for Kooiman, the key problem is how best to ‘strike a balance’ among different kinds of actors and steering mechanisms at the micro, meso and macro levels of society.8
Kooiman distinguishes first-, second-and third-order governing. First-order governing is problem-solving; second-order governing occurs when attempts are made to modify the institutional conditions of first-order governing when, according to Kooiman, these conditions are out-dated, dysfunctional or detrimental in governance terms; and third-order governing (or, for Kooiman, metagovernance) involves attempts to change the broad principles that concern the way governing takes place: it is the governance of governance or governors through modification of the (normative) framework in which first-and second-order governing activities evolve (Kooiman, 2000, 2002).
Whereas the literature on governance and metagovernance has shown much interest in issues of institutional design appropriate to different objects of governance, work on governmentality has explored attempts to change the subjects of governance and their values. The neoliberal project, for example, clearly requires attempts to create entrepreneurial subjects and demanding consumers aware of their choices and rights as well as actions to expand the scope of the market mechanism. Anglo-Foucauldian scholars have explored the role of power and knowledge in shaping the attributes, capacities and identities of social agents and, in the context of self-reflexive governance, in enabling them to become self-governing and self-transforming (cf Miller and Rose, 2008). This raises questions about the compatibility of modes of governance not only institutionally but also in terms of individual and collective capacities to pursue creatively and autonomously the strategies and tactics required to sustain contrasting modes of governance. This indicates that collibration demands more than the search for a technical, problem-solving fix. It also involves specific objects, techniques and subjects of governance and efforts to manage the wider ‘unstable equilibrium of compromise’. Applied to metagovernance, this means comparing the effects of failure or inadequacies in markets, government, self-organization and solidarity, and regularly reassessing how far current actions are producing desired outcomes. This, in turn, requires monitoring and modulating mechanisms, and a willingness to reevaluate objectives.
Political contexts
Given such theoretical pre-histories and current theoretical alternatives, it is worth asking whether other factors might lie behind the recent interest in governance. Here one should certainly consider the strong practical dimension to such paradigm shifts. Current fascination with the nature and dynamics of governance is closely linked to the failure of many taken-for-granted coordination mechanisms in the postwar world. Here we could mention the competitive threat to Anglo-American capitalism posed by other models of capitalism (such as Continental European or East Asian variants); the crisis of US hegemony in a post-Cold War order and the attendant search for post-hegemonic and/or ‘post-national state’ solutions to global problems; the crisis of the postwar Keynesian welfare national state and its typical modes of economic and political coordination, including tripartite macro corporatism; and the eruption of identity politics and new social movements that threaten established forms of social and political domination. In these circumstances we find concern with both corporate governance and national competitiveness; managing new (or newly defined) economic, military, demographic, environmental and other threats to global security; with ‘good’ rather than ‘bad’ governance in ‘Third World’ polities, whose authoritarianism and corruption can no longer be simply defended as preferable to totalitarian communist rule;9 with compensating for the failure of hierarchical decision-making and ‘top-down’ planning in a turbulent environment marked by complex reciprocal interdependence; and with resolving the disciplinary crisis of an allegedly dependency-inducing ‘state of welfare’ by instituting new forms of ‘regulated self-discipline’ in an ‘enterprise society’. On a more meso-level scale there was also growing interest in clinical governance in medicine, the governance of schools and universities, the self-regulation of the scientific community and the governance of sport.
It is certainly worth noting that the increased interest in governance coincided with the crisis of Atlantic Fordism and the Keynesian welfare national state, and it was strengthened, in the mid-1990s, as recognition grew of the limited success of an over-enthusiastic and fetishistic turn to the market. This was also a period when civil society was celebrated and efforts made to integrate community organizations and old and, especially, new, social movements into policy-making and implementation. These responses also opened up the space for some governance scholars to assert or predict that the sovereign national state was losing authority and influence, and to intone the ‘government to governance’ mantra. The plausibility of this claim was reinforced because governance arrangements were identified within and across many different social fields and functional systems, at and across different scales of social organization, and transversally to the conventional juridico-political boundaries between the state and society. In short, the turn to governance theoretically and in practice seemed to be a general trend that extended beyond the state or political system. The state and the modalities of state power nonetheless remained central to some analyses that regarded governance as an integral part of state projects and strategies. Overall, then, these empirical and theoretical trends opened up the space for society-and state-centred approaches to governance as well as for accounts that sidestepped or crosscut this familiar, indeed, often reified, distinction.
Another aspect of the changing economic and political order in this period was the reshaping of the world economy by a complex dialectic of globalization–regionalization under the dominance of capitalist relations that combined growing integration of the world order together with the survival of a plurality of national states. This process is alleged to make it more difficult for (national) states to control their own domestic economies let alone the global dynamic of capital accumulation. At the same time, capital accumulation was said to depend on an increasing range of extra-economic factors generated on various spatio-temporal scales through other institutional orders (see, for example, Chesnais, 1987; Castells, 1989; Porter, 1990; Reich, 1991; Nelson, 1993; Boyer, 1996). Major changes were also occurring in the (global) political system with equally paradoxical effects. Thus, on the one hand, there has been a tendential denationalization of the state system through the movement of state power upwards, downwards and sideways as attempts are made by state managers to regain operational autonomy (if not formal sovereignty as such) and thereby enhance the state’s own strategic capacities. On the other hand, there has been a tendential destatization of politics (a shift from the primacy of top-down government towards more decentred governance mechanisms) as political capacities are seen to depend on the effective coordination of interdependent forces within and beyond the state (for a review of these and related trends, see Jessop, 2015). It is in this context that governance (or ‘partnership’) strategies were strongly advocated as alternatives to market anarchy and organizational hierarchy in promoting economic development.
Interest in metagovernance was related to the growing perception of the problems generated in the 1990s by a combination of state and market failure and/or by a decline in social cohesion in the advanced capitalist societies. This was reflected in notions such as governmental overload, legitimacy crisis, steering crisis and ungovernability. It prompted theoretical and practical interest in the potential of coordination through self-organizing heterarchic networks and partnerships and other forms of reflexive collaboration. Most of the early studies of governance were concerned with specific practices or regimes oriented to specific objects of governance, linked either to the planning, programming and regulation of specific policy fields or to issues of economic performance. Concern with problems of governance and the potential contributions of metagovernance followed during the mid-1990s, and the nature and dynamics of metagovernance have since won growing attention.
The real world of governance
Many practices now subsumed under ‘governance’ have been examined under other rubrics. Thus corporatism, public–private partnerships, industrial districts, trade associations, statecraft, diplomacy, interest in ‘policing’, policy communities, international regimes and the like all involve aspects of what is now termed ‘governance’.
