do not support a concept of ‘civil society’ as denoting a specific institutional site with its own structured coherence. This is problematic, especially as there is no definition of civil society that corresponds to the modern territorial state. ‘Civil society’ comprises a heterogeneous set of institutional orders and pluralistic set of agents, many of which are operationally autonomous and resistant to control from outside – whether through market forces, top-down command or horizontal networking. It is also the site of identities and interests that are not grounded in any specific institutional order but crosscut them by virtue of their relationship to the experience and ‘lifeworld’ of whole persons. This is reflected in David Lockwood’s questioning of sociologists’ focus on class formation over citizenship and his recognition of the politics of intersectionality (cf Lockwood, 1999: 531, 537, 547). Indeed, people with multiple roles and complex personal identities and in addition, complex multifunctional organizations, often attempt to integrate their personal and organizational lives by retaining autonomy and resisting state intervention. This is where demands for empowerment and capacity-building become relevant. But identity politics and empowerment could become just another opportunity for capital to appropriate more flexible labour power, to commodify other institutional orders, to restructure consumption even as its tendencies towards economic polarization continue on a global scale, to seek legitimacy through the domestication of calls for corporate social responsibility, and so forth. This would limit attempts to ensure the inclusion of all citizens within each order.
This raises the question of whether ‘civil society’ is an autonomous domain of social life with its own logic, or comprises no more than a heterogeneous set of social relations that are not (yet) dominated by other institutional orders. The former approach can be illustrated through Habermas’s analysis of the public sphere with its dialogical role in elaborating the ‘public interest’ (1989). In contrast, the latter approach sees ‘civil society’ as a horizon of action or ‘environment’ for other institutional orders (such as the economy or political system and their relevant actors) that form the main object of analysis. I incline more to the latter view, especially as the increasing functional differentiation of modern societies along with the tendential globalization of different functional systems (such as economics, law, science, education, health, politics or military security) makes it harder to identify a distinct site on which ‘civil society’ might be unproblematically located. Indeed, it is precisely this increasing decomposition or formlessness of ‘civil society’ that makes it such a significant (if often imaginary) stake in so many different struggles.
Not only are there what Habermas calls ‘colonizing’ attempts to penetrate civil society and subordinate it to the requirements of specific institutional orders (for example, market, law, science, education, healthcare, politics, foreign or homeland security). Civil society also serves as a heterogeneous site of struggles to resist such colonization in defence of identities and/or interests that lie outside and/or crosscut the relevant institutional orders (for example, in defence of class, gender, race, nationality, generation, stage in the life course, citizenship, human rights or the natural environment). In this sense ‘civil society’ is an essentially contested space (as well as an essentially contested concept) for representatives of very different types of interests, norms and values. It serves both as a horizon of action for strategies to secure the dominance of a given institutional order, and as a reservoir of antagonistic ‘instincts’ (rooted in other identities) and social resources for resisting such colonization (Habermas, 1989).
This was expressed well by Maurizio Lazzarato, in the following:
In order for governmentality to preserve its global character, in order for it to not be separated in two branches (the art of economics and juridical government), liberalism invents and experiments [with] a series of techniques (of government) which are exerted on a new level of reference that Foucault calls civil society, society or the social. But here civil society is not the space for the making of autonomy from the state, but the correlative of certain techniques of government. Civil society is not a first and immediate reality, but something that belongs to the modern technology of governmentality. Society is not a reality in itself or something that does not exist, but a reality of transactions, just like sexuality or madness. At the crossing of these relations of power and those which continue to escape them emerge some realities of transaction that constitute in a way an interface between the governing and the governed. At this junction and in the management of this interface liberalism is constituted as an art of government and biopolitics is born. (Lazzarato, 2005: 2–3)
These practical concerns are also reflected in new theoretical and policy paradigms that highlight the need to govern in and across different systems or institutional orders. Relevant concepts include the ‘triple helix’ formed by government, business and universities, the desirability of ‘joined-up thinking’ in promoting international competitiveness and the improbability of effective intersystemic cooperation to promote sustainable development. In addition to explicit use of the word ‘governance’ to denote these issues, analogous terms such as steering, networks, stakeholding and partnerships are also liberally deployed nowadays.1 Nor has civil society escaped this fascination with new forms of governance. Indeed, with its growing pluralization of individual and collective identities and its multiplication of social movements, civil society is seen as ripe for their development. This is linked to a continuing search for forms of inclusion in the political process that go beyond the relationship of individual citizens to their respective sovereign states and for forms of participation that would enable various stakeholders to influence the operation of other systems too. As such, civil society is a rich and confused site of multiple and contestable identities that can be mobilized for both pro-and anti-systemic purposes. Compounding this already ample complexity are recommendations that governance be used to guide interactions between systems and the lifeworld in response to issues such as ecological crisis, the dialectic of globalization–regionalization, social exclusion and the risk society.
Governance
This introductory chapter presents the theoretical background to interest in governance, shows the etymological roots of the concept, offers some reasons for the explosion of interest in governance in the 1960s and 1970s, and describes the main features of governance practices. Chapters 2 and 3 of Part I then frame the discussion of governance in terms of a dialectic between the governance of complexity and the complexity of governance. This highlights the relation between the increased interest in governance that is associated with more recognition of the growing complexity of world society and that the greater resort to governance, whatever its modalities, often ends in governance failure. This is intended to counter the ‘governance optimism’ that exaggerates the potential of new (or rediscovered) governance practices and to provide the basis for my recommendations about approaching governance in a spirit of romantic public irony. Chapter 4 introduces supplementary arguments about the spatio-temporal complexities of the objects and modalities of governance, and makes a case for approaching the meso-and macro-level governance of complex objects in terms of their multispatial (and multitemporal) dimensions as well as other substantive features. It argues that neglect of its spatio-temporal complexities is one dimension of governance failure.
Chapter 5 of Part II shows how WISERD (Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods) is concerned with the politics and policy concerns of civil society, and has developed an interest in civic stratification and civic repair in its second five-year funding round. Chapter 6 extends this interest to the political economy of civil society by drawing on the insights of Marx and Gramsci. Chapter 7 introduces the work of Michel Foucault and Foucauldian scholars to illustrate the politics of governance and its role in civil society.
Part III then comprises two chapters that illustrate the preceding arguments from case studies drawn from different fields of governance and metagovernance, and focuses on their forms of failure. In Chapter 8, the examples chosen are global social policy (GSP) and the discourse
