Modernisation,Managerialism and the Culture Wars: Reshaping the Local Welfare State in England

The story of local government over the last few decades is often summarised in the assertion that there has been a move away from institutional authority embodied in the structures of councils towards more complex networks of local governance, incorporating a range of stakeholders and other agencies, alongside a shift of power from local to central government. But local government has been at the centre of wider processes of restructuring - of attempts to modernise the welfare state, and specifically the local welfare state. Underpinning the changes that have faced local government (and created new forms of governance) has been a series of assumptions about welfare and how it is best delivered. These combine notions of community, neighbourhood, personal responsibility, workfare and partnership with a distrust of 'bureaucracy' and professional power. It is in this context that the 'modernisation' agenda - promising cultural change - has been driven forward, paradoxically combining a rhetoric of decentralisation and empowerment with an increasingly direct involvement by the institutions of central government and a range of other state agencies in the practice of 'local' governance. The emergent arrangements are increasingly characterised by forms of self-regulation as well as more differentiated management from above.     

Neighbourhood Governance: Contested Rationales within a Multi-Level Setting – A Study of Manchester

‘Neighbourhood’ is a long standing concept in local governance which was re-energised as part of the post-1997 New Labour policy paradigm. This paper builds on the work of Lowndes and Sullivan which identified four distinct rationales for neighbourhood working – civic, social, political and economic. The utility of the framework is explored through primary research in Manchester, UK. The research shows that different rationales are held by actors at different locations within the complex system of multi-level governance within which neighbourhood policy is made and implemented. Neighbourhood approaches to urban regeneration exist within a congested governance environment. In Manchester, regeneration has been strongly driven by the self-styled ‘Team Manchester’ who have provided an urban entrepreneurial vision for change in the city. Significantly, however, interventions at the neighbourhood level have shown potential for creating opportunities for citizen and community dissent and empowerment not subsumed with the narrative of the entrepreneurial city. Lowndes and Sullivan's framework provides important analytical building blocks and illuminating tools for understanding neighbourhood approaches. This research points to the merit of a dynamic approach recognising competing perspectives and contested agendas.     

Building the Tamil Eelam State: emerging state institutions and forms of governance in LTTE-controlled areas in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka's civil war has created a political – territorial division between the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (ltte), where ltte is engaged in a process of state building within the areas they control. The article examines this state formation with an emphasis on the functions and forms of governance that are embedded in the new state institutions. It is observed that the emerging state formation has a strong focus on external and internal security, with an additional emphasis on social welfare and economic development. In terms of governance, the ltte state apparatus is marked by authoritarian centralisation with few formal mechanisms for democratic representation, but there are also partnership arrangements and institutional experiments that may foster more democratic forms of representation and governance. Hence, resolving the security problem in tandem with political transformations towards democratic governance remain prime challenges for peace building in northeast Sri Lanka.     

Parliaments in Disguise? How German Councillors perceive Local Councils

Dominant narratives of neighbourhood working in the United Kingdom accentuate the diversity and ‘messiness’ of practices across local authorities. This paper questions such narratives. Drawing upon a study of 15 local authorities, we first argue that neighbourhood working is increasingly oriented towards neighbourhood management, privileging the ‘joining up’ of mainstream service delivery over the enhanced community engagement and political accountability more associated with the practices of neighbourhood governance. Deploying Lowndes and Sullivan's four rationales of neighbourhood working (2008), in combination with Mintzberg's metaphor of organisation as ‘structure in fives’ (1983), we suggest that the practices of neighbourhood working are currently best understood in terms of Mintzberg's decentralised divisional authority as a form of constrained decentralisation in which semi-autonomous divisions are brought together under a central administration and given limited control over service delivery in order to address the social and economic rationales for neighbourhood working. We then draw upon recent neo-liberal critiques of local governance to offer a critical evaluation of both the appeal for local officers and politicians of neighbourhood management and the potential tensions and contradictions of such a move for future policy and practice. We conclude that neighbourhood management as a neo-liberal ‘roll-out’ strategy may be self-defeating, surfacing the incapacity of local authorities to respond to local community expectations and grievances, whilst exposing the organisational constraints of partnership working, managerialism and outsourcing.     

Guilty Bodies, Productive Bodies, Destructive Bodies: Crossing the Biometric Borders

This article examines the forms of power brought into play by the deployment of biometrics under the lenses of Foucault's notions of discipline and biopower. These developments are then analyzed from the perspective of governmentality, highlighting how the broader spread of biometrics throughout the social fabric owes not merely to the convergence of public and private surveillance, but rather to a deeper logic of power under the governmental state, orchestrated by the security function, which ultimately strengthens the state. It is associated with the rise of a new governmentality discourse, which operates on a binary logic of productive/destructive, and where, in fact, the very distinctions between private and public, guilty, and innocent—classic categories of sovereignty—find decreasing currency. However, biometric borders reveal a complicated game of renegotiations between sovereignty and governmentality, whereby sovereignty is colonized by governmentality on the one hand, but still functions as a counterweight to it on the other. Furthermore, they bring out a particular function of the "destructive body" for the governmental state: it is both the key figure ruling the whole design of security management, and the blind spot, the inconceivable, for a form of power geared toward producing productive bodies.     

Leadership in Urban Governance: The Mayor of London

This article discusses leadership in urban governance by examining the Mayor of London. It uses a conceptual framework of four elements: the external environment to local leadership; the institutional arrangements in which leaders operate; the local environment; and the personal characteristics of leaders. It is argued that the Mayor of London is 'strong' within the Greater London Authority, but 'weak' in formal terms in the governance of London. In order to be effective in London governance, the Mayor needs to facilitate the co-operation of others in order to wield power. The area of negotiation of the leadership of the Mayor of London is broad and takes place between the Mayor and the organisations which form the governance of London.     

HOW LOW CAN YOU GO? RATIONALES AND CHALLENGES FOR NEIGHBOURHOOD GOVERNANCE

Associated with innovation in both democratic practice and service design, neighbourhoods are high on policy agendas across Europe. Drawing upon classic debates about size and devolution, the article identifies four distinct rationales for neighbourhood governance: civic, social, political and economic. In England, the ‘new localism’ agenda gets near to developing a comprehensive case for neighbourhood governance, drawing upon all four rationales. Options for institutional design are explored with reference to four ideal types: (1) neighbourhood empowerment; (2) neighbourhood partnership; (3) neighbourhood government; (4) and neighbourhood management. Key challenges for neighbourhood governance are analysed in terms of capacity, competence, diversity and equity. The article argues that the classic democracy/capacity trade‐off associated with small units needs to be re‐thought in the context of the ‘new governance’ (multi‐level, multi‐actor and e‐enabled). Rather than confronting one big trade‐off, institutional designers face a series of questions about the underlying purposes and priorities of neighbourhood governance.     

Community Empowerment or a Strategy of Containment? Evaluating Neighbourhood Governance in the City of Westminster

The longstanding emphasis on the neighbourhood as a scale for intervention and action has given rise to a variety of forms of governance with a number of different rationales. The predominant rationales about the purpose of neighbourhood governance are encapsulated in a fourfold typology developed by Lowndes and Sullivan (2008). This article sets out to test this approach by drawing on an evaluation of neighbourhood initiatives in the City of Westminster which were delivered through a third sector organisation, the Paddington Development Trust. ‘Insider’ perspectives gathered at city and neighbourhood levels regarding the infrastructure for neighbourhood management are discussed and evaluated in the light of these rationales. The conclusions, while broadly reflecting Lowndes and Sullivan and a follow-up study of Manchester, suggest that in Westminster the civic and economic rationales tend to predominate. However, the Westminster approach is contingent on the prevailing ethos and funding regimes at central and local levels and remains relatively detached from mainstream services. While community empowerment is an important part of the policy rhetoric, it is argued that in practice a ‘strategy of containment’ operates whereby residents in the neighbourhoods have relatively little control over targets and resources and that new governance mechanisms can be relatively easily de-coupled when required. In retrospect, co-production might have been a more effective model for neighbourhood governance, not least given its fit with policy direction.     

Localism and Accountability in a Post-Collaborative Era: Where Does It Leave the Community Right to Challenge?

Since the establishment of subsidiarity in the early 1990s, the European-wide move to devolve governance has been interpreted by previous and present UK governments adopting differing ideological positions within a ‘localism agenda’. Interpretations have changed the dynamics of the community right to challenge, as well as the structure and mechanisms for community accountability. This article adopts the typology of forms of local governance developed by Lowndes and Sullivan (2008, How low can you go? Rationales and challenges for neighbourhood governance. Public Administration, 86 (1), 1–22) to explore the hypothesis that the localism agenda realigns the synergy between neighbourhood rationales; citizen engagement in service delivery and the opportunity for public scrutiny and accountability. It concludes that opportunities for communities to challenge service delivery and ensure increased accountability to the local level will be tempered by increased complexity and demands on local authorities to develop new relationships with both service users and providers.     

Placing Ethical Trade in Context: wieta and the South African wine industry

How ethical trade develops in specific ways in particular national-institutional and historical contexts remains largely unexamined. This paper analyses approaches to ethical trade in the South African wine industry through a case study of the Wine and Agricultural Ethical Trade Association (wieta). It examines factors influencing wieta, including the legacies of colonialism and apartheid, its relationship with post-apartheid restructuring and legislation, and the role of international retailers. wieta's impact within the wine industry, stakeholder perceptions, and improvements in on-farm standards are explored. The paper illustrates how these impacts are mediated by political and economic factors operating at various scales, and by the contradictions of improving working conditions within free market globalisation. Within these broader contexts, it argues that expectations of wieta are unrealistic and its role in transformation widely misunderstood. Instead, ethical trade initiatives need to be understood within their spatial, institutional, and historical contexts so as not to overestimate and undervalue their contribution to socioeconomic transformation.     

Challenges for EU governance through Neighbourhood Policy and Eastern Partnership: the values/security nexus in EU–Belarus relations

Whereas the European Union (EU) has had some effect on political and economic reforms in the Ukraine and Moldova, it almost completely failed to impress the regime and population of Belarus. Despite growing consensus at the EU level that the Union's policies for Eastern Europe cannot succeed without Belarus, few attempts have been made to account for the failure of EU governance in Belarus. Having recalled the current legal and institutional set-up of EU–Belarus relations, this article introduces the notion of the ‘values/security nexus’ to explain the limited impact of EU governance in Belarus. It argues that the highly contradictory normative objectives in the Union's current Neighbourhood Policy towards Belarus effectively undermine the EU's credibility in the country: idealist values of ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of the Belarusian population increasingly collide with traditional realist goals of protecting EU interests and the stability of the Belarusian state. By way of conclusion, the article highlights the challenges facing the EU's new Eastern Partnership, including Belarus.     

"Global Civil Society" and the Political Depoliticization of Global Governance

Activists, officials, and academics alike have often linked observations about an emerging global civil society to an incipient democratization of world politics. Global civil society is assumed to bring public scrutiny and "bottom-up" politics to international decision making "from outside" formal political institutions. Based on an analysis of uses of the concept of global civil society in 1990s global governance discourse (especially related to the major UN world conferences), this paper argues that the presumed democratization of world politics is better understood in terms of a double movement: on the one hand, "global civil society" depoliticizes global governance through the promotion of "human security" and "social development"; on the other hand, the emerging international public sphere (in the UN context) operates as a subsystem of world politics rather than opposing the system from outside. Practices of depoliticization are thus part of the political logic of (neo-)liberal global governance. The argument draws on Luhmann's systems theory and Foucault's analysis of governmentality.     

The Development of the Urban Government System in Bangladesh: Does Coordination Exist?

This paper is intended to shed some light on the development of urban governance in Bangladesh by highlighting the issue of coordination. It addresses the question of whether there is any mechanism through which urban government bodies can ensure coordination on matters of dispute between different government organisations. The paper is based on a review of secondary literature as well as on primary data drawn from a case study on a city corporation. The available data substantiates the view that the process of urban service delivery in Bangladesh has lacked proper coordination mechanisms from its very inception. Successive governments since the independence of Bangladesh have experimented with the structural design of urban government bodies without considering the need for a proper mechanism to ensure sound coordination among actors involved in implementing the various policies of these bodies. Although an attempt was made by the then Awami League1 1 The Awami League is one of the two major political parties in Bangladesh. View all notes (1996–2001) government to establish a high-powered coordination committee under the chairmanship of the minister in charge of the Local Government, Rural Development and Cooperatives (LGRD&C) Ministry for each city corporation, in order to ensure better management of services and to settle disputes between various government agencies, the initiative was perverted upon the change of state power in 2001. As a result, these bodies continue to suffer from problems of coordination.     

Securitisation of research: fieldwork under new restrictions in Darfur and Mali

Knowledge on conflict-affected areas is becoming increasingly important for scholarship and policy. This article identifies a recent change in knowledge production regarding 'zones of danger', attributing it not only to the external environment, but also to an on-going process of securitisation of research resulting from institutional and disciplinary practices. Research is increasingly framed by security concerns and is becoming a security concern in itself, although the implications are not readily acknowledged. To illustrate these developments, we draw on fieldwork in Mali and Darfur.     

The EU's Support for Democratic Governance in the Eastern Neighbourhood: The Role of Transition Experience from the New Member States

The European Union seems to place an increasing rhetorical emphasis on harnessing the transition experience of the new member states. This article examines whether the EU actually makes use of this experience in its promotion of democratic governance in the eastern neighbourhood. The main conclusion is that while reform priorities of the EU in the region are aligned with transition experience, the actual participation of actors from the new members in implementing EU-financed projects aimed at promoting democratic governance is limited. This contradiction should be resolved or it will further erode the credibility of the EU's external policies.     

The limits of EU governance: Belarus's response to the European Neighbourhood Policy

The article examines some conceptual and practical tensions related to the application of the external governance framework to the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in less motivated states, such as Belarus. First, it critically analyses the foundations of the external governance framework – from M. Smith's perspective – in order to suggest that the failure of the ENP to legitimize in Belarus should not be solely attributed to the vices of Lukashenko's regime. Second, it argues that an understanding of specifically Belarusian ‘boundaries of order’ – geopolitics and culture – is essential for tailoring a more nuanced policy that will be able to accommodate the needs and interests of ‘less motivated’ ENP partner states. In conclusion, it is suggested that a new policy framework – of extended partnership – should be more technical and less political, based on horizontal networks of cooperation rather than on hitherto hierarchical governance by conditionality that has found little appeal in the less motivated neighbourhood. Can an Eastern Partnership framework become such an alternative?     

Introduction: Governing the Asia Pacific--beyond the 'new regionalism'

This paper provides a broad introduction to the special issue and examines the main contours of regional governance in the Asia Pacific. It suggests that prevailing theories of regional co-operation in the Asia Pacific fail to pay due heed to the manner in which regional integration is rooted in domestic coalitions, economic strategies, and state forms that prevailed in the boom years of the 'Asian Miracle'. The paper then goes on to argue that the collapse of the developmentalist project has given way to the new regulatory state, which in turn spawns new forms of regulatory regionalism that place a heavy accent on policy co-ordination and harmonisation.     

Military service,governance and the African Diaspora

Abstract

During World War II black soldiers who served in the United States Army and in the Caribbean colonial forces of the British military performed their duties within the constraints of a racialized governmentality. When black soldiers served in the military forces of either nation, they were regulated by policies meant to control and contain their participation. The institutional racism within both the War Department and the Colonial Office is representative of a political theory of racialized governmentality – the black body was inscribed with governance by those who exercised power. This paper outlines and defines the concepts and terms of engagement necessary to understand the mentalities and realities facing black soldiers in two colonial settings during the Second World War.     

An American Perestroika in Dutch Cities? Urban Policy in the Netherlands at the End of a Millennium

This paper discusses the implications of the recent adoption of interactive forms of governance in Dutch urban policy. Advocates of this new approach claim that interactive governance will have positive effects for (1) the quality of urban democracy and urban governability and (2) for the solution of the information problems inherent in coping with (wicked) urban problems. On the basis of an extensive evaluation of the implementation of the new policies in four of the 25 Dutch municipalities involved, these claims are critically assessed.     

Recent research: The micro-politics of deliberation: Case studies in public participation

The contemporary emphasis on public participation in policy making derives both from concerns to increase the legitimacy of public decision making and to develop more dialogic forms of governance, and from more 'bottom-up' action intended to ensure that the voices of those excluded from policy making are heard. This has resulted in diverse forms of participative practice, including forums in which social movement organizations meet officials, and forums initiated by officials to which 'the public' are invited. This article examines four case studies of participation, studied as part of research conducted in the ESRC Democracy and Participation programme. It focuses on a micro-level analysis of the dynamics of exchanges within such forums to question the capacity of such forums to generate alternative discourses within which policy problems can be defined and addressed.