomised individuals who are exploiting the state as a means to realise their...

As Janet Newman points out in the Introduction to this volume, the shift in styles of politics in western countries from the more formal and hierarchical to the more informal and network-based – from government to governance – brings with it the need to question many of our received assumptions about politics and the state. This chapter sketches some of the traces of new kinds of political imaginary which change the meaning of political representation. Rules and practices of representation are fundamental to democratic politics. The legitimacy of policies and actors primarily rests on the extent to which they legitimately represent, or...

In the Introduction to this volume it was claimed that governance theory tends to work with a ‘thin’ conception of the social. Here, I return to the three themes set out in the Introduction: the remaking of peoples, publics and politics. In doing so I debate the contribution of this volume to conceptualising how peoples and publics are constituted as both the object of governance and as the locus of new forms of social and political agency. Such an understanding, I argue, means rethinking governance as social and cultural, as well as institutional, practices.

This book has been concerned with...