"Governance" as New Kids on the Block

New words do not always indicate a new condition. One of my favourite cartoons is the Jules Feiffer one of a small kid rehearsing the various words which have been used to describe the condition of those like him -

“I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived...then underprivileged. Then they told me underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary”.

Although I hated the word "governance" when it started to appear in the 1990s, I did understand why some academics felt a new word was needed. A whole new architecture of institutions - Agencies, regulators of privatised public utilities, legally superior (EU/NATO/WTO) and inferior (devolved) bodies; not to mention public procurement and consultation procedures - means that a Government is no longer Master of it's Domain. There are other kids on the block with whom it has to share power

I am aware, however, that there are other, more ideological, reasons for using the term. Recent posts have referred to the role of bodies such as the World Bank and American Think Tanks in weakening the role and power of the State - and the use of the word "governance" has undoubtedly been one the weapons they have used. Take, for example, the famous injunction of the 1991 "Reinventing Government" book to "row - rather than steer"
But I concede that the new institutional complexity does justify the new word. Somewhat reluctantly, therefore, I have accepted that the word is a legitimate one - even if I still shiver when people use it wrongly, when they should have said "government"

But why - as I indicated in the last post - did academics stop using the term some 5-6 years ago? Are they no longer interested? Have other topics become sexier?
Have they exhausted all that can be said on the topic? If so, it would be useful if someone could do a post-mortem article to tell us that was usefully learned from this 25-year episode of scribbling...
Or perhaps this Chinese article - Governance and Good Governance (2018) was that article?
- although I have to say I prefer this 2014 article Making sense of governance

Masochists who really need an answer to such questions are directed to the two definitive Handbooks which were published just as the fashion for the subject was spluttering to an inglorious end. The excerpts give an excellent sense of the field
The Sage Handbook of Governance ; ed M Bevir (2011) 600 pp
The Oxford Handbook of Governance ; ed  David Levi-Faur (2014) 800 pp

Organisational Health - time to change the medicine if not the doctor......

I’ve been “doing development” for so long that I’ve just begun to realise how odd if not questionable an activity it is……preying on people’s dissatisfactions and hopes…..and, yet, more and more consultants, academics and development workers get paid good money to churn out reports and books which identify organisational deficiencies….and then develop programmes which order people what they should be doing – rather than helping the organisation’s staff to flourish……

Such change programmes have been scything through the private and public sectors in similar fashion for the past couple of decades – they are all controlled by the same type of person in the Corporate Consultancy or national/international Funding Body…… they make the same sorts of assumptions….use the same sort of models…..and generally fail…  

The private sector has generally been in the van - with the public sector taking another few years to pick up the same fads....We noticed this more than 10 years ago - when there were several books indeed about the phenomenon of the "management guru" and the emptiness of what they preached....
But it ll seemed out of everyone's control.....

I’m at last beginning to pick up a deeper sense that something has gone seriously wrong with the way we have "parsed" management and development in the post-war period….although there are huge political and financial interests in keeping a state of amnesia; a sense of bafflement amongst so called experts about the health of our organisations….
- The Emperor has no clothes post referred to some recent critical assessments in both the field of public management and development to which I should add Toward a new world – some inconvenient truths for anglo-saxons 2014 lecture by Chris Pollitt (which, rather belatedly, recognises that a significant part of Europe - as well as the world) - has never bought the neo-liberal/Benthamite thinking of "New Public Management"); and A government that works better – and cost less?? By Christopher Hood and Ruth Dixon .
-  And this book on Reinventing Organisations also seems to be making waves in the private sector – taking us back to management books of the 1980s and echoing the work of maverick Richard Semmler….

Is it too much to suggest that there is a link here with the “slow food” and the “limits to growth” movements? All signalling a wider revolt against the way advertising, marketing and the corporate media has so insidiously, in the post-war period, developed a collective sense of dissatisfaction??

For the first part of my working life I was an “insider” working to improve a very large (public) organisation - with a strategy and structures which tried to use the energies of a range of people which the organisation’s “logic” had trained it to ignore….These were its lower-level officials, its more junior politicians and, above all, citizen activists we brought into new structures we established in the early 80s. I’m glad to say that this sort of work was so strongly accepted and “embedded” (to use an important concept in the change literature) that it has continued to this day in the structures and strategies of the Scottish Government….

But my role fundamentally changed after 1990 to that of an “Outsider” – the European Commission (and the small private “consultancies” it sub-contracts) funded me to appear in capitals and to “effect change”… using increasingly detailed prescriptions and tools which I wrote about with increasing frustration……What I enjoyed was identifying and working flexibly with people who wanted to change their institutions for the better – but the rigidity with which EC programmes are designed made that increasingly impossible….

It was a decade ago I first came across the notion of “good enough governance” which challenged the push global bodies such as The World Bank were making (at the start of the new millennium) for “good governance” - including the development of indices to measure the extent of progress “developing countries” were making in reaching the standards of public management apparently possessed by “developed” countries.

We need to explore this “good enough” concept in all our thinking but, above all, we need to have an outright ban on externally-imposed organisational change…..and a requirement that anybody proposing change should have to justify it to a panel of self-professed sceptics….