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Conflict reconsidered: The boomerang effect of depoliticization in the policy process
Abstract
This article argues that the efforts of policy-makers to avoid conflict in the short run can be counterproductive in the long run. Not only may policy-makers fail to reap the benefits of conflicts when they try to steer clear, but conflict may actually increase rather than diminish. We study conflict through the conceptual lens of (de)politicization in the lengthy and highly contested policy-making process over the multibillion-euro ‘Oosterweelconnection’ highway in Antwerp (Belgium). An in-depth media analysis of 739 articles is combined with data from 32 narrative interviews. We conclude that efforts to end public debate through depoliticization can have a boomerang effect, in which conflict disappears only temporarily, and that these efforts can ultimately increase conflict while wasting engagement and creativity. More attention to the productive aspects of conflict is needed in public administration literature and practice.
... Policy realities are characterized by interactions among multiple stakeholders with divergent values, interests, and logics of action. Conflict arises when (groups of) actors realize and manifest that they have incompatible beliefs, visions, and objectives (Wolf & Van Dooren, 2018). Two dimensions of policy conflicts can be identified. ...
... In this respect, conflict has a positive side in that it might signal public engagement and stimulate creativity and innovation, as well as prevent tunnel vision. Of course, conflictual dynamics also have a negative side in that they can foster distrust and hostility (Wolf & Van Dooren, 2018;You et al., 2022). The literature in project management has mainly dealt with conflict among internal stakeholders such as project teams, financers, contractors, subcontractors, employers, and employees. ...
... Few studies on megaprojects have adopted a discursive perspective to investigate a variety of empirical settings such as energy megaprojects (van den Ende & van Marrewijk, 2015; van Wijk & Fischhendler, 2017), highways and motorways (Haughton & McManus, 2021;Wolf & Van Dooren, 2018), railways (Esposito et al., 2022;Nagel & Satoh, 2019;Ninan & Sergeeva, 2021), ports (Merkus & Veenswijk, 2017), bridges (Brewer, 2019), and canals (Sayan & Nagabhatla, 2022). ...
Megaprojects are now as important as ever. As a response to the pandemic, the European Union has put forward the Next Generation EU policy, making available a 2021–2027 long-term budget of €1.8 trillion to fund projects with ecological and digital applications in the field of telecommunication, transportation, and energy infrastructures. Similarly, in the United States a $1.9 trillion Covid relief plan is on the way. Also, China has planned to expedite the rollout of 102 infrastructure megaprojects earmarked for the 2021–25 development plan. Despite their importance to policy-makers, megaprojects are often met with criticism and opposition by citizens, and often go off the rails—either with regard to budget or time, or both. This introductory article presents the aim and scope of the themed issue. It positions the problem areas beyond technical issues and connects them to the social and institutional environment within which megaprojects are planned and implemented. Moreover, the article makes the case for conceptualizing megaprojects as wicked policy fields. In doing so, we specify the three defining elements of megaprojects, namely, complexity, uncertainty, and conflict. The article argues that megaproject development cannot be seen as a rational, straightforward process. It is often a non-linear, conflictual process shaped by the collective action of different stakeholder groups (e.g., project managers, policy-makers, and citizens). Driven by divergent interests, sociotechnical imaginaries, as well as behavioral and discursive logics, groups of actors construct and mobilize narratives to influence final decision-making while interacting with the institutional context.
... (Verloo, 2015;Weible and Heikkila, 2017;Wolf and Van Dooren, 2018a), but focuses on the role of institutions specifi cally. The role of institutions in policy confl icts is a topic that has received scant academic att ention (exceptions are Weible and Heikkila, 2017;Wolf, 2019), even though institutionalist scholars have argued for decades that we cannot fully understand how policymaking works if we ignore the mediating eff ect of institutions (Hall and Taylor, 1996;Lowndes and Roberts, 2013;Peters, 1999;Schmidt, 2010;Scott , 2001). ...
... This article tries to move forward the policy confl ict scholarship by focusing on the role of institutions in structuring policy confl icts. In addition to academic relevance, with confl ict having both constructive (Coser, 1956;Hajer, 2003;Keane, 2009;Kriesberg and Dayton, 2017;Mouff e, 2009;Schnatt schneider, 1960;Verloo, 2015;Wolf and Van Dooren, 2018a) and destructive (Burdick, 2017;Sabatier et al., 1968;Wu and Laws, 2003) qualities, insights as to how institutions impact these qualities also have obvious practical relevance. ...
... A confl ict that starts out as a confl ict over a local mall (substantive confl ict), for example, may end up as a confl ict between policymakers and protesters who have become personal antagonists over the course of time (relational confl ict). The escalation of confl ict is not necessarily a bad thing as the creativity (Coser, 1956;Kriesberg and Dayton, 2017) and democratic engagement (Hajer, 2003;Keane, 2009;Mouff e, 2009;Schnatt schneider, 1960;Verloo, 2015;Wolf and Van Dooren, 2018a) elicited by confl icts may contribute constructively to new policy ideas (on the substantive or the procedural level). However, when a confl ict turns relational, it becomes increasingly destructive because the communication between parties stops as a result of personal distrust, and parties consider themselves superior to one another (Kriesberg and Dayton, 2017, p. 144). ...
This article argues that in situations of policy conflict, policymaking institutions that act as de facto conflict arbiters may escalate the conflict they are trying to settle. The role of institutions in policy conflicts is studied in the lengthy and highly contested policymaking process of the multibillion-euro 'Oosterweelconnection' highway in Antwerp (Belgium). The article concludes that while narrowing the scope of conflict through standardized institutional procedures initially disciplined the Oosterweel conflict, it ultimately drove further escalation, as residual topics of conflict remained and sought new institutional outlets. At the same time, more flexible institutions, while being able to finally settle the Oosterweel conflict, produced an agreement that remained institutionally unembedded and therefore more vulnerable to exploitation because it was not formally enforceable.
... By studying policy conflict escalation through the lens of SCPD, this article, first, answers a call for more systematic research on policy conflicts in general and on the mechanisms of conflict escalation in particular (Weible & Heikkila, 2017;Wolf & Van Dooren, 2018). Few studies have explicitly focused on these issues, and insights from conflict or urban mediation literature are not immediately applicable to policy processes. ...
... Perhaps surprisingly, few policy studies have focused on policy conflicts' development or escalation (Weible & Heikkila, 2017;Wolf & Van Dooren, 2018). Much of what we do know about conflicts stems from the field of international relations and conflict studies (i.e., Deutsch, 2011;Kriesberg & Dayton, 2017) or from casework conducted by urban planners and mediators (i.e., Forester, 2009;Laws & Forester, 2007;Susskind & Ozawa, 1984). ...
... This article contributes to the emerging scholarship on policy conflicts (Weible & Heikkila, 2017;Wolf & Van Dooren, 2018) in at least two ways. First, by combining concepts from the fields of policy studies and conflict studies, it increases our understanding of the theoretical mechanisms underlying policy conflict escalation. ...
This article investigates, through the theory of social construction and policy design, the feedforward effects of labeling on policy conflicts. It argues that such conflicts escalate when policymakers distinguish between more and less deserving and more and less powerful segments of the population. It draws on the empirical analysis of 32 narrative interviews with vital stakeholders in the conflict over the contested multibillion‐euro Oosterweelconnection highway in Antwerp (Belgium), as well as on the media analysis of 739 articles. According to such analyses, Flemish policymakers became increasingly hostile toward action groups as the latter moved beyond conventional policy‐making procedure, labeling them as a powerful but undeserving “vocal minority.” Meanwhile, they endorsed the Oosterweel policy, claiming that it represented an increasingly powerless but deserving “silent majority.” However, labeling action groups as powerful but undeserving and consequently dismissing them resulted in the escalation of a substantive policy conflict to a relational policy conflict, which became increasingly difficult to settle as parties fought each other rather than fighting over policies.
... This view on politicization could apply to policy proposals integrating different subsystems or to more sector-specific policy proposals. Politicization is the opposite of depoliticization, which refers to attempts by "the state" to prevent important policy decisions from being discussed and questioned in the public arena (Wolf & Van Dooren, 2018;Wood, 2016, pp. 523-525) as well as to the broader reduction of political deliberation and conflict in the public and the private spheres (Fawcett et al., 2017, p. 12). ...
... Such an instance might entail that a demand for integrated policy either receives very little public attention or that very few actors engage with it in a controversial way without many political conflicts erupting about it (de Wilde et al., 2016, p. 5). Nevertheless, depoliticization can also entail a deliberate strategy of government or other stakeholders by framing a policy demand in a way that they do not receive much political attention to avoid political contestation (Fawcett et al., 2017;Wolf & Van Dooren, 2018;Wood, 2016). One consequence of such a strategy is the adoption of integrated policy strategies, for example regarding climate change, forest protection, or digitalization, which only outline broad policy goals (Rayner & Howlett, 2009). ...
Researchers in public policy and public administration agree that policy integration is a process. Nevertheless, scholars have given limited attention to political aspects that facilitate or impede integration. This paper aims at filling that gap, by looking at how different theories of the policy process can help in explaining the process of policy integration as shaped by policy subsystems. By building on insights from theories of the policy process, we develop pathways regarding adoption and implementation in policy integration that account for the politicization and the role of actors and subsystems in the policy process. Our main argument is that policy integration is in permanent political tension with the sectoral logic of policymaking, which predominantly happens between actors in subsystems. Policy integration is, thus, not a single moment when those tensions are solved once and for all, but a political process that requires deliberate efforts to overcome the pull toward sector-specific problem definition, policymaking, implementation, and evaluation.
... Additionally, Willems (2020) has looked into the effect of politicization on interest groups' access to advisory councils when political-administrative venues are characterized by conflict. The third category focuses on political mobilization in policymaking and administration Lennon, 2017;Wolf & Van Dooren, 2018). Much of this research measures conflict indirectly, such as through belief disagreement or coalition emergence. ...
... At the same time, the literature on policy conflict and issue attention renders valuable insights that guide our expectations articulated in this article. In general, the underlying dimensions of conflict-such as threats to identity, competing values and interests, and political behaviors-vary widely across institutional contexts (Burstein, 2014;Choi, 2020;Wolf & Van Dooren, 2018). Within these varied circumstances, the capacity of interested actors to heed specific decisions and influence them is constrained by resources and cognitive biases (Baumgartner & Jones, 2009;Katz, 2018). ...
Across the world, public administration and policy decisions are related to diverse levels of conflict and attention. However, the degree and variance of conflict and attention remain largely unspecified. This article examines how types of energy infrastructure and characteristics of project location are associated with the distribution of conflict and attention around the energy infrastructure siting process. Our empirical focus is on gas pipelines, electricity transmission lines, solar power projects, and wind power projects across the United States in 2018. Primarily relying on regression analysis and interviews, this article finds differences in the distribution of conflict and attention intensity within and between these energy infrastructure types, with gas pipelines and wind power projects presenting relatively higher conflict and attention intensities. However, conflict and attention are skewed to low intensities across infrastructure types. Characteristics of project locations that are positively associated with high conflict and attention intensity include the proportion of Democratic voters and the level of urbanization in the places where projects are sited. In contrast, the proportion of Black or Hispanic residents is negatively associated with high conflict and attention intensity. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
... Policy conflicts are ubiquitous in modern democracies but remain undertheorized in theories of the policy process. Recently, we have witnessed renewed academic interest in the dynamics underlying policy conflict (de) escalation (Verloo, 2015;Weible & Heikkila, 2017;Wolf & Van Dooren, 2018a). Although we know that trust plays an essential role in conflicts and their prolongation (Forester, 2009;Susskind et al., 2000;Wu & Laws, 2003), trust-erosion dynamics in policy conflicts remain conceptualized, nor theorized. ...
... Conflict, however, has remained a background concept in most theories of the policy process. This has impeded our understanding of how policy conflicts work (Lan, 1997) and has prompted renewed attention in conceptualizing and theorizing public policy conflicts (Verloo, 2015;Weible & Heikkila, 2017;Wolf & Van Dooren, 2018a). Recent studies have provided insights on the properties that characterize policy conflicts and the theoretical dynamics underlying conflict escalation. ...
This article investigates the relationship between policy conflict and trust‐erosion. It concludes that in a context of trust‐erosion, practices to deal with conflict may backfire and lead to further conflict escalation. The article draws on an in‐depth analysis of 32 interviews with key actors in the conflict over a contested multibillion‐euro highway project in Antwerp (Belgium). It concludes that while all actors draw on the policy repertoire of “managing public support” to explain the conflict, their perspectives of what it means for a policy to have public support differ. Practices to “manage public support” that made sense from one perspective, contributed to the erosion of trust from those holding a different perspective, thus further escalating the conflict. Practices intended to end conflict proved to be fatal remedies.
... 152). The use of language and framing to normalize and naturalize issues is fatalistic, in that some situations or policy solutions are outside the realm of agency or contingency (Wolf & Van Dooren, 2018;Tilli, 2009). Jenkins (2011) says, "Fatalism limits human capacities to choose to act and change things … [and can] hold us captive by concealing and reducing the inherent contingency of political processes" (p. ...
... When the government tried to procedurally limit debate of the first motion, it created a backlash and expanded the conflict. Wolf and Van Dooren (2018) call this a "boomerang effect," where "efforts to close off public debate through depoliticization [sic] may be counterproductive in the long run. Depoliticization [sic] can increase conflict in a way that fosters its negative aspects" (p. ...
In 1988, Canada’s federal Parliament faced the challenge of addressing the legal status of abortion after the Supreme Court of Canada, in R. v. Morgentaler, struck down existing restrictions. In the resulting legal void, the Progressive Conservative (PC) federal government found itself under pressure to act. Examining parliamentary debates and recently released cabinet documents from the period of January 1988 to May 1990, this paper asks how the federal government managed the abortion issue following R. v. Morgentaler, including creating and defending legislation as a policy solution. This paper identifies politicising and depoliticising procedures (i.e., legislation and motions) that framed the issue in a way that that allowed the government to take action on the abortion issue while maintaining distance as it crafted and defended legislation. This paper reconstructs the frames that presented government legislation (Bill C-43) as “balanced” and uses the theoretical concepts of politicisation and depoliticisation to show how the frames alternately pushed and pulled the government towards and away from the abortion issue. These frames worked by deferring responsibility to other levels of government and the private sphere, as well as by invoking fatalism by highlighting the intransigency of abortion, the constraints that limit government action, and the necessity of pursuing only the government’s proposed solution. Although the frames serve to justify the frame of a “balanced” solution, their inherent contradictions and tensions point to fractures within the narrative of Bill C-43 as a “balanced” solution and may help explain the legislation’s failure.
... Before we can examine how EBPM affects policy conflict, the latter requires additional conceptualisation. We define policy conflict as a process that arises when two or more parties manifest the belief that their goals are incompatible (based on Kriesberg, 2007: 2;Wolf and Van Dooren, 2018a). As democracy is organised conflict about goals, conflicts about public policy play an essential role in healthy democracies (Schattschneider, 1960;Mouffe, 2009). ...
A popular explanation for governments’ persistent enthusiasm for evidence-based policymaking (EBPM) is its expected capacity to solve policy conflict. However, research is divided on whether or not EBPM actually has a positive impact on conflict. On the one hand, EBPM is said to introduce a set of principles that helps overcome political differences. Simultaneously, EBPM has been criticised for narrowing the space for democratic debate, fuelling the very conflict it is trying to prevent. This article explores how EBPM structures policy conflict by studying the example of Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) in policy processes through reconstructive interviews and ethnographic observations. It argues that, although EBPM channels conflict in a way that prompts engagement from stakeholders, it also escalates conflict by misrepresenting the nature of policy processes. As such, the findings suggest that managing process participants’ expectations about what evidence is and can do is key in fostering productive policy conflict.
... Conflicts in this study refer to situations where there are difficulties in reconciling different interests or disagreements over policies or objectives (Schmidt and Kochan 1972;Skoog 2019;Skoog and Karlsson 2022). Earlier scholars have studied depoliticisation from a wide range of perspectives (Etherington and Jones 2018;Evans and Tilley 2012;Hay 2007;Mouffe 2005;Wolf and Van Dooren 2018). Common themes regard the role and power of a dominant rationale, shifts in political reasoning, the reallocation of functions and responsibilities to independent bodies or panels of experts, and the exclusion of politics through the adoption of "rational" practices. ...
As a way to manage political disagreements over public policies, political representatives might be tempted to avoid open discussions by depoliticising political issues—hoping that the conflict may eventually disappear. When decision-makers employ such strategies, it is up to the administration to make political priorities and manage unresolved policy conflicts. Earlier studies indicate that there are at least two strategies that administrators can employ to manage such ambiguities: (re)framing and technical depoliticisation. This article reveals that public administrators also employ a third framing strategy: repoliticisation, where administrators seek to endow their policy areas with political power by connecting politicians to the work and implementation of policies. The study is based on 38 interviews from 11 municipalities in Sweden.
... Instead, practitioners could particularly profit from public administration scholars who contest, confront, and provoke comfortable knowledge. Instead ofagain reemphasizing instrumental knowledge, novel research shows for instance the importance of reflexive knowledge that enables particularly policy practitioners to rethink conflict and contestation as important elements of dedication, affection, and loyalty to the democratic and public sphere (Verloo 2015;Wolf and van Dooren 2018;Wolf 2021). Several branches of the field show, for example, the importance of not shunning but engaging with dissatisfied citizens expressing "not-in-my-backyard" behavior. ...
Recently a new discourse emerged in policy sciences and public administration under the label of “Positive Public Administration” (PPA), emphasizing a focus on “positive” governmental and policy successes. It positions itself as a renewed attempt to move away from an overemphasis on criticism, declinist discourse, and negative language, presenting itself as vital for reviving the field. Deconstructing PPA allows us to engage with a growing debate about “positivity” both inside and outside academia, and to discuss its novelty in public administration and policymaking. This commentary discusses this scholarly ambition by critically reviewing its historical traces, current ambitions, and strategic claims of PPA as discourse. This contribution shows that if PPA is a renewed attempt, it is a renewed attempt to reinforce “traditional” arguments and instrumental knowledge production. Moreover, PPA will not create a way out, but only a new way into traditional problems that have haunted PA as a field for decades.
... citizens). Such a mismatch may eventually lead to backfiring (Wolf, 2016), e.g. stalling of decision-making or more conflict. ...
It is hard to know what society wants when it comes to the development and implementation of Renewable Energy Technology (RET), as society articulates its assessment in many different ways. This chapter presents social conflict on RET as one of these forms of societal assessment. After we conceptualise the notion of societal assessment as a rhizomatic phenomenon, we identify and discuss three false assumptions about social conflict in social acceptance literature. We argue that social acceptance research should look more into (1) social conflict as a multi-actor process, (2) as a process of participation, (3) as a process in which multiple conflicts interact. We finish the chapter with a discussion on the implications for research on social acceptance.
... 12 Second, we find a correspondence between conflict-attention intensity, the number of actors and frames, and the presence of advocacy coalitions. This confirms the parallels of Schattschneider (1960) and other policy conflict scholarship (Baumgartner and Jones, 1993;Weible et al., 2020;Wolf and Van Dooren, 2018). However, this article offers something new by comparing a population of cases rather than focusing on a single case. ...
Maintaining the quality and reliability of electricity transmission lines is central to effective energy governance. However, transmission line siting is often a contentious policy decision since permitting and constructing lines may involve private and public property, residents and communities, and localized and national concerns. Yet, policy conflict in transmission siting across cases and over time has remained largely understudied. This article derives and tests hypotheses about policy conflict in the context of transmission lines completed or constructed between 2017 and 2018 in the United States. In exploring the full population of transmission lines, we find that a majority exhibit relatively low and moderate levels of conflict and attention rather than high levels. We further examine a subset of six of these cases that represent a range of conflict and attention intensity. We describe variation in the diversity of actors and frames, advocacy coalitions, and the volume of discourse associated with transmission line siting over time. As problems related to energy governance have become more complex, energy siting disputes are likely to remain a fruitful area for research on policy conflict.
... This crucial role of developing alternative narratives, visions or imaginaries for politicising governance arrangements has also been argued in research on cases where collaborative or interactive governance was notably absent, and civil society actors had to break into the policy agenda. In an article on a large-scale urban development project in Antwerp (Belgium), Wolf and Van Dooren (2018) argue that a depoliticised discourse in order to avoid conflict has a boomerang effect: the conflict only temporarily disappears from view and can come back more forcefully, and the opportunities for mobilising citizen participation and contribution have been wasted. ...
This dissertation examines the relationship between government and civil society. In academic literature it is claimed that fundamental changes in society (decline of traditional structures and increased functional differentiation) have led to shifts in the nature and position of both government and civil society. This has contributed to the growing importance of alternative governance paradigms (new public management, new governance theories) which might be destabilising the traditional institutional exchange between government and civil society organisations (CSOs). This dissertation provides empirical research into this claim by examining the relationship between government and civil society in Flanders, which we consider a region that has a long history of neocorporatist institutional exchange.
... Wolf (Wolf, 2019;Wolf & Van Dooren, 2017a, 2017b, 2018a. The chapter shows how ex ante analyses do indeed have certain productive effects, but that their presence also leads to considerable amounts of friction and disappointment as they create false expectations about the nature of the policy process. ...
Over the past decades, predictive or ex ante analyses have come to play an increasingly important part in policy processes. In infrastructure policy, they are used to predict the economic and environmental impact of investments. The ex ante analyses used in infrastructure policy processes are complex, difficult to understand and have limited predictive power, yet they also take up a central position in modern day policy processes.
This book offers a new perspective on the popularity of ex ante analyses based on an ethnographic study observing meetings in three large infrastructure policy processes in Belgium and the Netherlands. It argues that, besides the obvious informational role, ex ante analyses fulfil an important therapeutic function. The prime reason they are valued is not because they unambiguously tell policymakers what to do, but because they offer them the tools to move processes forward in a world characterized by ambiguity and uncertainty.
... Moreover, we accept that readers may be unpersuaded of the need for, or legitimacy of, the agonistic forms of engagement advocated (Adams & Larrinaga, 2019). However, these are attracting increasing attention within and beyond accounting as the harmful impacts of depoliticization become more evident (Alawattage & Azure, in press;Alawattage & Fernando, 2017;Wolf & Van Dooren, 2018). Moreover, others may feel we have presented neoliberalism and/or GAD studies in overly monolithic terms, for there are many forms of "actually existing" neoliberalism (Peck, Brenner, & Theodore, 2018) and different strands of GAD scholarship, both of which warrant further exploration. ...
By applying critical dialogics to “surface the political”, we interrogate the microfinance industry’s disputed claims of promoting women’s empowerment in developing countries. We counterpose two competing ideological framings: the currently dominant neoliberal discourse of “microfinance minimalism” and a counter-hegemonic discourse articulated in gender and development studies. By examining the chains of signification and key signifiers in each discourse, we specify the political frontier that separates them. We then use these contested perspectives to analyze how a microfinance NGO in Bangladesh operates, which shows how they are dominated by neoliberal discourse that precludes more enabling alternatives. Drawing on our critical dialogic analysis, we consider possibilities for change and their implications for accounting and accountability systems. In so doing, we contribute to an emergent body of accounting literature drawing on critical dialogics to critique neoliberal ideas, values and practices and to propose alternative critical accounting and accountability systems consistent with a dialogic approach.
... When scientific advice and expertise are expected to "get rid" of problems, then science cannot deliver. The staging of science as the savior of society leads to a depoliticization of policy and a politicization of science (Wolf and Van Dooren 2018). It leads to expectations that normal science cannot meet. ...
In the Covid‐19 crisis, society pins its hope on science to play an authoritative role in reducing uncertainty and ambiguity. But is science up to the task? We argue that this far from self‐evident. The demands on science in times of crisis run counter to the values of good, normal science. Crisis science needs to be fast, univocal, personalized and direct, while normal science is slow, contentious, collective and sensitive to complexity. Science can only play its atypical role if it is staged in the public arena. Some patterns of staging stand out; personalisation, visualisation and the connection to lived experiences. So far, the staging of science has been successful but is fragile. The Covid‐19 crisis shows the potential of well‐staged forms of alliance between science and policy, but when the general assumption is that scientists will ‘solve’ societal ‘problems’, the staging of science has gone too far.
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... Nascent industries in particular are likely to find themselves in the position of English shale gas operators, unable to engage effectively in an online environment where they hold no privileged position and their voice is only one amongst many. Governments may find that their attempts to depoliticise an issue have unintended consequences [70] and that conventional tactics aimed at reducing conflict no longer work as they did in the pre-internet era. Conversely, the ubiquity of online information cannot be assumed to operate straightforwardly to the benefit of citizens attempting to influence public policy. ...
A strong online response has marked contention on shale gas from the outset, as campaign members link across borders to share information and inform themselves about the impacts of development. In this article, we apply a post-political lens to online activity in the English shale gas debate, to determine how this complex information ecology has shaped the dynamics of protest.
Using shale gas development in Lancashire, North West England, as our case study we argue that the seismic events of 2011, in combination with the Government framing of public scepticism as a matter of information deficit led to an online information divide which constrained how effectively the dominant institutional actors could engage. Between 2011 and 2017, three challenges of online information: complexity, overload and loss of gatekeepers, served to perpetuate this division. Anti-shale gas campaigners were less constrained in their activity but the substantial burden of online activism contributed towards perceptions of disempowerment, as improved information access failed to deliver policy influence. The ultimate consequence was to contribute towards the turn to direct action.
Applying a post-political analysis to online activity in information-intensive issues yields valuable insights into the varied ways in which internet use may influence the expression of dissent.
... While de-politicization might have short-term advantages for those in government, future research might focus on the longer term consequences of such a strategy. De-politicization of policy in an attempt to reduce potential conflict can ultimately be counterproductive and serve to increase conflict over the long term, in addition to reducing some of the constructive benefits that can be associated with such conflict (Wolf and Dooren 2018). Typically, the actions of an ALB are taken to be more objective and less partisan than those of Government (Mulgan 2007). ...
Meta-governance involves orchestrating the ‘rules of the game’ in public management. Arm’s-length bodies are particularly important vehicles for this. We consider the case of an arm’s-length body (NHS England) created to oversee the English NHS’ day-to-day operation, and remove ‘political interference’. Although mandated by the Department of Health it has increasingly operated as policy-maker, developing policies in tension with existing legislation, while Ministers have faded from public-facing accounts of service operation. This suggests NHS England operates as a meta-governor, insulating government whilst pursuing its own agenda, and raises crucial questions about governmental accountability whilst simultaneously making answers harder to obtain.
... ocial acceptance. Several studies have demonstrated that the decision-making process itself can be a source of discontent. Procedural fairness of these processes and trust in developers also has a significant impact on the acceptance of potentially unfavourable policy outcomes (Herian, Hamm, Tomkins, & Zillig, 2012;Knudsen et al., 2015;Tyler, 1988;E. Wolf & Van Dooren, 2018b). Additionally, other variables such as place attachment (Devine-Wright, 2013) and individually perceived political efficacy play a role (Wolsink, 2000). ...
In the literature on public opposition against spatial projects, social acceptance is considered a key variable in predicting protest. However, the process by which low levels of social acceptance are translated into real protest actions has received less attention in academia. Social movement theories predict that protest participation is strongly affected by social interaction. This article aims to connect theories on locational conflict with the growing literature on the neighborhood effect in social mobilization by conducting an empirical study of rare and unobtrusive data of protest participation, on the neighbourhood level in particular. Our case study focuses on opposition against a highway project in the city of Antwerp, Belgium. Based on a large, geocoded database with addresses of protesters and activists, we build a model to analyze activism and mobilization in neighborhoods. We control for the distance between the neighborhood and the project, as well as the socio-demographic profile of the neighborhood. As expected, we find that distance has a significant impact on the occurrence of protest. Contrary to expectations, the aggregated socio-demographic profile of a neighborhood is not significantly related to levels of opposition. However, the presence of social 2 capital and the presence of active protesters are good predictors of protest participation in the neighborhood. These findings support theories on the collective efficacy of neighborhoods.
... Examples of unproductive conflicts are those conflicts that end up in lengthy juridical battles between the project promoters and its challengers, or those projects that remain unimplemented and fail to address the societal or spatial problem for which they have been set up." [35, p. 96]. Another example comes from Wolf [36], who conducted in-depth analysis of how policymakers deal with conflict in a highly contested policy-making process over a multibillion highway in Antwerp (Belgium). She shows how policy-makers tried to quell conflict by de-politicization strategies, and how this led to a 'boomerang effect': conflict did not disappear but rather seemed to come back harder the more forceful it was done away with. ...
With this paper, I want to raise attention to the value of social conflict in energy policy and planning, and the limitations of participatory processes for including different normative appraisals in energy policy and planning. I first discuss three perspectives on the value of social conflict. Although invited participation is generally considered as a way to ameliorate, or anticipate social conflict on energy projects, this 'participatory reflex' goes past the fact that social conflict can itself be considered a form of participation, i.e. self-organized participation. Second, I discuss two basic characteristics of social conflict that show the limitations of invited participation in identifying and including divergent normative appraisals: 1) social conflict challenges institutions, and 2) social conflict involves emergent positions and groups. I propose to see social conflict as self-organized participation that serves as an source for identification and inclusion of normative appraisals in energy policy and planning. This not only necessitates the study of these phenomena as such, but also suggests a different approach to deal with such phenomena in research and practice. I will lay out three directions for further research.
Governments introducing smart city technologies increasingly encounter political contestation. The deliberative perspective aims to overcome contestation by seeking consensus through deliberation. The agonistic perspective critiques this deliberative perspective, arguing that emphasizing consensus-building in response to contestation can lead to a ‘post-political’ debate excluding certain citizens and opinions. This paper presents an empirical assessment of this critique by analyzing governments responses to contestation about the smart city and its potentially depoliticizing implications. Therefore, seventeen vignette interviews were conducted with civil servants working at major local governments in the Netherlands. The results reveal three depoliticizing responses in the smart city debate: (1) local governments aim to include everyone, but only if citizens act and behave in a way that they perceive as rational and reasonable; (2) local governments welcome a variety of viewpoints, but only if these views do not contradict what they see as the natural order and common sense; and (3) local governments allow for contestation, but only if it is perceived as being provided at the right time and in the right context. Two tentative explanations for depoliticizing responses are presented: a silent ideology within the government, and a lack of practical methods to organize agonistic channels for engagement.
Governing material conditions—including physical, material subjects such as machines, build constructions, construction materials, and subsoils—is a crucial challenge within projects and is underrepresented in project governance theory. To clarify the relationship between project governance and materiality, we draw on translation theory, which is essentially about the reinterpretation, appropriation, and representation of interests related to materials. This paper studies the challenges of governing the underground during the construction of the new terminal at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. The findings show that, during the project life cycle, the translation of the underground by project actors hampered the necessary relocation of utilities in this project. This eventually resulted in delays and unforeseen costs. This translation is explained by a combination of the governance of the project, strategic interactions of project actors, and the characteristics and context of the material conditions. We contribute to project governance studies by demonstrating the usefulness of translation theory to better understand the mechanisms at play in governing underrepresented material conditions in infrastructure projects.
This paper argues how communicative planning approaches, as one of the most dominant conceptualisations of participatory planning, often ignore the embodied dimensions of participation as a socio-political learning processes. To do so, the paper theoretically traces why a Habermasian conceptualisation of political intersubjectivity fails to democratise planning processes and turns to an alternative Mouffean framework where coproductive methods are conceptualised as public pedagogic interventions, allowing for different meanings to be created and shared in a dialogical process. Based on an analysis of two experiments the authors have conducted, some lessons are drawn on how specific methods can be designed to stimulate more embodied forms of intersubjectivity between involved actors, while avoiding top-down consensus-making. In this way, the analysis demonstrates how such methods stimulate participants to share experiences, while orienting the discussion in a spatialised direction and creating a space where the ambivalence of place is effectively stimulated.
Tomas Bergström discusses, with examples mainly from Sweden, the future of party-based local democracy. Could local democratic systems change as conditions change and remain vigorous? Long-term trends present a rather dystopian picture that seems to result in reduced discretion and depoliticisation. Changes that has taken place like globalisation, marketisation, the impact of social media and new roles for courts challenge local politicians’ chances of governing local matters. Decisions are taken at other levels, by other actors than elected politicians or in complex networks involving a number of partners and stakeholders. Historically local governments have been able to adjust to new conditions. Whether this is the case also now remains to be seen.
This article investigates how framing processes lead to polarization in the public debate on a large infrastructure project. Drawing on an analysis of newspaper articles about the Oosterweelconnection in Antwerp (Belgium), it concludes that framing through imaginative appeals and framing through evidence mutually reinforce each other in a spiralling pattern. When evidence backs up appeals to the imag- ination, such as when facts back up metaphors, these appeals are endowed with authority and hence legitimacy. While this strength- ens appeals that have been ”proven” to be true, it also makes actors backing these appeals increasingly frustrated with other parties that still refuse to accept them. Because of their frustration, the former are spurred to launch new imaginative appeals conveying their anger and to seek new evidence to substantiate these new appeals. Over time, as parties in a conflict grapple with evidence and imagination, their tolerance for ambiguity decreases and the debate polarizes.
This study argues that episodes of urban conflict can serve as a lens into the challenges that society presents to citizens and to those responsible for governance. Struggles around representation, inequality, belonging, and governance get negotiated among citizens, professionals, and policy practitioners at the street-level of urban neighborhoods. Therefore, the interactions between stakeholders in situations of conflict can function as laboratories to understand how citizenship gets performed through informal en unconventional street-level practices. My study is a result of four years ethnographic case study research in which I immersed into the dramas of people who inhabit, govern, or practice in the urban environment. The study suggests that these episodes of urban conflict are moments of opportunity for ‘negotiated democracy’.
Stagnating political participation, the growth of delegated agencies and the prevalence of rationalistic-technocratic discourse all represent interlinking aspects of what can been termed 'the depoliticised polity'. Existing research has overwhelmingly focused on institutional or governmental depoliticisation strategies and fails to acknowledge repoliticisation as a critical counter-trend. This chapter argues that these weaknesses can be addressed through 'a three faces' approach that embraces societal and discursive depoliticisation strategies as complementary statecraft dynamics that often underpin more tangible governmental strategies. By revealing the existence of multiple forms of depoliticisation this approach also offers new insights in terms of politicisation and socio-political change.
Could policymaking be constitutive of politics? Conventionally, policymaking is conceived of as the result of politics. In this view classical-modernist political institutions seek to involve people in politics via a choice of elected officials who are subsequently supposed to represent the interests of their voters, initiate policy and oversee its implementation. But what if people do not always have clear-cut identities or preferences? What if they regard ‘party politics’ with a certain cynicism, and are much more ‘spectators’ than participants (cf. Manin 1997)? Is that the end of politics? This chapter argues that this is not necessarily true. Citizens could also be seen as political activists on ‘stand by’ who often need to be ignited in order to become politically involved. This creates a new role for policymaking. In many cases it is a public policy initiative that triggers people to reflect on what they really value, and that motivates them to voice their concerns or wishes and become politically active themselves. Public policy, in other words, often creates a public domain, as a space in which people of various origins deliberate on their future as well as on their mutual interrelationships and their relationship to the government. The idea of a network society only adds to this. Nowadays policymaking often takes place in a context where fixed political identities and stable communities always be assumed.
We analyze the impact of conflict on the adaptive comanagement of social-ecological systems. We survey the risks and the resources that conflict creates and review experiences with public policy mediation as a set of practical hypotheses about how to work collaboratively under conditions of conflict. We analyze the significance of these features in the context of an approach to adaptive comanagement that we call "hot adaptation." Hot adaptation is organized to draw on the energy and engagement that conflict provides to enhance the capacity for deliberation and learning around the wicked problems that constitute the working terrain of adaptive comanagement.
Key actors engaged in debate on obesity in Australia and the UK subscribe to radically different narratives about the nature, extent and even existence of this public health problem. Yet there is a common thread to these clashing narratives: evidence. All are emphatic that their story is ‘evidence-based’. In this paper, I seek to examine this state of affairs by looking at how actors think about, use and interpret evidence across a range of sites of policy debate on this issue. In doing so, I contribute to academic inquiry about the place of evidence in democratic deliberation. Firstly, I find that there is a high degree of consensus among actors who promote differing interpretations of the issue on what evidence means and entails in the abstract. Secondly, I find that the differing narratives on obesity are underpinned by different interpretations of the evidence, but that internal inconsistencies affect each of these competing narratives as well. As such, I argue that policy actors should not be seen just as strategically marshalling convenient evidence to support a preconceived cause. Overall, I suggest that these findings have mixed implications for democratic deliberation on the issue, enhancing the deliberative side of the equation but undermining the democratic. I then point to ways in which the goals of evidence-based and democratic policymaking on this issue may be further reconciled.
This article analyses the (de)politicization dynamics in complex and technical matters like public–private partnerships, which is necessary given its social impact and bud- getary consequences for the years and gen- erations to come. The global financial crisis provides an excellent window of opportunity to present this argument, because PPP pol- icy needs to reinvent itself. We argue that PPP policy needs to be (re)politicized at the broader societal and discursive levels, which means that their public nature is recognized and that policy alternatives are debated in the public forums. The ‘Private Finance Initiative’ reassessment process in the UK may serve as an example.
Stagnating political participation, the growth of delegated agencies and the prevalence of rationalistic-technocratic discourse all represent interlinking aspects of what can been termed 'the depoliticised polity'. Existing research has overwhelmingly focused on institutional or governmental depoliticisation strategies and fails to acknowledge repoliticisation as a critical counter-trend. This article argues that these weaknesses can be addressed through 'a three faces' approach that embraces societal and discursive depoliticisation strategies as complementary statecraft dynamics that often underpin more tangible governmental strategies. By revealing the existence of multiple forms of depoliticisation this approach also offers new insights in terms of politicisation and sociopolitical change.
There is an emerging intellectual body of thought on the dynamics of de-politicisation and the “disappearance of the political”. In the first part of the paper, I shall consider the process of post-politicisation. In a second part, I shall re-centre the political by drawing on the work of a range of political theorists and philosophers who have begun to question this post-politicising process. The theme of the final section will consider the contours of a reawakening of the democratic political understood as a political order contingently based on the axiomatic presumption of equality of each and every one in their capacity to act politically.
This article makes an important contribution to the depoliticisation literature by switching the
focus on to how strategies and forms of depoliticised governance are repoliticised. At present, there
is an absence of empirical research on how issues move from depoliticised to politicised arenas
and the role of non-state actors in these processes. This article addressed these gaps through an
exploration of the partial remunicipalisation of the Berlin Water Company in 2012. The case study
reveals the potential for dynamic interplay between processes of depoliticisation and politicisation
and the continuing possibility for political agency despite the constraints on urban politics.
A critical pathway for conceptual innovation in the social is the construction of theoretical ideas based on empirical data. Grounded theory has become a leading approach promising the construction of novel theories. Yet grounded theory–based theoretical innovation has been scarce in part because of its commitment to let theories emerge inductively rather than imposing analytic frameworks a priori. We note, along with a long philosophical tradition, that induction does not logically lead to novel theoretical insights. Drawing from the theory of inference, meaning, and action of pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce, we argue that abduction, rather than induction, should be the guiding principle of empirically based theory construction. Abduction refers to a creative inferential process aimed at producing new hypotheses and theories based on surprising research evidence. We propose that abductive analysis arises from actors’ social and intellectual positions but can be further aided by careful methodological data analysis. We outline how formal methodological steps enrich abductive analysis through the processes of revisiting, defamiliarization, and alternative casing.
The fields of political science and public administration are said to be drifting apart. This article argues that a focus on executive politics – the politics of the executive and of the execution of policies – offers a key avenue to maintain a useful conversation that focuses on perennial questions that are shared across research traditions. This conversation should concentrate on the ‘administrative factor’ in political life and the ‘political factor’ in administrative life. This article develops this argument in three steps. First, it defines the field of executive politics. Second, it considers the rationale why a focus on executive politics is pertinent at this particular time. Third, it discusses the challenges that a turn towards executive politics faces. This article concludes by considering the position of British public administration in the field of executive politics.
If the new fin de siècle marks a recurrence of the real, Bent Flyvbjerg’s Rationality and Power epitomizes that development and sets new standards for social and political inquiry. The Danish town of Aalborg is to Flyvbjerg what Florence was to Machiavelli: a laboratory for understanding the real workings of power, and for grasping what they mean to our more general concerns of social and political organization. Politics, administration, and planning are examined in ways that allow a rare, in-depth understanding. The reader witnesses, firsthand, the classic and endless drama which defines what modernity and democracy are and can be.
Large-scale social and political changes have revolutionized policy-making. Traditionally, policy analysis has been state-centered, based on the assumption that central government is self-evidently the locus of government. However, policy-making is often carried out today in loosely organized networks of public authorities, citizen associations and private enterprises. The contributors to this book argue that democratic governance now calls for a new deliberatively-oriented policy analysis. They provide examples from around the world to demonstrate how this would work in practice.
English
Although convincingly discredited academically, a crude ‘business school’ globalisation thesis of a single world market, with its attendant political ‘logic of no alternative’, continues to dominate the discourse of globalisation adopted by the British Labour Party. Here, we identify three separate, albeit reinforcing, articulations of the policy ‘necessities’ associated with global economic change. Labour’s leaders are shown to have utilised a flexible synthesis of potentially contradictory ideas in constructing their chosen discourse of globalisation to guide the conduct of British economic policy following the Party’s election victory in 1997. We conclude that Labour appealed to the image of globalisation as a non-negotiable external economic constraint in order to render contingent policy choices ‘necessary’ in the interests of electoral rejuvenation.
This paper focuses on the fifth dimension of social innovation—i.e. political governance. Although largely neglected in the mainstream 'innovation' literature, innovative governance arrangements are increasingly recognised as potentially significant terrains for fostering inclusive development processes. International organisations like the EU and the World Bank, as well as leading grass-roots movements, have pioneered new and more participatory governance arrangements as a pathway towards greater inclusiveness. Indeed, over the past two decades or so, a range of new and often innovative institutional arrangements has emerged, at a variety of geographical scales. These new institutional 'fixes' have begun to challenge traditional state-centred forms of policy-making and have generated new forms of governance-beyond-the-state. Drawing on Foucault's notion of governmentality, the paper argues that the emerging innovative horizontal and networked arrangements of governance-beyond-the-state are decidedly Janus-faced. While enabling new forms of participation and articulating the state – civil society relationships in potentially democratising ways, there is also a flip side to the process. To the extent that new governance arrangements rearticulate the state-civil society relationship, they also redefine and reposition the meaning of (political) citizenship and, consequently, the nature of democracy itself. The first part of the paper outlines the contours of governance-beyond-the-state. The second part addresses the thorny issues of the state –civil society relationship in the context of the emergence of the new governmentality associated with governance-beyond-the-state. The third part teases out the contradictory way in which new arrangements of governance have created new institutions and empowered new actors, while disempowering others. It is argued that this shift from 'government' to 'governance' is associated with the consolidation of new technologies of government, on the one hand, and with profound restructuring of the parameters of political democracy on the other, leading to a substantial democratic deficit. The paper concludes by suggesting that socially innovative arrangements of governance-beyond-the-state are fundamentally Janus-faced, particularly under conditions in which the democratic character of the political sphere is increasingly eroded by the encroaching imposition of market forces that set the 'rules of the game'.
Introduction
If the twentieth century witnessed the triumph of democracy, then the first decades of the twenty-first century appear to suggest that something has gone seriously wrong. This is reflected in a raft of post-millennium analyses that focus on the rise of ‘anti-politics’ and the challenges faced by contemporary democratic governance (for example, Rancière, 2006; Rosanvallon, 2008; Keane, 2009). Alongside this tide of rather bleak commentary exist a number of related debates concerning (inter alia) the decline of political participation and the rise of ‘disaffected democrats’ (see Norris, 2011); a shift to technocratic governance and models of decision making (notably in the wake of the global financial crisis) (Davis et al, 2012); and a more subtle set of concerns regarding the essence of democratic politics and the willingness or capacity of politicians to take inevitably unpopular decisions (see Flinders, 2012). These concerns have become crystallised into a set of terms (or clichés) – ‘post-democracy’, ‘the democratic winter’, ‘the end of politics’, ‘the democratic malaise’ – broadly capturing an interpretation of recent developments, but at the same time tending to tell us little about the roots or drivers, the patterns or forms, of these shifts in democratic culture. To an extent, recent literature on ‘depoliticisation’ in the field of governance research has begun to offer a more fine-grained analysis of these tensions and pressures (Burnham, 2001; Flinders and Buller, 2005). It is, however, the argument of this chapter that this literature offers too narrow a conceptual and empirical perspective to fully capture and analyse the complex and nuanced contours of this vast phenomenon that we might term the ‘depoliticised polity’, and that a broader cross-disciplinary framework is required to achieve this goal. Hence, just as Carl Schmitt (2007), whose work is examined in the introductory chapter to this special issue, argued for a broader conception of ‘the political’ going beyond ‘the state’, so we argue in a similar spirit (but in an admittedly very different way) for an expansive approach to studying depoliticisation, going beyond the ‘governmental’ approach predominant in the governance literature.
Although Marsh (2011, 48) highlights ‘depoliticisation’ as one of the most ‘interesting’ emergent concepts for analysing contemporary patterns of governance, scholars have tended to approach the topic through a fairly narrow conceptual lens (for example, Burnham 2001; Flinders and Buller, 2005; 2006; Kettell, 2008; Newman, 2009; James, 2010).
This article argues that when different perspectives on time remain disregarded in a public policy debate, policy-making conflict can increase. We present an in-depth qualitative analysis of media articles from 2005, 2009, and 2014 in the debate surrounding the contested 'Oosterweel connection,' a multibillion-euro infrastructure project in Antwerp (Belgium). Although concerns of time management motivated arguments to speed up the policy-process, the insensitivity of policy-makers to multiple perspectives on time increased conflict. Firstly, while administrative actors reasoned mainly from a procedural time perspective and saw time as scarce, citizens reasoned mostly from an impact-based time perspective and saw time as abundant. A binary debate on policy-making tempo (high versus low) ensued. Secondly, political actors often reasoned from political perspectives on time. Their actions, which were intended to appease, did not end the binary debate and sometimes reinforced it. As the debate on the Oosterweel connection persisted, parties increasingly believed that not only were their infrastructure goals incompatible, but so too were their goals for time management. This increased conflict.
Conflict Resolution is one of the fastest growing academic fields in the world today. Although it is a relatively young discipline, having emerged as a specialized field in the 1950s, it has rapidly grown into a self-contained, vibrant, interdisciplinary field. The SAGE Handbook of Conflict Resolution brings together all the conceptual, methodological, and substantive elements of Conflict Resolution into one volume of 35 specially commissioned chapters. The Handbook is designed to reflect where the field is today by drawing on the contributions of experts from different fields, presenting, in a systematic way, the most recent research and practice.
Theory and practice of conflict handling by third parties present various approaches for the resolution of conflicts—for example, judicial conflict solving, arbitration, conciliation, mediation, good services, power intervention, process consultation, and so forth (Fisher, 1972; Young, 1972; La Tour et al., 1976; and Prein, 1976, 1979a). Many of these approaches may be compared and evaluated to arrive at some conclusions on the use of specific conflict-handling models for different kinds of social conflicts and different degrees of intensity of conflicts. However, what are different degrees of intensity? Which approach is appropriate for which degree of escalation? To answer these questions, this paper will present a model of escalation of social conflicts within organizations. The model of escalation describes various mechanisms at work and distinguishes nine different stages of escalation. Different strategies of conflict handling then are related to these nine different stages of escalation, and the relative value of conflict-handling interventions is discussed in light of the nine stages of escalation. The evaluation of these approaches suggests that all of them do have limited use and effect for specific stages but must be applied according to the degree of intensity of conflict.
Democracy is established as a generally uncontested ideal, while regimes inspired by this form of government fall under constant criticism. Hence, the steady erosion of confidence in representatives that has become one of the major political issues of our time. Amidst these challenges, the paradox remains that while citizens are less likely to make the trip to the ballot box, the world is far from entering a phase of general political apathy. Demonstrations and activism abound in the streets, in cities across the globe and on the internet. Pierre Rosanvallon analyses the mechanisms used to register a citizen's expression of confidence or distrust, and then focuses on the role that distrust plays in democracy from both a historical and theoretical perspective. This radical shift in perspective uncovers a series of practices - surveillance, prevention, and judgement - through which society corrects and exerts pressure. © Éditions du Seuil, Paris and Cambridge University Press 2008.
From the theory of "deliberative democracy" to the politics of the "third way," the present Zeitgeist is characterised by an attempt to negate the inherently conflictual nature of democratic politics. Political thought and practice are stifled by a misconceived search fro consensus and the promotion of a bland social unanimity which, as Chantal Mouffe shows, far from being the sign of progress, constitute a serious threat for democratic institutions. Indeed, in many countries this 'consensus of the centre' is providing a platform for the growth of populist right-wing parties which, by presenting themselves as the only 'anti-establishment' forces, are trying to occupy the terrain of contestation deserted by the left. Taking issue with the work of John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas on one side, and with the tenets of the third way as practised by Tony Blair and theorised by Anthony Giddens on the other, Mouffe brings to the fore the paradoxical nature of modern liberal democracy. Against those who affirm that, with the demise of the left/right divide, antagonism has been eliminated from contemporary post-industrial societies and that an all-inclusive politics has become possible, she argues that the category of the 'adversary' plays a central role in the very dynamics of modern democracy. Drawing on the work of Wittgenstein and Derrida, and engaging with the provocative theses of Carl Schmitt, she proposes a new understanding of democracy in terms of 'agonistic pluralism' which acknowledges the ineradicability of antagonism and the impossibility of a final resolution of conflicts.
Provides new insights into depoliticisation literatures by applying depoliticisation beyond economic and monetary policy to energy and climate change policy. Demonstrates ways in which forms of depoliticisation can affect political capacity to respond to new policy challenges. Challenges climate change and energy transition literatures by explaining how and why UK energy policy institutions have constrained innovation and sustainable change.
Depoliticisation, as a concept, has been utilised to explain specific aspects of economic governance as it has developed over the past thirty years, particularly in certain OECD countries. This article focuses on the outcomes of three forms of depoliticisation, marketised, technocratic and non-deliberative, for political capacity. Political capacity is defined in relation to a notion of politics as social interaction, deliberation, choice and agency. Using UK energy governance as a case study it claims that the depoliticisation of energy policy has resulted in embedded corporate power, a widening disjuncture between experts and majoritarian institutions and limited knowledge structures. As a result the state’s role is still confined to giver of market signals and to temporary interventions in the face of complex and unprecedented commitments to transition the UK towards a low carbon future.
Public administrators often have to deal with conflicts. However, many public administrators have not been adequately exposed to the skills and rationales of conflict resolution. Ample literature about conflict exists in sister disciplines such as sociology, international relations, and labor relations. These studies focus on the impact of conflict, the nature of conflict, the players in the conflict, and possible strategies for conflict resolution. These studies can help public administrators better understand the nature of their work as well as their roles as conflict resolvers, conflict observers, or parties to conflict. The field, of public administration could benefit greatly by incorporating the conflict resolution perspective into its teaching and research.
Understanding the relations between elected and administrative officials in council-manager cities is hampered by inadequate models for assigning responsibility for governmental functions. Practitioners tend to view their roles in terms of the traditional model based on dichotomy of policy and administration and, though aware of exceptions, are uncomfortable with them. Scholars, on the other hand, having rejected this model, see extensive overlap and have difficulty recognizing limits of the policy-making role of the manager. This paper draws on field observations in the five cities in North Carolina with populations of more than 100,000 and a review of the literature to consider a number of "existing" models of the policy-administration relationship and to propose a new formulation that is empirically sound and responsive to practitioners' concern for normative guides to behavior. The proposed model is based on a separation of responsibility for the definition of mission by elected officials and the management of programs by administrative staff. Policy and administration-which fall between mission and management-are viewed as the shared responsibility of elected officials and staff, with each having a legitimate role in both functions. Implications of the model for administrative ethics, council roles, and future research are explored.
The public value framework, with its call for more entrepreneurial activities by public managers, has attracted concern and criticism about its implicit breaching of the politics/administration dichotomy. This article explores the role of political astuteness not only in discerning and creating public value, but also in enabling public managers to be sensitive to the dichotomy. We employ a conceptual framework to identify the skills of political astuteness, and then articulate these in relation to identifying and generating public value. Drawing on a survey of 1,012 public managers in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, and in-depth interviews with 42 of them, we examine the perceptions and capabilities of public managers in producing value for the public while traversing the line (or zone) between politics and administration. We conclude that political astuteness is essential to both creating value and maintaining allegiance to democratic principles.
To what extent do we need a 'second-wave' of writing on depoliticisation to correct the biases of the first and thereby to improve our capacity to gain analytical traction on the dynamic interplay between politicising and depoliticising tendencies in contemporary liberal democracies? In this article I welcome the debate this special issue has opened, but defend the first wave against its critics. More specifically, I argue that the first wave literature provides ample analytical and theoretical resources to capture the dynamic interplay between depoliticising tendencies and politicising or repoliticising counter-tendencies which its critics rightly place at centre stage. Indeed, I go further, suggesting that the more empirical contributions of the special issue, while bringing a series of new and important insights to the analysis of politicisation–depoliticisation dynamics, in fact do so by drawing extensively on first wave depoliticisation theory. Such work is very necessary and advances significantly our understanding of depoliticising, but it extends rather than challenges first wave perspectives and is ultimately better characterised as 'second generation' rather than 'second wave'.
This article places the study of depoliticisation within a framework that highlights the crisis-ridden character of capitalist development. It suggests that by linking depoliticisation to the activities of state managers engaged in crisis management, the concept scores highly in terms of clarity and precision over more expansive uses that lack a cutting edge and result in the assertion that 'depoliticisation is everywhere'. In a context characterised by the continued crisis of global capital it is argued that the politicisation of social relations threatens the basis not only of individual governments but of the liberal capitalist form of the state itself.
The purpose of this paper is to identify ‘participative politics' and what is here called ‘self‐service politics' as distinct political themes in many advanced democracies, in order to investigate their main elements and chart their interrelationships. These two themes are examined from the viewpoint of politicization and depoliticization tendencies. Participative politics consists of three main forms, defined as active citizenship, citizen networks and co‐production. Self‐service politics, in turn, connects each of these forms to a larger political transformation by pitting themes of activating politics, social governance and accountability against them. The paper investigates what bearing participative politics, and self‐service politics as its inevitable attendant, have on the sphere of democratic deliberation.
Spatial projects are often contested. In most cases, contested planning projects evolve into what some conflict scholars have labeled as destructive or intractable conflicts. However, collaborative planning theorists claim that under certain conditions, conflicts can result into constructive outcomes. The Ruggeveld-Boterlaar-Silsburg case in Antwerp, Flanders, might be considered as a conflict with a constructive outcome. We reflect upon the conditions for constructive conflict management and argue that public authority, citizens and experts have to leave their traditional roles. This implies openness to collaborative approaches from the public authority, governance capacity from citizens and finally a collaborative approach toward design.
Winner of the 2008 W J M Mackenzie Book Prize Politics was once a term with an array of broadly positive connotations, associated with public scrutiny, deliberation and accountability. Yet today it is an increasingly dirty word, typically synonymous with duplicity, corruption, inefficiency and undue interference in matters both public and private. How has this come to pass? Why do we hate politics and politicians so much? How pervasive is the contemporary condition of political disaffection? And what is politics anyway? In this lively and original work, Colin Hay provides a series of innovative and provocative answers to these questions. He begins by tracing the origins and development of the current climate of political disenchantment across a broad range of established democracies. Far from revealing a rising tide of apathy, however, he shows that a significant proportion of those who have withdrawn from formal politics are engaged in other modes of political activity. He goes on to develop and defend a broad and inclusive conception of politics and the political that is far less formal, less state–centric and less narrowly governmental than in most conventional accounts. By demonstrating how our expectations of politics and the political realities we witness are shaped decisively by the assumptions about human nature that we project onto political actors, Hay provides a powerful and highly distinctive account of contemporary political disenchantment. Why We Hate Politics will be essential reading for all those troubled by the contemporary political condition of the established democracies.
This article raises a set of cautions regarding public value governance along two dimensions. First, it questions the common claim that public value governance poses a direct challenge to the economistic logic of neoliberalism. Second, although public value is often presented as a democratizing agenda, leading works sidestep foundational questions of power and conflict and advance prescriptions that are at odds with important democratic values. Without attending to these problems, the public value concept risks producing a new variant of neoliberal rationality, extending and strengthening the de--democratizing, market-oriented project that its proponents seek to overturn.
Multi-level governance, network governance, and, more recently, experimentalist governance are important analytical frameworks through which to understand democratic governance in the EU. However, these analytical frameworks carry normative assumptions that build on functionalist roots and undervalue political dynamics. This can result in a lack of understanding of the challenges that democratic governance faces in practice. This article proposes the analysis of democratic governance from the perspective of multiple political rationalities to correct such assumptions. It analyses the implementation of the Water Framework Directive in the Netherlands as a paradigmatic case study by showing how governmental, instrumental, and deliberative rationalities are at work in each of the governance elements that it introduces. The article concludes by discussing the implications of a perspective of multiple political rationalities for the understanding and promotion of democratic governance in practice.
This article argues for a new way of valuing development control planning practices in a democratic society: as agonistic political engagement. Using Chantal Mouffe’s conception of the political, it counters claims that collaborative and consensus seeking approaches are of higher value than conflicts over site-specific development. In this, the idea of true consensus is an impossibility as some viewpoint has to be excluded from any agreement. Moreover, for democracy to exist, legitimate arenas for the expression of different opinions are needed, without resolution and agreement being the endpoint of discussion. Examples are drawn from discussion in a public inquiry on how meanings assigned to planning policy and the built environment can be part of this agonistic debate. They form the elements building up contradictory arguments about what is ‘appropriate’ or ‘good’ for a specific place. The mechanisms of development control provide a legitimate forum for these arguments to be articulated, without consensus or agreement as the ultimate goal.
Most literature on public sector networks focus on how to build and management such systems and ignore the potential political problems networks can create for organizations. This paper argues that individual network nodes can work to bias the actions of the organization in ways that are likely to benefit the the organization’s more advantaged clientele. The argument is then support with an analysis of performance data from 500 organizations over a five year period. Networks, while greatly benefitting the organization, have a dark side that managers ans scholars need to consider more seriously.
Research design is fundamental to all scientific endeavors, at all levels and in all institutional settings. In many social science disciplines, however, scholars working in an interpretive-qualitative tradition get little guidance on this aspect of research from the positivist-centered training they receive. This book is an authoritative examination of the concepts and processes underlying the design of an interpretive research project. Such an approach to design starts with the recognition that researchers are inevitably embedded in the intersubjective social processes of the worlds they study. In focusing on researchers' theoretical, ontological, epistemological, and methods choices in designing research projects, Schwartz-Shea and Yanow set the stage for other volumes in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods. They also engage some very practical issues, such as ethics reviews and the structure of research proposals. This concise guide explores where research questions come from, criteria for evaluating research designs, how interpretive researchers engage with world-making, context, systematicity and flexibility, reflexivity and positionality, and such contemporary issues as data archiving and the researcher's body in the field.
In this framing paper for the special issue as a whole, the authors review existing attempts to diagnose and respond to the condition of political disaffection and disengagement afflicting our democratic polities. They caution against an overemphasis on measures to address declining turnout - which they see as a symptom of a more general condition. That condition, they suggest, is the development and inadvertent nurturing of a profoundly anti-political culture. Such a diagnosis suggests: (i) the need for political elites to acknowledge how implicated they are in the crisis of democratic politics; (ii) that constitutional reform does not hold the key to a solution; (iii) that a revitalised politics must deal more adequately with the multi-level character of modern politics; and (iv) that any strategy for revitalising our politics must build from a genuine understanding of how citizens understand and orient themselves to politics.
This article assesses the thinking behind what is perhaps the single most important attempt to depoliticise monetary policy making in postwar Britain prior to the Bank of England Act 1998 – the introduction of the minimum lending rate (MLR) in October 1972. Drawing on recently released primary sources it argues that the MLR was devised to ‘defuse’ the political implications of Bank Rate policy and thereby shield the government from the consequences of frequent upward shifts in interest rates. MLR is considered as an experiment in ‘governing through the market’ and it is argued this has implications for how postwar monetary policy is viewed and how state/market relations are analysed, empirically and theoretically, within IPE.
Transnational networks of activists play an increasingly important role in international and regional politics, and have contributed to changing policies of multilateral organizations and states. Transnational advocacy networks represent a particular type of transnational activism, in which principles and values play an important role in motivating network actors. These are particularly visible in such contentious areas as human rights, the environment and women's rights. This essay examines the emergence, strategies and impact of networks of activists of different nationalities that organize around these issues. It concludes that the actions of such networks provide an important part of explanations for both normative and policy change in the international system.