Regimes of practise Discourse
GOVERNING AS GOVERNANCE - KOOIMAN
Kooiman (1993) makes a distinction between “governing” as covering “all those activities of social, political and administrative actors that can be seen as purposeful efforts to guide, steer, control or manage (sectors or facets of) societies”, and “governance” as the “patterns that emerge from governing activities [… to form the] more abstract (higher level) framework for the day-to-day governing” (Kooiman, 1993a: 2).
Kooiman (1993a) argues that many countries over recent decades have tended to shift balance between government and society in terms of both privatisation and deregulation. He further finds “a third” shift towards sharing tasks and responsibilities – “doing things together instead of alone”. Kooiman’s interest is in the latter interactive public private approaches to governing in terms of co-regulation, co-steering, co-production, cooperative management and public private partnerships on national, regional and local levels. He specifically labels such co-arrangements as social-political governing or –governance as a specification of the overall governing and governance terms (Kooiman, 1993a).
Kooiman argues that such “new ways of governing” mark a shift away from seeing governing as “one-way traffic” towards “two-way traffic” including both the perspective of the governing system and those of the system to be governed (Kooiman, 1993a: 4).
Kooiman sees such shifts as responses to the growing realisation of the enormous complexity, dynamics and diversity of the socio-political (sub-) systems to be governed. Governing activities are intervening in highly complex and dynamic subsystems, each having diverse characteristics. The success of governing is therefore dependent on how the governed reacts to the given means applied. The governing approach therefore needs to be dynamic, complex and varied as well.
This means that the governing approach should be adaptive in respect of fitting the means applied towards the dynamics and complexity of the targeted subsystem (Kooiman, 1993; 1993b).
The governance system is itself a highly complex and dynamic system, covering both policy formation and execution with variations between policy levels and fields etc.: “These qualities [the dynamics, complexity and diversity] not only apply to the object to be governed [the targeted socio-political system]. Governing, governance and governability themselves have dynamic, complex and diverse qualities of their own” (Kooiman, 1993b: 36). This means that governance systems themselves need to be viewed as multifaceted with diverting and sometimes even conflicting governing approaches.
In a later publication from 2003, Kooiman introduces a three level order of governance: 1st orders, 2nd orders and 3rd orders. The latter he also frames as meta-governance.
“First order governing” refers to the specific means (or instruments in Kooiman’s wording) that governing agencies apply in their day-to-day governing activities of identifying and acting on socially shaped problems. He specifies his earlier conceptualisation of the governing activities of interest, distinguishing between three modes25 of governance-instruments in terms of respective: hierarchical modes of steering and control; self-governance in terms of enabling actors to control their
25 I have earlier (in Chapter 1) introduced Bulkeley and Kern (2006) that applied a slightly different framing of such modes of governing, distinguishing between self-governing, governing by provision, governing by authority, and governing through enabling. Their aim with this framing was to catch the broad variety of actions that local government takes towards the climate change agenda as a whole. My focus is restricted to the activities directed towards influencing local business, and thus the modes I am interested in centre on the character of such interference/interactions,
own actions; and finally co-governing where governing and governed actors work together to achieve targeted goals (Kooiman, 2003; 2009).
“2nd order governance” refers to the constituted framework for carrying out first order governing in terms of system agreements, rules and procedures. A central element for understanding specific governing activities is thus also to look at the specific regulatory set-up within which such governing takes place. The governing choices of those in charge are thus dependent on the overall regulatory framework within the field including guiding materials; formal competences and allocated agency; as well as the resources and skills assigned for the task etc. (Kooiman, 2003; Kooiman, 2009).
3rd order governance” – or meta-governance – refers to the values, norms and principles that underlie (are underpinning) the various lower order governance choices. “The governance of governance” in terms of the discussion, formulation and application of governance system values, norms and principles that are to govern the governing processes (Kooiman, 2003; 2009).
Kooiman (2009) specifically argues that difficult governing choices – what he frame as hard choices – often have to do with conflicts between values and norms that are incompatible, incommensurable and incomparable by nature. It is therefore important that governance norms and the principles behind them are made explicit, which they often are not (Kooiman, 2009).
Kooiman further uses the term “governability”. With this he addresses the overall governance system capabilities (the created pattern of solutions or developed strategies) to actually respond to the identified governing needs in terms of the identified problems and situations in the system to be governed that necessitated the intervention in the first place (Kooiman, 1993; 2003).
GOVERNMENTALITY
With the introduction of these interrelated terms of governing, governance, meta-governance and governability, Kooiman in my reading comes close to capturing some of the same interrelated processes that Foucault attempted to address with his term “governmentality”.
According to Lemke (2002), Foucault’s intent with the term is specifically to build a framework for assessing the underlying rationalities for specific governing processes: “The semantic linking of governing (gouverner) and modes of thought (mentalité) indicates that it is not possible to study the technologies of power without an analysis of the political rationality underpinning them” (Lemke, 2002:
50).
Lemke (2002) and also Fimyar (2008) point out that “government” as Foucault applies the term, includes several aspects. It relates to a spectrum of arrangements including “governing the self”, “governing others” and “governing societal (sub) system”. It includes however also the very framing for these governing processes.
Government in Foucault’s terms is thus a broader concept than the rather narrow political understanding of the term often applied in respect of the state (Lemke, 2002; Fimyar, 2008).
A central concept used by Foucault in relation to governmentalite is the “conduct-of-conduct” where conduct is applied in its meaning as both a verb – the first conduct – and a noun – the second conduct. As a verb, conduct means to lead, direct or guide, whereas as a noun, conduct refers to the behaviour and actions of actors. The conduct-of-conduct thus refers to the purposeful guiding or directing of one’s (own or others) behaviour (Dean, 2010).
Following Foucault’s broad conceptualisation of power as a two-way relationship, governing is similarly twofold in terms of how it is executed, but also received – each being mutually dependent and reinforcing – or opposing – the other.
For Foucault the act of governing is – equal to Kooiman – viewed as a process involving activities that can take various forms and use diverse techniques or means to direct or guide the behaviour of the subject, group, societal subsystem etc. in question. Dean (2010) specifically argues that government in this sense is an activity that shapes the field of action – or more precisely “structuring the field of possible action” making use of a variety of different techniques ranging from direct rulings to indirect shaping of citizens value and norms (Dean 2010).
Emphasising this structuring the field of action, various studies have focussed on how government by various means shapes citizens – for example, through the educational system (Fimyar, 2008).
Dean (2010) and Jessop (2011) emphasise however that Foucault’s intent with the term ‘governmentality’ is not restricted to the structuring the field of actions of the regulated parties. They further argue that Foucault is also interested in what actually structures the approach and choice of governing techniques and means used by the regulator. The governors (those involved in governing the behaviour of others) are themselves part of a governmental system that shapes their actual governing activities (Dean, 2010; Jessop, 2011).
Dean argues that Foucault’s interest in the term ‘governmentality’ specifically is to provide a framework for assessing the formation of the specific governing approaches and the reasoning behind such – the rationalities underlying the government’s way of governing – and not just the various governing techniques as such (Dean, 2010).
In relation to the “state”, Dean (2010) argues that while often described as a relative unified actor, it is actually a multiple complex representing many diverse (and even opposite) way of thinking and acting. Jessop (2011) further advances this argument to point out that Foucault’s interest was indeed in state formation and development where the state is viewed as an outcome of a specific historical process “that produce[s] different forms of state, each with their own historical specificities, agendas and typical form of governmental practice” (Jessop, 2011: 70).
The rationalities underlying specific governmental ways of governing are thus by no means uniform (Dean, 2010).
The object of a governmentality study is thus to reveal such diverse rationalities in terms of how they become structuring for specific governing choices:
“Studies of governmentality (…) do not assume a single form of rationality but insist on plurality of governmental rationalities”
(Bröckling et al., 2011:11).
“One isn’t assessing things in terms of an absolute against which they could be evaluated as constituting more or less perfect forms of rationality, but rather examining how forms of rationality inscribe themselves in practices or systems of practices, and what role they play within them, because it’s true that “practices” don’t exist without a certain regime of rationality” (Foucault, 1991: 79, ref in Lemke, 2002:
55).
In Deans’ wording, the object of a governmentality study is
”… not the simple empirical activity of governing, but the art of government [… meaning that] the governing is an activity that requires craft, imagination, shrewd fashioning, the use of tacit skills and practical know-how, the employment of institutions. … It is a study of the organized practices through which we are governed and through which we govern ourselves, what we shall call here Regimes of practices or regimes of government” (Dean, 2010: 28).
Dean (2010) defines such regimes of practise as referring to the historically constituted assemblages of various institutionalised rationalities for how to conduct others conduct.
These “regimes of government” involve practices for the production of truth and knowledge, and comprise multiple forms of practical, technical and calculative rationality. “Regimes of practises are simply fairly coherent sets of ways of going about doing things. [The] institutionalised practises … [meaning] the routinized
and ritualized way we do things” – the established truth of how to govern within specific governmental settings (Dean, 2010: 31).
Dean emphasises that several different regimes of practises can co-exist within the same overall governmental system. Regimes in Dean’s wording do not include the totality of, for example, the state. Conversely it is used to capture the idea that different practices evolve within different governmental subsystems:
Within given society there is a large, put finite, number of intermeshing regimes (that) link up particular institutions. … However, such regimes are never identical with a particular institutions or even system (Dean, 2010: 31).
While Dean argues that multiple “regimes-of-practices” exist within government in general, he seems to apply the term to catch all the different practices within a given subsystem (governmental field). The practices within these subsystems might colonise and effect (and vice versa) the regimes within another subsystem, however he doesn’t seems to frame this as two sets of practices “competing” or dominating within the same subsystems – the regimes form the hegemonic ways to do things:
There are borrowings … cooperation, overlap, intersections, fragmentation and contestation between [the regimes]… one regimes of practise might attempt to colonize and subjugate another (Dean, 2010:
31).
Dean introduced the concept of “analytics” as a type of analysis of the specific conditions under which particular entities emerge, exist and change. Analytics of government thus “examines the conditions under which regimes of practices come into being, are maintained and transformed” (Dean, 2010: 31).
The objective of such an analytics of government is thus to deconstruct the taken-for-granted practices and thereby show that such are not self-evident. This allows questioning how things are done and how we think about them and further that it is possible to do things differently (Dean, 2010).
The terms ‘governmentality’ and ‘regimes of practices’ thus apply a dynamic (evolutionary) perspective implying that not only are the existing practices historically constituted, they are continually reshaped by the way that they are executed. This brings a clear link to the learning perspective of this PhD thesis, as the objective precisely is to enhance the competences of the municipal (officers) to alter practises so as to improve the overall governability.
GOVERNANCE AND GOVERNMENTALITY IN THIS PHD THESIS