The Covid-19 pandemic that emerged in the spring of 2020 caused severe political, social, and economic turmoil throughout the world. In spite of early warning signals from the World Health Organization, countries struggled to shape their policy responses and countermeasures for curtailing the spread of the virus while also minimising the damage that any restrictions would inflict on the health and well-being of society at large. While some countries have adopted strict regulations and extraordinary measures after declaring 'states of exception' and 'national emergencies', others have relied upon expert recommendations and individual responsibility. Sweden is viewed as having adopted one of the latter type of approaches in that it places the responsibility for social distancing upon the individual. Is this an instance of a failed 'securitisation' process, or rather a sensible constitutional and political response to a severe security event? This article presents an in-depth analysis of the Swedish strategy for coping with Covid-19, arguing that this case illustrates that security management in a democratic state should direct greater attention to rule following in accordance with a logic of appropriateness rather than the rule breaking envisaged by securitisation theory.
Efforts to strategically implement governance reforms have become a common way in which to deal with complex social and political issues. The analysis presented in this article addresses recent governance reforms in Malmo, Sweden, that are intended to help resolve complex problems of urban segregation and social inequality. The article identifies important difficulties that have been encountered in promoting increased participation in spite of the great awareness on the part of local actors of the problems facing the community. The study brings forth evidence that there are good reasons for reassessing the inclusive ethos of network governance and for a critical investigation of precisely who gains access to political processes when network governance arrangements are implemented from above.
Contemporary liberal and democratic states have 'securitized' a growing number of issues by advancing the notion of societal security. This is coupled with a proactive stance and the conception of building societal resilience in order to withstand future crises and disturbances. The preemptive logic of contemporary security and crisis management calls for a new type of resilient neoliberal subject who is willing to accept uncertainty and shoulder greater individual responsibility for her own security. This article offers a genealogical analysis of this development in Sweden since the end of the Cold War, highlighting the role now assigned to citizens within social and national security planning. I argue that seeking a return to a more traditional notion of 'total defence' blurs the previously important war/peace and crisis/security distinctions. While war preparedness in previous eras was an exceptional aspect of human life and citizenship, the conceptions of security now evolving bind together societal and national security such that civil and war preparedness are merged into an ever-present dimension of everyday existence. The analysis also reveals that the responsibilization of individuals introduces a moral dimension into security and generates new forms of citizen–citizen relations. These extricate the sovereign powers of the state and the liberalist social contract between the state and its citizens.
The notion of civil society, as an ontologically distinct sphere, separated from the state thereby serves as an antidote to the sovereign power of the state. Since the 1990s, we have seen reforms and organizational structures that advances the role ofthe market as well as the civil society along with a voluntary sector, often with the deliberate attempt to disrupt the power of the stateand to tame the Leviathan through the promotion of networks,partnerships, co-governance and collaboration. This can be understoodin terms of a present day state phobia and builds on a liberal conception of negative freedom understood as non-interference.Yet if we take Foucault's theorizations of power as omnipresent as itdisrupts the power/freedom dichotomy we need to find alternativeways to cope with relations of power in order to not let themdeteriorate into relations of domination. I argue in this article that neo-republican ideal of non-domination can be combined with Foucault's insights on the nature of power. If correct, a continued promotion of more civil society involvement and partnerships between public and private actors provides a false insurance to diminish domination in contemporary societies.
The technocratic dimension of government—its reliance upon knowledge claims, usually in scientific guise—is of great importance if we wish to understand modern power and governance. In Power Without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy, Jeffrey Friedman investigates the often-overlooked question of the relationship between technocratic knowledge/power and ideas. Friedman's contribution to our understanding of technocracy can therefore be read as a contribution to governmentality studies, one that introduces the possibility of adding normative solutions to this critical tradition.
Network governance, which involves an informal and self-regulated set of public and private actors, who together address various political and social problems, has substantially altered the institutional landscape concerning the formation and implementation of public policy. A common view is that this has made it possible to enhance pluralism and disperse political power by transferring power from the sovereign state to a wider set of private actors and stakeholders. I argue in this article that we need to analyze network governance in reference to the concept of domination and the theoretical tradition of neo-republicanism. For this purpose, I develop a theoretical framework that specifies five dimensions in which domination may arise and, conversely, be mitigated. An alternative image of network governance emerges which reveals that this type of governance may in fact generate a form of institutional domination that encompasses both citizens and civil society actors due to the arbitrary influence that certain network participants come to exercise upon the life choices of nonparticipants.
Network governance, which involves an informal and self-regulated set of public and private actors, who together address various political and social problems, has substantially altered the institutional landscape concerning the formation and implementation of public policy. A common view is that this has made it possible to enhance pluralism and disperse political power by transferring power from the sovereign state to a wider set of private actors and stakeholders. I argue in this article that we need to analyze network governance in reference to the concept of domination and the theoretical tradition of neo-republicanism. For this purpose, I develop a theoretical framework that specifies five dimensions in which domination may arise and, conversely, be mitigated. An alternative image of network governance emerges which reveals that this type of governance may in fact generate a form of institutional domination that encompasses both citizens and civil society actors due to the arbitrary influence that certain network participants come to exercise upon the life choices of nonparticipants.
Book review of: Poststructural policy analysis– a guide to practice , by Carol Lee Bacchi and Susan Goodwin, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 149 pp., ISBN 978-1- 137-52544-4.
Colin Hay's and Vivien Schmidt's responses to my previous critical engagement with their respective versions of neo-institutionalism raise the issue of how scholars may account for the ideational power of political processes and how ideas may generate both stability and change. Even though Hay, Schmidt, and I share a common philosophical ground in many respects, we nevertheless diverge in our views about how to account for ideational power and for actors' ability to navigate a social reality that is saturated with structures and meaning. There continues to be a need for an analytical framework that incorporates discourse and a constitutive logic based upon the power in ideas. Post-structural institutionalism (PSI) analyzes discourse as knowledge claims by means of the concept of a constitutive causality, analytically identified in respect to institutions, such that the substantive content of ideas/discourse provides ideational power and generates immanent change.
Book review of: Poststructural policy analysis– a guide to practice , by Carol Lee Bacchi and Susan Goodwin, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 149 pp., ISBN 978-1- 137-52544-4.
Meta-governance recently emerged in the field of governance as a new approach which claims that its use enables modern states to overcome problems associated with network governance. This thesis shares the view that networks are an important feature of contemporary politics which must be taken seriously, but it also maintains that networks pose substantial analytical and political challenges. It proceeds to investigate the potential possibilities and problems associated with meta-governance on both theoretical and empirical levels. The theoretical discussion examines meta-governance in relation to governmentality, and it puts forward the claim that meta-governance may be understood as a specific type of neo-liberal governmentality. The meta-governance perspective regards networks as a complementary structure to traditional administration that can be utilized in the implementation and realization of public policy, but which also preserves the self-regulating and flexible character of networks. This generates a contradiction between the goals of public management and the character of networks that requires further investigation. The combination of the specific dynamics of the political field of security, the diminishing role of sovereign powers, the emergence of security networks, and the meta-governance stance adopted by the Swedish state constitutes a situation that should have been favorable for the successful employment of meta-governance. The empirical investigation of meta-governance is divided into two parts. The first part reviews the historical process involved and shows how the Swedish government and public authorities have adopted a meta-governance stance. The second analyzes the specific instruments and strategies that have been deployed in the governance of security communications and in the management of Sweden's new security communications system which is an important aspect of security networks. The historical study together with the analysis of the meta-governance tools deployed reveals that the meta-governors neither reached the goals specified, nor fulfilled the overall purpose of successful security communications. I argue on the basis of the theoretical and empirical findings obtained in the present study that it is very difficult to successfully employ meta-governance in respect to security and crisis management, and that we have sound reasons to suspect that meta-governance will run into similar difficulties in other political fields as well. I conclude that meta-governance is a far more difficult practice than has been anticipated by existing theories and policy recommendations. Turning to meta-governance as a way to govern and control organizations may in fact lead to further fragmentation and distortion of public politics.
