The Disoriented State: Shifts In Governmentality, Territoriality and Governance (Environment & Policy)

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Author: Bas Arts | Arnoud Lagendijk | Henk van Houtum

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THE DISORIENTED STATE: SHIFTS IN GOVERNMENTALITY, TERRITORIALITY AND GOVERNANCE

ENVIRONMENT & POLICY VOLUME 49

For other titles published in this series, go to www.springer.com/series/5921

THE DISORIENTED STATE: SHIFTS IN GOVERNMENTALITY, TERRITORIALITY AND GOVERNANCE Edited by

Bas Arts, Arnoud Lagendijk and Henk van Houtum

Editors Bas Arts Wageningen University and Research Centre Chairgroup Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Droevendaalsesteeg 3 Building 101/Gaia, B-wing, Third floor 6708 PB Wageningen The Netherlands

Arnoud Lagendijk Nijmegen School of Management Radboud University Nijmegen Thomas van Aquinostraat 3 6525 GD Nijmegen The Netherlands

Henk van Houtum Nijmegen School of Management Radboud University Nijmegen Thomas van Aquinostraat 3 6525 GD Nijmegen The Netherlands

Cover image taken by Ingrid Veldhuizen

ISBN: 978-1-4020-9479-8

e-ISBN: 978-1-4020-9480-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008938972 © Springer Science +Business Media B.V . 2009 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper 987654321 springer.com

Contents Contributors..........................................................................................................vii Part I Introduction 1

Shifts in Governmentality, Territoriality and Governance: An Introduction ... 3 Arnoud Lagendijk, Bas Arts and Henk van Houtum

Part II States, Territories, Governance 2

Neoliberalisation and Place: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Borders ............................................................................................................ 13 Philip G. Cerny

3

Urban Governance and the Production of New State Spaces in Western Europe, 1960–2000 ......................................................................................... 41 Neil Brenner

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From Governance to Governance Failure and from Multi-level Governance to Multi-scalar Meta-governance ............................................... 79 Bob Jessop

Part III Policy Practices 5

Querying the Queue: A Review of the Literature on the Management of Borders and Migration in the European Union......................................... 101 Roos Pijpers

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The Territoriality of Spatial-Economic Governance in Historical Perspective: The Case of The Netherlands ................................................... 121 Arnoud Lagendijk and Frans Boekema

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Producing Urban (Dis)similarity: Entrepreneurial Governance, Consumer Mobility and Competitive Consumption Spaces: The Case of the Enschede Region................................................................................. 141 Bas Spierings

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A Narrative Understanding of an Entrepreneurial City: The Case of Tilburg....................................................................................................... 161 Stefan Dormans and Arnoud Lagendijk

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River Basin Management in Europe: The ‘Up- and Downloading’ of a New Policy Discourse............................................................................ 181 Sander Meijerink and Mark Wiering

10 Environmental Governance Failure: The ‘Dark Side’ of an Essentially Optimistic Concept........................................................................................ 201 Rikke Arnouts and Bas Arts v

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Contents

Part IV Conclusions 11 The Disoriented State ................................................................................... 231 Bas Arts and Arnoud Lagendijk Index ................................................................................................................... 249

Contributors Rikke Arnouts holds an M.Sc. in Political Sciences of the Environment and is currently a Ph.D. student at the Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group of Wageningen University and Research Centre, The Netherlands. He is writing a thesis on governance processes in Dutch nature conservation policy. Bas Arts is Professor in, and Chair of the Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group at Wageningen University and Research Centre. His research mainly concerns global environmental governance, and he is particularly interested in new discursive-institutional arrangements in forest and nature policy. He was previously employed as Associate Professor within the Department of Environmental Policy Sciences. Together with Henk van Houtum and Arnoud Lagendijk he founded and coordinated the research programme Governance and Place and co-organised the Conference Mind the GaP on which this volume is based. Frans Boekema is Professor of Economic Geography at Radboud University Nijmegen and Associate Professor of Regional Economics at Tilburg University. His research focuses on a variety of topics in the field of Economic Geography and Urban and Regional Economics, with emphasis on regional innovation, learning regions, the knowledge economy and regional economic growth and development. Neil Brenner is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Metropolitan Studies Program, New York University. His research interests include state theory, critical urban political economy, sociospatial theory and comparative urban and regional studies with emphasis on processes of (neoliberal) globalisation and state restructuring. Philip G. Cerny is Professor of Global Political Economy in the Department of Political Science and the Division of Global Affairs at Rutgers University – Newark (New Jersey). He has written extensively on power and globalisation, world politics and pluralism, international finance and neoliberalism. Stefan Dormans is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences in Amsterdam. His research interests are in the field of ethnographic methods and narrative-discursive approaches. After having written a Ph.D. in urban and narrative geographies, he is currently focusing on collaborative practices in social and economic history. Henk van Houtum is Associate Professor in the Department of Human Geography at the Radboud University of Nijmegen. He also is head of the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research. His research interests are borders, (national) identity, home, migration and soccer. Together with Bas Arts and Arnoud Lagendijk he founded and co-ordinated the research programme Governance and Place.

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Contributors

Bob Jessop is Founding Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. His interests include state theory, Marxist and institutional political economy, governance, the political economy of post-war Britain, changes in the state and welfare regimes, entrepreneurial cities, the knowledge-based economy, and the (il)logic of globalisation. Arnoud Lagendijk is Associate Professor within the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Radboud University Nijmegen. His research interests revolve around in regional development, regional policy, and spatial planning, with a particular focus on the role of knowledge and power. Together with Bas Arts and Henk van Houtum he founded the research programme Governance and Place which he is still coordinating. Sander Meijerink is Assistant Professor at the Department of Spatial Planning at Radboud University Nijmegen. His current research interests include the alignment between water management and spatial planning, policy implementation and the management of trans-boundary river basins. Roos Pijpers is Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Geography at Radboud University Nijmegen. She is specialising in the ‘geography of work’, including the migration, mobility, and flexibility of labour, migrant/worker subjectivity, workplace restructuring, and border making, with a keen interest in Eastern Europe. Bas Spierings is Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Geography & Urban and Regional Planning at Utrecht University. He is focusing on the research themes retailing, city centre developments, urban competition, consumption, shopping and everyday life, and border subjectivities. Mark Wiering is a Senior Researcher and Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Sciences of the Environment at Radboud University Nijmegen. His research focuses on the institutionalisation of environmental policy and water policy, with a specific interest in the formation of governance arrangements.

Chapter 1

Shifts in Governmentality, Territoriality and Governance: An Introduction Arnoud Lagendijk, Bas Arts and Henk van Houtum

Abstract: This introductory chapter discusses the relationship between state governance and specific forms of policy making in the light of three major kind of changes, in governmentality, territoriality and governance itself. Our basic assertion is that policy-specific developments are not just derivative but co-constitutive of broader discourses and practices, such as associated with the rise of neo-liberalism and multi-actor, multi-level governance. We then introduce the way we will explore our questions in the remainder of the book.

Keywords: Governmentality, territoriality, governance, policy-making, neo-liberalism

1.1

Introduction

This volume is a product of the conference Mind the GaP: The ‘governance of place’ and the ‘spatiality of governance’ in the new millennium, held at the Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University, the Netherlands, June 3 and 4, 2004. It was organised by the research program Governance and Places (that explains the abbreviation ‘GaP’), which brings together the research of planners,

_________________________ Arnoud Lagendijk (,) Department of Spatial Planning, Radboud University of Nijmegen, PO Box 9108, NL-6500 HK, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] Bas Arts Chair of the Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group, University of Wageningen, PO Box 47, 6700 AA, Wageningen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] Henk van Houtum Department of Human Geography, Radboud University of Nijmegen, PO Box 9108, NL-6500 HK, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] 3 B. Arts et al. (eds.), The Disoriented State: Shifts in Governmentality, Territoriality and Governance, 3–10. © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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geographers, environmental scientists and policy scientists. The original theme of the conference was described as follows in its brochure and call for papers: How do we govern ‘places’ in a world that is globalising and localising at the same time? At what spatial scales should we address issues such as transport, water management, migration, nature conservation or regional economic development? In many problem areas, the response to such questions has been the development of complex forms of governance, involving multiple actors, scales and forms of co-ordination. One result is that governance structures addressing spatial problems exhibit complex forms of spatiality themselves. In each domain of action, we can observe how the governance of place creates its own specific spatiality of governance, with its own boundaries, scales and network forms. It is this spatiality of governance that forms the core topic of this conference (…) This topic is also related to two contrasting trends in the development of (spatial) governance structures. On the one hand, there is an ongoing concern with the wish, or felt need, to upscale. That is, to develop forms of governance dealing with processes of globalisation and large-scale integration. On the other hand, current debates are increasingly focused on the need to root governance structures within self-recognising places, notably at the local and regional level. An interesting question is what evidence from various policy domains can tell us about these tensions. Locally oriented initiatives often seem to fall back on classic forms of ‘spatial fixes’, expecting that territorial rooting and integration will help to tackle complex problems. This often fails, leading to what we may call a ‘territorial trap’. At the same time ‘global’ orientations often result in ‘free floating’ initiatives, detached from what is at stake within particular places and communities, leading to what we may call a ‘governance gap’. By examining a variety of governance practices, this Conference aims to shed light on the nature and significance of such ‘territorial traps’ and ‘governance gaps’.

The conference welcomed well-known key note speakers in the field of political economy, political geography and political sociology, such as Phil Cerny, Neil Brenner and Bob Jessop, as well as more than 20 paper givers in several thematic workshops. From these key notes and papers, the chapters of this volume have ultimately resulted. With that, the original theme of the conference has been adjusted to the central message of this book, although topics such as the governance of space, the spatiality of governance, territorial traps and governance gaps will be recognised by the reader in the texts below. Yet the theme has been re-articulated towards the so-called ‘meta’ shifts in governmentality, territoriality and governance at the level of nation states and the interstate system as a whole and the consequences of these shifts for particular policy practices, for example migration, urban competition and water management. Further reflexion on this theme encouraged us to posit the thesis of the ‘disoriented state’. Certainly, the state has neither retreated nor been hollowed out in the current ‘glocal’ governance era, but it is not sure either how to respond to all these shifts. Enthusiastic global networking, European federalism, old-fashioned domestic reflexes and radical neo-liberal policies have all been responses by different states and at different times. ‘Disorientation’ seems a nice metaphor to express this condition, all the more so since its connotation is definitely spatial in nature. This first chapter introduces the topics and issues of this volume. In the following sequence, the central themes, general contents and outline of the book will be dealt with below.

1 Shifts in Governmentality, Territoriality and Governance: An Introduction

1.2

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Starting Points: Shifts in Territoriality, Governance and Governmentality

The literature on territorial governance has recently paid considerable attention to the changing role of the state (Gualini 2004; Jessop 2004; Jones 2001). A key theme in this discussion is the actual meaning of state territoriality. Where mainstream political-economic approaches consider state territoriality – and spatially in general – as a kind of given background factor, or even tend to ignore it entirely, critical authors have come to stress its constitutive and, hence, historical nature, thereby emphasising current dynamics in territorial statehood and the emergence of new state spaces (Agnew and Corbridge 1995; Brenner 2001). One might think of relocations of (aspects) of statehood to the European Union and to metropolitan regions, such as the Randstad in the Netherlands. With that, the classical and intimate connection between the nation state, its sovereignty, authority and functions as well as its given territory seems to get loosened. Therefore a shift in territoriality is positioned as a thesis in the literature. This volume aims to build upon this thesis, not only by further theorising it, but also by linking it to specific case studies on various policy practices. Besides the territorial dimension, the political-institutional force field in which the state operates has been undergoing significant change too. On the one hand, pervasive processes of economic globalisation, political integration and subnational regionalisation have had a weakening, or at least a decentring, impact on the state, pushing it into what can be conceived as ‘glocal’ forms of governance (Brenner 2004; Swyngedouw 2003), resulting in a vertical diffusion of politics and power. On the other hand, the rise of new forms of coordination and participation, induced by societal pressures for stronger public engagement, accountability and performance, has changed the status and role of the state in political and policy processes, resulting in a horizontal diffusion of politics and power. In addition, ‘state failure’ has become an often debated theme, both in developing countries as well as in the developed world, given the many failures of state-induced planning and development programs, either socialist or Keynesian in nature, which has further eroded the central position and role of the nation state (Hay et al. 2005; Pierre 2000; Scott 1998). From a primary role as ‘overall manager’ of a politically enclosed space, the state has evolved towards a more entrepreneurial, interactive, catalysing and mobilising agent, which is also reaching out to other spatial levels through novel forms of European and global governance (Held 1995; Held and Mcgrew 1999; Nye and Donahue 2000; Rosenau 2000). These latter processes are often referred to as a shift in governance (Pierre 2000; Van Kersbergen and Van Waarden 2001). The current literature addresses the above changes largely from state-political, political-economic and political-geographic perspectives. Theoretical work has focused on notions of hegemony, regulation, scale and scalar politics and evolving forms of political governance (Brenner 2001; Jessop 2004; Swyngedouw 2003). In doing so, the changing role of the state and its territoriality has generally been interpreted in the context of major structural economic and societal changes, such as globalisation and the transition to Post-Fordism. Due to these changes, some

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theorists have proclaimed a ‘retreat of the state’ or a ‘hollowing out of the state’ in political-economic governance (Albrow 1996; Ohmae 1996; Strange 1996). Others have, in contrast, fiercely opposed such theses and argued that the state is still the main political power container ever, irrespective of globalisation, decentralisation, privatisation processes, and the like (Hirst 2000). Whatever be the case, the consensus today seems that we indeed acknowledge a fundamental transformation of the state in the current globalised network society (Castells 1996) but that we at the same time witness the continuation of the state’s strong roles in these new forms of territoriality and governance. Often, this is attributed to the shaping and mobilisation of an ‘embedded neoliberal consensus’ by state institutions all over the world, resulting in – using Foucault’s terminology – new, powerful forms of state governmentality (Jessop 2004; Swyngedouw 2005; Uitermark 2005). This latter concept refers, according to Foucault (1994), to the ‘art of governing’ in modern times, to an ensemble of power techniques that is used by the state to exercise ‘government’, or in other words, to discipline and police the population for its own ‘well-being’ through institutions, bureaucracies, tactics, procedures, knowledge, technologies, etc. Now that the state has not retreated but adapted its coordination, steering and power strategies and techniques in the globalised network society, we seem to witness a shift in governmentality too, being the third corner stone of this volume.

1.3

Towards our Core Thesis

Associated with governmentality are the state’s key role in balancing internal territorial governance with managing its external economic and political position (Cerny 2001). Territorial strategies form a key part of these balancing acts, including, amongst others, nurturing core economic zones, like the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, building and linking local knowledge infrastructures, like Silicon Valley in the USA, investments in core transport links, like the high-speed railway connections in France, supporting cross-border cooperation projects, such as transboundary national parks, like Sumava/Bayerischen Wald in the Czech-Germany border area, and selective admission policies at national borders, such as in the Schengen area of the EU. Crucially, such investments do not only result in physical and institutional changes, for the (assumed or propagated) benefits of countries and their people, but also in stories about why particular territories, why this specific region or why that city are ‘the places to be’ for entrepreneurs and tourists, as well as for their own inhabitants. Place marketing through the construction of identity forms an essential part of such territorial strategies (Dormans and Lagendijk, Chapter 8). Various authors have pointed at the ambiguous, even schizophrenic nature of the state’s new roles and ambitions (Hay et al. 2005). In Cerny’s view, state formation, nation building and territorial enclosure are not so much the outcome of an intended process. Rather, they are the by-product of failed or tamed imperial ambitions and nationalisms, followed by an intensive copying behaviour between


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emerging states. In line with this position, the shaping of the territorial form of governance has generally been riddled with problems and conflicts. Not only does the embedding of core urban areas and remote regions remain a challenging task in many parts of the world, but many states have also continually been confronted with problems of peripherality, separatist movements and regional autonomy ambitions. This adds up to centripetal forces ‘from above’, such as Europeanisation and globalisation, as already referred to in the above. The modern nation state seems to be squeezed from both sides, from beneath and from above, both feeding and constraining ambitions for a renewed governmentality, pushing the state into a situation of complex schizophrenia. Then, in addition, many ‘substantive’ processes with which states have to deal, many inherited from their position as ‘overall manager’, have shown a tendency to ‘spin out of control’. Traditional national markets, for instance, have increasingly given way to international and global markets. For example, certain parts of the labour and education market have turned ‘global’. Many pressing environmental problems, including issues of water and nature management, are of a cross-border or even global nature (Meijerink and Wiering, Chapter 9; Arnouts and Arts, Chapter 10). To cope with such and similar challenges, Jessop advocates the development of new forms of governance that are intrinsically multi-level, more flexible and more reflexive, what he calls multi-scalar meta-governance’ (Jessop, Chapter 4). Key elements of this approach are an enhanced management of interscalar relations, advanced forms of negotiated decision-making, and the use of more ‘intelligent’ and reflexive forms of policy action and control, involving deand re-regulation, the use of network-based models of governance, and monitoring. According to Jessop (2004), the use of meta-governance means that the state retains a relative monopoly of organised intelligence, combined with an overall monitoring of agreed governance procedures. At the same time, Jessop is not blind to governance failures. The new forms of governance, so often heralded as an alternative to state government and a salvation of state failure, do not offer a panacea. They inherently imply complexity reduction and, hence, are vulnerable to errors. A naïve governance optimism is therefore not justified (Arnouts and Arts, Chapter 10). Moreover, institutional changes are often much more difficult to realise than politicians and policy-makers think (Buitelaar et al. 2007). In conclusion, a critical assessment of any governance theory or steering philosophy is very much needed. The call for new forms of reflexive governance leads to the more operational domain of ‘substantive’ policies. Over the last decades, critical observers have analysed the development of particular policy fields against the background of perceived major structural economic and societal changes, and a changing role of the state. Good examples for this work are shifts in local and regional development policies (Amin and Malmberg 1992; Anderson 2001; Gough 2003; Jones 1997), in EU innovation and cohesion policies (Grande 2001; Hooghe and Marks 2001) and in environmental politics (Hajer 2004; Van Tatenhove et al. 2000; Weale 1992). This work tends to focus on how policy developments are a manifestation of broader changes, how policy problems are interpreted and codified on the basis of hegemonic (post-Fordist, neoliberal) discourses, and how

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this translates into forms of policy measures in line with the prevailing emphasis on deregulation, individualism and economic competitiveness (Peck 2001). Accordingly, changes in policy domains are primarily considered as derivative of political shifts, and hence strongly determined by a changing role of the state. While we do not deny the importance of the way (inter)national politics is shaping policy, we reject a sole one-way focus. As a starting-point for this book, we hypothesise that policy domains display their own (relatively) strong discursive and institutional dynamics. This dynamics, in turn, might have a significant influence on (inter)national political discourses and shifts. An area like EU regional policy, for instance, has, over time, developed its own realms of discursive development, institution building and political mobilisation, which has, in turn, affected broader discourses on spatial economic development and innovation at a European level (Boekema and Lagendijk, Chapter 6). Although, admittedly, the regional policy discourse, through its emphasis on competitiveness and endogenous development, shows obvious marks and embodiments of neoliberal thinking, its own discursive development has clearly made a difference in how EU politics addresses the complex link between economic development, spatial cohesion and the role of the region. Similarly, European discourses on water management are strongly affected by domestic discussions on the history, meaning, management and use of water, for example in the Netherlands, which, in turn, through processes of ‘uploading’, impinge upon the European scale (Meijerink and Wiering, Chapter 9). Our core thesis is thus as follows. We assume that domain-specific developments are not just derivative but co-constitutive of broader discourses and practices bearing on the shifts in governmentality, territoriality and governance. One the one hand, we will analyse how the various policy domains remain the key foci for political actors pursuing agendas of deregulation, marketisation, innovation, etc. Indeed, what is particularly interesting in this context, is how notions of social and political ‘order’ (Pijpers, Chapter 5) articulated and used within political arenas are imposed upon policy domains, eliciting responses that, due to internal dynamics, may highly differ between domains as well as in space. On the other hand, we will argue that policy domains develop their own structures of governance as well, with their own spatiality, their own notions of territoriality, and their own forms of governmentality, although all in relation to broader societal and political developments.

1.4

Outline of the Book

To understand this co-constitution and mutual interaction, our explorations will follow a double track. Various more ‘top down’ perspectives on governance and the role of the state (Part II) are confronted with more ‘bottom-up’ stories of policy development and policy arrangements (Part III). Consequently, we analyse how these global/national discourses and local stories materialise and become visible into institutional regulations, bodies and configurations in the various policy domains, which in turn reproduce and/or modify the discourses and stories.


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To do so, we zoom in on the mundane, material and visible procedures through which spaces and policy practices are literally constructed. Hence, this book attempts at analysing the modes and ways of inscripting the dominant discourses into the policy domains on the one hand as well as analysing the re-inscription of stories and narratives of the policy domains into public governance. Co-constitutively, these inscripting and re-inscripting powers produce the ‘Zeitgeist’ in public governance, as will be summarised in the concluding chapter (Part IV). What we attempt to do, in summary, is localising this ‘zeitgeist’ with respect to public governance. In more detail, the first part of the book focuses on the current ‘grand theories’ on neo-liberalisation, state territoriality and border (re)construction (chapter by Cerny), on rescaled competition state regimes, regional economic discourses and urban governance (chapter by Brenner) and on governance failure and multi-scalar meta-governance (chapter by Jessop). Given its complexity and diversity, disentangling the various interrelations and interactions between specific policy domains and broader political shifts is far from easy. Indeed, within the ambit of our study here, we cannot expect to deliver a comprehensive view on this dynamics. What we aim to do, instead, is to offer a cross-sectional analysis covering a range of policy domains. What we will do in the second part of the book is analyse the local stories and institutional arrangements in various policy domains: migration policy (chapter by Pijpers), innovation policy (chapter by Boekema and Lagendijk), consumption and urban policy (chapter by Spierings), urban governance (chapter by Dormans and Lagendijk), water management (chapter by Meijerink and Wiering) and nature conservation (chapter by Arnouts and Arts). In doing so, we hope to shed more light on the extent to which specific policy domains make a difference, alone or collectively, within the broader picture of societal, political and economic change.

References Agnew, J. and Corbridge, S. (1995). Mastering space. Hegemony, territory and political economy. London: Routledge. Albrow, D. (1996). The global age. State and society beyond modernity. Oxford: Polity. Amin, A. and Malmberg, A. (1992). Competing structural and institutional influences on the geography of production in Europe. Environment and Planning, 24(3), 401–416. Anderson, J. (2001). The rise of regions and regionalism in western Europe. In M. Guibernau (Ed.), Governing European diversity (pp. 35–64). London: Sage. Brenner, N. (2001). The limits to scale? Methodological reflections on scalar structuration. Progress in Human Geography, 25(4), 591–614. Brenner, N. (2004). Urban governance and the production of new state spaces in western Europe, 1960–2000. Review of International Political Economy, 11(3), 447–488. Buitelaar, E., Lagendijk, A. and Jacobs, W. (2007). A theory of institutional change: illustrated by Dutch city-provinces and Dutch land policy. Environment and Planning A, 39(4), 891–908. Castells, M. (1996). The information age: economy, society and culture. Volume 1: the rise of the network society. Oxford: Blackwell. Cerny, P. (2001). From ‘iron triangles’ to ‘golden pentangles’? Globalizing the policy process. Global Governance, 7(4), 397–410. Foucault, M. (1994). “Space, Knowledge, Power”, in Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954– 1984 (pp. 349–364). New York: Penguin.

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Gough, J. (2003). The genesis and tensions of the English regional development agencies – class relations and scale. European Urban and Regional Studies, 10(1), 23–38. Grande, E. (2001). The erosion of state capacity and the European innovation policy dilemma – a comparison of German and EU information technology policies. Research Policy, 30(6), 905–921. Gualini, E. (2004). Multi-level governance and institutional change. The Europeanisation of regional policy in Italy. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hajer, M. A. (2004). Coalitions, practices, and meaning in environmental politics: from acid raid to BSE. In D. Howarth (Ed.), Discourse theory in European politics: identity, policy and governance (pp. 297–315). London: Palgrave/Macmillan. Hay, C., Lister, M. and Marsh, D. (2005). The state: theories and issues. Bastingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan. Held, D. and Mcgrew, A. (1999). Global transformations. Politics, economics and culture. Cambridge: Polity. Held, D. (1995). Democracy and the global order. From the modern state to cosmopolitan governance. Cambridge: Polity. Hirst, P. (2000). Democracy and Governance. In J. Pierre (Ed.), Debating governance. Authority, steering and democracy (pp. 13–36). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hooghe, L. and Marks, G. N. (2001). Multi-level governance and European integration. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Jessop, B. (2004). Multilevel governance and multilevel metagovernance. Changes in the EU as integral moments in the transformation and reorientation of contemporary statehood. In I. Bache and M. Watson (Eds.), Multi-level Governance (pp. 49–74). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, M. (2001). The rise of the regional state in economic governance: ‘partnerships for prosperity’ or new scales of state power? Environment and Planning A, 33(7), 1185–1211. Jones, M. R. (1997). Spatial selectivity of the state? The regulationist enigma and local struggles over economic governance. Environment and Planning A, 29(5), 831–864. Nye, J. S. and Donahue, J. D. (2000). Governance in a globalizing world. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Ohmae, K. (1996). The end of the nation state. The rise of regional economics. Washington, DC: Free Press. Peck, J. (2001). Neoliberalizing states: thin policies/hard outcomes. Progress in Human Geography, 25(3), 445–455. Pierre, J. (2000). Debating governance: authority, steering and democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. Rosenau, J. N. (2000). Change, complexity, and governance in a globalizing space. In J. Pierre (Ed.), Debating governance. Authority, steering and democracy (pp. 167–201). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scott, J. (1998). Seeing like a state. How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press. Strange, S. (1996). The retreat of the state: the diffusion of power in the world economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swyngedouw, E. A. (2003). Globalisation and ‘glocalisation’? Networks, territories and re-scaling. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 17(1), 25–48. Swyngedouw, E. A. (2005). Governance innovation and the citizen: The Janus face of governancebeyond-the-state. Urban Studies, 42, 1991–2006. Uitermark, J. (2005). The genesis and evolution of urban policy: a confrontation of regulationist and governmentality approaches. Political Geography, 24(2), 137–163. Van Kersbergen, K. and van Waarden, F. (2001). Shifts in governance: problems of legitimacy and accountability. Den Haag: NWO. Van Tatenhove, J., Arts, B. and Leroy, P. (2000). Political modernization and the environment. The renewal of environmental policy arrangements. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Weale, A. (1992). The new politics of pollution. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Chapter 2

Neoliberalisation and Place: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Borders Philip G. Cerny

Abstract: The territorial state defined by hard geographical space is not so much withering away as being increasingly enmeshed in a denser and more complex set of virtual political spaces that cut across traditional distinctions between inside and outside, public and private. Boundaries are less and less about distinctions between territorial units and constituencies and more and more about those between economic sectors with different asset structures, cross-cutting socio-cultural networks that span the local and the transnational, state agencies and public– private organisations with competing clienteles enmeshed in ‘transgovernmental networks’, and new groups of social and economic ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. Thus political action today involves a range of attempts to politicise what has previously been seen as a predominantly economic image of globalisation and to reinvent the social dimension of politics through new policy and coalition ‘spaces’ in both the developed and developing worlds.

Keywords: Governmentality, neoliberalism, borders, transgovernmental networks, international political economy

2.1

Introduction: Vertical and Horizontal Borderings

Politics and society have been seen ever since Plato’s Republic as involving two kinds of bordering and structural differentiation. The first, ‘vertical’ dimension is one of place, of situating and rooting political systems and communities in particular physical or territorial locations. These ‘hard’ geographical places provide the material conditions for the development of the face-to-face contacts, knowledge-sharing networks, resource agglomerations and organisational synergies necessary for effective collective action. The second, ‘horizontal’ dimension is one of social stratification or functional differentiation, of evolving and rooting

_________________________ Philip G. Cerny (,) Department of Political Science and the Division of Global Affairs, Rutgers University-Newark, New Jersey, 07102, USA e-mail: [email protected] 13 B. Arts et al. (eds.), The Disoriented State: Shifts in Governmentality, Territoriality and Governance, 13–39. © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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that collective life in a division of labour and function among different human tasks, roles and activities. Although often thought of as ‘soft’ or ‘virtual’ spaces, the latter define the boundaries of human life at least as much as, or more than, hard geographical spaces; they are complex and multidimensional, reflecting the myriad dimensions of politics, economy and society more closely than mere geography. Through most of human history political actors have sought, whether for political, economic and/or socio-cultural reasons, to fuse these two distinct kinds of bordering within the same organisational unit – the politeia or political community, whether that be at village, regional, city-state, nation-state or imperial level. Nevertheless, deep tensions between these two distinct forms of differentiation (and cooperation) have always been a source of political instability, economic inefficiency, organisational disorder and social conflict. The process of globalisation is causing people to reconstruct the relationships between these two sorts of borders as they have developed in the modern world in fundamental ways. Historically, those tensions have increased the larger the physical scale of the territorial unit involved and the more complex the economic and political life that was meant to be contained within that unit. Looser, more diffuse forms of extended political organisation such as traditional empires and feudal systems suffered from both local and external centrifugal forces pulling them apart, whereas more localised, city-state type units could not benefit from the military and economic economies of scale and scope potentially available to larger units. However, over the past 3½ centuries – a developmental trend usually dated to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 – political actors have laboured to bring about that fusion at the level of the nation-state, while relations among nation-states have been seen as a distinct ‘level of analysis’, the international system. The role of nation-states has always been analytically and politically problematic. The modern nation-state has been a political project rather than a fait accompli. It has continually been manipulated, undermined and reshaped politically, economically and culturally – both by formal and informal empires (Subrahmanyam 2006) as well as by what Joel Kotkin calls ‘global tribes’ (Jews, Anglo-Saxons and Scots, Overseas Chinese, etc.: Kotkin 1992) from above, on the one hand, and, of course, by class, ethnic and political divisions from below, on the other. But today’s challenge is not merely one of degree; it is one of kind. The particular form of organisational fusion that has constituted the modern state is increasingly cut across and challenged systematically from both above and below by the uneven process called ‘globalisation’. Out of globalisation has come a new, post-nationstate political project of complex, flexible, multi-level fusion – neoliberalism. This chapter will attempt, through broad historical and analytical brush-strokes, to outline some of the main features of this process of historical change. The next section considers relevant aspects of the history of the modern nation-state and states system, emphasising just how contingent and problematic that development has been – but also marvelling in its relative success. Several key variables will be identified that enabled political actors to generate what the late French social philosopher Michel Foucault called ‘governmentality’ at the level of the nation-state and the states system (Burchell et al. 1991; Cerny 2008a; Foucault 2004a; cf.

2 Neoliberalisation and Place: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Borders

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Herman 2001). The third and fourth sections focus on the tensions that were already immanent in that political construct and the seeds of decay that are leading to its at least partial deconstruction. The fifth and sixth sections deal with the complex question of where and how a range of cross-cutting boundaries might be drawn in a more complex global political economy – i.e. whether a new project of fusion is actually under way and along what lines. In this context, the final section argues that the neoliberalisation of place and spatiality is a key organising principle of the emerging world of multi-level governance and multi-nodal politics that is coming to characterise the 21st century.

2.2

Embedding the Nation-State and the States System

World politics has over the past few centuries been predominantly portrayed as a schizophrenic phenomenon, rooted in the entrenching of social, economic and political structures and processes in a particular dualistic organisation of space – that complex, fungible entity called the nation-state. The concept of ‘nation-state’ is, of course, an uneasy marriage between two equally problematic concepts: the ‘nation’, denoting a supposedly socially coherent, large scale, solidaristic, territorially defined social whole; and the ‘state’, denoting a supposedly organisationally coherent, quasi-hierarchical, relatively efficient system for collective action, collective decisionmaking and policy implementation. The rise of the modern nation-state since the 17th century, and the emergence of ‘international relations’ as a system of relations among sovereign states, have meant that politics, economics and society have been bifurcated between two levels of analysis with distinctly different characteristics – an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’. The ‘inside’ is seen as relatively civilised (or civilisable), characterised by some as ‘hierarchical’ and by others as an arena for the pursuit of collective action and collective values such as liberty and social justice. The ‘outside’, in contrast, is seen as either an ungoverned semi-wilderness characterised as ‘anarchical’ and ruled entirely by power balances and imbalances among states mainly constructed through war (Waltz 1959, 1979) or as a quite different sort of society, a semi-governed but often fragile ‘society of states’ (Buzan 2004). The nature and dynamics of the interaction between (a) domestic political systems seen as ‘arenas of collective action’ and (b) inter-state relations as involving the capacity of states to make ‘credible commitments’ to other states (seen as ‘unit actors’) constitute the central paradox. These two levels are seen as fundamentally dissimilar and even mutually contradictory or schizophrenic, both normatively and empirically – and yet they are inextricably intertwined and interdependent in terms of the structuring of the modern world (Hollis and Smith 1990). This conceptualisation of world politics is only credible because the actors who have created, consolidated and built upon the nation-state have seen – and constructed – the nation-state itself as a crucial, Janus-like structural axis of this dualistic, schizophrenic system. Political actors are thus compelled by the system’s structural imperatives to be concerned at one and the same time with pursuing

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projects of political, social and economic improvement at home – what Michel Foucault has called ‘biopolitics’ (Foucault 2004b) – while also paying attention, first and foremost, to constructing and defending the structural ‘bottom line’ of sovereignty – i.e. securing and defending the homeland from external threats. In this latter task, they must be willing and able to put survival of the nation-state first and to be ruthless in confronting external enemies, even when this apparently contradicts and undermines the domestic political and social goals and values they would otherwise swear by. The underlying pseudo-material foundation of this schizophrenic political balancing act – a balancing act which is, I would argue, a key part of the art of Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ – is territoriality, or what Bob Jessop and Neil Brenner have called the ‘spatio-temporal fix’ (see Cerny 2006a). Without relatively fixed territorial borders – boundaries or ‘containers’ (see Brenner et al. 2003) that simultaneously enclose and order a range of fundamentally disparate human activities – the modern world could not exist. Village and tribal societies were too small to have such formalised and defended boundaries, although the periphery of the village itself was certainly defended. Nevertheless, especially in hunter-gatherer, slash-and-burn and nomadic societies, the space between villages was not the precise property of the particular society, but something between a dangerous no-man’s land and a quasi-heavenly open space belonging to the gods. It could be either good or evil, like Greek gods, but it was not possessed. In feudal, early trading and most pre-capitalist imperial societies, too, boundaries were both fluid and multi-level. They involved not rigid borders but shifting ‘frontiers’ where ‘civilisation’ met ‘barbarians’ and where different castes and noble ranks interacted in a continual confrontation-cum-bargaining process involving different rights and privileges in the same or overlapping territorial spaces (Cerny 1998). Political power in the periphery of empires – the institutional form of choice in the pre-modern world – was uneasily managed through suzerainty rather than sovereignty, and the frontiers of suzerainty were eminently fungible the further one got from the ‘centre’. (A ‘suzerain’ is defined as ‘a sovereign or state having supremacy over another state which possesses its own ruler but cannot act as an independent power’ – Oxford Shorter English Dictionary 1983.) Warlords, merchants, priests and bureaucrats coexisted uneasily, shifting allegiances when it suited them and when they could get away with it, and the latter serving whomever had the most power at the time, like the legendary Vicar of Bray. Political power on land was more like sea power, where despite claims that Rome or Britain might rule the waves, the vast mass of geographical space was without clear ownership or control – continuously contested but ultimately fluid. Of course, the difference with the sea was that land-based political ‘centres’ could be controlled and organised through geographically fixed fortifications and social as well as physical habitats. Eventually the military and political power of these centres enabled them to spread their organisational control across land and even across the sea, as in the various European empires post-1492. These empires were much more than nation-states, including within them multi-level and even internally contradictory forms of governance, but they ultimately served the purposes of the ‘metropole’, the dominant nation-state (or ‘empire-state’) at the


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core (Subrahmanyam 2003, 2006). The collision of these land empires and their seaborne extensions provided the means to carve up the world into ‘nationally’ controlled territories. Eventually, with the decolonisation of the European empires in the 1950s and 1960s, the whole globe was ostensibly carved up into discrete nation-states with supposedly clear, internationally recognised territorial boundaries – the last gasp of nation-state development before the current wave of globalisation (Cerny 1990). Thus the first real ‘globalisation’ in the 17th–19th centuries – not usually described as such, but the starting point for a genuine ‘world politics’ – actually meant attempting to organise the political architecture of the planet as a whole around discrete, sovereign and mutually recognised states with clear boundaries. This project was huge, took several centuries, and established the politics of the ‘modern’ world as we know them. Whether the units concerned were really nation-states at all but instead transnational empire-states is, of course, highly debatable, but the ideology of nationhood at the core of – and justifying – empire was a key element of what the French called their mission civilisatrice and the British concept of the ‘white man’s burden’. Furthermore, the nation-state, as well as being problematic in and of itself, was also always an unfinished project with structural contradictions that have deepened with globalisation. Revolutions, national rebellions, irredentist movements, population transfers, class conflicts, civil wars and the like were key moments that could make or break nation-building projects – as Barrington Moore Jr. pointed out with regard to the American Civil War and other upheavals (Moore 1966). Indeed, the racial divisions, hatreds and distrust that were spawned by American slavery – part of a huge transnational phenomenon of the 18th and 19th centuries – are still the most potent cause of domestic conflict and instability in the United States – and in much of Africa too. Nevertheless, the construction of nation-states also created national identities, foreign policies, and state apparatuses with ever-growing social and economic functions – industrial and welfare states in particular, both authoritarian and democratic. In the process, the construction of nation-states also reconfigured world politics, creating an international (inter-state) relations system that depended on the balance of power to maintain peace and stability yet paradoxically was wracked by widening wars and which by the 1940s gave way to total war. The nuclear confrontation of the Cold War – and its eventual culmination in the superpowers developing what Kaldor (1981) called a ‘baroque arsenal’ – was indicative of the underlying instability of this inter-state system and its potential vulnerability to holocaust, despite the nostalgic view of the Cold War period that has developed since its demise at the end of the 1980s. The key element for understanding the dynamics of this system is to see that the project of establishing single, one-dimensional boundaries for human societies was a deeply flawed project in the first place. It was always crosscut by transnational conflicts, cleavages and connections: whether by political empires, alliances and ideologies; by an increasing economic division of labour as capitalist modernisation progressed; or by cross-border social bonds, patterns of communication, migration and social movements – indeed, by all three in complex feedback circuits. It was therefore eminently (a) vulnerable to being whipsawed between the

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spatial as well as the social and functional requirements of different human activities and (b) prone to continual warfare, oppression and the imperative of hierarchical control to keep it from meltdown. Political processes proliferated both domestically and internationally simply to keep the system in place and working and to keep those boundaries from being holed below the waterline – while also lighting those problematic beacons of liberty and social solidarity that fed and intensified the momentum of its development. The world is a complex, crosscutting, multi-level, multi-nodal construction by its very nature – and the continual modern political imperative of shoehorning human life into nation-state boxes required eternal vigilance and a thick-skinned resistance to that natural complexity. That project could only be taken to its highest level – the ‘high modern’ nationstate of approximately 1850–1950 – because it coincided and fitted together with the other great organisational project of the modern world, the Second Industrial Revolution (Cerny 1995). This structural congruence of Weberian bureaucratic politics and Fordist economics – the coming of modern, large-scale organisations in both politics and economics – squared the circle of territoriality. As Eric Hobsbawm argued in his classic Industry and Empire, the British-based First Industrial Revolution was not just too early but also too fragmented – what we would today call ‘modular’ and ‘incremental’ – to take up the challenge of catchup industrialisation from around the 1870s onwards (Hobsbawm 1968; Gerschenkron 1962). This surge of ‘late industrialisation’ came at a time of huge technological change and the growth of economies of scale in such industries as the railways, steel, chemicals, communications and later automobiles – the source of the term ‘Fordism’. It was only when such large-scale industrial organisation – what Chandler (1990) called the ‘modern industrial enterprise’, something that passed Britain by at the time (Kemp 1969) – came into being that the fusion of Clausewitzian military-bureaucratic statism, economic-industrial statism and welfare statism could take place. It also fostered two World Wars. The 17th century France of Louis XIV’s minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert may have been the original prototype of the modern nation-state (Anderson and Anderson 1968; Spruyt 1994). However, French economic and political development was too sporadic and diverse to develop into a truly organic national industrial welfare state, despite the best efforts of the Napoleon III (Marx 1852/ 1987), until that model was already in its later stages of decay after the Second World War (Cerny 1982). At the turn of the 20th century, Germany and Japan were becoming the leading prototypes of new powerful, industrialising, mainly authoritarian nation-states seeking empires, with Russia (and later the Soviet Union) constituting another authoritarian version. Democracy took a nationalist turn from the French Revolution onwards, while Marx’s call of “Workingmen of all countries, unite!” increasingly fell on deaf ears as Lenin, Stalin and others reshaped Communism into a nationalist and statist form of authoritarian socialism. At the same time, the United States, because of its special conditions – extensive domestic natural resources and available land; a rapidly growing internal market; huge investment flows from abroad (especially Britain); a large middle class and growing working class rooted in the flow of ambitious, hardworking immigrants; a strong educational system and technological infrastructure; and a liberal political


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tradition (Hartz 1955) – was rapidly rising to economic as well as political preeminence. And the welfare state, from Bismarck to Lloyd George to Franklin Roosevelt (not to mention its role in Fascism and Communism as well as in the democracies) created the crucial popular base for this modern state form by incorporating the working classes into both national consciousness and the growth of the national economy. But this apparent institutional hegemony of the nationstate form was to prove shaky as the next wave of globalisation grew in the late 20th century.

2.3

The Seeds of Change

What went wrong with this integrated, territorially bounded nation-state/inter-state model? Why could not political actors – de Gaulle, Mao, Nehru, Nixon/Kissinger, Western social democrats, a string of Japanese leaders, Thatcher, Bush/Cheney/ Rumsfeld – despite their best efforts maintain or resurrect the triumphant nationstate? After all, as noted earlier, it was not until the mid-20th century that the nation-state model covered the entire world and had apparently won out in evolutionary terms over all other political/institutional forms. Was this not the ‘survival of the fittest’ institutionally? Then why was its triumph also the sign of its decay? Why do we today, instead of the ‘strong state’ so imperative for the working of the ‘modern’ Westphalian model, have not only weak states, but states that in some ways apparently make themselves weaker – or, to be precise, state actors act to weaken the state – by reducing their powers, whether through ‘neoliberalism’ at home and/or ‘globalisation’ abroad? And why do apparently militarily dominant states get stuck in foreign quagmires and undermined by transnational social movements and terrorism? In order to find an answer to these questions, it is crucial first to look back at the nation-state itself – as a long-term political project and political construct. Indeed, in some ways it is difficult to understand how such a model could have been so successful over time. As pointed out earlier, the requirements for the kind of boundary-setting necessary for nation-state-building were extremely rigorous. Boundaries had to enclose or ‘contain’ three basic types of variables – political, economic and socio-cultural. In the first place, it required the development of a state apparatus and a political process that could at least to some extent be effectively sovereign: not only an organised bureaucracy, especially a military and police bureaucracy that could impose order (Weber’s ‘monopoly of legitimate violence’) and the rule of law; but also a policy-making process that sought to shape and ostensibly improve the lives of the people enclosed within those boundaries (Foucault’s ‘biopolitics’). Perhaps even more important was the capacity to get different interests, factions, groups, classes, ethnicities, etc., to accept a set of common rules of the game in order to transform their potential for conflict into relatively peaceful competition. The development of political institutions, political systems and, in particular, widely accepted legal systems, required a holistic, centripetal form of organisation that benefited particularly from territoriality.

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Secondly, the boundary-setting process required the establishment of national economies – production and market systems to a significant extent rooted and ‘contained’ within national borders. Indeed, this aspect of the process became highly problematic once trade and capital movements moved society beyond the relative parochialism of pre-capitalist, localised agricultural production. It was not until the late 19th and even the 20th centuries that the political apparatuses and processes of the most developed state-like polities moved beyond being competing empires with fungible frontiers to being economically relatively sovereign nationstates, albeit still with empires to feed their need for raw materials and to absorb their simpler consumer goods. It was only when the economic bureaucracies of large-scale capitalism developed and when industrialisation and economic growth became the main objectives of government policy with the Second Industrial Revolution, that state and industrial bureaucracies partly fused (Lenin and Hilferding’s ‘finance capital’: Lenin 1905) and partly mimicked each other (Galbraith’s ‘new industrial state’: Galbraith 1967/2007) that a range of key economic activities (not all of them, of course) could be enclosed behind national borders and integrated with the political processes discussed above. At the same time, of course, this growth process created sufficient economic surpluses that governments could skim off enough in taxes (Schumpeter 1918/1991) to build the foundations of welfare states, further integrating a range of ‘domestic’ groups and interests into the political process and giving them stakes in the bordered nationstate (Gallarotti 2000). Third, of course, was the challenge of creating socio-cultural enclosure. Popular nationalism was a key bulwark against internationalist liberalism and socialism. The Kulturkampf in 1870s Germany was not merely a Bismarckian invention but an inherent part of a much longer-term process everywhere, although it took quite different forms (Curtius 1932/1962). With regard to religion, the original 1648 Peace of Westphalia was an essential agreement and symbol of the subordination of religious institutions to the authority of the national state, with other aspects of sovereignty an afterthought. However, the establishment of national religions became a running battle in many areas that continued to undermine state holism, with the Irish question, for example, still undermining the otherwise highly centripetal British state. Linguistic integration has been a running battle too. Probably the most important cultural factor in creating a sense of belonging to the nation-state has been war, especially after the advent of the levée en masse – mass conscription following the French Revolution – and industrialised warfare in the 19th century (Clausewitz 1832/1989). Industrialised warfare brought together bureaucratic political organisation, economic organisation and cultural organisation into one cataclysmic experience for ordinary people, fusing them into a fighting force and centralised support system and forging them into seeing themselves as a ‘people’ united in deadly conflict where their other experiences were still much more fragmented (Pursell 1994). Probably the other most important factor in creating cultural enclosure was of course democratisation – although it tended to appear later in most countries. Democracy ostensibly fused political institutions and processes, economic processes (economic growth, capitalist firms, the welfare state) and the sense of belonging or ownership of the nation-state from the bottom


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up, even where these reflected the dynamics of top-down political mobilisation more than spontaneous bottom-up national consciousness (Nettl 1967), and promoted a sense that the national state somehow represented the ‘public interest’ or ‘common good’. However, as will be seen from even a cursory critical glance at the three dimensions of the boundary-setting process, the whole project was riddled with exceptions and structural weaknesses. The domestic political development of various countries was often more centrifugal than centripetal in its underlying dynamics as conflicting groups sought to suppress each other, exclude their opponents and demand their complete defeat rather than to include them, as in the Iraqi notion of sahel (Wong 2007). In many cases, only severe authoritarian measures enabled the enclosure process to move ahead, with democratisation often proving dysfunctional rather than functional – leading not to internal compromise on political processes but to intensified conflict between entrenched and excluded groups – until some proto-states reached a later stage when national integration had already developed by other means or indeed been forced upon them through defeat in war. However, as historians like Kennedy (1987) and Spruyt (1994) have pointed out, what made the political enclosure process work was its reciprocal, mutually interactive character, where states either imitated or were forced to imitate each other to survive. This process of imitation/imposition started in Europe, and Europeans either imposed it directly on the rest of the world through imperial expansion or caused non-Europeans to try to imitate it, the better to resist it, as with Japan in particular. But in Europe, and later in the rest of the world, it was the failure of empire to establish itself within the European continent – despite the best efforts of Charlemagne, Napoleon and Hitler – that led to the sorts of inter-state conflicts that institutionalised exclusive national boundaries. Post-medieval dynastic rulers did not intend to create nation-states. Indeed, many of them sought to re-establish the Holy Roman Empire, a sprawling, feudalistic, multicultural concoction that was nevertheless highly culturally, economically and socially successful in its day. The Ottoman Empire that succeeded it in the East had a somewhat analogous structure but was never as economically successful (Mazower 2004). What created post-medieval, ‘sovereign’ nation-states was the increasing impossibility for absolutist rulers to actually subdue and conquer rival dynasties and subsequent attempts to prevent other dynastic rulers with imperial pretensions from undermining one’s own power (Kennedy 1987). The kind of one-dimensional national boundaries characteristic of the later 19th and 20th centuries were not the result of some inside-out or bottom-up intention of ‘nations’ or ‘peoples’ to create something like modern effective nation-states, although nationalism did become a potent if unstable ideology. They were ultimately, and ironically, the by-product of the clash of failed imperial projects within Europe itself, the top down constructions of absolutist monarchs whose intra-European imperial ambitions were stymied by the state building successes of their continental rivals. The fact was, as Spruyt (1994) has so cogently argued, that certain quasi-empires – Bourbon France being the prototype – succeeded by doing two things at the same time, simultaneously creating strong domestic organisational structures (arenas of collective action)

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while also defending themselves effectively against external predators (allowing them to make credible commitments). Once the French monarchy succeeded, the others had to imitate it to survive and prosper. What might be called ‘keeping up with the Bourbons’ became the bottom line of success. Europe was carved up into states; frontiers were increasingly enclosed; and the three dimensions, political, economic and socio-cultural, became increasingly mutually reinforcing as the modern state grew and, eventually, as empires became counterproductive and rebellious. This of course did not dampen more frontier-like imperial ambitions, ambitions that were driven by the limitations of surplus extraction and economic development within state borders. To retain power, the absolutists required new sources of income and economic growth to buy off rising demands from urban and rural sectors of the population. Although generating occasional failed attempts to resurrect the European imperial project (Napoleon and Hitler, among others), the most successful nation-building projects within Europe were precisely those where state actors effectively diverted the imperial project outwards to the rest of the world. Unable to expand domestic production and markets beyond relatively the relatively narrow geographical limits of their own increasingly circumscribed portions of Europe, the imperative of continually keeping up with the Bourbons (and the Tudors, Stuarts, Hanoverians, Hohenzollerns, etc.) required the conquest of overseas empires to generate economic development. So at one fundamental level, nation-states sought to transcend the limits of their enclosed boundaries by going elsewhere, paradoxically spreading the combined nation-state/empire model to the rest of the world. The first wave of globalisation was not about states as such, but about the increasing power and impact of ‘empire-states’ (Subrahmanyam 2003). As the European-generated nation-state system first consolidated within Europe and then spread by imposition and/or imitation to the rest of the world, the conditions for the later decay and undermining of that system began to grow too. While nation-state borders were increasingly being defined, embedded and reinforced politically, economically and socially within Europe, so also were the trends that would ultimately challenge that emerging and consolidating bordersetting process. The territorial stalemate in geographical Europe was only deepened by continual warfare, leading to two World Wars and to the ultimate stalemate that was the Cold War, rooted in nuclear deterrence. To this was added the ever denser and more profound internationalisation of the once European nation-state system, not only through European empires but eventually by Europe’s position at the interface of the competing American and Soviet empires (Deporte 1979) – the legacy of an ideologisation of politics into capitalist democracy versus state socialism/Soviet Communism which, like nationalism, also started in modern Europe. This confrontation of capitalism and communism replaced the political and social values maintained through enclosed nation-state borders with those of universal values – transnational images of freedom, equality and social justice – undermining the unstable, inward looking nation-state synergy that had begun with the English, American and French Revolutions. At the same time, the entropy characteristic of many of the new postcolonial nation-states of the Third World


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demonstrated that imitation does not bring success if the political, economic and social preconditions of border-setting are not in place. What would later be called globalisation increasingly eroded ‘modern’ nation-state boundaries from both above and below, outside-in and inside-out, along all three of the dimensions identified earlier. The development of the nation-state and the states system was therefore a schizophrenic affair, its very success also implanted with seeds of decay. On the one hand, the convergence of political, economic and social boundaries led to an embeddedness of territoriality at the nation-state level, a sense that the locality of human activities had shifted to a higher scale and that village, local region or citystate institutions and the sense of belonging that had characterised family and kinship based societies – Gemeinschaft (Tönnies 1887/2003) – had effectively been transferred upwards to the level of the nation-state. However, at the same time, the development of a capitalist world economy, the ideologisation of politics around universal values, and concepts like social ‘modernisation’, ‘individualisation’, ‘functional differentiation’ and the like – not to mention extended notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘social justice’ – created a wider framework of understanding within which the nation-state/inter-state system would increasingly have to be legitimated and evaluated. This would prove to be beyond the capacity of nationstates to achieve by themselves. Nation-states could no longer credibly aim to achieve the values that had been set for them in the modern world.

2.4

Deconstructing the Nation-State Paradigm

The boundary setting process, always contingent – inherently a social project/ construct set up and moved forward by political, economic, ideological and institutional entrepreneurs – therefore contained the seeds of its own decay, as with all Kuhnian paradigms (Kuhn 1962). Nevertheless, that process of decay has not thus far smashed the nation-state as such. Rather, it has enmeshed the nationstate and the states system in cross-cutting webs of governance and of transnationally embedded social, political and economic processes, creating complex non-territorial – functional – boundaries. Deconstruction and reconstruction constitute a dialectical politics of reinventing space in a globalising world – a politics that has come to be characterised and shaped by neoliberalisation. The deconstruction of the modern nation-state/states system has proceeded rapidly along all three of the dimensions discussed earlier. With regard to political borders, a number of key features can be identified, three of which are particularly significant for the purposes of this chapter. In the first place, a trial-and-error process of developing international institutions and regimes has been in place since the late 19th century in a range of issue areas and policy domains, starting with communications (the International Telegraph Union), taking a major if problematic leap with collective security (the League of Nations), and, after the Second World War, being extended to a whole gamut of issues. By the end of the 20th century a new term, ‘global governance’, was being applied to such regimes

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taken together. Although for the most part such institutions remained ‘intergovernmental’, i.e. subordinated to negotiations among their member governments, they increasingly achieved a certain autonomous legitimacy and authority given that governments found it more and more difficult to act independently and were in turn subjected to the imperative of seeking cooperative outcomes (Keohane 1984). At the same time, issues of public policy increasingly came to reflect a range of often asymmetric ‘complex interdependencies’ across borders (Keohane and Nye 1977). Macroeconomic policy, partially shielded from international pressures during the postwar period of ‘embedded liberalism’ and the expansion of the welfare state, became progressively subjected to ‘embedded financial orthodoxy’ (Cerny 1994) and priority was given to anti-inflationary policy, deregulation and privatisation. Trade policy was of course a particular focus, linking the politics of domestic interest groups, elite and mass, with the process of reducing trade barriers. The collapse of the Bretton Woods exchange rate regime in the early 1970s accelerated the internationalisation of financial markets and a process of regulatory arbitrage and competition among governments to retain and attract investment, leading further to discussions of the concept of an ‘international financial architecture’ (Cerny 2005a). The crisis of welfare states in the 1970s inaugurated a painful process of restructuring social policy around market and business-type organisational principles (Clayton and Pontusson 1998; Evans and Cerny 2003). Direct outcome orientated state intervention in the economy was progressively replaced by process orientated, ‘arms’-length’ regulatory policies, public–private partnerships and the pro-market approach of the ‘competition state’ (Cerny 2000a). ‘Transgovernmental networks’ among policymakers and bureaucrats expanded, cutting across state hierarchies, and processes of policy transfer deepened (Keohane and Nye 1977; Slaughter 2004; Evans 2005). Of course, although these trends began within and across the more developed states, they also spread rapidly to ‘transition’ and developing economies through the demonstration effect and through pressure both from G7 states and from international economic institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The politics of mass politics and interest group politics has also been transformed. Business interests are increasingly dominated not simply by the interests of multinational corporations but also by those of small and medium sized enterprises whose upstream and downstream operations require foreign markets, external sources not only of raw materials but also of component parts and basic consumer items, overseas labour resources and footloose sources of investment capital. People are more and more aware of the constraints of international economic conditions on interest rates, consumer prices, changing labour markets and the like, leading to new patterns of demands and voting. Indeed, it is argued that in the broad spectrum of political inputs, producer groups, long dominant through business pressure groups, trade unions and the like, are being overtaken by more diffuse, broad-based consumer interests. Consumers may, indeed, be the main drivers of economic globalisation as well as of political liberalisation (Cerny 2006a). Political debate and party competition are increasingly dominated by the issue of how to deal with ‘global realities’.


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Up to the end of the 20th century, it was possible to see domestic political systems as increasingly becoming a terrain of conflict, competition and coalitionbuilding between groups, factions and parties that favoured more globalisation and neoliberalisation on the one hand, and those opposed – those more in favour of the traditional ‘modern’ politics of protection and redistribution – on the other. Today, however, that competition has come to be characterised by an ‘embedded neoliberal consensus’ where protection and redistribution are relegated to the periphery and mainstream discourse focuses on the need to ‘capture the benefits of globalisation’ for purposes of rebuilding and rearticulating coalitions on the one hand and on the promise to move towards a more ‘social neoliberalism’ or ‘globalisation with a human face’ on the other (Cerny 2008b). Traditional boundaries between left and right, so deeply embedded in the nation-state and the states system, have not so much been left behind as given a new salience and urgency as political actors seek to adapt popular, electoral and pressure group politics to new interdependencies. Along the second dimension discussed earlier, the economic dimension, the blurring and enmeshing of boundaries is even more obvious. There is no need here to expand at length about the roles of international financial markets, trade growth and interdependence, international production chains, multinational corporations and the like in deconstructing the economic borders so painfully erected in the process of nation-state building in the 19th and 20th centuries. National markets and economic sovereignty are increasingly a fiction. Economic effectiveness, whether on the part of the private sector or of governments, today means the capacity to manipulate international economic conditions in order to improve the profitability, productive and competitiveness of domestic firms and economic activities vis-à-vis foreign and/or transnational competitors and to obtain benefits from market interdependencies for domestic consumers. Where economies of agglomeration (or location) do occur, as they do in a number of key sectors, those locational advantages have less and less to do with nation-states as places/spaces per se (big factories, immediate access to raw material supplies, nationally integrated consumer markets, etc.). In contrast, they increasingly involve craft industry synergies, knowledge clusters and the like – spaces and places that, like ‘world cities’ and regions like Silicon Valley, possess locational advantages that derive not from where they are physically located within a national territory but how they are plugged into the international economy. Post-Fordism and the flexibilisation of a range of industrial processes, along with marketing and the rapid expansion of service sectors, imply synergies of ‘glocalisation’ – the interaction of processes of globalisation and localisation – across geographically disconnected spaces, not exclusive embeddedness within discrete, contiguous national territories. Recent French and German calls for more ‘national champion’ industries are more likely to lead to stagnation and inefficiency than to greater market share and national economic strength, as the recent experience of Japan demonstrates – although the prevalence of such policy discourse in the 2007 French presidential election campaign and the post-election pronouncements of President Nicolas Sarkozy indicate that the political clout of such ideas is still powerful amongst certain voters and pressure groups. Nevertheless, such an approach is a ‘dead man walking’. The shift of public policy

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and political discourse noted above from outcome orientated state intervention to process orientated arms’-length regulation and the promotion of competitiveness (along with compensating losers) represents a further entrenching of the embedded neoliberal consensus. Along the third dimension, the socio-cultural, the embeddedness of the nationstate and the states system is perhaps more robust. We are all brought up in a world of identity and belonging that privileges national-level social bonds, perceptions and discourses. People in developed nation-states do indeed see themselves as primordially American, English (but perhaps not British …), French, Japanese, etc., although tribalism, class and ethnic conflict and the like have stymied nation-state consolidation in much of the developing world. Nevertheless, other bonds, perceptions and discourses are increasingly overshadowing the national in ways that are growing in salience and intensity. This social transformation is even reflected in the rapid disillusionment with foreign military adventures that has been characteristic of recent decades. As with the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’, the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan and the American war in Iraq, empires and potential hegemons are being undermined just as much by opposition at home as by military defeat in the field – the ‘body bag syndrome’. Furthermore, immigrants, diasporas and other mobile individuals and groups are no longer cut off from their networks of origin. The internet creates virtual spaces for transnationally connected people to maintain their identities in ways that represent neither the national space of their origins (where they may well have been minorities) nor that of their destination country as such, but complex spaces where both are inextricably intertwined, as exemplified by remittances, which constitute an ever increasing form of development funding. The nation-state is too confining and counterproductive a source for identity formation, although no clear alternative has yet emerged. In this context, transnational multiculturalism clearly transforms, and occasionally undermines, the exclusive, painfully constructed and often incomplete or counterproductive national cultural boundaries so important to identity in the modern nation-state. Liberal states may adapt relatively better by resorting to more complex strategies of reconciliation, whereas non-liberal states and state actors may engage in attempts at crude assimilation or ethnic cleansing. However, in both cases national identities are increasingly cut across and transnationalised in the process among both categories. Although we may not be in a fully blown ‘postmodern’ era of fragmentation, disorientation and virtual spaces, nevertheless the deconstruction of ‘modern’ national and ideological cultural narratives is leading to myriad attempts at identity reconstruction that privilege at both global and local levels the kind of ‘cross-cutting’ and ‘overlapping’ notions of group membership that were so crucial to mid-20th century pluralist thinking at the domestic level (Cerny 2006b). Socio-cultural boundaries are no longer between fixed physical territories but cut right across individual identity too, like a more complex version of those who were once derided as ‘hyphenated Americans’. Multiple hyphenation of identities along different virtual borders (locational, religious, gendered, occupational, orientation to ‘liberal’ or ‘monistic’ politics, etc.) is the norm today.


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But it is not merely multiculturalism that is at issue here, whether within particular ‘national’ spaces or within groups and individuals, but a partial simultaneous transnationalisation and localisation – glocalisation – of culture itself. At the local end of the spectrum, some circumscribed but highly conscious communities like the Zapatistas of Chiapas in Mexico do not merely make claims on behalf of their own unique political, economic and social autonomy (although many ethnic groups and tribes do). Rather they increasingly claim a universal right for such communities to demand autonomy from what they see as the oppressive centralisation of state-building elites. At the global end of the spectrum, increasingly geographically dispersed groups – Kotkin’s ‘global tribes’ (1992), not to mention major religious groupings and transnational ‘epistemic communities’ of experts and professionals – play a crucial role across the world in spreading transnational and global knowledge and organisational forms. Of course, much of the present day analysis of the phenomenon of terrorism, along with the virtual elimination of inter-state wars and the ubiquity of below-the-border, cross-border and civil wars, takes both its novelty and its significance from examining the organisational flexibility that derives from terrorism’s transnational, non-state character. The ‘new security dilemma’ (Cerny 1998, 2000b, 2005b) is rooted in the failure of the states system to cope with these non-state security challenges.

2.5

Deconstruction and Reconstruction, Fusion and Coalition-Building: Towards Neoliberalism

Political, economic and socio-cultural borders are therefore in a growing state of flux and deconstruction, while de facto and experimental reconstruction projects increasingly dominate institution-building and institutional reform, political discourse and competition, public and economic policymaking, and social and cultural politics and policy. These reconstruction projects are profoundly shaped by cross-border functional differentiation and by the transnationalisation of a range of political processes and groups. In this context of transition and change, world politics (i.e., domestic, international, transnational, translocal, etc., taken together) in the 21st century are increasingly dominated by a range of policy and institutional strategies rooted in neoliberalism – a flexible and fungible paradigm that nevertheless involves and makes sense of the uneasy and uneven interaction of convergence and diversity of a globalising world. The notion of neoliberalism per se is a complex one and there is not space to expand on it much here. Neoliberal politics today is increasingly concerned with attempts to cope with and to capture the benefits of globalisation for the purposes of coalition-building and public policymaking. I argue elsewhere that there has emerged over the past few years an ‘embedded neoliberal consensus’ around a range of distinct component parts that can be arranged and rearranged in various policy configurations (Cerny 2008b). In this embedded neoliberal consensus, several dimensions of neoliberalism are generally acknowledged to constitute the new ‘bottom line’ of politics on both left and right.

P.G. Cerny

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These dimensions include: • Growing, if grudging, acceptance of a more open world economy with regard to trade, financial flows, the operation of multinational corporations, etc. • Reform of national finances and, in particular, the a priori control of inflation • A shift from outcome orientated, direct state intervention to arms’-length regulation and the promotion of international competitiveness, marketisation, financialisation and the like through regulatory reform • Privatisation, public–private partnerships, and the marketisation and contractualisation of ostensibly appropriate firms and sectors and • ‘Reinventing government/governance’ both domestically and in terms of socalled ‘global governance’, i.e. ‘flexibilising’ and marketising the state itself as well as the international system In this context, the territorial state defined by physical/geographical space is not so much withering away as being increasingly enmeshed in webs of economic interdependencies, social connections and political power – the development of a denser and more complex set of virtual political spaces that cut across traditional distinctions between inside and outside, public and private. In particular, the politics of economic liberalisation, competitiveness, regulation and governance require a far-reaching shake-up in terms of institutional boundaries, hierarchies and decisionmaking processes. Boundaries, especially economic boundaries, are less and less about distinctions between territorial units and constituencies and more and more about those between: • Economic sectors with different asset structures (see below) • Cross-cutting socio-cultural networks and interest groups that span the local and the transnational • State agencies (and public–private organisations) with competing clienteles and crosscutting, cross-border – transgovernmental – connections and • New groups of social and economic ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ Thus the core of the 21st century political process is focused on attempts by political actors to reconstruct political processes along these new functional boundaries within the framework of embedded neoliberalism. This reconstruction process includes reorganising political institutions, realigning political forces and coalitions, reforming policy processes, and restructuring ideological space in order to reflect the changing sets of constraints and opportunities of a globalising world. In particular, what is emerging is a range of attempts to politicise – to (re)claim for the theoretical as well as the practical realm of politics (and Political Science) – what has been seen up to now as an ineluctably economic image of globalisation. This involves a reinvention of the social dimension of politics through new policy and coalition ‘spaces’ populated by a wide range of new, and old, political actors in both the developed and developing worlds. Although technological and economic structures can alter the parameters and payoff matrix of the playing field of politics and public policy, in the last analysis outcomes of the interaction of politics and economics in a transnational political context are, I argue, primarily


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determined by political action and not merely by economic-structural variables. This is, of course, the stuff of the relatively new transdisciplinary field of International Political Economy.

2.6

Constructing New Boundaries

These new political processes are differentiated more by sector and issue area than by physical, geographical and territorial space. They therefore involve the construction of new boundaries between issue areas – a ‘horizontal’ restructuring of institutions and policy domains. While at first glance these new boundaries seem like ‘virtual’ boundaries when compared to territorial borders, they are just as ‘real’ for the actors bounded by them. In many cases, they are even more ‘real’, impacting on people’s core interests in fundamental, behaviour-determining ways: through the distribution of economic opportunities, costs and benefits; through the construction and reconstruction of social bonds, ideologies, cultures and identities; and through changing patterns of politicking, policymaking and pressure group activity – indeed in the most crucial aspects of everyday life. Three kinds of bordering dimensions, taken together, differentiate these issue areas and distinguish the forms of governance most likely to develop in each – what are referred to in this book as ‘policy domains’. The first is a mainly economic-structural dimension, developed primarily in the field of institutional economics – that of asset structure (Williamson 1975, 1985). Williamson’s key hypothesis is that where a particular economic activity or process is characterised by assets that cannot easily be disconnected or disentangled from other assets – in other words where they are only ‘fit’ for a specific purpose and lose value if redeployed for other purposes (‘specific assets’) and where it is difficult or impossible to determine their prices through a standard, market-based price setting mechanism – then they are usually more effectively organised and governed through hierarchical structures and processes, i.e. decisionmaking or governance processes that determine the uses for those assets by authoritative pronouncement or fiat (‘long-term contracting’). However, where an activity or process is characterised by assets that can be separated out and/or divided up without losing value, especially where there are other uses to which they can be easily redeployed – where they can be bought and sold freely and where there is an efficient price setting mechanism at work (‘non-specific assets’) – then they are likely to be more efficiently organised through markets (‘recurrent contracting’). It should be noted that spatiality is a key element in this equation, as physical location and ‘economies of agglomeration’ are among the most significant specific assets. In purely economic terms, this means that firms with extensive specific assets are more efficiently organised through quasi-monopolistic, hierarchical governance structures. In public policy terms, this means on the one hand that where a particular industry or activity is characterised predominantly by specific assets – for example, a large integrated ‘Fordist’ production process with non-divisible technological assets like large integrated factories and production lines, low

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marginal costs and high economies of scale based on economies of agglomeration (traditional cold rolled steel production, for example) – then direct government intervention, whether through public ownership, direct control, subsidisation and/or traditional ‘hands-on’ forms of regulation, is more likely to lead to relatively efficient outcomes than privatisation or marketisation, which would lead to private monopolistic or opportunistic behaviour. On the other hand, where an industry or activity is characterised predominantly by non-specific assets – say a flexible, post-Fordist steel mini-mill or an internet firm – then not only will it be more efficiently organised through private markets, but also in public policy terms, arms’-length regulation concerned with setting general, process orientated rules for market transactions, ensuring price transparency and preventing fraud in an otherwise privately organised market setting will be more efficient. This distinction becomes crucial when placed in the context of globalisation. If globalisation does involve increasing flexibilisation and post-Fordist production and distribution processes, and if a larger (global) market means that more assets can be traded on liquid transnational markets, this implies in economic terms that the specific asset dominated Second Industrial Revolution model of domestically based monopolies is increasingly likely to be replaced by a marketised, non-specific asset dominated Third Industrial Revolution model of industrial organisation and governance more generally. Public policy in turn is likely to shift its general orientation away from outcome orientated, direct intervention of the traditional type associated with the Industrial Welfare State towards process orientated regulation and reregulation. However, it also implies that public policy itself needs to become more flexibilised and marketised, moving away from what has been called a ‘one size fits all’ hierarchical bureaucratic from of intervention towards pro-market regulation, privatisation, contractualisation and the like (Osborne and Gaebler 1992), if it is to be effective in such a transnational setting. Neoliberalism, therefore, perhaps most egregiously involves a shift from outcome orientated intervention to arms’-length regulation. In this sense, globalisation, flexibilisation and neoliberalism actually open up more spaces for transnational political actors to conflict, compete, cooperate and build coalitions. The traditional interventionist state becomes not only a ‘regulatory state’ (Moran 2002) but also a ‘competition state’ seeking to maximise returns from globalisation. In turn, rather than being restricted to the nation-state ‘container’, the reconfigured boundaries among economic sectors and issue areas in a globalising world open up a wide range of complex spaces – some new, some reconfigured ‘old’ spaces as political behaviour adjusts to the more complex global playing field – for transnationally linked political actors, especially interest groups that define those interests in their global context. The second dimension therefore concerns the configuration of interests characteristic of the industry or activity concerned. For example, where people involved in a particular industry are concentrated in a discrete geographical area and where the impact of competition (whether domestic or foreign) affects the whole interest group and not merely some sub-groups, then there will be direct pressure whether through lobbying or electoral behaviour for governments to promote or protect that industry through traditional outcome orientated means.


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However, where those people affected by the fate of an industry are geographically dispersed – indeed, this refers mainly to producer groups, as consumer groups are usually geographically dispersed anyhow – then political actors will have a wider set of policy options to deploy (Frieden and Rogowski 1996). What appear to be the geographical boundaries of the firm or sector become transformed into boundaries between concentrated losers from market competition, on the one hand, and both dispersed losers and winners on the other. Political coalitions between the two latter categories can often resist demands for protection and bailouts from dispersed losers, although this is highly variable. In the latter case, neoliberal political coalitions may be constructed on a quasi-cross-class basis. On the one hand, patterns of cross-border sectional or economic-utilitarian politics of specific agricultural sectors will be very different from those of a rapidly changing steel industry, varied high tech sectors, textiles and other consumer goods, or the commercial aircraft industry, based mainly on their asset structures (specific or non-specific) and on their cross-border geographical integration and interdependence. On the other hand, new forms of value politics on a range of globalising non-economic issue areas like AIDS prevention, poverty reduction, criminal law and the like, have been growing, where transnational pressure groups, advocacy coalitions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) seek new ways to compete and cooperate in the quest for political influence, economic clout and social relevance (Lipschutz and Rowe 2005). The third dimension concerns the relative sensitivity and vulnerability of the industry or activity to specifically international or transnational economic trends, in particular export potential, import vulnerability, position in an international production chain, exposure to internationally mobile capital and the like. There are essentially two aspects of this dimension – the mobility of physical capital and cross-border price sensitivity. When an industry or activity is insulated from such cross-border structures and processes, then lobbying pressure and ‘iron triangles’ in that sector are likely to favour traditional redistributive/protective policy measures. However, firms and sectors that are highly integrated or linked into such structures and processes, especially where there is a ‘world market price’ for a good or asset that determines local prices, then lobbying pressure from firms in that sector and from industry organisations is likely to be organised through ‘golden (or flexible) pentangles’ rather than traditional ‘iron triangles’ – coalitions that include transnational actors from outside the national ‘container’ and which operate at transnational level to influence ‘global governance’ processes – and to push for neoliberal outcomes (Cerny 2001). In the light of these three dimensions, I would argue first of all for the broad hypothesis that the growing marketisation of assets – i.e., structural shift caused by flexibilisation and the globalisation of markets – when added to increasing dispersion of losers and the growing sensitivity of sectors to international markets, means that public policy in general and the political coalitions that support it are likely to shift over time in a more and more neoliberal direction, thus challenging the traditional boundaries of the nation state. However, what is perhaps more important in portraying processes of change is to argue that certain key sectors, sectors that constitute structurally significant nodes of economic activity and

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thereby impact upon a wide range of other sectors, ‘go neoliberal’ first, creating a domino effect on others even where they are characterised by more specific assets, geographical concentration of interests and low sensitivity/vulnerability. Finance is a particularly crucial sector, linking together and acting as a ‘crossroads’ issue area and policy domain where most of the others meet. As I have argued elsewhere, regulatory changes and regulatory arbitrage in the financial sector are key triggers for wider neoliberalisation, especially as they have direct knock-on effects on the availability and cost of capital as well as the regulation of accounting standards, consumer protection, fraud prevention, corporate governance and the like (Cerny 2005a; Wolf 2007). Indeed, neoliberal, pro-market reregulation started with financial regulatory reform and that continues to be the ‘bottom line’ focus of public policy innovation. This is the case not only in developed countries but indeed in developing countries too, where it forms the core both of the socalled Washington Consensus, and in a more complex manifestation, of the postWashington Consensus with its increasingly regulatory focus as well (Guha 2007). These dimensions might potentially be applied to assess the likelihood and shape of neoliberal policy innovation and coalition-building across a range of contrasting, differently structured issue areas and policy domains, and the actors that populate them, including • • • • • • • • • •

Financial systems and regulation International monetary policy and exchange rate management Macroeconomic – fiscal and monetary – policy Microeconomic and strategic industrial policy Public and social services Trade policy Corporate governance Labour markets Welfare states and The most informal, diffuse and unorganised – but nonetheless increasingly marketised – issue area of all, consumption

This reconstruction of space implies that there exists a wide range of options for policy innovation in different issue areas and policy domains even within the parameters of an ‘embedded neoliberal consensus’. In some cases, traditional policies of protection and redistribution will be appropriate too. However, it is ultimately the mix of policy measures that is at the core of the new transnational political process and is the most important part of neoliberal coalition-building. And it is furthermore crucial to examine the process of interaction among these and other issue areas and policy domains. As pointed out earlier, the politics of certain key issue areas like financial regulation can play a distinct catalytic role in reshaping global economics and politics as a whole, imposing their particular market and policy structures on other sectors and issue areas too. Finally, neoliberalisation, I would argue, is overdetermined. The actors and institutions that make up the galaxy of multi-level governance and multi-nodal politics in the 21st century can all be seen as pushing more or less in the same


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direction, towards more transnationally interconnected political processes as well as market structures. In one sense this means that there is a holistic, ‘fusion’ aspect of the neoliberalisation process that transcends national borders. But it also means that the constellation of variables all play distinct, if complementary, roles in neoliberalisation. In the first place, as argued earlier in this chapter, political actors – politicians and bureaucrats, policy and institutional entrepreneurs, interest groups and even ordinary voters – have in various ways been key actors in this process. For example, state actors today, in pursuing traditional goals of economic growth and development, tend to prioritise using public policy to promote and enhance the international competitiveness of firms and sectors that also play significant roles in the domestic economy – the ‘competition state’ (Cerny 1997, 2000a). In this role they increasingly to construct broad yet neoliberal coalitions such as New Labour in the United Kingdom (Cerny and Evans 2004), the current Christian Democrat-Social Democrat coalition in Germany under Angela Merkel, or even, despite nationalist electoral rhetoric, the quasi-neoliberal majority of Sarkozy in France. At the same time, international economic institutions and other structures and processes of ‘global governance’ base their own legitimacy and authority on neoliberal coalition-building, whether in shoring up their own financial support from donor states, developing their own institutional autonomy, and/or attempting to ensure compliance through quasi-voluntary conditionality among client developing states. The Washington Consensus and, indeed, its post-Washington Consensus successor can be characterised as coalition-building projects to legitimise as well as to control the development process in order to ensure that it proceeds in a broadly neoliberal direction (Cammack 2004). Obviously the role of the United States in international negotiations, although at times erratic, has also been one of the main factors pushing for trade and financial liberalisation over the past 70 years. Indeed, it has been argued that the U.S. benefits from a ‘globalisation premium’ in that the internal organisation of the American economy and policy have given not just the American state but also American non-state actors key roles to play through various kinds of domestic and transgovernmental coalitions in spearheading liberalisation processes. But the key to the link between globalisation and neoliberalism lies not in the hard or soft power of United States as such, nor in the development of ‘global governance’. The key is the political flexibility, fungibility and transnationality of neoliberalism itself, including the spread and legitimation of ‘neoliberalisation discourse’ at both elite and mass levels. In today’s globalising world, neoliberalism reaches the parts – the spaces and places – other discourses and political projects no longer reach.

2.7

Many Roads to Neoliberalism? Reinventing the Social in a More Open World

The spread of neoliberalism is therefore essentially a political project or construct that is multidimensional and that can be shaped to the needs and values of a large number of increasingly powerful, transnationally connected political, economic

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and social actors (Cerny 2000c). Once the basic dimensions of neoliberalism listed above have been accepted in principle in the embedded neoliberal consensus, a huge range of policy options opens up. Globalisation and neoliberalism are not merely about constraints on the nation-state and the states system. Rather they involve the integration and fusion of the state into a wider, multi-level and multinodal system. As Moran (2002), for example, argues, the concept of arms’-length regulation does not result in a ‘retreat of the state’, as in Strange’s (1996) famous phrase. Paradoxically it involves a reorientation of the state towards much more intrusive systems of regulation across a wider range of issue areas and policy domains than ever before, while still supporting the underlying overall trend towards transnationalisation and marketisation. Similarly, neoliberal reform of the welfare state has not rolled back welfare as we have known it. Rather it has restructured and marketised welfare in far more complex ways than ever before (Evans and Cerny 2003). Neoliberal reform reaches from issues such as disease prevention to labour market ‘deregulation’ and welfare reform, to urban and regional governance and the institutions and processes of the central state, and up to the uneven and still developing processes of superregional (e.g., European Union) and global governance. And it isn’t just governance that is being reformed and restructured; the key to understanding change is that it is neoliberal governance that is shaping the institutions, processes and spaces of our multilevel, multi-nodal world. In this process, neoliberalism, like other ideological paradigms and political projects before it, cannot be kept to a rigid formula of Thatcherite neoliberalism ‘red in tooth and claw’. Neoliberalism needs coalition partners, allies and supporters in the mass of the population if it is to form a consensus and provide the discourse and strategic parameters of global politics. In other words, neoliberalism, despite its bottom line, needs to be flexible. The first line of flexibility is the flexibilisation of the state, the move towards the competition state. The second line of flexibility is the development of glocalised multi-level governance. The third line of flexibility is the re-articulation of coalitions of interest groups and, yes, voters. And the fourth line of flexibility is the capacity to construct coalitions transnationally around distinct issue areas. For neoliberal political projects – in a world where liberal democracy is highly institutionalised in developed countries and becoming more institutionalised in many previously authoritarian states (‘two steps forward, one step back’) – will go nowhere without coalitions, alliances and mass support (or at least mass acquiescence). This process of coalition-building requires more than just marketisation and economic efficiency. It requires a sense of virtual and functional as well as territorial space and stake-holding for people who are not the natural allies of neoliberalism. It requires social payoffs and side payments. And it stretches across and links together the complex new functional, transnational issue area-based boundaries of a globalising world. Indeed, the most striking thing about neoliberalism today is the extent to which the fusion project increasingly includes a reinvention of the social. On a rearranged political spectrum actors are asking the following kinds of questions:


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• Deregulation or re-regulation? To what extent can arms’-length regulation of particular industries as well as public and social services replace traditional forms of public ownership, control, production, delivery and even redistribution? • ‘Concerted’ or ‘liberal’ market economies? What scope is there for governments not so much to engage in neo-corporatist or quango-like bargaining processes at the domestic level, but rather support crosscutting innovative activities that promote synergies among sectors without involving outcome orientated intervention (e.g., the ‘new endogenous growth theory’, on the one hand, and the growth of hedge funds and private equity on the other)? • Multi-level governance or ‘neomedievalism’ – does fragmentation of authority strengthen or weaken governance capacity (Cerny 1998)? How can ideas like ‘subsidiarity’ be used – as it originally was meant to be used in the 19th century (e.g., Social Catholicism) – actually to increase the effectiveness of social and public services? How can the transfer of decision-making powers from national (democratic?) institutions both upwards and downwards to local/regional governance and to global governance be organised to maximise social goals? • Relative efficiency of private versus public provision in differently structured issue areas – management? cost containment? capital raising? delivery? Efficiency or effectiveness? quality? (electricity, health, railroads, etc.)? To what extent do particular sectors with high levels of specific assets – like railways (consider the effects of rail privatisation in the United Kingdom) – need to be more hierarchically controlled through the public sector, or, alternatively, to what extent can feasible ‘internal markets’ be devised (as with electricity distribution) without leading to re-monopolisation? • What are the new principles for the restructuring of social safety nets: streamlining or erosion; rights or obligations; universal or targeted; temporary compensation or structural adjustment; poverty reduction and/or hunger? In other words, are there new ways that welfare goals can be pursued other than through the traditional government hierarchies? • The transformation of global governance norms ‘post-Washington Consensus’? To what extent can international economic institutions (e.g., the World Bank) and other regimes become vehicles for effective social policy, even if it is subordinated to the ‘bottom line’ of neoliberalisation? • To what extent can transnational pressure groups and non-governmental organisations also become vehicles for the socialisation of the global? Is the antiglobalisation movement really anti-globalisation – or is it becoming a force for transforming globalisation, the so-called ‘alternative globalisation’ movement? Can the World Social Forum and its offshoots have any real impact in creating ‘globalisation with a human face’?

2.8

Conclusion: The New Neoliberal Spatiality

Globalisation and neoliberalism involve a fundamental restructuring of the spaces and places of world politics, economics and society. The imposition of the nationstate as the core building block of the modern world system was always a

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problematic political project, distorting wider crosscutting developmental trends. And even at the apparent height of the nation-state’s success as a structural/ institutional phenomenon during the phase of decolonisation after the Second World War, both old and new processes and structures were undermining existing territorial bases for politics and governance, while simultaneously strengthening the kind of crosscutting functional connections that could only be mobilised by a crosscutting set of policy ideas like neoliberalism. In turn, neoliberalism is reshaping and reconstructing the spaces and places of world politics in new and innovative ways. Its fungibility and flexibility means it can be adopted and adapted by a wide range of transnationalising political actors to suit both their sectional and their value goals. Neoliberalism is becoming many things to many people. Globalisation therefore is continually being shaped by a set of complex political processes and strategies that blend old and new in unexpected ways, especially with the emergence of a new political spectrum of plural ‘neoliberalisms’. Some of the purveyors of the latter are more concerned with marketisation pure and simple (e.g., Thatcherism); but others are seeking a kind of reorganised ‘social neoliberalism’ at various levels of governance – while preserving the globalising and competition-promoting characteristics of the original neoliberal project. These emerging ‘varieties of neoliberalism’ will vary not so much by ‘vertical’ national models as by a complex ‘horizontal’ and functional-differential reconfiguration of issue areas, shaped by the distinct crosscutting constraints and opportunities characteristic of each. In other words, the oversimplified view of modern space and territoriality as requiring exclusive, multidimensional territorial borders needs to be replaced with a paradigm of complex linkages across space and time, and the reordering of governance and politics along multi-level and multi-nodal lines – including, but going beyond, the notion of ‘networks’ (Castells 2004) to a more complex range of institutional forms, economic structures, social processes and patterns of politicking. A key dimension of this process is to bring actors back in. This neoliberal world requires not domination and rule but what Preston has called ‘orchestration’ and ‘political choreography’ (Preston 2000) – a ratcheting upwards of Foucault’s art of governmentality to complex translocal, transnational, international and global levels. Political and institutional entrepreneurs must learn new skills, especially the skills of operating on several asymmetric playing fields at one and the same time – playing fields that can be within, cutting across, above and below old-fashioned national borders. This will require an increasing focus on new institutional strategies and institutional entrepreneurs as well as new policy strategies and policy entrepreneurs. World politics is not still moving down a path dependent upon and circumscribed by existing nation-state borders. Rather it is approaching a new branching point or tipping point – one which will deconstruct those boundaries, reconstruct them, and construct new ones connecting issue areas and policy domains across borders and creating a new social neoliberal spatiality for the 21st century.


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References Anderson, E. N. and Anderson, P. R. (1968). Political institutions and social change in continental Europe in the nineteenth century. Berkeley, CA/Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Brenner, N., Jessop, B., Jones, M. and MacLeod, G. (Eds.) (2003). State/space: a reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (Eds.) (1991). The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Buzan, B. (2004). From international to world society? English school theory and the social structure of globalisation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cammack, P. (2004). What the World Bank means by poverty reduction, and why it matters. New Political Economy, 9(2), 189–212. Castells, M. (Ed.) (2004). The network society: a cross-cultural perspective. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Cerny, P. G. (1982). Gaullism, advanced capitalism and the fifth republic. In D. S. Bell (Ed.), Contemporary French political parties (pp. 24–51). London/New York: Croom Helm/ St. Martin’s Press. Cerny, P. G. (1990). The changing architecture of politics: structure, agency, and the future of the state. London/Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Cerny, P. G. (1994). The infrastructure of the infrastructure? Toward ‘embedded financial orthodoxy’ in the international political economy. In B. Gills and R. Palan (Eds.), Transcending the state-global divide: the neostructuralist agenda in international relations (pp. 223–249). Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner. Cerny, P. G. (1995). Globalization and the changing logic of collective action. International Organization, 49(4), 595–625. Cerny, P. G. (1997). Paradoxes of the competition state: the dynamics of political globalization. Government and Opposition, 32(2), 251–274. Cerny, P. G. (1998). Neomedievalism, civil war and the new security dilemma: globalisation as durable disorder. Civil Wars, 1(1), 36–64. Cerny, P. G. (2000a). Globalization and the restructuring of the political arena: paradoxes of the competition state. In R. Germain (Ed.), Globalization and its critics (pp. 117–138). London: Macmillan. Cerny, P. G. (2000b). The new security dilemma: divisibility, defection and disorder in the global era. Review of International Studies, 26(4), 623–646. Cerny, P. G. (2000c). Political agency in a globalizing world: toward a structurational approach. European Journal of International Relations, 6(4), 435–464. Cerny, P. G. (2001). From ‘iron triangles’ to ‘golden pentangles’? Globalizing the policy process. Global Governance, 7(4), 397–410. Cerny, P. G. (2005a). Power, markets and accountability: the development of multi-level governance in international finance. In A. Baker, A. Hudson and R. Woodward (Eds.), Governing financial globalization (pp. 24–48). London: Routledge. Cerny, P. G. (2005b). Terrorism and the new security dilemma. Naval War College Review, 58(1), 11–33. Cerny, P. G. (2006a). Restructuring the state in a globalizing world: capital accumulation, tangled hierarchies and the search for a new spatio-temporal fix. Review of International Political Economy, 13(4), 679–695. Cerny, P. G. (2006b). Plurality, pluralism, and power: elements of pluralist analysis in an age of globalization. In R. Eisfeld (Ed.), Pluralism: developments in the theory and practice of democracy (pp. 81–111). Opladen: Barbara Budrich for the International Political Science Association.

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Lenin, V. I. (1905). Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Lipschutz, R. D. and Rowe, J. K. (2005). Globalization, governmentality and global politics: regulation for the rest of us? London: Routledge. Marx, K. (1852/1987). The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Mazower, M. (2004). Salonica, city of ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950. New York: Knopf. Moore, B. Jr. (1966). Social origins of dictatorship and democracy: lord and peasant in the making of the modern world. Boston, MA: Beacon. Moran, M. (2002). Understanding the regulatory state. British Journal of Political Science, 32(2), 391–413. Nettl, J. P. (1967). Political mobilization: sociological analysis of method and concepts. London: Faber & Faber. Osborne, D. and Gaebler, T. (1992). Reinventing government: how the entrepreneurial spirit is transforming the public sector, from schoolhouse to statehouse, City Hall to the Pentagon. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Preston, P. W. (2000). Understanding modern Japan: a political economy of development, culture and global power. London: Sage. Pursell, C. W. (1994). White Heat: people and technology. Berkeley, CA/Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Schumpeter, J. A. (1918/1991). The crisis of the tax state. In R. Swedberg (Ed.), Joseph A. Schumpeter: the economics and sociology of capitalism (pp. 99–140). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Slaughter, A.-M. (2004). A new world order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Spruyt, H. (1994). The sovereign state and its competitors: an analysis of systems change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Strange, S. (1996). The retreat of the state: the diffusion of power in the world economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Subrahmanyam, G. (2003). Bringing the Empire back in: patterns of growth in the British imperial state, 1890–1960, unpublished Ph.D. thesis. London: London School of Economics and Political Science. Subrahmanyam, G. (2006). Ruling continuities: colonial rule, social forces and path dependence in British India and Africa. Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 44(1), 84–117. Tönnies, F. (1887/2003). Community and society [Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft]. Mineola, NY: Dover. Waltz, K. N. (1959). Man, the state and war: theoretical analysis. New York: Columbia University Press. Waltz, K. N. (1979). Theory of international politics. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. Williamson, O. E. (1975). Markets and hierarchies. New York: Free Press. Williamson, O. E. (1985). The economic institutions of capitalism. New York: Free Press. Wolf, M. (2007). The new capitalism: how unfettered finance is fast reshaping the global economy. Financial Times, 19 June, 13. Wong, E. (2007). Iraq’s curse: a thirst for final, crushing victory. New York Times, 3 June.

Chapter 3

Urban Governance and the Production of New * State Spaces in Western Europe, 1960–2000 Neil Brenner

Abstract: While many analyses of globalization and the changing state have focused on the construction of new supranational political regimes, such as the European Union, this chapter argues that the subnational scales of major urban regions represent strategic institutional arenas in which far-reaching transformations of state spatiality are unfolding. I suggest, in particular, that processes of urban governance represent a key mechanism for the rescaling of (western European) state space. First, managerial-welfarist forms of urban governance are shown to have played a major role in the consolidation and eventual crisis of nationalized state spaces between the 1950s and the mid-1970s. Second, the entrepreneurial, growth-oriented approaches to urban governance that have proliferated during the post-1970s period are interpreted as significant expressions and catalysts of a fundamental rescaling of inherited national state spaces. In contrast to the project of national territorial equalization associated with Keynesian welfare national states, contemporary “urban locational policies” promote the formation of Rescaled Competition State Regimes (RCSRs) in which (a) significant aspects of economic regulation are devolved to subnational institutional levels; and (b) major socioeconomic assets are reconcentrated within the most globally competitive urban regions and industrial districts. Keywords: Urban governance, state space, state rescaling, urban locational policies, urban entrepreneurialism

_________________________ * This chapter summarizes some of the main arguments in my book, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Brenner 2004). This chapter also builds upon an article published in 2004 in the Review of International Political Economy, 11(3), 447–488. The author and editors are grateful to the publishers of this journal for permission to include this material here.

Neil Brenner (,) Professor of Sociology and Metropolitan Studies, New York University, Puck Building, 295 Lafayette Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10012, USA e-mail: [email protected] 41 B. Arts et al. (eds.), The Disoriented State: Shifts in Governmentality, Territoriality and Governance, 41–77. © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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3.1

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Introduction: State Theory Beyond the Territorial Trap?

State theorists have long emphasised the territorial dimensions of political power in the modern world. Within the Westphalian geopolitical order, states are said to be composed of self-enclosed, contiguous and mutually exclusive territorial spaces that separate an “inside” (a realm of political order and citizenship) from an “outside” (a realm of inter-state violence and anarchy) (Walker 1993). For the most part, however, even while being acknowledged as an underlying feature of modern geopolitical organisation, territoriality has been treated within mainstream social science as a relatively fixed, unproblematic and inconsequential property of statehood. Just as a fish is unlikely to discover water, most postwar social scientists viewed national state territories as pregiven natural environments for sociopolitical life (Taylor 1994, p. 157). In Agnew’s (1994) memorable phrase, a “territorial trap” has underpinned mainstream approaches to political-economic analysis insofar as they have conceived state territoriality as a static background structure for regulatory processes rather than as one of their constitutive dimensions. During the last decade, however, in conjunction with debates on globalisation and the crystallisation of a post-Westphalian world order, these entrenched methodological assumptions have been unsettled. As many analysts have noted, the global political-economic transformations of the post-1970s period have reconfigured the Westphalian formation of state territoriality (a) by decentering the national scale of state regulatory activity and (b) by undermining the internal coherence of national economies and national civil societies (Agnew and Corbridge 1994). Under these conditions, scholars throughout the social sciences have become more directly attuned to the dynamically changing geographies of statehood within contemporary global capitalism. To date, this ongoing re-conceptualisation of state space has been oriented towards at least two overarching issues. • State reterritorialisation. The organisation, meaning and functions of state territorial borders are being re-examined. Boundaries are no longer understood as exclusively national demarcators of state sovereignty. Instead, they are being analyzed as multidimensional semiotic and political-economic practices through which state power is articulated and contested at a range of geographical scales and in a range of institutional sites (Newman and Paasi 1998; Perkmann and Sum 2002). • State rescaling. In contrast to the earlier fetishising of the national scale of political power, scholars have begun to analyze a range of rescaling processes through which new, multiscalar hierarchies of state institutional organisation, political authority and regulatory conflict are being generated. Accordingly, the scalar organisation of state power is no longer understood as a pregiven background structure, but is increasingly viewed as a constitutive, contested, and therefore potentially malleable dimension of political-economic processes (Brenner 2004; Jessop 2002; Boyer and Hollingsworth 1997).

3 Urban Governance and the Production of New State Spaces in Western Europe

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At the present time, our understanding of the new state spaces that are currently emerging remains relatively rudimentary. Nonetheless, recent research has provided some fruitful methodological starting points through which the geographies of state power under early 21st century capitalism may be explored more systematically (for recent overviews, see Brenner et al. 2003a; Peck 2001, 2003). Against the background of these debates, this chapter develops an interpretation of state spatial restructuring in contemporary western Europe, where the consolidation of the European Union (EU) has underpinned far-reaching transformations of political space. While supranational state restructuring processes – such as the institutionalisation of Europe-wide political institutions and regulatory arrangements – are undeniably of profound significance, the following analysis focuses primarily upon national and subnational transformations of state spatiality. The phenomenon of state downscaling – the devolution or decentralisation of regulatory tasks to subnational administrative tiers, coupled with a restructuring of subnational institutional configurations – is arguably as fundamental to the contemporary remaking of European political space as the processes of state upscaling that have been examined at length by radical critics of neoliberal globalisation (Gill 1998). I shall propose, in particular, that the remaking of urban governance represents a key mechanism through which processes of state rescaling are unfolding throughout the EU. The reorientation of urban governance from the managerial, welfarist mode of the Fordist-Keynesian period to an entrepreneurial, competitiveness oriented framework during the post-1970s period has been analyzed extensively during the last decade by critical urbanists (Harvey 1989; Hall and Hubbard 1998). With a few notable exceptions, however, the interconnections between this restructuring of urban governance and broader, nationally configured transformations of state spatiality have not been systematically examined.1 In this chapter, I argue that urban governance provides an illuminating analytical window through which to explore contemporary rescalings of state spatiality and their ramifications for the political and economic geographies of western Europe. From this perspective, the entrepreneurial approaches to urban governance that have proliferated during the post-1970s period can be interpreted as significant expressions and catalysts of “urban locational policies” oriented towards a fundamental rescaling of national state space.2 In contrast to the project of national territorial equalisation associated with Keynesian welfare national states, urban locational policies promote the formation of what I have elsewhere (Brenner

_________________________ 1 Important forays into such an investigation include Jessop (1998), Jones (2000), MacLeod (2000), MacLeod and Goodwin (1999), Goodwin and Painter (1996). 2 The notion of “locational policy” is derived from the German notion of Standortpolitik, which has gained currency in post-unification Germany through ongoing political debates on Standort Deutschland (Germany as an investment location). However, the term locational policy used in this chapter in a more specific, social-scientific sense, to be specified below. For more detailed discussions of the ideology and practice of locational policy in the contemporary German context, see Brenner (2000b), Krätke (1999).

N. Brenner

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2004) termed Rescaled Competition State Regimes (RCSRs) in which (a) significant aspects of economic regulation are devolved to subnational institutional levels and (b) major socioeconomic assets are reconcentrated within the most globally competitive urban regions and industrial districts. This ongoing rescaling of statehood has not only eroded the nationalised formations of urban governance and the redistributive forms of state spatial policy that prevailed during the Fordist-Keynesian period. It has also entailed the consolidation of new interscalar rule-regimes (Peck 2002) that have enhanced fiscal constraints and competitive pressures upon European cities and regions, impelling their regulatory institutions to privilege the goals of local economic development and territorial competitiveness over traditional welfarist, redistributive priorities. In my view, contemporary rescalings of inherited formations of national state space pose major theoretical and methodological challenges to social scientists concerned to grasp the transformed form of statehood in the current era. At the same time, insofar as they enhance intra-national territorial disparities, such rescalings also pose daunting political challenges to progressive forces concerned to forge a European institutional order based upon substantive priorities such as democracy, equality and social justice rather than purely economic imperatives such as competitiveness, growth and efficiency. The analysis is organised as follows. The next section develops a processual conceptualisation of state spatiality and underscores the path-dependent character of state spatial restructuring. I then examine the role of urban governance in the production and transformation of state spatial configurations under modern capitalism. Subsequent sections explore the path-dependent evolution of state spatiality in relation to changing approaches to urban governance in western European cities since the early 1960s. Four distinct phases of urban restructuring and state spatial reorganisation are examined – Spatial Keynesianism (early 1960s–early 1970s); Fordism in Crisis (early 1970s–early 1980s); State Rescaling Strategies, Round I (1980s); and State Rescaling Strategies, Round II (1990s). A concluding section summarises the implications of newly emergent RCSRs for the political geographies of western European capitalism in the early 21st century.

3.2

The State Spatial Process

I conceptualise state spatiality as a dynamic, transformative process rather than as a fixed thing, container or platform. Since the seminal contributions of radical urbanists such as Lefebvre (1974), Harvey (1973) and Castells (1977), processual approaches to the production of social spatiality have been mobilised extensively in the field of critical urban and regional studies (Soja 2000). Surprisingly, however, the methodological insights of critical urban researchers and other geographically inclined social scientists have had only a minimal impact upon mainstream discussions of contemporary state restructuring (Brenner 1999). I would argue, nonetheless, that the conceptualisations of socio-spatial dynamics that were developed in these pioneering analyses of urban spatiality may be


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fruitfully mobilised to investigate the production and transformation of state spatiality as well. In what sense is state spatiality a process? Much like the term “city,” the term “state” ostensibly connotes a fixed, thing-like entity – in this case, a closed institutional system that occupies a bordered geographical territory, as represented in the colours allotted to each country on a world map. Yet, as theorists of dialectics have argued (Ollmann 1993; Harvey 1996), a reification of processes of change is entrenched within the conceptual grammar of mainstream social science, leading scholars to presume the existence of stasis, fixity and continuity even in the midst of the most blatant evidence of flux, fluidity and transformation. Along with other foundational sociological concepts such as economy, society and culture, the notions of the city and the state are arguably among the paradigmatic exemplars of this pervasive reification of social dynamics in the modern social sciences. Over two decades ago, radical urban scholars began to break out of these intellectual constraints by introducing more dialectical, processual concepts for describing the contemporary city – for instance, urbanisation or, in Harvey’s (1978) more precise terminology, the urban process. Against traditional approaches to urban locational analysis, which conceived space in Euclidian-Cartesian terms, as a flat surface upon which economic activity is extended, Harvey introduced a more dynamic, historically specific view. For Harvey, the urban must be understood simultaneously as a presupposition, a medium and an outcome of the conflictual, continually changing social relations of capitalism. From this perspective, any historical configuration of urban spatiality represents a sedimented crystallisation of earlier patterns of social interaction and an evolving grid of possibilities for, and constraints upon, future social relations. A directly analogous methodological strategy can, I propose, be developed to conceptualise the state spatial process under capitalism. Much like the geography of the city, the geography of state spatiality must be viewed as a presupposition, an arena and an outcome of continually changing social relations. It is not a thing, a container or a platform, but a socially produced, conflictual and dynamically evolving matrix of socio-spatial interaction. The spaces of state power are not simply “filled,” as if they were pregiven territorial containers. Instead, state spatiality is actively produced and transformed through sociopolitical struggles in diverse institutional sites and at a range of geographical scales. The traditional Westphalian image of states as being located within static, self-contained territorial arenas must thus be replaced by a dialectical, processual analysis of how historically specific configurations of state space are produced and incessantly reworked through sociopolitical struggles. It is not possible, in the present context, to elaborate a systematic theorisation of the state spatial process under modern capitalism (but see Brenner et al. 2003a; Brenner 2004). Instead, I shall outline schematically some of its key elements. To this end, it is useful to distinguish two closely intertwined dimensions of state

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spatiality – state space in the narrow sense; and state space in the integral sense (Brenner et al. 2003b, p. 6).3 First, state space in the narrow sense refers to the state’s distinctive form of spatial organisation as a discrete, territorially centralised, self-contained and internally differentiated institutional apparatus. This aspect of state space refers, above all, to the changing configuration of state territoriality and to the evolving role of borders, boundaries and frontiers in the modern interstate system. Even following the historical-geographical watershed associated with the Treaty of Westphalia, in which the principle of state territorial sovereignty was institutionalised, borders have never been static, pregiven features of state power. Rather, their functions within the modern geopolitical and geo-economic system have been modified, sometimes dramatically, through sociopolitical struggles (Agnew and Corbridge 1995). Since the long 16th century, the state’s role as a territorial power-container has hinged upon an expanding repertoire of regulatory activities – including (a) war-making and military defence; (b) the containment and enhancement of national economic wealth; (c) the promotion of nationalised politico-cultural identities; (d) the institutionalisation of democratic forms of political legitimation; and (e) the provision of social welfare (Taylor 1994). Thus, from the war machines of early modern Europe and the wealth containers of the mercantile era to the national developmentalist states of the second industrial revolution and the national welfare states of the Fordist-Keynesian period, states have deployed a variety of regulatory strategies, and have attempted to contain diverse types of social activities, through the principle of territoriality. While the state has “acted like a vortex sucking in social relations to mould them through its territoriality” (Taylor 1994, p. 152) throughout much of the history of modern capitalism, this territorialisation of political life has never been accomplished “once and for all.” It must be understood, instead, as a precarious, contentious outcome of historically specific state projects (Jessop 1990). Therefore, the role of territorial borders as modalities of spatial enclosure is best viewed not as a fixed, permanent condition but rather as a medium and result of historically specific political strategies intended to mould the geographies of social interaction both within and between states. To the extent that states have ever appeared to have captured politics through their territoriality, this situation has never represented more than a temporary moment of stabilisation within ongoing struggles over their geographical architectures, regulatory operations and political orientations. In addition to its territorial aspects, state space in the narrow sense also encompasses the changing geographies of state territorial organisation and administrative differentiation within national jurisdictional boundaries. With the possible exception of small-scale city-states, most state institutions exhibit a significant degree of internal territorial differentiation insofar as they are subdivided among multiple

_________________________ 3 For purposes of this discussion, I bracket the “representational” aspects of state space which encompass the diverse ways in which state space is represented, interpreted and imagined by hegemonic political-economic actors and in everyday life (for further discussion and references, see Brenner et al. [2003b]).


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administrative tiers that are allotted specific regulatory tasks (Painter and Goodwin 1995). This internal territorial differentiation of the modern state entails the establishment of (a) intergovernmental hierarchies, and (b) place- and regionspecific institutional forms in which particular types of spaces – such as urban areas, metropolitan economies, rural peripheries, border zones and so forth – are encompassed under distinctive administrative arrangements. The resultant scalar divisions of state regulation may provide a relatively stabilised framework for state regulatory activities during a given period. However, such scalar arrangements may also be unsettled as opposing sociopolitical forces struggle to reorganise the institutional structure, borders and/or functions of subnational administrative units (Cox 1990). Second, state space in the integral sense refers to the territory-, place- and scale-specific ways in which state institutions are mobilised to regulate social relations and to influence their locational geographies. This aspect of state space refers, most centrally, to the changing geographies of state intervention into socioeconomic processes within a given territorial jurisdiction. Each historical formation of state spatiality is associated with policy frameworks that target specific jurisdictions, places and scales as focal points for state regulation, public investments and/or financial aid (Jones 1999). Through this process of spatial targeting, states attempt to enhance territorially specific locational assets, to accelerate the circulation of capital, to reproduce the labour force, to address place-specific socioeconomic problems and/or to maintain territorial cohesion. Thus early industrial capitalist states channelled massive public investments into large-scale territorial infrastructures such as railroads, roads, ports and canals. These strategies were eventually complemented by state-led initiatives to regulate urban living and working conditions and to establish large-scale public works facilities (such as hospitals, schools, energy grids, mass transportation networks, waste management systems) within major metropolitan areas. Following the second industrial revolution, the large-scale bureaucratic states of western Europe came to promote the entire national territory as an integrated geographical framework for balanced economic growth. In this context, relatively non-industrialised rural and peripheral regions were targeted in redistributive state projects that aimed to spread urban industrial growth more evenly throughout the national territory. Most recently, following the global economic crisis of the 1970s, urban and regional economies across western Europe have become strategically important spatial targets for a range of socioeconomic, industrial and infrastructural policies that aim to enhance national competitive advantages. In addition to these explicit spatial policies, state space in the integral sense also encompasses the indirect socio-spatial effects that flow from apparently aspatial policies. There are two distinct aspects of this phenomenon (Jones 1999, pp. 237–238). On the one hand, apparently aspatial policies may impact particular locations, or particular social groups within those locations, in distinctive ways. For instance, military spending in the USA is not only a form of industrial policy that subsidises particular sectors, such as aerospace and shipbuilding, but also a form of spatial policy that generates significant employment growth in major industrial regions such as Los Angeles and Seattle. Analogously, US government

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sponsored mortgage subsidies and homeowner tax breaks tend to privilege suburban areas rather than cities, in which rental housing predominates. On the other hand, many national state policies generate uneven spatial effects due to their interaction with locationally specific conditions. For example, national workfare policies may facilitate enhanced employment in buoyant local labour markets while eliciting the opposite effect within depressed local economies (Jones 1999, p. 238). Analogously, centrally delegated programs to create new forms of regional economic governance may generate radically divergent policy agendas in different locations due to the impacts of place-specific industrial conditions, institutional legacies and political alliances (MacKinnon 2001). The uneven development of state regulation therefore represents an important dimension of the state’s evolving socio-spatial configuration (Duncan and Goodwin 1989). The narrow and integral aspects of state space – including territoriality, territorial differentiation, spatial targeting and indirect spatial effects – interact to produce historically specific formations of state spatiality. Such state spatial configurations represent outcomes of earlier regulatory practices that in turn provide temporarily stabilised institutional-geographical arenas in and through which new regulatory arrangements may be forged. Thus conceived, the spatiality of state power is at once a presupposition, a medium and a product of the conflictual interplay between inherited geographical parcelisations of state space and emergent political strategies intended to instrumentalise, restructure or transform the latter. In the resultant dialectic, established state spatial structures are modified as diverse social forces struggle to rework the geographies of statehood towards particular ends. Such struggles endow state institutions and policies with historically specific forms of spatial selectivity in which distinct spaces, locations and scales within each national territory are privileged whereas others are neglected, marginalised or excluded (Jones 1999). The restructuring of state spatiality rarely entails the complete dissolution of entrenched political geographies. For, as Lipietz (1992) indicates, human beings do not create new socio-spatial structures under conditions of their own choosing. Rather, all social actors are circumscribed in their projects to remake territory, space and place by geographical configurations inherited from the past, which serve simultaneously as constraints upon future developments and as openings for the latter. For this reason, the restructuring of state spatiality is uneven, discontinuous and unpredictable: it is best conceived as a layering process in which newly projected spatial arrangements are superimposed upon entrenched morphologies of state spatial organisation. The organisation of state space at any historical conjuncture represents a multilayered territorial mosaic in which political geographies established at different moments of historical time are tightly interwoven. Just as the spatial imprint of earlier rounds of capitalist industrialisation is evident within the built environment of most contemporary cities, the architecture of state spatiality likewise bears the unmistakable territorial markings of earlier regulatory projects, institutional compromises and political struggles.


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THE STATE SPATIAL PROCESS . The spaces of state power are not simply “filled,” as if they were pregiven territorial containers Instead, state spatiality is actively produced and transformed through sociopolitical struggles at various geographical scales. The geography of statehood must therefore be viewed as a presupposition, arena and outcome of evolving social relations. STATE SPACE IN THE NARROW SENSE

STATE SPACE IN THE INTEGRAL SENSE

This refers to the state’s distinctive form of spatial organization as a discrete, territorially centralized, self-contained and internally differentiated institutional apparatus.

This refers to the territory-, place- and scalespecific ways in which state institutions are mobilized to regulate social relations and to influence their locational geographies.

Territoriality/bordering: the changing configuration of state territoriality and the evolving role of borders, boundaries and frontiers in the world interstate system.

Spatial targeting: the mobilization of state policies, public investments and/or financial subsidies to modify or transform social conditions within specific jurisdictions and at particular scales.

Internal territorial differentiation: the subdivision of state territories among various jurisdictional units. This occurs through the establishment of (a) intergovernmental hierarchies and (b) place- and region-specific institutional forms.

Indirect spatial effects: the unintended, unevenly distributed socio-spatial consequences that flow from apparently aspatial state policies. This occurs through (a) the role of hidden geographical “selectivities” within ostensibly generic state policies and (b) the interaction of national state policies with locationally specific subnational conditions.

STATE SPATIAL SELECTIVITY Each historical formation of state institutions and policies tends to privilege particular spaces, locations and scales within a given national territory and to neglect, marginalize or exclude others (Jones 1999). Such selectivities emerge and are continually modified as inherited formations of state spatial organization interact with emergent political strategies oriented towards the creation of new geographies of state policy and political-economic life (Brenner 2004). STATE SPATIAL RESTRUCTURING Inherited patterns of state spatiality are rarely, if ever, completely destroyed through processes of state spatial restructuring. Rather, during periods of systemic change, newly projected spatial arrangements are superimposed upon entrenched patterns, morphologies and scales of state spatial organization. Consequently: The organization of state space at any historical conjuncture represents a multilayered territorial mosaic in which political geographies established at different moments of historical time are densely intermeshed. The evolution of state spatiality is strongly path-dependent insofar as many of its characteristics may be reproduced, reinforced and even locked in during the process of historical evolution. Despite this path dependency, systemic transformations of state spatiality may occur when inherited forms of spatial selectivity are modified significantly enough to create qualitatively new geographies of state territorial organization and state regulatory activity.

Fig. 3.1 The State Spatial Process: Key Elements

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This conceptualisation implies, further, that all dimensions of the state’s spatial configuration do not change simultaneously or in organisationally isomorphic patterns. Here, too, an analogy to urban spatiality is illuminating. Much like the early settlement morphologies of industrial cities, whose underlying contours have been preserved through successive rounds of economic growth and socio-spatial restructuring (Abu-Lughod 1999), certain ossified layers of state spatial regulation may remain entrenched, even as surrounding layers are reworked. Indeed, as with many other sociohistorical processes, such as technological change and institutional restructuring (North 1990; Pierson 2000), the evolution of state spatiality is strongly path-dependent insofar as many of its characteristics may be reproduced, reinforced and locked in through the process of historical development. Nonetheless, systemic transformations of state spatiality may occur when its selectivities are modified significantly enough to create qualitatively new geographies of state territorial organisation and/or state regulatory activity. The main elements of this conceptualisation of the state spatial process are summarised in Figure 3.1. My aim, in the remainder of this chapter, is to explore the role of one particular regulatory arena, urban governance, in the making and remaking of state spatiality. More generally, this analysis is intended to illustrate how a processual conceptualisation of state spatiality may be deployed as a tool for the critical investigation of contemporary transformations of statehood.

3.3

Urban Governance as an Arena and Medium of State Spatial Restructuring

The concept of urban governance refers to the broad constellation of social, political and economic forces that mould the process of urban development within modern capitalism, whether during phases of relative stability and “structured coherence” (Harvey 1989) or during periods of accelerated restructuring, crisis and turmoil. Urban governance occurs at a range of geographical scales insofar as the process of capitalist urbanisation encompasses individual cities, metropolitan regions, crossborder agglomerations, national city-systems and supranational urban hierarchies (Lefebvre 2003 [1970]). The state’s impact upon urban development processes has expanded considerably since the consolidation of organised capitalism during the early 20th century (Läpple 1978; Lipietz 1977; Lojkine 1978). It was during this era, and particularly after the Second World War, that western European states began to invest extensively in the construction of large-scale infrastructures for capital circulation and social reproduction; to engage in sophisticated, long-term forms of urban, regional and spatial planning; and to intervene directly in the regulation of capital’s uneven geographical development (Dunford 1988; Hudson 2001). Once the state began to operate as the “overall manager of the production and reproduction of social infrastructures” (Harvey 1982, p. 404) within each national territory, the politics of national economic development were interlinked ever more closely with a variety of state strategies to influence urban growth and expansion. Consequently, urban governance must be viewed as a key institutional


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arena in which states attempt to influence the geographies of capital accumulation and everyday social reproduction within their territories. Just as crucially, as the urbanisation process unfolds, the institutional-territorial matrix for urban governance is itself continually restructured, generally bringing with it broader shifts in the geographies of state regulation both within and beyond the urban scale. Insofar as the state’s own spatial configuration impacts its capacity to confront place-, scale- and territory-specific regulatory problems, states are often pressured to reconfigure their internal territorial hierarchies and jurisdictional frameworks, not least within major urban regions (Duncan and Goodwin 1989). During periods of sustained economic crisis, extant frameworks of urban governance may be viewed as ineffectual, and powerful social forces may promote the reorganisation of inherited local and/or regional state structures. Under these conditions, new geographies of state organisation may be introduced, whether as a means to construct more viable industrial infrastructures, as a strategy to establish the extra-economic conditions for urban regeneration, or as a mechanism of crisismanagement. The urban geographies of state space may also be reconfigured in conjunction with distributional pressures that emerge as competing localities, cities and regions within a national territory struggle to channel public resources and private capital into their jurisdictions. In this context as well, the state’s territorial structure – as manifested, for instance, in city/suburban jurisdictional boundaries, systems of municipal finance or in the relative centralisation/ decentralisation of administrative arrangements – may become a direct object of sociopolitical struggle (Cox 1990). Urban governance is thus an important politicoinstitutional force field in which the geographies of state activity are themselves continually forged and reworked. In subsequent sections, I shall explore the multiscalar transformations of urban governance and state spatiality that have unfolded during the last four decades in western Europe. Since the era of high Fordism that began in the early 1960s, four successive configurations of urban governance have crystallised, each of which has in turn been closely intertwined with historically specific strategies of state spatial regulation. Crucially, the transformations of urban governance captured by this periodisation do not represent simple, unilinear transitions from one stabilised regulatory framework to another. They entail, rather, a path-dependent layering process in which inherited and emergent projects of state spatial regulation interact conflictually at various spatial scales.

3.4

Urban Governance and the Geographies of Spatial Keynesianism: Early 1960s–Early 1970s

The economic geography of postwar Fordism in western Europe was composed of a functional division of space at various geographical scales (Lipietz 1994). Spatial divisions of labour emerged within each national territory in the form of hierarchical relationships between large-scale metropolitan regions, in which the lead firms within the major, propulsive Fordist industries were clustered, and

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smaller cities, towns and peripheral zones, in which branch plants, input and service providers, and other subordinate economic functions were located. In the western European context, the geographical heartlands of the Fordist accumulation regime stretched from the Industrial Triangle of northern Italy through the German Ruhr district to northern France and the English Midlands. Each of these regional production complexes was in turn embedded within a nationally specific system of production. Throughout the postwar period, most major European urban regions and their surrounding industrial satellites were characterised by consistent demographic growth and industrial expansion (Dunford and Perrons 1994). As the Fordist accumulation regime reached maturity, a sustained decentralisation of capital investment unfolded as large firms began to relocate branch plants from core regions into peripheral spaces (Rodriguez-Pose 1998). Under these conditions, urban governance acquired a key role in a variety of nationalising regulatory strategies through which western European states attempted to construct centralised bureaucratic hierarchies, to establish nationally standardised frameworks for capitalist production and collective consumption, to underwrite urban and regional growth, and to alleviate uneven spatial development throughout their national territories. For present purposes, three key components of this nationalised framework of urban governance deserve particular emphasis. 1. Urban managerialism and the “dual state”. In order to standardise the provision of welfare services and to coordinate national economic policies, national states centralised the instruments for regulating urban development, thereby transforming local states into transmission belts for centrally determined policy regimes (Mayer 1992). Within this managerial framework of urban governance, the state’s overarching function at the urban scale was the reproduction of the labour force through public investments in housing, transportation, social services and other public goods, all of which were intended to replicate certain minimum standards of social welfare and infrastructure provision across the national territory (Castells 1977). In this manner, local states were instrumentalised in order “to carry out a national strategy based on a commitment to regional balance and even growth” (Goodwin and Painter 1996, p. 646). Insofar as the national economy was viewed as the primary terrain for state action, local and regional economies were treated as mere subunits of relatively auto-centric national economic spaces. These centrally financed local welfare policies also provided important elements of the social wage, and thus contributed significantly to the generalisation of the mass consumption practices upon which Fordist growth was contingent (Goodwin and Painter 1996, p. 641). As theorists of the dual state subsequently recognised, the pervasive localisation of the state’s collective consumption functions during the postwar period was a key institutional feature within a broader scalar division of regulation in which production-oriented state policies were organised at a national scale (Saunders 1979). Accordingly, throughout this period, state strategies to promote economic development, including urban economic development, were mobilised primarily at a national scale rather than through bottom-up regional or local initiatives. In this context, a range of national social and economic policy initiatives – including demand-management policies, nationalised ownership of key industries, the expansion of public sector


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employment, military spending and major expenditures on housing, transportation and public utilities – served to underwrite the growth of major urban and regional economies (Martin and Sunley 1997, p. 280). 2. Compensatory spatial policies. The national states of the Fordist-Keynesian era introduced a variety of spatial policies intended to alleviate intra-national territorial inequalities. To be sure, due to their high population densities, metropolitan regions received the bulk of large-scale public infrastructure investments and welfare services throughout the Fordist-Keynesian epoch. Nonetheless, such city-centric central state initiatives were counterbalanced through a variety of state expenditures, loans programs and compensatory regional policies designed to spread growth into underdeveloped regions and rural peripheries across the national territory. From the Italian Mezzogiorno and Spanish Andalusia to western and southern France, the agricultural peripheries and border zones of West Germany, the Limburg coal-mining district of northern Belgium, the Dutch northeastern peripheries, the north-western regions and islands of Denmark, the Scandinavian North, western Ireland and the declining industrial zones of the English North, South Wales, parts of Scotland and much of Northern Ireland, each European country had its so-called “problem areas” or “lagging regions”, generally composed of economic spaces that had been marginalised during previous rounds of industrial development or that were locked into obsolete technologicalindustrial infrastructures (OECD 1976). Such regions “were conceived as blank spaces on the national map of industry, to be filled by the same development strategies as such voids were to be filled in the Third World” (Sabel 1994, p. 126). Accordingly, throughout the postwar period until the late 1970s, a broad range of regional and spatial policies were introduced across western Europe that explicitly targeted such peripheralised spaces. Generally justified in the name of priorities such as balanced national development and spatial equalisation, these redistributive regional policies entailed the introduction of various forms of financial aid, locational incentives and transfer payments to promote industrial growth and economic regeneration outside the dominant city cores; and they often channelled major public infrastructural investments into such locations (Clout 1981). Such interregional resource transfers had a significant impact upon the geographies of uneven development during the postwar period, contributing to an unprecedented convergence of per capita disposable income within most western European states (Dunford and Perrons 1994). Such policies also “brought regions and localities within the [national] economy under much greater state control and dependence”, causing them to be “… subordinated to the macro-economic and macro-redistributive imperatives of the centre” (Martin and Sunley 1997, pp. 279–280). This nationally oriented project of industrial decentralisation, urban deconcentration and spatial equalisation was one of the foundations of spatial Keynesianism, the system of state territorial regulation that prevailed throughout the Fordist-Keynesian period. 3. Metropolitan institutional reform. Within this nationalised system of urban governance, metropolitan political institutions acquired an important mediating role between managerial local states and centrally organised, redistributive forms of spatial planning. Between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s, diverse types of

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consolidated metropolitan institutions were established in a number of major western European city-regions – including, among others, the Greater London Council (1963), the Rijnmond or Greater Rotterdam Port Authority (1964), the communautés urbaines in French cities such as Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon and Strasbourg (1966), the metropolitan counties in British cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle, the Metropolitan Barcelona authority, the Greater Copenhagen Council, the Greater Frankfurt Association (1974) and the Ruhr Municipal Agency (1975) (Sharpe 1995). These metropolitan administrative bodies were widely viewed as mechanisms for rationalising welfare service provision and for reducing administrative inefficiencies within expanding urban agglomerations. In this sense, metropolitan institutions served as a key, coordinating administrative tier within the centralised hierarchies of intergovernmental relations that prevailed within the Keynesian welfare state apparatus. As suburbanisation and industrial decentralisation intensified, metropolitan political institutions were also justified as a means to establish a closer spatial correspondence between governmental structures and functional territories (Lefèbvre 1998). By the early 1970s, metropolitan authorities had acquired important roles in guiding industrial expansion, infrastructural investment and population settlement beyond traditional city cores into suburban fringes, primarily through the deployment of comprehensive land-use plans and other mechanisms to influence intra-metropolitan locational patterns. In this sense, metropolitan institutions appear to have significantly influenced the geographies of urbanisation during the era of high Fordism. In sum, urban governance was an essential pillar within the nationalised system of spatial Keynesianism that prevailed throughout western Europe from the late 1950s until the early 1970s. Spatial Keynesianism is best understood as a broad constellation of national state strategies designed to promote capitalist industrial growth by alleviating uneven geographical development within each national economy. Thus conceived, spatial Keynesianism represents a state-led scalemaking project in two senses. First, it entailed the establishment of a system of subnational institutions for the territorial regulation of urban development. Second, it entailed the embedding of major local and regional economies within a hierarchically structured, nationally focused political-economic geography. Throughout the postwar period, local governments were subsumed within nationalised institutional matrices characterised by centralised control over local social and economic policies, technocratic frameworks of metropolitan governance, extensive interregional resource transfers and redistributive forms of national spatial planning. Taken together, such policies and institutions attempted to secure a structured coherence for capitalist growth (a) by transforming cities and regions into the localised building blocks for national economic development and (b) by spreading urbanisation as evenly as possible across the national territory, like butter on a piece of toast (see Figure 3.2). By the early 1970s, however, it had become apparent that the fantasy of transcending uneven spatial development through the promotion of balanced urbanisation within a relatively closed national economy was as short-lived as the Fordist accumulation regime upon which it was grounded.


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Geo-economic and geopolitical context: Early 1960s–early 1970s: high Fordism Differentiation of global economic activity among distinct national economic systems under Fordist accumulation regime Privileged spatial target(s): National economy Major goals: Deconcentration of population, industry and infrastructure investment from major urban centres into rural peripheries and “underdeveloped” zones Replication of standardized economic assets, investments and public goods across the entire surface of the national territory Establishment of a nationally standardized system of infrastructural facilities throughout the national economy Alleviation of uneven development within national economies: uneven spatial development is seen as a limit or barrier to stabilized industrial growth Dominant policy mechanisms: Locational subsidies to large firms Local social welfare policies and collective consumption investments Redistributive regional policies National spatial planning systems and public infrastructural investments Construction of large-scale metropolitan institutions and regional planning agencies Spatio-temporality of economic development “National developmentalism”: development of the entire national economy as an integrated, self-enclosed territorial unit moving along a linear developmental trajectory Fig. 3.2 Spatial Keynesianism and the Geographies of Urban Governance Under European Fordism

3.5

Urban Governance and the Crisis of Fordism: Early 1970s–Early 1980s

A new configuration of urban governance and state spatial regulation began to crystallise during the early 1970s, as the Fordist developmental regime entered a phase of systemic restructuring on a world scale (Lipietz 1994). A number of geoeconomic shifts occurred during this era that decentered the predominant role of the national scale as a locus of political-economic coordination and led to the rescaling of state regulatory capacities both upwards to supranational institutional

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forms such as the EU and downwards to the regional and local levels. The uneven, incremental and contested character of these rescaling processes is illustrated clearly in the realm of urban governance, in which inherited regulatory arrangements and scalar hierarchies were significantly reorganised during the course of the 1970s. According to Lipietz (1994, p. 35), processes of capitalist restructuring are articulated in the form of struggles between “defenders of the ‘old space’” (to which he refers as the “conservative bloc”) and proponents of a “new space” or a “new model of development” (to which he refers as “the modernist bloc”). For Lipietz, the production of new spaces occurs through the conflictual interaction of conservative/preservationist and modernising, restructuring-oriented political forces at diverse scales, leading to a new territorial formation that combines elements of the old geographical order with aspects of the “projected spaces” sought by the advocates of (neoliberal and/or progressive) modernisation. This conceptualisation illuminates important elements of urban governance restructuring and state rescaling during the 1970s. Throughout this decade, intense conflicts between preservationist and restructuring-oriented political blocs unfolded at different spatial scales, with highly uneven impacts upon the regulatory geographies that had been established during the Fordist-Keynesian epoch. At a national scale, preservationist blocs mobilised diverse strategies of crisismanagement in order to defend the institutional infrastructures of the FordistKeynesian order. From the first oil shock of 1973 until around 1979, traditional recipes of national demand-management prevailed throughout western Europe as central governments attempted to recreate the conditions for a Fordist virtuous circle of growth. However, as Jessop (1989, p. 269) remarks of the British case, such countercyclical tactics amounted to no more than an “eleventh hour, statesponsored Fordist modernisation,” for they were incapable of solving, simultaneously, the dual problems of escalating inflation and mass unemployment (Scharpf 1991). Meanwhile, as the boom regions of Fordism experienced sustained economic crises, the policy framework of spatial Keynesianism was further differentiated to include deindustrialising, distressed cities and manufacturing centres as key geographical targets for state assistance and financial aid. In contrast to traditional Keynesian forms of regional and spatial policy, which had focused almost exclusively upon underdeveloped regions and peripheral zones, national urban policies were now introduced in a number of western European states in order to address the specific socioeconomic problems of large cities, such as mass unemployment, the deskilling of labour, capital flight and infrastructural decay. Major examples of such policies included the West German Urban Development Assistance Act, the French Plan of Action for Employment and Industrial Reorganisation, the Dutch Big Cities Bottleneck Program and the British Inner Urban Areas Act (Fox Przeworski 1986). In this manner, many of the redistributive policy relays associated with spatial Keynesianism were significantly expanded during the 1970s. Nonetheless, even though the spatial targets of regional policies were now differentiated to include urban areas as key recipients of state aid, the national state’s underlying commitment to the project of spatial equalisation at a national scale was reinforced. Indeed, the 1970s can be viewed as


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the historical culmination of the various projects of national socio-spatial redistribution that had been introduced during the postwar period, albeit under geo-economic conditions that were systematically undermining the Fordist developmental model. While preservationist political alliances prevailed at a national scale during the first half of the decade, the tide began to change as of the late 1970s. At this time, across much of western Europe, the national scale became an increasingly important institutional locus for modernising, restructuring-oriented political projects that aimed to dismantle many of the redistributive policy relays associated with the Keynesian national welfare state. In particular, a range of national policy initiatives and intergovernmental realignments were mobilised in order to unsettle the entrenched managerial-welfarist framework of urban governance that had previously prevailed. During the post-1970s recession, as national governments were pressured to rationalise government expenditures, national grants to subnational administrative levels were reduced. These new forms of fiscal austerity caused local governments throughout western Europe to become more dependent upon locally collected taxes and non-tax revenues such as charges and user fees (Mouritzen 1991). In the wake of these shifts, many western European local governments attempted to adjust to the new fiscal conditions by delaying capital expenditures, drawing upon liquid assets and increasing their debts, but these proved to be no more than temporary, stop-gap measures. Subsequently, additional local revenues were sought in, among other sources, economic development projects (Fox Przeworski 1986). Whereas the new national urban policies introduced during this period enabled many cities to capture supplementary public resources, most local governments were nonetheless confronted with major new budgetary constraints due to the dual impact of national fiscal retrenchment and intensifying local socioeconomic problems. One of the most significant institutional outcomes of the national fiscal squeeze of the 1970s, therefore, was to pressure localities to seek new sources of revenue through a proactive mobilisation of local economic development projects and inward investment strategies. Under these conditions, the managerial, welfarist form of local economic governance that had been consolidated during the Fordist-Keynesian period was significantly unsettled as so-called “bootstraps” strategies to promote economic growth from below, without extensive reliance upon national subsidies, proliferated (Bullmann 1991). In contrast to their earlier focus on welfarist redistribution, local governments now began to introduce a range of strategies to rejuvenate local economies, beginning with land-assembly programs and land-use planning schemes and subsequently expanding to diverse firm-based, area-based, sectoral and jobcreation measures (Eisenschitz and Gough 1993). Although this new politics of urban economic development would subsequently be diffused in diverse political forms throughout the western European city-system, during the 1970s it remained most prevalent within manufacturing-based cities and regions in which industrial restructuring had generated particularly devastating socioeconomic problems (Parkinson 1991). Thus, even as most western European national governments continued to promote economic integration and territorial equalisation at a national scale, neo-corporatist alliances between state institutions, trade unions and other

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local organisations within rustbelt cities and regions from the German Ruhr district to the English Midlands elaborated regionally specific sectoral, technology and employment policies in order to promote what was popularly labelled “endogenous growth” (Stöhr and Taylor 1981). Throughout the 1970s, the goal of these neo-corporatist alliances was to establish negotiated strategies of industrial restructuring in which economic regeneration was linked directly to social priorities such as intra-regional redistribution, job creation, vocational retraining and class compromise (Hahne 1985; Sabel 1994). These initiatives were grounded upon an essentially neo-Fordist political project to rescale the institutional infrastructures of spatial Keynesianism from a national to a regional or local scale. Regional and local economies were now recognised to have their own specific developmental trajectories and structural problems rather than being mere subunits within a unitary national economic space. At the same time, however, the basic Fordist-Keynesian priorities of social redistribution, territorial equalisation and class compromise were maintained, albeit within the more bounded parameters of regional and local economies rather than as a project to be extended throughout the entire national territory. In contrast to the central state’s policies of national territorial redistribution, the new politics of endogenous growth that emerged during this period were oriented primarily towards place-specific regulatory problems, socioeconomic dilemmas and political conflicts. Many of these neo-corporatist local economic initiatives would continue during the 1980s, albeit in a transformed geo-economic environment. The salient point here is that such strategies of endogenous growth first emerged during a period in which neo-Keynesian priorities continued to prevail at a national level. Under these conditions, due to their differentiating impacts upon local economies, the subnational neo-corporatisms of the 1970s explicitly counteracted the projects of national spatial equalisation that were then still being pursued by most western European national states. In sum, the 1970s is best viewed as a transitional period characterised by intense interscalar struggles between political alliances concerned to preserve the nationalised institutional infrastructures of spatial Keynesianism and other, newly formed political coalitions concerned to introduce more decentralised frameworks of territorial development and urban governance. Although the new regulatory spaces sought by such modernising coalitions remained relatively inchoate, they shared a broad commitment to the goal of endogenous growth and an explicit rejection of nationally encompassing models of territorial development. In this sense, the proliferation of local and regional regulatory experiments articulated qualitatively new scale-making projects that markedly destabilised the nationalising form of urban governance that had prevailed under spatial Keynesianism. While central governments continued to promote such nationalising, spatially redistributive agendas, the diffusion of these bootstraps strategies during the course of the 1970s appears to have entailed a major modification of the inherited institutional framework of spatial Keynesianism. Yet, given the unstable, contested character of these local regulatory experiments and scale-making projects, it would be an exaggeration to claim that they contributed to the establishment of a new structured coherence for urban development.


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Rather, such bootstraps experiments are best understood as localised strategies of crisis-management through which a new spatial layer of state regulatory arrangements was superimposed upon the subnational political geographies that had prevailed during the period of urban managerialism. It was through the conflictual interaction of this newly emergent, subnational layer of state spatial regulation and the inherited national geographies of spatial Keynesianism that the broad contours of a new, rescaled landscape of state spatiality began to emerge as of the late 1970s. Insofar as the projects of endogenous growth of the 1970s entailed a clear divergence from the nationally equalising, redistributive agendas of spatial Keynesianism, they established a significant politico-institutional opening for the more radical rescalings of urban governance and state spatiality that would subsequently occur. The rescaling processes of the post-1980s period have unfolded in qualitatively different forms and via diverse politico-institutional pathways within each western European national state. For present purposes, my concern is to analyze the underlying commonalities among these cross-national rescaling processes. Such an analysis arguably provides an essential analytical foundation for a more systematic, variation-finding comparative study of urban governance and the politics of state rescaling.

3.6

Urban Locational Policy and the Rescaling of State Space, Round 1: The 1980s

The crisis of the Fordist developmental model intensified during the 1980s, leading to a new phase of industrial transformation, territorial reconfiguration and state spatial restructuring. The strategies of crisis-management introduced during the 1970s had neither restored the conditions for a new growth cycle nor successfully resolved the deepening problems of economic stagnation, rising unemployment and industrial decline within major western European cities and regions. Consequently, during the course of the 1980s, most European national governments abandoned traditional Keynesian macroeconomic policies in favour of monetarism: a competitive balance of payments replaced full employment as the overarching goal of monetary and fiscal policy (Scharpf 1991). By the late 1980s, neoliberal political agendas such as welfare state retrenchment, trade liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation had been adopted not only in the United Kingdom under Thatcher and in West Germany under Kohl, but also in many traditionally social democratic or social/Christian-democratic countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Denmark and Sweden (Brenner and Theodore 2002). This geopolitical sea-change resulted in the imposition of additional fiscal constraints upon most municipal and metropolitan governments, whose revenues had already been significantly reduced during the preceding decade. Political support for large-scale strategic planning projects waned and welfare state

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bureaucracies were downsized, not least at metropolitan and municipal levels. Major metropolitan institutions such as the Greater London Council, the English metropolitan counties, the Metropolitan Barcelona authority, the Greater Copenhagen Council and the Rijnmond in Rotterdam were abolished during the mid1980s. Elsewhere, metropolitan institutions were formally preserved but weakened in practice due to centrally imposed budgetary pressures and enhanced competition between city cores and suburban peripheries for capital investment and state subsidies (Barlow 1991). The fiscal squeeze upon public expenditure in cities and regions and the dissolution or weakening of metropolitan governance were thus among the important localised expressions of the processes of national welfare state retrenchment that began to unfold during the 1980s. As of this decade, the national preconditions for municipal Keynesianism were being eroded as local and metropolitan governments were increasingly forced to “fend for themselves” in securing a fiscal base for their regulatory activities (Mayer 1994; Rödenstein 1987). During this same period, a new mosaic of urban and regional development crystallised throughout the western European city-system. Across western Europe, the crisis of North Atlantic Fordism triggered the tumultuous decline of many large-scale manufacturing regions that had been grounded primarily upon Fordist mass production industries. At the same time, established metropolitan cores such as London, Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt, Milan and Zürich were being transformed into strategic nodal points within global and European financial networks. As Veltz (1993) explains, the post-1970s period has witnessed the consolidation of an “archipelago economy” in which corporate headquarters, major decision-making centres and most high value-added economic activities have been concentrated within the most powerful metropolitan nodes in a worldwide inter-urban network. For Veltz (2000), this trend towards metropolitanisation represents an important expression of a marked intensification of territorial inequalities that has been unfolding at all scales within post-1970s western Europe – including an intraEuropean divide between winning and losing regions; various intra-national divides between booming urban cores and declining manufacturing zones or depressed rural peripheries; intra-regional divides between central city cores and surrounding hinterlands; and intra-metropolitan divides between wealthy or gentrified areas and disadvantaged, impoverished neighbourhoods. In a now-famous report prepared for the French spatial planning agency DATAR prior to the consolidation of the Single European Market, Brunet (1989) famously described the core urban zone of the European archipelago economy as a “blue banana” whose strategic importance would be further enhanced as geoeconomic and European economic integration proceeded. Notably, Brunet’s map of Europe’s urbanised boom zone envisioned a nearly exact inversion of the geography of development zones that had been established during the era of spatial Keynesianism. Earlier spatial and regional policies had been based upon notions of cumulative causation in which the spatial diffusion of growth potentials was seen to benefit both cores and peripheries. In stark contrast, Brunet’s model implied that winning cities and regions would form a powerful, densely interlinked and relatively autonomous urban network dominated by advanced infrastructural facilities and high-value added activities, leaving other regions to fend for


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themselves or risk being marginalised further in the new geo-economic context. As Brunet’s model dramatically illustrated, the economic transformations of the 1980s were causing the geographies of spatial Keynesianism to be turned insideout. As of this decade, growth was no longer being spread outwards from developed urban cores into the underdeveloped peripheries of each national economy, but was instead being systematically reconcentrated into the most powerful agglomerations situated within Europe-wide spatial divisions of labour. Throughout the 1990s, Brunet’s representation of the European city-system was invoked in countless policy reports and planning documents commissioned by diverse state agencies concerned to assess the future prospects of particular national territories, regions and cities in the “new Europe”.4 The wide influence of Brunet’s model of the European blue banana was symptomatic of a major, stateled reorientation of urban governance that began to unfold throughout western Europe during the course of the 1980s. As urban economic restructuring intensified in conjunction with processes of global and European integration, western European central governments began more explicitly to target major cities and city-regions as the locational keys to national economic competitiveness. In the “Europe of regions” – a boosterist catchphrase that became increasingly important in national policy discussions as of the mid-1980s – cities were no longer seen merely as containers of declining industries and socioeconomic problems. Instead, they were increasingly viewed as dynamic growth engines through which national prosperity could be secured. This view of the city as an essential national economic asset became widely prevalent in mainstream policy circles in the late 1980s, as national and local governments attempted to prepare for the introduction of the Single European Market. As Mayer (1994) notes, a number of fundamental realignments of urban governance subsequently ensued: • local authorities were constrained to engage more extensively and proactively in local economic development projects; • local welfarist and collective consumption policies were increasingly marginalised or subordinated to production-oriented policies, and • new forms of local governance, such as public–private partnerships, became increasingly prevalent. By the late 1980s, this new, entrepreneurial form of urban governance had been diffused throughout the European city-system as fiscally enfeebled local and regional governments mobilised a range of economic regeneration strategies to attract inward investment and to promote property redevelopment (Harding 1997). Although urban entrepreneurialism was articulated in a variety of political forms during this period – including neoliberal, social democratic and centrist variants (Eisenschitz and Gough 1993) – all contributed to a trans-European diffusion of

_________________________ 4

For social-scientific critiques of this and other analogous models of the European citysystem, see Krätke (1993), Krätke et al. (1997), Taylor and Hoyler (2000).

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“beggar-thy-neighbour” inter-local competition, in which local and regional governments struggled aggressively against one another to lure a limited supply of investments and jobs into their territories (Cheshire and Gordon 1996). I shall refer to the diverse institutional realignments and regulatory strategies associated with urban entrepreneurialism as forms of urban locational policy insofar as they are grounded upon state strategies that explicitly target cities and urban regions as sites for the enhancement of territorial competitiveness (Brenner 2000). As conceived here, the essential feature of locational policies is their overarching goal of enhancing the economic competitiveness of particular places, territories or scales in relation to broader, supranational circuits of capital accumulation. Locational policies may involve direct subsidies and other public schemes to lure the investments of specific firms, but they are best understood as being oriented towards the general conditions for capital accumulation within particular territorial jurisdictions. While locational policies have a long history under modern capitalism, they have most frequently been mobilised at a national scale, in conjunction with national-developmentalist strategies of industrialisation and nationalised approaches to territorial development (McMichael 1996; Lefebvre 2003). It is only since the 1980s, I would argue, that western European states have deployed locational policies extensively at an urban scale, in the field of urban governance. Since this period, urban locational policies have been mobilised aggressively by national, regional and local state institutions in order to promote the territorialised competitive advantages of strategic cities and regions in relation to supranational (European or global) spaces of economic competition (Cheshire and Gordon 1996). In this transformed political-economic context, cities are no longer seen as containers of declining industries and intensifying socioeconomic problems, but are increasingly viewed as dynamic growth engines through which national territorial competitiveness may be promoted. In short, as Lipietz (1994, p. 37) notes, the locality is increasingly construed as a “breeding ground for new productive forces,” which state institutions at various spatial scales (European, national and local) are now actively attempting to cultivate. The urban locational policies of the 1980s and early 1990s built, in significant ways, upon the legacies of previous strategies of endogenous development from the 1970s. For, as in the 1970s, the restructuring of urban governance during the 1980s was initiated in part through the bottom-up strategies of local political coalitions struggling to manage the disruptive consequences of economic restructuring by means of ad hoc, uncoordinated policy adjustments. Concomitantly, like the endogenous growth policies that had prevailed during the preceding decade, the new urban locational policies emphasised place- and scale-specific regulatory problems and mobilised place- and scale-specific forms of state intervention in order to confront them. Finally, insofar as urban locational policies broke decisively from top-down, standardised and nationally encompassing approaches to the regulation of urban development, they significantly deepened the fragmentation and erosion of spatial Keynesianism that had been initiated during the previous wave of urban policy reform.


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However, the endogenous development strategies of the 1970s emerged in a political-economic context in which most western European national governments remained firmly committed to the priority of national spatial equalisation. In stark contrast, the urban locational policies of the 1980s and early 1990s were articulated under conditions in which newly consolidated, post-Keynesian competition states were scrambling to enhance their competitive advantages within a rapidly integrating global and European space-economy. Thus, even as they drew upon certain regulatory instruments of endogenous growth strategies, the urban locational policies of the post-1980s period also systematically suppressed their spatially redistributive agendas. Within this new, increasingly austere political-economic landscape, the project of promoting territorial redistribution at any spatial scale was increasingly viewed as “a luxury belonging to an earlier period of economic growth” (Läpple 1985, p. 52). Consequently, “national commitments to geographically ‘balanced’ growth in the name of equity have increasingly given way to concern with the way in which the characteristics of particular localities can enhance the growth prospects of firms and support national economic competitiveness” (Harding 1997, p. 307). In this manner, place- and scale-specific approaches to urban governance were transformed from a basis for promoting economic rejuvenation and territorial redistribution within crisis-stricken industrial urban regions (1970s–early 1980s) into a means for positioning major cities and regions strategically within global and European spatial divisions of labour (post1980s period). Most crucially here, urban locational policies entailed not only the realignment of urban policy priorities; they were also closely associated with significant, lasting institutional transformations. Thus, aside from attempting to undercut traditional redistributive regional policy relays, national governments now mobilised a number of institutional restructuring initiatives that were intended to establish a new, competitive infrastructure for urban economic growth within their territories: Local governments were granted new revenue-raising powers and an increased level of authority in determining local tax rates and user fees, even as national fiscal transfers to subnational levels were diminished. (Fox Przeworski 1986)

New responsibilities for planning, economic development, social services and spatial planning were devolved downwards to subnational (regional and local) governments. In a number of western European countries, local economic development projects were a key focal point for such devolutionary initiatives. Although these trends were most apparent in traditionally centralised states, such as France and Spain, various policies to enhance regional and local autonomy were also enacted in less centralised European states as well (Parkinson 1991). In each case, decentralisation policies were seen as a means to “limit the considerable welfare demands of urban areas and to encourage lower-level authorities to assume responsibility for growth policies that might reduce welfare burdens” (Harding 1994, p. 370). Even in the United Kingdom, where major aspects of local governance were subjected to increasing central control under the Thatcher regime, the problem of local economic governance was among the key issues

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upon which the restructuring of intergovernmental relations was focused (Duncan and Goodwin 1989). National spatial planning systems were redefined. Economic priorities such as promoting structural competitiveness superseded traditional welfarist, redistributive priorities such as territorial equity and spatial equalisation. Meanwhile, in many European countries, the most globally competitive urban regions and industrial districts replaced the national economy as the privileged target for major spatial planning initiatives and infrastructural investments. The reorientation of Dutch spatial planning towards the Randstad megalopolis in the mid-1980s, the French national government’s promotion of “megapolisation” in the Paris/Île de France region during the late 1980s, the refocusing of Danish regional planning on the Copenhagen region during the early 1990s, the introduction of new national urban growth policies in Italy after 1991 and the adoption of a city-centric approach to spatial planning in post-unification Germany represent striking instances of this realignment. National, regional and local governments introduced new, territory- and placespecific institutions and policies – from enterprise zones, urban development corporations and airport development agencies to training and enterprise councils, inward investment agencies and development planning boards – designed to re-concentrate or enhance socioeconomic assets within cities. Such institutions have often been autonomous from local state institutions and controlled by unaccountable political and economic elites. The Docklands redevelopment project in London and the Dutch mainports policies in Amsterdam and Rotterdam represent prominent instances in which western European national governments have channelled substantial public subsidies into strategically located urban economic development projects. The forms and functions of local states were systematically redefined. Whereas postwar western European local governments had been devoted primarily to various forms of welfare service delivery, these institutions were transformed into entrepreneurial agencies oriented above all towards the promotion of economic development within their jurisdictions. This transformation occurred in three basic forms. First, confronted with increasing budgetary constraints, local states privatised or contracted out numerous public services and attempted to modernise systems of public administration. Second, local states attempted to promote economic regeneration by seeking to acquire subsidies through national and/or European industrial and sectoral programs. Third, and most crucially, local states – often in conjunction with regional state governments in federal countries – introduced a range of new policies to promote local economic growth, including labour market programs, industrial policies, infrastructural investments, placemarketing initiatives and property redevelopment campaigns (Eisenschitz and Gough 1993; Jessop 1998). Taken together, the policy shifts and institutional realignments associated with urban locational policies entailed not only a major reconfiguration of urban governance, but a fundamental transformation of inherited geographies of state spatiality. The consolidation and diffusion of urban locational policy was premised upon the establishment of new subnational layers of state and para-state


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institutions through which cities could be marketed as customised, specialised and maximally competitive locations for strategic economic functions within global and European spatial divisions of labour. At the same time, the devolutionary, decentralising initiatives of the 1980s fundamentally reconfigured entrenched intergovernmental hierarchies and scalar divisions of regulation, imposing powerful new pressures upon subnational administrative units to fend for themselves within an increasingly uncertain geo-economic environment. These newly constituted, state-organised interscalar rule-regimes were explicitly designed to facilitate urban locational policies by channelling “the strategic options and tactical behaviour of local actors” (Peck 2002, p. 338) towards developmentalist, competitiveness driven agendas. More generally, such interscalar rule-regimes attempted to institutionalise entrepreneurial, competitiveness oriented and “growth first” approaches to urban governance (a) by exposing cities and regions more directly to geoeconomic pressures and (b) by subjecting them to competitive regimes of intergovernmental resource allocation based upon market position, performance and efficiency rather than social need (Peck and Tickell 2002, pp. 47–48). Consequently, in direct contrast to postwar strategies of spatial Keynesianism, which contributed to an alleviation of intra-national uneven development, newly emergent urban locational politics actively intensified the latter (a) by promoting a systematic re-concentration of industry and population within each national territory’s most competitive locations, (b) by permitting and even encouraging divergent, place-specific forms of economic governance, welfare provision and territorial administration within different local and regional economies, and (c) by institutionalising intensely competitive relations, whether for public subsidies or for private investments, among major subnational administrative units. Peck’s (2002, p. 356) account of how neoliberal workfare policies facilitate rather than minimise spatial unevenness provides an equally apt characterisation of contemporary western European urban locational policies: Uneven geographic development is being established as an intentional, rather than merely incidental, feature of the delivery of workfare programs, while local experimentation and emulation are becoming seemingly permanent features of the policymaking process. Under workfarism, spatial variability, the churning of persistently reformed programs, rapid interlocal policy transfers, and the ceaseless search for local success stories that are ripe for replication are all effectively normalized. In stark contrast to the aspirations to fair and equal treatment under welfare regimes, when spatial unevenness, local discretion and instances of atypical (...) treatment were often constituted as policy problems in their own right (...) workfare makes a virtue of geographic differentiation, subnational competition, and (...) circumstance-specific interventions.

In sum, in contrast to the relatively standardised geographies of state space under Fordism, in which national states attempted to maintain minimum levels of service provision throughout the national territory, the establishment of an entrepreneurial, competitiveness-oriented institutional infrastructure for urban governance during the 1980s appears to have entailed an increasing splintering of

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state regulatory activities at various spatial scales.5 From this point of view, the new interlocality competition of the post-1980s period cannot be understood simply as the aggregate expression of localised policy responses to global and European market integration. On the contrary, the grim, neoliberal requirement for cities to “compete or die” (Eisenschitz and Gough 1998, p. 762) – which aptly encapsulates the aggressively competitive spatial logic underlying urban locational policy – must be interpreted as a politically constructed imperative that was imposed upon local and regional economies in significant measure through the rescaling of national state spaces. Meanwhile, national states should not be conceived as static territorial containers within which urban locational policies have been mobilised. Rather, national state institutions actively promoted such policies by recalibrating their internal intergovernmental hierarchies, modes of intervention and policy repertoires in order to facilitate the strategic positioning of their major local and regional economies within Europe-wide and global circuits of capital. The interplay between urban locational policies and the rescaling of state space is summarised schematically in Figure 3.3. I propose to characterise the rescaled formation of national state spatiality that crystallised through these contested transformations as a Rescaled Competition State Regime (RCSR) – rescaled, because it rests upon concerted political strategies to reorganise national institutional hierarchies so as to position diverse subnational spaces (localities, cities, regions, industrial districts) within supranational (European or global) circuits of capital accumulation; a competition state, because it privileges the goal of structural competitiveness over welfarist priorities such as equity and redistribution; and a regime, because it represents an unstable, continually evolving institutional mosaic rather than a fully consolidated state form (see also Jessop 2002). Whether forged predominantly from below, through the initiatives of local and regional coalitions to manage economic restructuring, or from above, through central state strategies to enhance local and regional competitiveness, the institutional infrastructures of urban entrepreneurialism soon came to occupy pivotal regulatory positions within the newly forged scalar architectures of RCSRs. It is in this sense that urban locational policies provided an important institutional mechanism for the rescaling of national state space during the course of the 1980s.

_________________________ 5 The notion of a “splintering” of state space is inspired by Graham and Marvin’s (2001) path-breaking analysis of “splintering urbanism.” For Graham and Marvin, splintering urbanism emerges through the “unbundling” of the centralized, standardized and territorially integrated infrastructural arrangements that prevailed within high modernist/Fordist cities, leading to a number of complex rearticulations of urban and regional spaces. Splintered urbanism is composed of customized, specialized, high-capacity infrastructural grids that largely bypass their surrounding territories in order to link strategic spaces within cities to the worldwide networks of global capitalism. The present discussion is intended to suggest that a closely analogous transformation of state space is currently unfolding across western Europe. The compensatory, territorially integrative strategies of spatial Keynesianism have been superseded by spatially differentiating, splintering state strategies designed to position each country’s most competitive cities and regions within global and European circuits of capital.


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Geo-economic and geopolitical context: Late 1970s–present: ongoing processes of regulatory experimentation in the wake of the crisis of North Atlantic Fordism and the rise of a European “archipelago economy” New interscalar tensions: global and European economic integration proceeds in tandem with an increasing opening of national economies to foreign direct investment and an increasing dependence of large corporations on localized and regionalized agglomeration economies The search for a new institutional fix proceeds at all spatial scales in a geo-economic context defined by US-led neoliberal dominance

Privileged spatial target(s): Major urban and regional economies situated within supranational and/or global circuits of capital

Major goals: Re-concentration of population, industry and infrastructure investment into strategic urban and regional economies Differentiation and splintering of national economic space into increasingly specialized urban and regional economies Promotion of customized, place-specific forms of territorial administration and infrastructural investment oriented towards global and European economic flows Intensification of interspatial competition at all scales: uneven development is now seen as a basis for economic growth rather than as a limit or barrier to the latter

Dominant policy mechanisms: Deregulation and welfare state retrenchment Decentralization or devolution of intergovernmental arrangements, socioeconomic policies and fiscal responsibilities Spatially selective investments in advanced infrastructures, generally within strategic cities, regions and industrial districts Establishment of place-specific regional and local institutional arrangements, governance strategies and industrial policies Local economic initiatives; “place-marketing” programs Spatio-temporality of economic development “Splintered developmentalism”: fragmentation of national space into distinct urban/regional economies with their own place-specific locational features and developmental trajectories

Fig. 3.3 Urban Locational Policies and the Splintering of State Space

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Metropolitan Regionalism and the Reconstitution of Urban Locational Policies: The 1990s

A number of commentators have emphasised the chronically unstable character of entrepreneurial, growth-first approaches to urban governance (Leitner and Sheppard 1998; Peck and Tickell 1994). Because entrepreneurial urban strategies intensify social inequality, social exclusion and uneven spatial development, they undermine the socio-territorial conditions upon which sustainable capitalist expansion depends. While entrepreneurial urban strategies may unleash short-term bursts of economic growth within circumscribed local and regional economies, they generally fail to sustain such economic upswings beyond the medium-term. These contradictions within entrepreneurial forms of urban governance have been exacerbated during the 1990s in conjunction with the diffusion of urban locational policies and the consolidation of RCSRs throughout western Europe. As indicated, one of the major effects of urban locational policies has been to enhance competitive pressures upon subnational administrative units and thus to intensify uneven spatial development within each national territory. While these institutional realignments may initially benefit a select number of globally competitive urban regions, they inflict a logic of regulatory undercutting upon most local and regional economies, a trend that may seriously downgrade national economic performance. At the same time, the increasing geographical differentiation of state regulatory activities induced through urban locational policies is “as much a hindrance as a help to regulation” (Painter and Goodwin 1996, p. 646). For, in the absence of mechanisms of meta-governance capable of coordinating subnational development strategies, these ongoing rescaling processes may undermine the national state’s organisational coherence and operational unity, leading in turn to serious governance failures, inter-territorial conflicts and legitimation deficits (Jessop 1998; Gough and Eisenschitz 1993). As of the 1980s, the contradictions of first-wave state rescaling strategies and urban locational policies became widely apparent throughout western Europe; they have subsequently had important ramifications for the institutional and scalar architectures of RCSRs. During the course of the 1990s, faced with the pervasive regulatory deficits of their own predominant strategies of economic intervention, many RCSRs have mobilised various forms of institutional restructuring and rescaling in order to manage the disruptive, dysfunctional consequences of unfettered interlocality competition. Thus, whereas the rescaling of urban governance during the 1970s and 1980s was catalyzed primarily through strategies to manage economic crisis and to promote industrial regeneration, the rescaling projects of the 1990s have been mediated increasingly through initiatives designed to contain the governance failures associated with previous rounds of state rescaling. In this manner, during the 1990s, a variety of political responses to what Offe (1984) once termed “the crisis of crisis-management” have been superimposed upon the local economic development strategies that had been mobilised immediately following the economic downturn of the 1970s. In short, it would appear that the post-1970s period of crisis-induced urban restructuring has been superseded, since


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the early 1990s, by a qualitatively new conjuncture of restructuring-induced urban crises (Soja 2000). The widespread proliferation of new regionally focused strategies of state rescaling during the last decade must be understood in this context. During the 1980s, the first wave of state rescaling strategies focused predominantly upon the downscaling of formerly nationalised administrative capacities and regulatory arrangements towards local tiers of state power. It was under these conditions that many of the metropolitan institutional forms that had been inherited from the Fordist-Keynesian period were abolished or downgraded. During the 1990s, however, the regional or metropolitan scale became a strategically important site for major projects to modify the geography of state regulatory activities throughout western Europe (Keating 1997). From experiments in metropolitan institutional reform and decentralised regional economic policy in Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands to the Blairite project of establishing a patchwork of Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) in the United Kingdom, these developments led many commentators to predict that a “new regionalism” was superseding both the geographies of spatial Keynesianism and the forms of urban entrepreneurialism that emerged following the initial crisis of North Atlantic Fordism (Keating 1998). Against such arguments, however, the preceding discussion points towards a crisis-theoretical interpretation of these rescaling initiatives as an important evolutionary modification of RCSRs in conjunction with their own immanent contradictions (see chapters by Jessop and Cerny, this volume, Brenner 2003). Although the politico-institutional content of contemporary metropolitanisation and regionalisation strategies continues to be an object of intense contestation, they have been articulated thus far in two basic forms in most western European states. On the one hand, regionally focused strategies of state rescaling have frequently attempted to transpose inherited approaches to urban locational policy upwards, onto a metropolitan or regional scale, generally leading to a further intensification of uneven spatial development throughout each national territory. In this scenario, the contradictions of urban locational policy are to be resolved through the integration of local economies into larger, regionally configured territorial units, which are in turn to be promoted as integrated, competitive locations for global and European capital investment. In this approach to state rescaling, the spatial selectivity of RCSRs is modified in order to emphasise metropolitan regions rather than localities; however, the basic agenda of spatial re-concentration, unfettered interspatial competition and intensified uneven development is maintained unchecked. On the other hand, many contemporary strategies of metropolitanisation and regionalisation have attempted provisionally to countervail the dynamics of unfettered interlocality competition by promoting selected forms of spatial equalisation within strategic regional institutional spaces. Although such initiatives generally do not significantly undermine uneven spatial development between regions, they can nonetheless be viewed as efforts to modify some of the most disruptive aspects of first-wave strategies of state rescaling within major metropolitan zones. Indeed, this aspect of regional state rescaling may be viewed as an

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attempt to reintroduce a downscaled form of spatial Keynesianism within the splintered regulatory architectures of RCSRs. The priority of promoting equalised, balanced growth is thus to be promoted at a metropolitan or regional scale, within delimited subnational zones, rather than throughout the entire national territory. HISTORICAL DOMINANT FORM OF DOMINANT FORM OF FORMATION STATE SPATIAL URBAN-REGIONAL SELECTIVITY REGULATION

MAJOR CONFLICTS AND CONTRADICTIONS

Spatial Keynesianism: early 1960s– early 1970s

Urban managerialism: local states operate as agents of welfare service provision and collective consumption

Urban cores and growth poles may overheat due to rapid growth and physical expansion

Metropolitan institutions coordinate the provision of welfare services and manage the physical expansion of Fordist urban agglomerations

Inter-territorial and inter-scalar distributional struggles proliferate as peripheral regions intensify their demands for central state subsidies

Gradually, national redistributive policy relays are retrenched, forcing regional and local states to fend for themselves under conditions of enhanced geo-economic uncertainty

National and local fiscal crises ensue as struggles intensify over the appropriate balance of growth vs. redistribution

National states promote economic development by spreading industry, population and infrastructural investment evenly across the national territory Primacy of the national scale of statehood: national economies and national societies are viewed as pregiven territorial arenas

Fordism in Crisis (transitional phase): early 1970s– early 1980s

Preservationist alliances within national states initially maintain their commitment to balanced national growth and the redistributive project of spatial Keynesianism The geographies of spatial Keynesianism are re-differentiated, however, as national urban policies are introduced to address the structural problems of declining industrial cities and regions The entrenched role of the national scale as a locus of politicaleconomic coordination is destabilized

A new “bootstraps” politics of endogenous growth emerges in crisis-stricken industrial regions: goal is to mobilize customized policies to confront place-specific forms of economic decline

Political conflicts intensify between preservationist social forces concerned to protect the institutional settlement of Fordism and “modernizing” alliances oriented towards a systemic reorganization of inherited regulatory arrangements

Fig. 3.4 State Spatial Strategies and the Geographies of Urban Governance: A Schematic Periodization of the Western European Case, 1960–2000


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Fig. 3.4 (continued) HISTORICAL FORMATION

FORM OF STATE SPATIAL SELECTIVITY

FORM OF URBAN-REGIONAL REGULATION

MAJOR CONFLICTS AND CONTRADICTIONS

State Rescaling Strategies, Round I:1980s

The rise of first-wave strategies of urban locational policy: national states promote the re-concentration of economic capacities and advanced infrastructure into the most globally competitive cities and regions within their territories

Urban entrepreneurialism: local states acquire key roles in promoting local economic development and place-marketing strategies

Intensified uneven development and zero-sum forms of interlocality competition undermine national economic stability

Traditional managerialwelfarist forms of local socioeconomic policy are retrenched

Place- and jurisdiction-specific forms of territorial administration are introduced in key sites within many strategic urban regions

Metropolitan institutions are abolished or downsized in conjunction with welfare state restructuring

Urban locational policies trigger systemic governance failures due to a lack of supra-local policy coordination

The rescaling of urban locational policies: national states target large-scale metropolitan regions rather than cities or localities as the most appropriate scales for economic rejuvenation

Competitive regionalism: metropolitan institutions are rejuvenated in conjunction with projects to establish coordinated programs of regional economic development

New scalar layers of state space are established to address some of the major regulatory deficits and governance failures associated with firstwave urban locational policy

Metropolitan institutions acquire new roles in various aspects of crisis-displacement, interscalar management and meta-governance

State Rescaling Strategies, Round II: 1990s–present

New institutional forms and policy strategies are mobilized that attempt to balance the priorities of economic regeneration and crisismanagement

National and local legitimation crises ensue as territorial inequality intensifies

Metropolitan institutional reforms trigger an upscaling of the problems of uneven development, intensified sociospatial inequality, inadequate policy coordination and legitimation to major metropolitan regions The crisis-tendencies and governance failures of first-wave urban locational policies are rescaled but remain chronically unresolved at a national scale

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Which mixture of these opposed approaches to state rescaling prevails within a given national, regional or local institutional environment hinges upon political struggles in which diverse social forces strive to influence the geography of state regulatory activities towards particular political ends. Nonetheless, both of the rescaled forms of crisis-management outlined above represent significant scalar rearticulations within the RCSRs that were consolidated during the 1980s. In this newest scale-making project of the 1990s, the twin priorities of economic competitiveness and crisis-management are juxtaposed uneasily in an unstable, shifting institutional and scalar matrix for urban governance. While there is little evidence at the present time that either of these regionalised regulatory configurations will engender sustainable forms of economic regeneration or territorial governance, it currently appears likely that they shall further intensify the geographical differentiation of state space and the uneven development of capital across western Europe. Figure 3.4 provides a schematic summary of the broad periodisation of urban governance restructuring and state rescaling developed in this chapter.

3.8

Conclusion: Cities, Locational Policies and the New Landscape of Regulation

In the preceding analysis, I have argued that the proliferation of entrepreneurial approaches to urban governance in western European cities – analyzed here under the rubric of urban locational policy – has been closely intertwined with a broader re-differentiation, splintering and rescaling of national state spaces. The concept of the Rescaled Competition State Regime is intended to provide an initial theoretical basis on which to explore the tangled new layerings of state spatiality that have been produced through these conflictual rescaling processes. Within this rescaled configuration of state spatiality, national governments have not simply downscaled or upscaled regulatory power, but have attempted to institutionalise competitive relations between major subnational administrative units as a means to position local and regional economies strategically within supranational (European and global) circuits of capital. In this sense, even in the midst of the wide-ranging rescaling processes that have unsettled traditional, nationally focused regulatory arrangements and institutional forms, national states have attempted to retain control over major subnational political-economic spaces by integrating them within operationally rescaled, but still nationally coordinated, accumulation strategies. I have suggested, in this context, that the contradictions unleashed within RCSRs provide an important impetus for their further political, institutional and geographical evolution, in large part through the production of new scales of state spatial regulation in and through which crisis-management strategies may be mobilised (see also Jones 2000; Jones and Ward 2002). It is in the context of these emergent, increasingly scale-sensitive forms of crisis-management, I believe,


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that the recently observed shift from a “new localism” to a “new regionalism” across western Europe (Deas and Ward 2000) must be understood. The rescaled configurations of state spatiality that have been consolidated during the last two decades have systematically undermined the nationalised forms of social and spatial justice that had been established during the Fordist-Keynesian period in western Europe. This rescaled landscape of market-oriented political regulation has generated new forms of socio-spatial inequality and political conflict that significantly limit the choices available to progressive forces throughout Europe. In the current geo-economic climate, the project of promoting territorial equalisation within national or subnational political units is generally seen as a luxury of a bygone era that can no longer be afforded in an age of globalised capital, lean management and fiscal austerity. Yet, even as these rescaling processes appear to close off some avenues of political regulation and democratic control, they may also establish new possibilities for socio-spatial redistribution and progressive, radical-democratic political mobilisation at other spatial scales. To date, the processes of European integration and eastward enlargement have been dominated by orthodox neoliberal agendas that reinforce and even intensify the entrepreneurial politics of interspatial competition (Agnew 2001). Nonetheless, the supranational institutional arenas associated with the EU may provide a powerful political mechanism through which progressive forces might once again mobilise social and spatial programs designed to alleviate inequality, uneven development and unfettered market competition, this time at a still broader spatial scale than was considered possible during the era of high Fordism (Dunford and Perrons 1994). It remains to be seen whether the contemporary dynamics of state rescaling will continue to be steered towards the perpetuation of neoliberal geographies of uneven spatial development based upon chronic macroeconomic instability, intensifying inequality and social exclusion, or whether – perhaps through the very contradictions and conflicts they unleash – they might be re-channelled to forge a negotiated settlement at a European scale based upon substantive political priorities and new interscalar compromises. At the present time, it appears highly unlikely that RCSRs will successfully establish a new structured coherence for capitalist growth, for they have yet to establish a stabilised framework for territorial governance or interscalar management in any national context. As Peck (2002, p. 357) explains: “These networks of interscalar regulatory relations are more fragile than they may seem at first, being partly designed to mystify and obfuscate the regime’s serial vulnerability to local policy failure and the continuing political culpability of national states.” Because the institutional and scalar framework of European state space is in a period of profound flux, its future can be decided only through ongoing political struggles, at once on local, national and supranational scales, to rework the geographies of regulation and sociopolitical mobilisation. Under these conditions, the spatiality of state power has become the very object and stake of such struggles rather than a mere arena in which they unfold. A major intellectual and political task for state theorists, political sociologists and political geographers in the current era is therefore to develop new theoretical frameworks through which to grasp the intensely

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contested processes of state spatial transformation that have been provoked by such struggles.

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Chapter 4

From Governance to Governance Failure and from Multi-level Governance to Multi-scalar Meta-governance Bob Jessop

Abstract: This chapter reflects on the time-space complexity of governance practices in the current era of post-national statehood. This is illustrated through two contrasting examples: the first is the growing emphasis on the “territorialization of social work”, where rootedness in place is increasingly emphasized (but generates a “territorial trap”); the second is the growing emphasis on the “Europeanization of employment policy”, where the role of the open method of coordination (OMC) is claimed to be an effective response to the clear tensions between national policies and the European-wide perspective (but maintains a “governance gap”). These cases show the high complexity of current governance practices and the high likelihood of governance failure. This brings the author to advocate the “multi-scalar meta-governance” perspective, in which the “governance of governance” as well as the “multi-faceted spatiality of governance” are at stake. However, this should not be misunderstood as another plea for “rational management” at a higher level. Instead, the author poses the principles of reflexivity, flexibility and irony as the basic premises of such an approach.

Keywords: Multi-scalar meta-governance, employment policy, Europe, territorial trap, open method of coordination

4.1

Introduction

The basic problem of governance can be summarised in four general statements. First, all activities are grounded in particular places and times; second, activities are not reducible to their coordinates in space and time but have other material and discursive dimensions that contribute to their specificity as potential objects of

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governance; third, the conditions for successful performance of activities nonetheless exceed these times and places; and, fourth, the repercussions of activities, successful or not, spread out in space and time. Because one cannot govern all aspects of this potentially infinite set of features, governance poses the problem of complexity reduction, i.e., of identifying a subset of features of relevant activities that are sufficiently governable to enable relatively successful steering of the current conditions of existence, the substantive activities themselves (including their location and timing), and at least some of their short-term repercussions. This entails a paradoxical dialectic between the ‘governance of complexity’ and ‘complexity of governance’ and requires a solution based on a combination of requisite variety in the means of governance, requisite reflexivity in the reduction of complexity, and the desirability of romantic public irony (Jessop 1997a, 2003, see also below). An important aspect of this argument is that, whereas requisite reflexivity mainly concerns the capacity of the agents of governance to reflect on the course of governance relative to its intended outcomes, requisite variety mainly concerns the modes, instruments, and objects of governance. Thus effective governance requires a rough correspondence among modes, subjects, mechanisms, and objects of governance. So, after some general reflections on governance and governance failure I ask whether different policy sectors require different modes of governance and, if so, how this can be reconciled, if at all, to the neo-liberal bias towards market-based solutions to many problems. I then consider the implications of these remarks for the spatial dimensions of governance, with special reference to territory, place, scale, and network. In this context I consider issues of metagovernance and multi-level governance in relation to different policy sectors. I also suggest that multi-level governance is more complex than many of its advocates and critics have argued and that it is better redefined as multi-scalar meta-governance.

4.2

Preliminary Remarks on Governance, Governmentality, and Meta-governance

Governance involves the coordination of natural and social relations characterised by complex, reciprocal interdependence. Four main forms are generally identified for the social world: market exchange, hierarchical coordination, deliberative networking, and unconditional solidarity. There are also sub-types within each and hybrid forms that combine two or more of the main mechanisms. A sound analysis of governance should cover five crucial issues: modes of governance, agents of governance, subjects of governance, objects of governance, and aims of governance. Yet theoretical studies of governance tend to neglect the subjectivities of the direct agents of governance (the governors) and their subjects (the governed) in favour of concern with the mechanisms of coordination. In addition, empirical studies often deal only partially, at best, with the interconnections between these

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mechanisms and the other four issues. Work on governmentality is better here because it directly addresses subjectivation (assujetissement or subject formation), modes of calculation, the production of knowledge and knowledgeable subjects, and, notably, the potential for subjective resistance to attempts at governance. Another problem area in governance studies concerns the specificity of the objects and aims of governance and the extent to which different modes of governance may succeed in governing these objects and realising the stated and/or implicit objectives. While there is certainly a substantial body of work on market and state failure, less has been written on network failure and little on the limits of solidarity. This weakness is especially important when increasing reliance is placed on one mode of governance (or governmentality) as an all-purpose solution to governance problems, a clear tendency in radical neo-liberal regimes. Interestingly, governmentality studies are less well-equipped theoretically to address this problem because they tend to treat governmentality as constituting the objects as well as subjects of governance and make the normalisation of subjects and/or their self-disciplining the criterion of success. However, while objects of governance are rarely, if ever, fully constituted prior to efforts to govern them, governance nonetheless operates on pre-existing material, social, and discursive relations and helps to co-constitute them. It would be foolish to believe that governance and/or governmentality operate on a tabula rasa and in vacuo. It follows that some modes of governance/governmentality are more suited to governing some objects than others and, indeed, that this explains both the continued plurality of modes of coordination and the tendencies to failure associated with radical breaks in modes of governance of specific objects of governance. A good illustration of such constraints is provided in Kitschelt’s study of the changing fit between the particular governance mechanisms suited to the leading industrial sectors associated with different Kondratieff waves and the capacity of national varieties of capitalism (with their individual, path-dependent modes of economic and political governance) to assume and/or maintain a leading role in different waves of economic development (Kitschelt 1991). Castells makes a similar, but less nuanced, argument that, whereas the industrial mode of development could be realised under both statist and capitalist modes of production, informationalism, which is based on the reflexive application of knowledge to knowledge production, is incompatible with statism in so far as it depends on networked governance rather than hierarchical command (Castells 2000). The same sort of argument may well hold for particular policy sectors (see later chapters in this volume and editorial conclusions). In short, depending on the objects of governance, some forms of governance are more appropriate than others. Thus exchange is a formal and procedural means to secure the efficient allocation of scarce resources to competing ends under defined conditions (which are not always present), command is a substantive and goal-oriented mechanism for securing given collective goals, dialogue is a reflexive and procedural mechanism to secure negotiated consent about interdependent goals, and solidarity involves an unreflexive substantive commitment to provide support. The ideal typical examples of each mechanism are the market, state, network, and love respectively. While some studies treat expertise as a separate

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mode of governance, I regard it as a strategic resource based on socially proven technique, skill, knowledge, or insight that can be deployed in different ways in different modes of governance. It can be purchased on the market as required through contracts; deployed in a permanent advisory or professional capacity in states or other formal organisations, enrolled as one stakeholder among others in interactive networks; or mobilised voluntarily as required, including unconditionally in times of crisis or need. By analogy with Gramsci’s remark on intellectuals, everyone is an expert, but not everyone has the function of an expert (Gramsci 1971, p. 9, Q12§3). The distinguishing feature of the latter’s expertise is a relative monopoly on intelligence regarding a specific realm of theoretical, applied, or policy-relevant knowledge. This relative monopoly may be based on successful branding (e.g., management gurus), formal credentials (e.g., established professions), privileged access to critical knowledge resources (e.g., experts as brokers), or socially validated accumulated experience. Thus the key question becomes the conditions under which expertise is recognised and relied upon, in what respect, within which governance mechanisms, and to what ends (cf. Rose 1993; Willke 2006; Ziman 2002). We should also note that this raises questions about the governance of expertise as well as about governance mediated through expertise; and that there is now increasing interest in ‘lay expertise’ as a counterweight to socially validated expertise, especially in the field of deliberative governance (cf. Callon 1999; Felt and Wynne 2007; Myskja 2007; Willke 2006).

4.3

Territory, Place, Scale, and Network

Space is the ‘umbrella concept’ for analysing socio-spatial relations in all their rich diversity. In addition to its natural conditions of possibility and associated barriers and affordances, social space comprises the socially produced grids and horizons of social life. As such it offers a whole series of strategically selective possibilities to develop social relations that stretch over the various dimensions of natural and social space, including time-space distantiation and/or compression. Of most interest here are four dimensions, moments, or aspects of socio-spatiality: territory, place, scale, and network (cf. Jessop et al. 2008). Territory in its widest sense is a bordered, bounded, or enclosed space based on the construction of an inside/outside divide and for which a natural, social, or virtual border and its ‘outside’ have crucial constitutive roles. Political territory is a special case in so far as the relevant frontiers, boundaries, or border regions are established, policed, and defended by political authority. Place is a more or less bounded site of face-to-face relationships among individuals or other forms of direct interaction among relevant social forces. As such, it will be more or less extensive depending on whether direct interactions require the co-presence of specific individuals or can be mediated through representatives. Its boundaries serve to contain and connect: they provide a strategically selective social and institutional setting for direct interactions and also structure possible connections beyond that place to other places and spaces over various scales. The naming,


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delimitation, and meaning of places are always contested and changeable and the coordinates of any given physical space can be connected to a multiplicity of places with different identities, spatio-temporal boundaries, and social significance. The scalar division of labour refers to the allocation of different tasks or functions to different scales within a vertical hierarchy of scales – as opposed to the spatial division of labour whereby the same tasks or functions are divided among different places on the same spatial scale. Many such scalar hierarchies exist and they create the possibilities of ‘scale-making’ and ‘scale jumping’ (or switching) to provide more favourable chances to secure the ideal and/or material interests of given forces. This is related to scale dominance, i.e., ‘the power which organisations at certain spatial scales are able to exercise over organisations at other, higher or lower scales’ (Collinge 1999, p. 568). In contrast, nodal scales are non-dominant in the overall hierarchy of scales but nonetheless serve as the primary loci for the delivery of certain activities in a given spatio-temporal order or matrix (Collinge 1999, p. 569). Using these distinctions, we can explore how the relationship between dominant and nodal scales changes over time and/or varies across different scalar divisions of labour. One issue of particular significance for this volume is the relative loss of dominance of the national scale in state policy compared with the typical post-war pattern and its implications for the politics of interscalar articulation and rescaling in the contemporary world (cf. Jessop 2002). This ‘relativisation of scale’ is crucial when addressing the ‘gap’ between the local and global in policy-making. Networks involve interconnections among nodes in a transversal topological system. Position and centrality within a network confers advantages and disadvantages, the distribution of which defines an asymmetrical force field (cf. Neal 2008). Networks may cross territorial boundaries, connect places, jump scales, link natural, social, and cyber-space, and, indeed, comprise networks of networks. Their capacity to connect these socio-spatial forms implies that they are distinct from each of them and may develop their own substantive network dynamics in a complex ecology of networks (cf. Baecker 2006; Taylor 2007; Neal 2008; Willke 2006).

4.4

The Territorialisation of Social Work

Building on these distinctions, I now re-specify the implications of my four prefatory statements in relation to territory and the territorial trap in sectoral policies. Much of the discussion of the territorial aspects of governance is plagued by the ‘chaotic’ nature of concepts such as territory and territorialisation. To see what is involved in territorial governance, we must distinguish three analytically different (but typically interrelated) aspects of the territorial. These are the territorial per se, the territorially conditioned, and the territorially relevant. The territorial refers directly to natural, social, or virtual territorial properties as immediate objects of analysis (cf. Lukes 1994, in the terrestrial, territorial, and telematic). The territorially conditioned refers to those aspects of other immediate

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objects of analysis that are shaped by the territorial properties of other objects of analysis. And the territorially relevant refers to the repercussions or implications of the immediate object of analysis for other objects of analysis. Note that these distinctions are analytical and, indeed, that, depending how we define the object of analysis, the classification of properties as territorial, territorially conditioned, or territorially relevant will change. Yet it matters for governance purposes whether the object (the set of relations between social forces, mediated directly or indirectly through territory) that is being governed is seen as directly territorial, territorially conditioned, or territorially relevant and, a fortiori, how efforts at governance connect with attempts to govern other sets of social relations. To illustrate these conceptual and practical problems, I refer to a 2003 conference on the territorialisation of social work (proceedings were later published as Kessl and Otto 2004, 2007). The theme was topical for two reasons: first, social work (especially in the German context of Sozialpädagogik rather than Anglo-American ‘social work’) has been increasingly re-oriented towards places as the sites, stakes, and generators of social work problems and solutions; and, second, individuals or families are no longer regarded as the primary sources of the problems with which social work deals. Thus it became important to ask how social work practices were being transformed through its (re-)territorialisation. Yet careful attention to the assembled experts’ arguments showed that territorialisation could mean very different things. First, there was the ‘territorialisation’ of the aetiology (causation, generation) of “social problems”. For some participants, social problems are essentially territorial problems and must be tackled as such; for others, they have a directly territorial dimension but are not essentially territorial in character; for yet others, they are territorially conditioned or mediated but their effective causation is not itself territorial; and, for others, social problems are neither territorial nor significantly territorially conditioned but that they have territorial effects. Depending on these interpretations, it was variously held that: (a) social problems will be solved by territorial change; (b) social problems will be partly solved by territorial change; (c) social problems will be partly solved by changing environments; and (d) solving social problems will help to solve territorial problems. These debates are reflected in attempts to ‘territorialise’ social work practices and social work policy-making. Regarding the former, quite varied initiatives have been pursued with the intention of re-siting social work practices (e.g., one-stop shops, neighbourhood offices, multi-disciplinary teams working on different aspects of the same set of territorial or territorially-conditioned problems). Other initiatives introduce a new spatial division of labour into social work practices (e.g., a greater focus on localised delivery in multi-disciplinary teams) and/or a new scalar division of labour (e.g., greater focus on tackling problems at the “right” scale even if this means multiplying points or sites of intervention). There are analogous changes in social work policy-making, with a greater emphasis on bringing this closer to the sites (locales, places) where the problems are generated and/or territorially conditioned and/or where the territorial implications of new social work practices can be monitored more effectively. This is linked in turn to new spatial and scalar divisions of labour in social work policy-making – raising, in


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turn, new problems about multi-level, multi-scalar coordination and metagovernance. These changes seem wide-ranging and may be related to the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism and its associated relativisation of scale. More specifically, the golden age of Fordism and its Keynesian Welfare National State saw a strong emphasis on the homogenisation of space (with such homogeneity either assumed or, in its absence, targeted in order to reduce spatial as well as economic and social inequalities). This was associated with the dominance of the national scale in economic and social policy-making. Nonetheless, the urban scale was nodal (in Collinge’s terms) in social work delivery and practice, if not social work policy-making. But this did not mean that problems were seen as essentially territorial – merely that social work policies had to be delivered in specific places. Following the crisis of Fordism and the Keynesian Welfare National State, there has been a (re-)discovery of the heterogeneity of place, a relativisation of scale, and a multiplication of nodal scales for delivering economic and social policy. This is also associated with a greater recognition of the essentially territorial nature of various economic and social problems and the need to address their territorial dimensions more directly. For social work, this is reflected in the remarkable extent to which social problems are re-interpreted as territorial, territorially conditioned, and territorially relevant. More specifically, social problems have been construed as caused by place-specific ecologies and/or mediated by place-specific ecologies. It is also claimed that solving social problems will ‘improve’ places and thereby other place-conditioned or mediated social relations and dynamics. It is further argued that social work will be more effective if, first, it is refocused on places (e.g., multi-agency co-ordination focused on specific quarters, etc.) and, second, if there is a new spatial division of labour (differentiated micro-management of social problems rather than nationally scaled uniform approaches). Finally, it is argued that social work will be more effective if there is a new scalar division of labour (if the right scalar fix is found to deal with each aspect of the aetiology and resolution of social problems). In pursuing such territorialised policies, however, it is essential that the importance of local social work delivery is not mistaken for a mono-scalar aetiology, leading to the mutual insulation or isolation of different sites (locales or places) in their individual ‘silos’ at the expense of broader ecological, economic, political, social, and other processes – whether these operate elsewhere on the same scale but in equivalent places, on other scales, or across scales. At a minimum this indicates the need for cooperation among units on the same scale; more importantly, it indicates the need to cooperate across scales and spaces in complex forms of interscalar articulation, creating opportunities for scale jumping to produce more effective social policies, and, in general, addressing the ‘glocal’ character of economic and social issues. This is especially important given the uneven distribution of problems and resources. For attempting to resolve local issues through purely local mobilisation using purely local resources is a good recipe for failure because local issues are conditioned by extra-local causes, require cooperation across local boundaries and across different scales, require commitment of resources from regional, national, and even trans- or supra-national governments

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and non-governmental agencies, and must take account of the extra-local impact of local action. This implies that the objects of social work cannot be defined as purely local even if they are best tackled locally. There is a complex dialectic here between at least two different but related sets of policy environment: (a) local “civil society” qua site of social problems vs. its supra-local social environment; and (b) local “civil society” qua site of social problems vs. its non-social local environment (the local economy, the local political system, the local education system, religious institutions, etc.). The first distinction is premised on the idea that, whatever the vagaries and contingencies of social development on a global scale, it might be possible to endogenise and control at least some conditions bearing upon local social problems. At stake here is how the boundaries of place or locale are discursively constructed and materialised. The second distinction refers to the means-ends relations involved in attempts to develop local strategies and concerns the range of activities that need to be co-ordinated to realise a given strategy to resolve social problems. Analogous arguments apply, of course, to local economic or other problems (see Jessop 1997b). Another set of issues concerns the governance of complexity. Both the supralocal social environment and the extra-social local environment are more complex than local actors can understand (especially in real time) and both will always involve a more complex web of causality than they could ever control (since adequate control would require that local social actors command diverse means of influencing the interaction of causal mechanisms over time and space corresponding to the complexity of those mechanisms). Thus we must direct attention to the role of the spatial and scalar imaginaries, narratives and/or discourses in demarcating a local (territorially specific, territorially rooted) space with an imagined community of interests in solving social problems from the seamless web of a changing global-regional-national-local nexus. There is no reason, of course, why this space should coincide with a given political territory or administrative unit. Nor is there any a priori reason why the temporalities of social problems should coincide with cycles or rhythms related to localised forms of government and governance or with their over-determination by outside forces. Thus we must also consider the specific practices, if any, that tend to transform this into a real space amenable to regulation and/or governance concerned to realise these common interests over a given time horizon. This will typically involve organising local governance and social work practices that extend beyond local government.

4.5

The Europeanisation of Employment Policy

The re-territorialisation of social work illustrates the downward re-scaling of state policies following the crises of Fordism and the Keynesian welfare national state. It also demonstrates its limits in so far as the local is not a self-contained bubble in natural and social space-time but has multiple connections with other places by


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virtue of its differential insertion into spatial and scalar divisions of labour, different kinds of networks, and ties of solidarity. Recent changes in employment policy involve important measures of localisation too but they also illustrate the upward re-scaling of state policies as part of the transformation of the European Union from an intergovernmental framework suited to Fordist expansion to an emerging post-national regime adapted to the pursuit of competitiveness in the post-Fordist, globalising knowledge-based economy (Jessop 2002, 2006). This transition involves new modes of economic and social policy governance that focus on promoting competitiveness in increasingly open economies by intervening on the supply side; on reducing the costs of the welfare state considered as a cost of international production, and enhancing the employability of labour power; on making and implementing relevant economic and social policies at several scales rather than primarily through the national scale as the dominant scale within a scalar division of economic and social policy making and delivery; and on partnership and networking as the preferred means to compensate for market failures. The post-national development of employment policy is a good example of the rescaling of sectoral policies upwards as well as downwards and it also shows that the territorial trap cannot be removed simply by upwards re-scaling. The EU’s overall economic policy has been reoriented towards a Schumpeterian strategy from an earlier period when it was more suited to Atlantic Fordism. The primary form of this transition is neo-liberal but it is flanked, as we shall see, by neo-corporatist, neo-statist, and neo-communitarian policies. In particular the European Monetary Union has established a new ‘gold standard’, requiring conformity to relatively rigid norms of economic and political conduct favourable to a liberal (money) conception of economic stability and growth. In particular compliance with the Maastricht criteria has required public spending cuts or constraints, social security and welfare reforms, and more or less significant privatisation of state-owned enterprises and commercialisation of public services. This in turn has reinforced state concern to promote competitiveness, innovation, and enterprise in line with Schumpeterian perspectives as well as with a more Ricardian approach to cost-reduction, especially in regard to labour-power. One of the earliest signs of this reorientation can be found in the European Commission’s White Paper on Growth, Competitiveness, Employment (European Commission 1993). In the field of labour market policy, for example, it called for a broad ‘advanced training offensive’ and other measures to enhance labour market flexibility. This reorientation was taken further at the 1994 EU summit in Essen, when it was finally recognised that effective employment policies conducted exclusively at the national level can no longer be successfully managed under the conditions of globalisation and European integration (Hoffman and Hoffman 1998). The Treaty of Amsterdam finally embedded a commitment to full employment as a ‘matter of common concern’ for the EU, translated this into the goal of reaching a ‘high level of employment’ without undermining competitiveness, and established an Employment Committee to discuss appropriate policy in this area and to monitor progress. In line with the European Union penchant for ‘meta-governance’ rather than direct top-down intervention, however, the Community’s responsibility in this area is to complement the activities of member states by developing a ‘coordinated strategy’, to formulate

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common guidelines, to establish benchmarks and ‘best practice’, and to monitor the pursuit of national action plans for employment. And the Lisbon Summit in 2000 committed the European Council to a 10-year strategy to make the EU the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world whilst promoting sustainable development and the European social model (with its opposition to social exclusion). A very interesting development in this area is, of course, the resurgence of corporatism in a new guise – social pacts oriented to wage restraint, social security reform, supply-side competitiveness, and general conformity to the logic of the new monetary system. Emerging practice in this area reveals both the extent to which the workfarist reorientation of social policy has penetrated to the EU level and also how far it is linked with expansion of the domain of the ‘economic’ into areas previously regarded as non-economic. For the first time, the breadth of the EU labour market guidelines has forced the ministries of economy, culture, finance, welfare and labour to present a joint plan and link their separate policies. This can be interpreted as the extension of the logic of commodification or, at least, of capitalist economic calculation into the wider society. This is also a good illustration of the changing scales of economic and social policy and changing definitions of the economic and extra-economic environments (or social and non-social environments) in the current period of restructuring. Such pressures are also incremental, building up ratchet-fashion, with each successive cycle of national employment pacts. On the one hand, some welfare policies (such as equal pay, equal opportunities, portable welfare benefits, minimum standards for health and security at work, and rules on working hours) have been gradually re-scaled to the EU level to supplement the more traditional nationally-scaled welfare measures; and some structural policies have also been re-scaled at a European level to facilitate industrial restructuring, compensate for uneven regional development, support agriculture, and help to regenerate declining communities. On the other hand, the emergence of social policy at the European level tends to assume a workfare rather than welfare orientation. In short, there is a growing mix of welfare and workfare strategies at the European level; but they are unified around the concern to create the conditions for an effective single market in post-Fordist rather than Fordist conditions. Third, almost by definition, European economic and social policy illustrates the post-national nature of the emerging welfare regimes. But this is part of a more complex internationalisation of economic and social policy. Its policies are evolving within a broader framework of growing involvement in agenda-setting and policy-making by international institutions, supranational apparatuses, intergovernmental organisations and forums, transnational think tanks, and transnational interest groups and social movements. This development, mediated through an increasingly dense web of parallel power networks, reflects the increased formation of a transnational capitalist class concerned to secure the conditions for capital accumulation on a global scale. This is associated with a ‘new constitutionalism’ (Gill 1995, 1998, 2001), i.e., an attempt to establish a new articulation between the economic and the political on a global rather than merely national scale. But it is


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also associated with attempts to re-articulate the relationship between the economic and the extra-economic conditions for capital accumulation in a globalising, knowledge-based economy. The European Union has a key role in this new constitutional settlement. Unsurprisingly, therefore, its still emerging character as a political arena-entity is subject to pressures from well beyond its borders (especially from the USA); and it is also becoming involved in international forums on various scales to re-stabilise the conditions for economic growth and stability in the wake of the crisis of the primacy of the national scale in the postwar ‘embedded liberal’ international settlement. At the same time the tendential Europeanisation of economic and social policy is also closely linked, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, to the increased role of subnational and crossnational agencies, territorial and/or functional in form, in its formulation and implementation. In this regard there is an interesting scalar division of labour between the EU, national states, and sub-national tiers of government. For, whereas national states retain significant powers in the traditional spheres of the sovereign state (military, police) and in welfare policy (where the limited EU budget blocks a major role in general social redistribution even if it acquired this competence), the EU has acquired increasing influence over economic policy. Fourth, the EU has developed an increasingly wide and deep array of both governance and meta-governance capacities that enable it to influence economic and social policy in most areas and on most scales. Four specific features of the EU give it special influence here: the role of judges and litigation (which enables the EU to override national laws and to ‘constitutionalise’ the treaties), its location at the heart of information flows (which gives it a relative monopoly in organisational intelligence), and fiscal poverty (which limits its vulnerability to claims on public spending and thereby circumscribes the political agenda) (Sbragia 2000); and the increasing adoption of European projects and guidelines which entitle the EU to monitor national and regional state activities and partnerships across an increasingly interconnected set of policy areas – thereby giving a means to steer national policy and endow it with greater coherence. The distinctive form of meta-governance in the EU, which invalidates attempts to judge its role in terms of traditional criteria associated with the sovereign national state, is reflected in the development of the ‘open method of coordination’ (hereafter OMC), which has become a key operating principle of the European Union since the Lisbon Summit in 2000. Although the term is new, its practices are not. Thus EU institutions typically operate less in the manner of a re-scaled, supranational sovereign state apparatus than as a nodal point in an extensive web of meta-governance operations. They have a central role in orchestrating economic and social policy in and across many different scales of action involving a wide range of official, quasi-official, private economic and civil interests (i.e., a supranational sovereign state). This still leaves scope for different national or regional interpretations of flexibility and employability – ranging from (a) the neo-liberal model promoted by Thatcherism and retained under New Labour through (b) the neo-statist model found in France until the recent election of Sarkozy, who is more neo-liberal minded, to (c) more neo-corporatist patterns associated with the Scandinavian and other Rhenish economies. The European

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Employment Strategy is a particularly good example of this approach insofar as it leaves scope for national or regional interpretations of flexibility and employability but ensures a common strategic direction through benchmarking, deliberation, and multi-level measures to reinforce policy coordination. In this context, the European Union can be seen as a major and, indeed, ever more important, supranational instance of governance for a wide range of complex and interrelated problems. While the sources and reach of these problems go well beyond the territorial space occupied by its member states, the EU is a crucial, if complex, point of intersection (or node) in the emerging, hyper-complex, and chaotic system of global governance (or, better, meta-governance) and is trying to develop its own long-term ‘Grand Strategy’ for Europe. But it is still one node among several within this emerging system of global meta-governance and cannot be fully understood without taking account of its complex relations with other nodes located above, below, and transversal to the European Union. Thus we can best describe this new system in terms of ‘multi-scalar meta-governance in the shadow of hierarchy’ (or, more precisely, ‘in the shadow of post-national statehood’). This can be contrasted to the usual stories of a rescaling of the traditional form of sovereign statehood or a revamping of the inter-governmentalism inherited from earlier integration rounds. As an institutionalised form of multilevel meta-governance, the emphasis is on efforts at continuing ‘collibration’ in a changing equilibrium of compromise rather than on systematic, consistent resort to a single method of coordination to deal with a fixed pattern of complex interdependence. Effective collibration depends in turn on ‘super-vision’ and ‘supervision’, i.e., a relative monopoly of organised intelligence combined with overall monitoring of agreed governance procedures (Willke 1996). There are also see repeated rounds of meta-constitutional dialogue (Walker 2000, pp. 17–21) about the overall design of the Europolity as well as increasing resort and expansion of comitology, social dialogue, public–private partnerships, mobilisation of non-governmental organisations and social movements, etc., as integral elements in attempts to guide European integration and steer European Union policy-making and implementation (Scott and Trubek 2002).

4.6

Governance Failure, Meta-governance, and Meta-governance Failure

This volume starts from the possibilities of territorial traps and governance gaps. The editors have identified two forms of governance failure in relation to its territorial dimension. The first is an overemphasis on the local territorial grounding and/or genesis of the problems that need to be governed. Thus attempts at governance remain trapped at the local level to the neglect of the extra-local conditions of existence of the relevant locality, the extra-local sources of problems, the extra-local resources and forces that need to be mobilised for a relatively successful response, and the extra-local repercussions of local failure


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(or, indeed, success – e.g., ‘Nimbyism’ serves to displace and defer problems beyond the local here and now). The second form of failure involves overemphasis on the ‘global’ (in the sense of some more encompassing rather than truly planetary) context of local problems. This leads to failure to address the specifically local and immediate roots of the problems to be addressed as well as the need to mobilise local resources, engage and empower local actors, and deal with specific local conditions. These two sources of failure certainly exist as my remarks on the territorialisation of social work and the Europeanisation of employment policy indicate. But the trap identified by the editors is more complex than this because there are more dimensions to socio-spatiality than they appear to recognise in this context and, in addition, the sources and forms of governance failure are also more complex. I now turn to more general problems of governance failure on the assumption that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ mode of governance (i.e., mode of coordination of complex reciprocal interdependence) and that each mode of governance has its own strategically selective advantages and disadvantages, strengths and weaknesses, and distinctive modes of failure. This is evident in cases such as market (and market failure), hierarchical coordination (e.g., through the state and its tendencies towards state – or, more generally, organisational – failure), heterarchic coordination (e.g., networks and network failure), or solidarity (e.g., social capital and its crisis). This in turn highlights the importance of meta-governance. Given the general possibility that market coordination (through the invisible hand), hierarchical coordination (through the iron fist, perhaps in a velvet glove), reflexive self-organisation (visible and invisible handshakes), and solidarity (helping hands) may fail, we can identify three more specific factors behind governance failure. First, it may fail because of over-simplification of the conditions of action and/or deficient knowledge about causal connections affecting the object of governance. This is especially problematic when this object is an inherently anarchic but complex system, such as the capitalism. Indeed, this leads to the more general ‘governability’ problem, i.e., the question of whether the object of governance could ever be manageable, even with adequate knowledge (Mayntz 1993). At best one is likely to find partially successful governance of delimited objects of governance within specific spatial and temporal horizons of action – at the expense of deliberately neglected or unrecognised costs elsewhere. Second, there may be coordination problems on one or more of the interpersonal, inter-organisational, and inter-systemic levels on which market forces, organisations, and networks operate. These three levels are often related in complex ways. For example, local labour markets often work through informal, interpersonal contacts – hence the importance, for Granovetter (1973), of weak ties; but such contacts can also operate as forms of economic and social exclusion. Likewise, while transaction cost considerations may lead to strong inter-organisational linkages, these are often pursued at the expense of flexibility in the face of new economic challenges. Third, where several heterarchic arrangements exist to deal with interdependent issues, significant meta-coordination problems can arise due to inconsistent definitions of the objects of governance, different spatial and

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temporal horizons of action, and their association with different interests and balances of force. There are at least two levels of governance or coordination failure – the failure of particular attempts at coordination using a particular coordination mechanism and the more general failure of one or other mode of governance. Failure is a routine feature of everyday life. Nonetheless, the multiplicity of satisfying criteria and the range and variety of actors with potential vested interests in one or another outcome means that at least some aims will be realised to a socially acceptable degree for at least some of those affected. Unsurprisingly, actors will also reflect on their failures, adjust their projects, and consider whether individual modes of coordination should be modified and/or a new balance should be struck between them. This can be discussed in terms of ‘meta-governance’, i.e., the organisation of the conditions for coordination. Four basic modes of meta-governance and one umbrella mode can be distinguished (the following discussion amplifies my earlier work in which only three basic modes were identified). First, ‘meta-exchange’ involves the reflexive redesign of individual markets (e.g., for land, labour, money, commodities, knowledge – or parts or subdivisions thereof) and/or the reflexive reordering of relations among two or more markets by modifying their operation and articulation. Market agents often resort to market redesign in response to failure and/or hire the services of those who claim some expertise in this field. Among the latter are management gurus, management consultants, human relations experts, corporate lawyers, and accountants. More generally, there has long been interest in issues of the institutional redesign of the market mechanism, the nesting and articulation of markets, their embedding in non-market mechanisms, and the conditions for the maximum formal rationality of market forces. There are also ‘markets in markets’. This can lead to ‘regime shopping’, competitive ‘races to the bottom’, or, in certain conditions, ‘races to the top’. Moreover, because markets function in the shadow of hierarchy and/or heterarchy, non-market agents may try to modify markets, their institutional supports, and their agents to improve their efficiency and/or compensate for market failures and inadequacies. Neo-liberal regime change involves meta-governance oriented to ‘metamarkets’. It is crucially concerned not only with market-building but also with securing the conditions for the operation of markets. In this respect it comprises: (a) de-regulation; (b) liberalisation; (c) privatisation; (d) introduction of market proxies into the residual state sector; (e) internationalisation; and (f) direct tax cuts to widen the scope for market-oriented decisions on the part of market agents. Even in its less radical form, i.e., neo-liberal policy adjustments within an otherwise neo-corporatist, neo-statist, or neo-communitarian context, neo-liberalism still depends on this form of market-oriented meta-governance – but can be seen to involve the more general form of meta-governance (collibration) too (see below). A second form of meta-governance is ‘meta-organisation’. This involves the reflexive redesign of organisations, the creation of intermediating organisations, the reordering of inter-organisational relations, and the management of organisational ecologies (i.e., the organisation of the conditions of organisational evolution in conditions where many organisations co-exist, compete, cooperate,


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and co-evolve). Reflexive managers in the private, public, and third sectors may undertake such meta-organisational functions themselves (e.g., through ‘macromanagement’ and organisational innovation) and/or turn to alleged experts such as constitutional lawyers, public choice economists, theorists of public administration, think tanks, advocates of reflexive planning, specialists in policy evaluation, etc. This is reflected in the continuing redesign, re-scaling, and adaptation of the state apparatus, sometimes more ruptural, sometimes more continuous, and the manner in which it is embedded within the wider political system. The case study of territorialisation of social work in the above illustrates meta-organisation insofar as it involves the redesign of delivery mechanisms. Third, ‘meta-heterarchy’ involves the organisation of the conditions of selforganisation by redefining the framework for reflexive self-organisation, for example through various measures to promote improved forms of interpersonal networking and inter-organisational negotiation or through institutional innovations to promote more effective inter-systemic communication. The OMC adopted in the Europeanisation of employment policy is a good illustration. Fourth, ‘meta-solidarity’ involves the promotion of opportunities for ‘spontaneous sociability’ (Fukuyama 1995) and other measures to enhance solidarity at all levels, from neighbourhood and work-place to cosmopolitan humanitarianism. Policies to build ‘social capital’ as part of the neo-communitarian flanking and supporting measures mobilised to sustain the radical neo-liberal project are a good illustration of this form of meta-coordination. Fifth, ‘meta-governance’ re-articulates and ‘collibrates’ (modifies the balance) among different modes of governance by managing the complexity, plurality, and tangled hierarchies found in prevailing modes of coordination (on collibration, see Dunsire 1996). It involves the judicious mixing of market, hierarchy, and networks to achieve the best possible outcomes from the viewpoint of those engaged in meta-governance. In deciding this, they often refer to the structurally inscribed strategic selectivity of different modes of coordination, i.e., their asymmetrical privileging of some outcomes over others. Since every practice is prone to failure, however, meta-governance and collibration are also likely to fail. There is no Archimedean point that ensures the success of governance or collibration. Moreover, if there is no Archimedean point, then one cannot escape the territorial trap by rescaling governance up to a point where all relevant factors come under some form of ‘supervisory’ control (both ‘omni-competent supervision’ and ‘omniscient super-vision’); nor can one escape the problem of ‘free-floating, ungrounded’ governance by coming down to the point where all relevant factors intersect and their intersection can be controlled through punctual, precise, timely interventions, regardless of how complex, multi-scalar, and multi-temporal the nexus of causes might be once it is followed away from this point of intersection. We should also note that meta-governance does not eliminate other modes of coordination. Markets, hierarchies, and heterarchies still exist; but they operate in a context of ‘negotiated decision-making’. On the one hand, market competition will be balanced by cooperation, the invisible hand will be combined with a visible handshake. On the other hand, the state is no longer the sovereign authority. It becomes just one participant among others in the pluralistic guidance

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system and contributes its own distinctive resources to the negotiation process. As the range of networks, partnerships, and other models of economic and political governance expand, official apparatuses remain at best first among equals. For, although public money and law would still be important in underpinning the operation of such networks, partnerships, and analogous governance arrangements, other resources (such as private money, knowledge, or expertise) would also be critical to their success. The state’s involvement would become less hierarchical, less centralised and less directive in character. The exchange of information and moral suasion become key sources of legitimation and the state’s influence depends as much on its role as a prime source and mediator of collective intelligence as on its command over economic resources or legitimate coercion (Willke 1992, 1996). Resort to meta-governance does not guarantee success. It is certainly not a purely technical matter that can be settled by experts in organisational design or public administration. Indeed, we can safely assume that, if every mode of governance fails, then so will meta-governance! This is especially likely where the objects of governance and meta-governance are complicated and interconnected. For, once the inevitable incompleteness of attempts at coordination (whether through the market, the state, or heterarchy) is accepted, commitment to social transformation requires adopting a satisfying (instead of an optimising) approach based on three interrelated principles: • A reflexive orientation about what would be an acceptable outcome in the case of incomplete success, comparing the effects of failure/inadequacies in the market, government, and governance, and re-assessing regularly the extent to which current actions are producing desired outcomes. • Deliberate cultivation of a flexible repertoire of responses so that strategies and tactics can be combined in order to reduce the likelihood of failure and to change their respective weights in the face of failure and turbulence in the policy environment. • Romantic public ‘irony’ such that participants in governance recognise the likelihood of failure but still proceed as if success were possible. This is needed not only for individual attempts at governance using individual governance mechanisms but also for the practice of meta-governance. The OMC is one such form of meta-governance insofar as it has instituted permanent reflection about the nature of problems in a changing world and the monitoring of different approaches to coordination; insofar as it involves a flexible repertoire of responses that can be deployed on different scales, with different dominant and nodal scales for different sets of problems, and is oriented to intertemporal as well as interscalar articulation; and insofar as it not only originated in the recognition that previous forms of European coordination (notably supranational government and intergovernmental coordination) had failed but also in the desire to develop a persuasive narrative that the OMC, at least, was worth trying. This does not mean that the OMC is an unqualified success, as an extensive literature demonstrates; but we should not believe that there is another mode of


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coordination that is guaranteed to work because it has the capacity for selfcorrection in the face of failure. If there is one certain lesson from governance studies, it is that multilevel government, multilevel governance, and multilevel meta-governance arrangements will all have their own distinctive strategic selectivities, i.e., they are never neutral among actors, interests, spatio-temporal horizons, alliances, strategies, tactics, etc. They also have their own distinctive modalities of success, failure, tension, crisis, reflexivity, and crisis-management. These selectivities and modalities depend on specific institutional, organisational, and practical contexts and few generalisations are possible about them. Nonetheless, one important generalisation is that it is wishful thinking to believe that creating meta-governance will not solve old problems without creating new ones (cf. Mayntz 2001).

4.7

Conclusions

I have introduced some concepts for addressing the territorial policy trap that arises from tendencies towards excessively place-centric or extra- or supra-local policy perspectives in local government policies. I have also illustrated some key issues from two contrasting examples: the growing ‘territorialisation of social work’, where rootedness in place is increasingly emphasised (but produces a type 1 ‘territorial policy trap’ through excessive localism); and the increasing ‘Europeanisation of employment policy’, where the OMC is heralded as an effective response to the tensions between the rootedness of local responses (and the contingent problems of local idiocy and/or egoism) and abstract, disconnected EU-wide (or even OECD-led) solutions that fail to address important local specificities (the type 2 trap). This book’s central theme is how to govern places in a world that is globalising and localising at the same time. I have argued that it is subject to more complex forms of socio-spatial restructuring than are captured in terms of this binary movement. Other changes include: (a) the trends towards the de-nationalisation of statehood, shift from government to governance, and growing internationalisation of policy regimes and their associated counter-trends of state efforts to guide interscalar articulation, to engage in meta-governance, and to advance national interests in the design and implementation of international regimes (Jessop 2002); (b) the emergence of new scalar hierarchies and the relativisation of scale (Collinge 1999; Jessop 2002); and (c) the increasing importance of social networks that cross local, regional, national, and supranational frontiers and also link different scales transversally (Cooke and Morgan 1993; Matellart 2000; Messner 1997; Neal 2008; Willke 2006). Since these changes also impact places, the governance of place is correspondingly more problematic too. Accordingly I have argued that the resulting problems posed are best resolved through ‘multi-scalar meta-governance’ that recognises the limits of action on any one scale, given the multiple and tangled nature of relevant scales of action, and the limits of relying on any one

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mode of governance. This new concept reflects the fact that governance arrangements that are concerned to govern problems that have a hyper-complex sociospatial positioning in and across territories, places, scales, and networks must themselves exhibit complex forms of spatiality, capacities to address de- and re-territorialisation and border-crossing, place-binding and disembedding rescaling and scale switching, and network creation, stabilisation, and dissolution. In addition to these socio-spatial dimensions of governance, there is also the question of the capacity to engage in different forms of meta-coordination and, above all, metagovernance or ‘collibration’, i.e., the capacity to alter the relative balance among different modes of coordination. Even this is insufficient, however, to guarantee effective governance. For all forms of governance (including the complex multi-scalar forms indicated here) are prone to failure. Addressing failure calls for new forms of flexibility, reflexivity, and irony to produce conditions for a continuing renewal of efforts at effective governance, including the capacity to learn from previous failures. Thus three important operational features of multi-scalar meta-governance are requisite variety, requisite reflexivity, and romantic public irony. The importance of requisite variety is illustrated by the limits of a radical neo-liberalism that prioritises market solutions and fails to provide essential flanking and supporting mechanisms. The increasing turn to such mechanisms in neo-liberal regimes reinforces this point. Requisite reflexivity is also important and the OMC is an interesting example of how this principle has been judged essential to the operations of a multi-scalar meta-governance regime such as the European Union – itself part of even more complex forms of multi-scalar meta-governance. More generally, this highlights the need for appropriate levels of reflexivity, super-vision, and supervision in governance practices (cf. Willke 1996, 2006). The hardest condition to achieve for effective meta-governance is an ironic, experimental approach that relies on collective intelligence to overcome tendencies towards scepticism, cynicism, opportunism, and spin. This requires overcoming the growing democratic deficit in policy-making and the recognition of lay expertise as an important input into the meta-governance processes.

References Baecker, D. (2006). Network society. In N. O. Lehmann, L. Qvortup and B. K. Walter (Eds.), The concept of the network society: post-ontological reflections. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur. Callon, M. (1999). The role of lay people in the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Science, Technology & Society, 4, 81–94. Castells, M. (2000). The rise of the network society, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Collinge, C. J. (1999). Self-organization of society by scale. Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 17, 557–574. Cooke, P. and Morgan, K. (1993). The network paradigm: new departures in corporate and regional development. Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 11, 543–564.


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Dunsire, A. (1996). Tipping the balance: autopoiesis and governance. Administration & Society, 28, 229–334. European Commission (1993). Growth, competitiveness, employment: the challenges and ways forward into the 21st century – white paper. Brussels: CEC. Felt, U. and Wynne, B. (2007). Science and governance: taking European knowledge society seriously. Brussels: CEC. Fukuyama, F. (1995). Trust: the social virtues and the creation of prosperity. New York: Free Press. Gill, S. (1995). Globalisation, market civilisation, and disciplinary neoliberalism. Millennium, 24, 399–424. Gill, S. (1998). New constitutionalism, democratisation and global political economy. Global Change, Peace & Security, 10(1), 23–38. Gill, G. S. (2001). Constitutionalising capital: EMU and disciplinary neo-liberalism. In A. Bieler and A. D. Morton (Eds.), Social Forces in the Making of the New Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 47–69. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (Q. Hoare and G. Smith, Trans.). In Hoare, Q. and Smith G. (Eds.), State and civil society. (pp. 211–276). New York: International Publishers. Granovetter, M. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78, 1360–1380. Hoffman, J. and Hoffman, R. (1998). Globalization – risks and opportunities for European labor policy. In D. Dettke (Ed.), The challenge of globalization for Germany’s social democracy (pp. 113–135). Oxford: Berghahn. Jessop, B. (1997a). The governance of complexity and the complexity of governance. In A. Amin and J. Hausner (Eds.), Beyond Markets and Hierarchy (pp. 111–147). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Jessop, B. (1997b). A neo-Gramscian approach to the regulation of urban regimes. In M. Lauria (Ed.), Reconstructing urban regime theory (pp. 51–73). London: Sage. Jessop, B. (2002). The future of the capitalist state. Cambridge: Polity. Jessop, B. (2003). Governance and meta-governance. On reflexivity, requisite variety, and requisite irony. In H. Bang (Ed.), Governance as social and political communication (pp. 101–116). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jessop, B. (2006). State- and regulation-theoretical perspectives on the European Union and the failure of the Lisbon Agenda. Competition & Change, 10, 145–165. Jessop, B., Brenner, N. and Jones, M. R. (2008). Theorizing socio-spatial relations. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29(3), 389–401. Kessl, F. and Otto, H.-U. (Eds.) (2004). Soziale Arbeit und Soziales Kapital. Zur Kritik lokaler Gemeinschaftlichkeit. Opladen: Leske+Budrich. Kessl, F. and Otto, H.-U. (Eds.) (2007). Territorialisierung des Sozialen. Regieren über soziale Nahräume. Leverkusen: Leske+Budrich. Kitschelt, H. (1991). Industrial governance structures, innovation strategies, and the case of Japan: sectoral or cross-national comparative analysis? International Organization, 45, 453–493. Lukes, T. W. (1994). Placing power/siting space: the politics of global and local in the New World Order. Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 12(5), 613–628. Matellart, A. (2000). Networking the World 1794–2000. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Mayntz, R. (1993). Governing failures and the problem of governability. In J. Kooiman (Ed.), Modern governance: new government–society interactions (pp. 9–20). London: Sage. Mayntz, R. (2001). Zur Selektivität der steuerungstheoretischen Perspektive. Köln: Max Planck Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung. Working Paper 01/2. http://www.mpi-fg-koeln.mpg. de/pu/workpap/wp01-2/wp01-2.html, last accessed 24.05.2007. Messner, D. (1997). The network society. London: Cass. Myskja, B. K. (2007). Lay expertise: why involve the public in biobank governance? Genomics, Society and Policy, 3, 1–16. Neal, Z. (2008). The duality of world cities and firms: comparing networks, hierarchies, and inequalities in the global economy. Global Networks, 8, 94–115.

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Rose, N. (1993). Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism. Economy & Society, 22, 283–299. Sbragia, A. M. (2000). The European Union as coxswain: governance by steering. In J. Pierre (Ed.), Debating governance: authority, steering, and democracy (pp. 219–240). Oxford: OUP. Scott, J. and Trubek, D. (2002). Mind the gap: law and new approaches to governance in the European Union. European Law Journal, 8, 1–18. Taylor, P. J. (2007). Problematizing city/state relations: towards a geohistorical understanding of contemporary globalization Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 32, 133–150. Walker, N. (2000). Flexibility within a Metaconstitutional Frame: Reflexions on the Future of Legal Authority. In G. de Burca and J. Scott (Eds.), Constitutional Change in the EU: from Uniformity to Flexibility? (pp. 9–30). Oxford: Hart. Willke, H. (1992). Ironie des Staates. Grundlinien einer Staatstheorie polyzentrischer Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Willke, H. (1996). Supervision des Staates. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Willke, H. (2006). Smart governance. Frankfurt: Campus. Ziman, J. M. (2002). In whom can we trust? European Review, 11, 67–76.

Chapter 5

Querying the Queue: A Review of the Literature on the Management of Borders and Migration in the European Union Roos Pijpers

Abstract: This chapter presents a review of a recently published body of thematic literature. The aim of this literature is to excavate a more generally expressed discontent with the widely observed contradiction between the supposed greater openness of the EU’s internal borders and the strengthening of external border controls. This formulation, however appropriate, to some extent underexposes the geopolitical motives and implications at stake. In particular, two claims stand out here. The first is that the line between the state and the non-state in regulating migration issues is rather thin. Without de facto rejecting the influence of market actors in migrant control and selection, many contributors to the current debate abundantly describe and criticise the market-inspired managerial features of European migration policy. The second claim is that, spatially, these policy practices translate into a conception of the borders of the EU as networked power instruments used to control security risks and the risks posed by flexible capitalism. In reviewing the arguments that sustain these claims, it is found that the management of borders and migration in the EU entails many aspects of governmentality and territoriality that, together, are expressed in the metaphor of the ‘queue’, literally a waiting line in a waiting space. Keywords: EU-borders, migration, governmentality, territoriality, queues The more exhaustively fair is the procedure for determining eligibility, the more understandably restless is the queue. (Crowley 2005, p. 153) In recent decades, borders have changed marginally in Western Europe, dramatically and completely in Central and Eastern Europe. Mobile or immobile, individuals are the human face of these macro-shifts of power and cartography. (Favell and Hansen 2002, p. 583)

_________________________ Roos Pijpers (,) Department of Human Geography, Radboud University of Nijmegen, PO Box 9108, NL-6500 HK, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] 101 B. Arts et al. (eds.), The Disoriented State: Shifts in Governmentality, Territoriality and Governance, 101–120. © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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5.1

Introduction

This chapter presents a review of the recent literature on borders and migration in the European Union. The past decade has witnessed a strong academic interest in migration in a Europe-wide context, initiated by closely related globalisation and security discourses and further intensified by the EU’s recent eastward expansion. Legal experts, for example, have expressed their concern about the modes of and limits to the control of European social space for migration and mobility by the EU and its Member States, as well as the dynamics of territorial inclusion and exclusion raised by policy practice (Thränhardt and Miles 1995; den Boer 1995, 2002; Foucher 1998; Kostakopoulou 2000; Verstraete 2001; Jileva 2002; Mitsilegas 2002; Amato 2002; Pastore 2002; Bigo 1998, 2005; Guild 2005a, b; Guild and Bigo 2002; Bigo and Guild 2005). In general, this literature points to a fundamental ‘contradiction between greater openness of internal borders and the reinforcement of controls at the external borders’ (Foucher 1998, p. 242). The internal borders of the EU have disappeared only to reappear for ‘aliens’: ‘freedom of mobility for some could only be made possible through the organised exclusion of others forced to move around as illegal aliens, migrants, or refugees’ (Verstraete 2001, p. 29). Transitional restrictions with regard to the free movement of labour imposed upon citizens of new Member States are disapproved of as well: the EU is reproached for obliging new Member States to adopt the Schengen regime and its visa directives, thereby at the same time creating new divides in Central-Eastern Europe, and ‘second-class’ EU citizens (who are not free to move for work purposes) (Jileva 2002). The discontent with the various legal fields of tension complicating the harmonisation of migration policy, however appropriate, to some extent underexposes its geopolitical motives and implications. It has been argued, for example, that celebrations of ‘global nomadism’, free mobility and moral equality for nationals and non-nationals alike do not keep pace with policy practices of entry and control unfolding ‘on the ground’ (Jordan and Düvell 2003; Favell and Hansen 2002; Peixoto 2002; Brown 2002; Anderson and Bort 2001; Foucher 1998; Samers 2004; Walters 2002, 2004). In particular, two claims stand out here. The first is that the line between the state and the non-state in regulating migration issues is rather thin. Although the influence of market actors in migrant control and selection is not de facto rejected, the current literature abundantly describes and criticises the market-inspired managerial features of European migration policy (Walters and Haahr 2005). The second claim is that spatially, these policy practices translate into a conception of the borders of the EU as networked power instruments used to control security risks and the risks posed by flexible capitalism at the same time (Mitchell 2001; Sassen 1996). In reviewing the literature that sustains these claims, I argue in this chapter that the management of borders and migration in the EU entails aspects of governmentality and territoriality that, together, find expression in the metaphor of the ‘queue’, literally a waiting line in a waiting space (Crowley 2005).

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I begin the chapter by briefly recapitulating the main leitmotifs of the various narratives of European migration policy. Sections 2.3 and 2.4 provide an in-depth discussion of the respective aspects of governmentality and territoriality identified in these policy narratives by the recent literature. Subsequently, Section 2.5 aligns the macro-politics of leitmotifs to the micro-politics of queues: the metaphor of the ‘queue’ serves to summarise the institutional and geographical loci discussed in the previous sections. I conclude the chapter by defining a research agenda wherein the border is not only a critical metaphor, but indeed a theoretical lens relevant to the study of contemporary migration into and within the EU. In order to illustrate or deepen the argumentation, I weave into the text observations with regard to the specific case of labour migration from new Member States to the Netherlands.

5.2

Leitmotifs of the Narratives of European Migration Policy

At the time of writing, the ratification process of the European Constitution has stagnated, largely as a result of the 2005 French and Dutch referenda ‘No’ votes. For the time being, this stagnation has uncertain consequences for the transfer of migration policy issues to the supranational level. In the draft text of the Constitution, the abolition of the ‘pillar structure’, created by the Treaty of Maastricht, was foreseen. At present, EU policy-making is divided into three main areas or pillars. In each of these pillars, a different balance is struck between supranational and intergovernmental policy principles. The treaties of Amsterdam and Nice catalysed the transfer of migration-related issues from the third – or intergovernmental – pillar to the first, or community pillar (Kostakopoulou 2000; Moraes 2003; Amato 2002). In the draft Constitution text, a further harmonisation of measures in the field of immigration and asylum, the rights of third-country nationals, external border controls and visas was laid down (Europese Conventie 2003). This transfer (which for debatable reasons is often referred to as the ‘Europeanisation’ of migration policy) involves a number of parallel narratives, interconnected by definition yet each emphasising other aspects of European migration and asylum policy, namely global economic competition, border management, undocumented migration, and security issues. These narratives are elaborated in physically and thematically distinct centres of policy-making (normally the Directorates General) within the EC, the most important of which are the Internal Market and Services DG, Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities DG, Justice, Freedom and Security DG, Enlargement DG and External Relations DG. At the peril of oversimplifying the complexities of European migration policy (yet for the purposes of this chapter, without grievous loss of precision), the narratives are summarised under the headings of, first, Internal Market policy and, second, external border management. Through the construction of an Internal Market (as arranged under the auspices of the first pillar), the EC aims to create a cohesive, internally borderless economic

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space furnished to compete with the United States, Japan and – increasingly – Southeast Asia’s large, rapidly developing economies. In accordance with neoliberal market ideology as well as neoclassical economic theory, to this end institutional barriers to the flows of capital, labour, goods and services between Member States are slowly but surely brought down. However, in a series of documents reporting the progress of Internal Market policy, the Commission expresses its concern about major delays with regard to the flexibility of crossnational and cross-regional labour markets (EC 2001, 2002a, 2004b). Only a very small share of the EU’s working population takes advantage of the opportunity to accept a job in another Member State with a minimum of bureaucratic obstacles.1 Forthcoming action plans and strategies to encourage occupational and geographical mobility on the Internal Market express a trust in the attraction of skilled, mobile workers from outside the EU (EC 2002a, 2003a, e). However, the case for a European economic migration policy is most explicitly formulated in the green paper On an EU approach to managing economic migration. This paper aims to instigate an EU-wide discussion about the actual degree of harmonisation to strive for (EC 2004e): … the need for a European strategic initiative is strengthened by the fact that, in its absence, migration flows are more likely to be able to bypass national rules and legislation. As a consequence, in the absence of common criteria for the admission of economic migrants, the number of third country citizens entering the EU illegally and without any guarantee of having a declared job – and thus of integrating in our societies – will grow. (EC 2004e, p. 4)

The abolition of internal borders for factors of production (the ‘four freedoms’) and above all for labour mobility was accompanied by the strengthening of the external borders of the EU. Implemented by the Justice, Freedom and Security DG, the Schengen regime facilitates movement across the national borders within the Internal Market, while at the same time containing and guarding this economic space by means of external border management. Over time, Schengen has become strongly associated (if not synonymous) with the external border of the EU: its principal goals are the coordination of visa, work and residence regulations for non-EU citizens as well as the creation of a common asylum policy. The external border narrative (managed through Schengen) develops within the realm of the intergovernmental third pillar (Police and Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters), which targets drug trafficking, trafficking in human beings and organised crime. External border management is concerned with migration issues particularly in the sphere of illegal migration from non-EU states (or ‘third countries’). The emphasis in the present policy proposals regarding illegal migration is on return: readmission agreements and other cooperation efforts on the part of third countries are leveraged by means of financial and technical assistance and, in very specific cases, economic development incentives (EC 2002b, c, 2003d).

_________________________ 1 Yet, at the same time, the right to freedom of labour for employees from the new Member States, many of whom wish to be mobile, has been put on hold by the national governments of some ‘old’ Member States until 2011 at the latest.


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Finally, timely concerns over internal security have strongly tied external border management and justice and home affairs in general to the EU’s second pillar, Common Foreign and Security Policy, which aims to create an area of freedom, security and justice. Some say that the extent to which this integration takes place implies that European migration policy is ‘securitising’, and that similarly discursive, migrants are being ‘criminalised’ (Huysmans 1995, 2000; Bigo 1998, 2001; Kostakopoulou 2000).

5.3

Aspects of Governmentality: The Managerial Migration State

5.3.1 Spheres of Governance in ‘Patchwork Europe’ Hence, the deepened economic and political integration of the EU over the past decade and a half, laid down in the respective treaties of Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice, has contributed to important insides and outsides for various forms of migration. ‘If there are as many Europes as pillars, this makes the task of defining frontiers very difficult,’ Didier Bigo writes in reference to the somewhat floating position of the Justice, Freedom and Security DG within the pillar structure (Bigo 1998, p. 152; see also Moraes 2003). This lack of clarity, however, is illustrative of the variety of distinct spaces or spheres of governance produced through the complex institutionalisation of policy-making within the EU. Hudson (2005), in an article appropriately entitled ‘One Europe or many?’, elaborates on a number of these ‘political-economic conceptions of Europe’ (p. 414). The neoliberal underpinnings of the European Internal Market, for instance, are in sharp contrast to the highly protectionist nature of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The Internal Market produces another ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ than the European regional policy, which reaches beyond the external border through its concern with crossborder Euroregions and their governance, or than the Euro zone (Hudson 2000; Walters 2002; Smith 1996). In a similar vein, Christiansen and Jørgensen (2000) call these spaces ‘Monetary Europe’, ‘Trade Europe’, ‘Defence Europe’ and ‘Passport Europe’, according to the governance domain of reference. Monica den Boer even speaks of ‘patchwork Europe’ in this respect (2002, p. 147). What catches the eye here is that this reading of the contrasting policy narratives, namely focusing on governance, differs from the one proclaimed by the legal experts who emphasise the uneven assignment of rights and imposition of duties. The difference in readings reflects divergent analytical views of statehood. In political philosophical thinking, the notion of statehood is traditionally equated with territorial sovereignty (Crowley 2005). The sovereign has the exclusive authority to enact laws on its territory, as well as the moral responsibility to ensure that these laws are just. When laws are obeyed, hence when people submit to the sovereign, sovereignty is exercised and the state is strengthened (Foucault 1991; Crowley 2005; Walters and Haahr 2005). This means that the ultimate end of sovereignty is sovereignty itself. However, in his seminal work, Michel Foucault

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challenges this circularity, arguing that statehood carries with it a certain sensitivity to tactics, to the ‘arrangement of things’ (Foucault 1991). Authority can also be maintained by opening up the black box that is the inside of the state (Walters and Haahr 2005). The territorial interpretation of legal statehood is to some extent eroded by what Foucault calls ‘governmentality’: When states negotiate with powerful corporate interests, conduct public-health campaigns using advertising techniques, and use various technical market-based instruments to steer the economy, they are not acting as ‘sovereign’ in any useful sense of the word. Yet much of what contemporary states routinely do is, precisely, either non-authoritative or nonlegal, or both. This was the point of Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’, which he counterposed to legal statehood, and resurfaces under a different guise, but with similar analytical implications, in the currently fashionable notion of ‘governance’. (Crowley 2005, pp. 146–147)

Over time, population has become an effective means with which to arrange things, to achieve specific ends. Indeed, the primacy of population appears in the various spheres of governance that make up ‘patchwork Europe’. The adjectives ‘monetary’ and ‘trade’ allude to economic steering, and ‘defence’ to police, military and security apparatuses. ‘Passport Europe’ suggests that ‘to those in political power, the control of territory now seems less important than the control of those who claim the right to move about within it’ (Foucher 1998, pp. 237–238). In many ways, therefore, the governmental state is also, and perhaps above all a managerial state (Crowley 2005). Indeed, the term ‘population management’ has been coined to appropriately term the ultimate end of government (Foucault 1991; Foucher 1998; Walters 2002). According to Foucault (1991), such management techniques as health care campaigns, public schooling and migration regulation, which target the increase of welfare of the native population, inevitably embody practices of discipline and control. The governmentalisation of Europe (Walters and Haahr 2005) therefore evolves through the application of power technologies. In the case of migration regulation, as will be shown later on, these technologies reify at various territorial scales.

5.3.2 Market Versus Politics: The Limits to State Migration Control The global economic and political developments in the second half of the 20th century pose challenges to the regulation of migration by national states. These multifaceted challenges are eloquently summarised by Jordan and Düvell, who argue that ‘new forms of global economic nomadism have outstripped the capacities of national migration management to adapt to the requirements of international capitalism’ (2003, p. 87). In their view, ‘global nomads’ are pushed forward by ongoing worldwide economic restructuring and at the same time are driven towards the neoliberal collaborative projects currently being undertaken in the EU and elsewhere. Simultaneously, flexible labour demand is soaring, particularly in the high-skilled and low-skilled segments of national labour


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markets (Menz 2002; Peixoto 2002). Since migrant labourers are generally more flexible than native workers, the demand for their labour all but ceases (Sassen 1988, 1996; Jordan et al. 2003a). In this global migration order with its obvious connections to post-Fordist flexible manufacturing, business outsourcing and business lobby, the state must continuously redevelop regulation for labour migration. As a consequence, according to Jessop, a ‘hollowing out of the state’ is likely to occur (1994, p. 264). Hollowing out implies that the governing power of the national state lessens to the benefit and growth of supranational regimes, paving the way for the resurgence of regional and local governance. Also, translocal linkages emerge between governments at various spatial scales (Jessop 1994). For the specific case of European migration policy, this hypothesis is implicitly contradicted by Virginie Guiraudon, who argues that although indeed a ‘denationalisation of migration control’ is taking place, this does not necessarily mean that the state incurs a loss of authority (2000, 2001). The Member States cope with a growing dependency on the decisions of the European Court of Justice, and with an increased obligation to answer to supranational representative bodies such as the European Parliament. Having in many individual cases overruled state verdicts to deny access to would-be migrants or to expel asylumseekers, these institutions have encouraged decision-making actors at the national level to seek new partners in order to retain dominantly restrictive migration policies. ‘Transnational cooperation in the fields of immigration and asylum is increasingly taking on the characteristics of a multilevel governance regime’ through the entry on stage of these partners (Guiraudon 2001, p. 37). For currently in the EU, migration control shifts up, down and out in a fashion that has been called ‘venue shopping’ (Guiraudon 2000, 2001; Lahav 2000). When venue shopping, the state searches for alternative institutional loci to take over governmental and managerial functions. Shifting up refers to the incorporation into policy frameworks of third countries (countries of origin and transit; compare Jessop’s translocal linkages). Under the auspices of return or readmission agreements, third countries are urged to readmit people (Guiraudon 2001). Also, customs agents are stationed at major transport hubs in these countries (Samers 2004), and information films specifically made to discourage migration are distributed among their native resident population. These latter ways of seeking the assistance of third countries have been referred to as ‘remote control’ (Zolberg 2003; Samers 2004). Responsibilities in terms of migration control are being shifted down as well, that is, they are being transferred to the subnational level. This concerns, for example, family reunification (in casu the prevention of bogus marriages) and the access by not legally residing immigrants to the welfare state. Also, local governments may be contracted to manage migration detention centres (Guiraudon 2001). Comparative research on the implementation of national migration policies in Greece, the UK, Italy and Germany has pointed out that the involved local administrators act as border guards, handling requests for work and residence permit as well as legalisation and insurance issues (Jordan et al. 2003a, b). Balancing between an economic demand for flexible labour and nationalist desires to protect native workers, these migration managers have considerable discretionary

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power. Accounting for significant differences in implementation styles,2 immigrants generally are the ‘weak users’ of these administrative systems. Important considerations about difficult cases are made under great time pressure, tasks are prioritised, and practices of improvisation and favouritism are widespread (Jordan et al. 2003a). In short, the translation of policy imperatives ‘into a bureaucratically streamlined algorithm’ creates inequalities between applicant migrants, regardless of their eligibility for the requested privileges (Crowley 2005, p. 155). These findings suggest that the functions of police forces and welfare agencies may converge when migration control is shifted down (Jordan et al. 2003a). Thirdly, through shifting out, non-state actors emerge in migration control processes. This relates to, for example, the de facto transfer of authority to transport carriers, agreed upon at the European level, and to the development that individual employers in the Member States are increasingly being held responsible for the presence of illegal migrant labour at the workplace (Guiraudon 2001; Lahav 2000). Shifting out may imply that returns to capital are realised by the participating non-state actors. In her case study of the Belgian seaport of Zeebrugge, Verstraete (2001) reports about companies that specialise and invest in, and indeed gain from the production of technological devices that detect the presence of stowaways. What is more, however, the current rent-seeking on the part of private firms in the EU also creates openings in dominantly restrictive policies. In the Netherlands, private labour market intermediaries circumvent the formally restrictive labour migration policies towards citizens of new Member States. These intermediaries have an impressive stock of knowledge about legal procedures and the building of migrant recruitment networks in both the Netherlands and the home countries and regions. The freedom of services in the Internal Market has been another outstanding example of rent-seeking ever since the remarkable decision made by the European Court of Justice back in 1990 ‘which explicitly permitted the posting of workers from low-wage Portugal within this framework of the provision of services’ (Menz 2002, p. 727; italics in original). The controversies over the ‘Bolkestein directive’, which formulates ways to further liberalise services in the Internal Market (EC 2004a), largely focus on the expected, supposedly massive arrival of cheap labour from new Member States. Yet, the directive’s opponents overlook the many consultancy and legal firms that are already advising hiring firms about how to bypass restrictions on the freedom of labour precisely through freedom of services.

_________________________ 2 Greek and British officials use their discretionary power in order to comply with business demands. The Greek pursuit of competitiveness coincides with a strong ethnic and class conception of nationhood, wherein discretion is open to discrimination and the cultivation of personal networks. In the UK, a strong emphasis on recruitment for the sake of global competitive advantage to some extent conceals actual discrimination. In Italy, migration management takes place within the realm of order maintenance, and is less concerned with business demands. Discretion in Germany, finally, is exercised in favour of the protection of native workers. The German administrative practices are perceived as relatively structured and regulated, and therefore potentially less adaptable to external circumstances (Jordan et al. 2003b).


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It is against the backdrop of these and similar examples, which clearly provide support for the hollowing out thesis, that the idea has been raised to rethink the role of non-state actors in academic discussions highlighting the governance of migration in a European context: Scholarly reflection on these issues, however, has not kept pace with developments on the ground. Driven by a normative attentiveness to the negative and exclusionary aspects of both current governmental policies and hostile public opinion …. (Favell and Hansen 2002, p. 581)

Developments on the ground are the reason that policy makers and policy implementers, who are struggling to meet populist anti-immigration sentiments, are unable to prevent large inflows of migrants who perform unskilled seasonal labour and increasingly also skilled work in various segments of the labour market. The legal justice debate, which was touched upon in the introductory section, to some extent ignores the market, swiftly becoming a co-author of the European migration scenario (Favell and Hansen 2002). Moreover, some contributors to this debate run the risk of unjustly basing their arguments on the assumption that migration flows are ‘one-directional, permanent and irreversible’ (Jileva 2002, p. 697). Venue shopping may encourage migrants to employ trial and error, hence to try first what they see as the most beneficial recruitment channels, implementation practices or travel routes within or into the Member States, and to try elsewhere and otherwise if the preferred strategy fails (see also Peixoto 2002). Rent-seeking may allow migrants to circulate between home and the country or countries of destination. Favell and Hansen (2002) argue that, by explicitly allowing market actors into migration selection processes, the EU and its Member States may create new opportunities for migration, whilst at the same time transferring to others governing authority over entry decisions. Thus, it can be ascertained that the governmentality of migration in the EU currently qualifies as multilevel, denationalised and managerial, implying yet different realities of inclusion and exclusion than those created by official policy language. Whereas the idea behind venue shopping is to diffuse and rescale a dominantly restrictive, controlling approach to migration, rent-seeking by nonstate actors can lead to new opportunities and indeed enabling strategies of entry that largely bypass or creatively use existing policy frameworks.

5.4

Aspects of Territoriality: Managing the Space of the Border

5.4.1 Risk Management Through Spatial Containment and Networked Spatiality Notwithstanding these multifaceted dynamics, there has been an almost positivist desire to appropriately name, term and label the allegedly static nature of the EU’s external border and the social space this border contains. Immigration and asylum issues have been used as a lens for this naming development, largely instigated by

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political and public debates. The two best-known concepts reflect a confrontation between those who expected the intensity of border controls at the external border of the enlarged EU to become excessive (Europe as a fortress) or insufficient (Europe as a sieve or maze) (Bigo 1998; Brown 2002). In general, academic literature has held a much more nuanced view vis-à-vis both of these extremes, although ‘Maze/Sieve Europe’ seems to attract more consent than ‘Fortress Europe’: controlling borders is so immensely time, money and resource consuming that a fortress-like external boundary is not feasible (Christiansen and Jørgensen 2000; Bigo 1998; Favell and Hansen 2002). At best, the fortress resembles an asymmetrical, neo-medieval empire (Pastore 2002; Zielonka 2001) with characteristically overlapping spheres of governance and concomitant ‘fuzzy borders’ (Christiansen et al. 2000). However, the territorial dimension of the Europeanisation of migration policy has invoked border metaphors that are much richer and much less static. Take for instance the notion of ‘Ban-opticon’, giving a contemporary twist to Foucault’s classic notion of the ‘Panopticon’ – the prison-like form of governmentality by which the modern society controls and disciplines the whole of its population. In the Ban-opticon, a space without equality of all under surveillance, it is not so much ‘the population’ that is managed as ‘the unease with possible harm done to the population’ (Bigo and Guild 2005; Bigo 2005). The identity of those who are thought likely to commit any such ‘next crime’ is traced, filed and distributed. Thus imagining different possible futures, proactive policing and, if needed, preemptive military strike is launched to prevent these next crimes from actually happening (Bigo 2005). This concern with risk management requires particular ways of organising the space of the border (Walters 2004). Reinterpreting a number of classic geopolitical border concepts, William Walters has identified these ways as ‘geostrategies’: Drawing upon historical precedents and examples, geostrategies have the potential to offer a much more nuanced and topographical account of the production of geopolitical space in Europe than do concepts like fuzzy borders or Fortress Europe. (Walters 2004, p. 693)

Of the four geostrategies Walters distinguishes, the first – the ‘limes’, meaning ‘boundary’ – goes all the way back to the 16th century and is now used to refer to the boundary of the Roman Empire, especially that in the north of Europe (Walters 2004; Foucher 1998). It refers to the relatively stable, quasi-permanent frontier that separates an empire-like power from its constitutive outside. In the south, the border of the EU resembles the limes: membership has explicitly been ruled out for the EU’s non-European partners there (see e.g. EC 2003b). The limes is closely related to the second geostrategy identified by Walters: that of the colonial frontier, offering a more discursive interpretation of the EU as an empire and surrounding third countries as its cultural other. Contrary to the limes, the colonial frontier is less fixed and more fluxed, as it is prone to changes in cultural identity and, above all, in the sociocultural features ascribed to identity by those inside. Identity markers, in turn, are inextricably linked to the question where the European enlargement project will eventually end.


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Whereas the limes and the colonial frontier still dominantly express spatial containment as a means to manage risk, the third and fourth geostrategies combined suggest a tendency towards networked spatiality. The geostrategy of the ‘march’ – once a neutral zone separating Roman from enemy powers and awaiting occupation by either one of them – has a ‘very long, historical association with Central and Eastern Europe’, too (Walters 2004, p. 684). Already a buffer zone in the Versailles Treaty, and later during the Cold War, the region comprising the EU’s new Member States (the current candidate countries as well as Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine) now re-emerges as a ‘space in-between’ (p. 684), awaiting candidate membership, full-fledged membership, the application of Schengen and the coming into force of freedom of labour in the Internal Market. What is more, the geopolitical in-betweenness of the countries in East-Central Europe has become institutionalised in the European Neighbourhood Policy (EPN). In its Wider Europe Communication (2003), the EC explores far-reaching ideas with regard to the relations between the EU and nations on its eastern fringe (Russia and the above-mentioned Western Newly Independent States). In the Communication, these countries’ likely ineligibility for EU membership is positively phrased by expressing the aim to construct its ‘near abroad’ (Christiansen et al. 2000) as ‘a zone of prosperity and a friendly neighbourhood – a “ring of friends”’ (EC 2003b, p. 4). The movement of persons is one central element of the EPN. Explicit references are made to the future need for skilled labour due to ageing, globalisation and flexibilisation, conclusive readmission agreements in order to combat illegal and transit migration, and joint cooperation in the fields of human trafficking, organised crime and security matters (EC 2003b). The march can also be found at the micro-political level, namely at international airports and on the territories of municipalities across the Member States. On many occasions, the march here takes the form of fenced zones d’attente located in remote areas where people can do little else but wait. In these ‘spaces of indistinction’, be they refugee camps or migrant detention centres, one awaits transit, access to asylum procedures, the outcome of such procedures, or expulsion and return (see also Guild 2005a). Sometimes, protective national jurisdiction does not apply: these spaces of indistinction have the legal status of an exclave (Walters 2004). These contemporary appearances of the march introduce the fourth geostrategy: the ‘networked (non)border’ (Walters 2004). This concept aims to capture the changing spatiality of border control activities in the EU from physically concentrated at the border to country-internal networks of regulation and cooperation, implying a ‘reconfiguring of the border from a space of lines and edges to one of nodes’ (Walters 2002, p. 577). Interconnected nodes and networks are complementing and even replacing controls enforced at the border proper: national territory is increasingly treated as an extended frontier zone, wherein border guarding is taken over by migration managers (Foucher 1998). Upon entering the Netherlands, for instance, migrants and asylum-seekers access the ‘migration chain’, which is the name of an institutional network consisting of ministries, the immigration and naturalisation services, institutions responsible for the issuance of work permits as well as the aliens police. The immigration and naturalisation

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services within this Dutch chain also partake in the European Migration Network (EMN), a network of national contact points designated by the Member States with the objective to systematically collect and analyse migration data (EC 2005). Other examples of the networked (non)border in the EU are networks of police and security forces that face networks of organised crime and human trafficking in strategic games or even openly fought battles (Walters 2004). In the Netherlands, the recruitment of migrant workers from new Member States by individual employers and private labour market intermediaries, often pursuing quasi-legal border circumvention strategies advised by consultancy and legal firms, are closely followed by the labour inspectorate. When the inspectorate suspects illegal employment as a result of this kind of rent-seeking, it takes the case to court and contends with specialised lawyers who represent the recruiting or employing party. In this way, migration control and indeed the very competence of defining ‘legal foreign employment’ are transferred to the space of the court. This case study also draws attention to the spatiality of ‘labour pools’ (a term used in human resource management): throughout the Netherlands, immigrant workers from new Member States find themselves waiting at campsites, callable whenever and wherever the market requires their input. This, again, is an example of the march.

5.4.2 The Border as an Instrument of Weakening and Disempowerment With the variety of border spaces in the EU thus given conceptual impetus, the border proper emerges as an instrument of risk management. William Walters has pointed out that the Schengen border (meaning the external border created by the Schengen regime that is also to an important extent manifest within the EU) is a useful analytical lens through which to understand this instrumentality. Following a Foucauldian method of genealogy, according to Walters, the present exclusionary appearance of the Schengen border can be deconstructed in three different yet related development trajectories (2002). The first of these entails a classic geopolitical trajectory. The Schengen border clearly has not emerged from the physical confrontations between states that traditional geopolitics builds on for the explanation of border formation. Rather, its geopolitical moment is inscribed in discursive power hierarchies, with power being played out at the negotiating table. More specifically, it is argued here that the securitisation discourse that Schengen has come to represent is historically conditioned by prior processes of demilitarisation and economic integration in Western Europe, which aimed at improving geopolitical and economic security (Walters 2002; Walters and Haahr 2005). The second trajectory is that of the national border, which is inextricably linked to national identity and the protection thereof. Contrary to the debates about EU enlargement, the security discourse constructs third-country nationals rather than third countries as cultural ‘others’, loosely associating illegal migration with crime and terrorism, and crime and terrorism with Islam and non-white (Walters 2002;


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Verstraete 2001). This corresponds to a more common, non-historicised way of explaining the securitisation of European migration policy as the outcome of ‘us versus them’ tensions (Huysmans 1995, 2000; Kostakopoulou 2000). The forthcoming practices of discipline and control bear on the third trajectory, which deconstructs the Schengen border as ‘biopolitical’. The border serves as an instrument of biopower, as ‘a machine with an assortment of technologies, simple and complex, old and new’ (Walters 2002, p. 572). These technologies range from passports, visas, fingerprints and iris scans to the highly controversial bone scans introduced (and then withdrawn) in the Netherlands, by means of which the adulthood of asylum-seekers can be determined – a viable ground to deny access. They can be applied within demarcated nodes of the networked (non)border such as medical examination rooms, but are preferably designed to check identities in ways that do not require legal residents to be touched or impeded (Bigo 2005). Subsequently, immediate pre-emptive action to ban the unidentifiable is taken before it is ‘too late’ and ‘the next crime’ occurs. It is believed that technologies that monitor the future have the ability to control the present (Bigo 2005). Yet, in doing so, it could be argued that they actually help to produce illegal immigration: the insides and outsides created in and by the various European migration policy narratives reify through private capital investments in border technology (Verstraete 2001; Samers 2004). Contemplating the fate of the stowaways detected in Zeebrugge, Verstraete conceptualises the production of the illegal migrant as follows: Once the ‘alien’ is thus translated – objectified – within the parameters of physical science, once s/he is reduced to the generic polar electrical view of a heartbeat, another mode of polarisation comes into view, that of ‘man’ versus animal … Along the way, the stowaway is reproduced along a set of Western cultural relations – man versus animal, the law versus the criminal, technology versus humans, movement versus location – that situate him/her at once inside and outside the capitalist nation, inside and outside European territory. S/he is, in one and the same breath, the target of the gun-shaped LifeGuard, of national security, of police officers, of Europe’s external frontiers, and of global capital investment. (Verstraete 2001, pp. 40–41)

Put differently, the alien’s body is a ‘geographical space for circulating capital’ (Mitchell 2001, p. 51; italics in original). These statements speak to a broader neo-Marxist argument that criticises globalisation and post-Fordist flexibilisation for weakening labour as a key means to create and add value (Comaroff and Comaroff 2002). According to this argument, the traditional workplace – which provides stability in terms of income and entrenchment in local communities – is relocated or closed down. As a consequence, the migrant comes to resemble a zombie, a spectral figure whose speech is impaired due to unfamiliarity with the language of the receiving country, who is pushed away from shrinking national labour markets and pulled towards temporary job openings abroad (Comaroff and Comaroff 2002). Public hostility, illegal employment and the inability to communicate render migrants invisible: they are territorially present but socially absent (Crowley 2005). Their labour degenerates into ghost labour. In such circumstances, the border is a ‘revolving door’ that invites people and pushes them back at the same time (Mitchell 2001).

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However, the invisibility of migrants and migrant labour to some extent problematises the very notion of the border as a line of exclusion: what is absent cannot be excluded (Saybasili 2004). In this view, the border is also a ‘performative space’, in the sense that only the apprehension of illegal migrants who attempt to cross it makes it real (Saybasili 2004, p. 5). In the first post-Wall years, migrant workers from new Member States in the Netherlands personified ghost labour, being subjected to acts of violence with regard to working, payment and housing conditions. These were the heydays of ‘witch hunts’: attempts by the labour inspectorate to catch illegal migrants redhanded while working in the open fields, pursuing people into nearby woods if necessary. Fortunately, today, recruitment and employment practices have improved. Labour migrants from new Member States are now increasingly visible in the Dutch landscape, working, consuming, being driven around by labour market intermediaries. In this respect, one could say that they constitute an almost ideal-type flexible European workforce: mobile, unbound to the employer and eager to return home once enough income has been earned. Hence, settings can change for the better: the border is always ‘a political technology which records the balance of power at a particular time in space’ (Bigo 1998, p. 149; my emphasis). Nevertheless, illegal and quasi-legal employment remains, in this case and in the many other instances of labour migration in the EU. These migrants find themselves trapped in ‘networks of violence’, comprising the workplace, the country of origin and, of course, the border: The border stands as the primary regulator of this system, the primary point of passage in the network of violence that drives migrant … workers underground, and stigmatises them so thoroughly that their labour becomes ever cheaper, ever more pliable. (Mitchell 2001, p. 57)

Although the territoriality of migration in the EU encompasses the whole of geostrategically developed administrative structures discussed above, on a more conceptual level this territoriality exists by virtue of uneven and sometimes physically offensive power relations between all the involved actors, state as well as non-state: migrants, employers, recruiters, human traffickers, migration managers, the labour inspectorate, the aliens police, the border guards. In concluding this section, the border as a revolving door, a performative space and a political technology is not so much a barrier to migration, as an instrument by which risk is managed and capitalism is reproduced (see also Sassen 1988).

5.5

The Macro-politics of Leitmotifs and the Micro-politics of Queues

The lack of progress in the transfer of migration-related issues to the community policy-making level, reflects an uneasy fusion between supranational attempts to foster freedom of movement and national struggles to prevent too great a loss of decisive power. As a consequence, other institutional sites emerge to take over the control of migration when the state has been or is likely to be hollowed out by the


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‘Europeanisation’ of migration policy and the various appearances of global nomadism. Foucault’s memorable observations regarding the management of the population as the ultimate end of government come to mind here: present EU-wide concerns over internal security only reinforce the tendency to exercise discipline and control. This is the governmentality that currently characterises migration in the EU and to which the geopolitical border literature has given various names, most recently ‘the Ban-opticon’. The complex bureaucracies accompanying this governmentality have invoked a renewed attention for the territorial border spaces within which migration policies develop and are implemented. Notions such as the march and the networked (non)border are not new, for zones d’attente, monitoring institutions and welfare agencies concerned with migrants have existed in Western Europe’s managerial states for quite a while. Yet, these are the spaces where the collaborative efforts to achieve a maximum controllability of ‘next crimes’ and of flexible capitalism are now the most overtly and dramatically manifest, justifying their conceptual reuse. As power instruments, borders may discursively produce migrants as illegal migrants and as commodified bodies labouring under substandard conditions or being hunted down by innovations in biotechnology. Drawing the threads together, it could be argued that the aspects of governmentality and territoriality reviewed in this chapter find expression in the metaphor of the ‘queue’ (Crowley 2005). In the literal sense of the word, a queue is a line of people waiting in a waiting space. Migration chains are so complex that those passing through them may spend weeks, months or even years waiting. Final decisions related to the acknowledgement or refusal of a specific status right, and hence about inclusion or exclusion, are amenable to randomness, subjectivity, prejudice, the nature of contacts with migration managers and erratic judgement resulting from the hasty allocation of resources. The management of queues can never be fair to everyone ‘in any but the crudest sense’ (Crowley 2005, p. 154).3 The anticipation of significant time delays may actually discourage otherwise eligible people from applying for work or residence permits and so on. Nontransparent and time consuming procedures to arrange insurance for migrant workers from new Member States in the Netherlands cause enormous frustration among both migrants and recruiting and employing parties. The last few years have seen signs of increased coordination and cooperation between the various institutions (Parliament, Council, Commission, Directorates General) responsible for the production and implementation of European migration policy (Menz 2002; Mitsilegas 2002; Guild and Bigo 2002). Although the mobilisation of the EU’s ‘native’ workforce is still set as the primary goal, the content of the narratives is shifting towards an increased inclusion of third-country nationals in the Internal Market. Here, Justice, Freedom and Security DG becomes

_________________________ 3 ‘Queuing theory’, a subfield in econometrics, studies the mathematics of waiting lines. It constructs mathematic models so as to minimise waiting times, given that the positions of subjects or objects in the queue are arbitrary. Queuing theory has applications foremost in logistics and transport: on a less abstract level, the organisation of labour pools for flexible migrant workers could qualify as an application too.

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a key connecting institution: the two policy areas that are presently in the making (the ‘four freedoms’ area and the area of freedom, security and justice) both rely on the Schengen regime as the main implementation strategy. The endeavours to integrate all migration-related issues into a European policy-making context have certainly blurred the sharply articulated and contrasting leitmotifs of openness versus closure of EU social space as discerned in the Internal Market and external border narratives. Also, EU policies in the fields of services liberalisation and external relations (neighbourhood), as well as private capital, were shown to have a constitutive role to play in the geopolitics behind the contrasting policy narratives. In mid 2004, the EC released a remarkable study on the links between legal and illegal migration, querying: … for the first time at EU level, whether or not legal avenues for the admission of migrants reduce incentives for illegal migration and, more specifically, to what extent policy on legal migration has an impact, first on the flows of illegal migrants and then on cooperation with third countries in fighting against illegal migration. (EC 2004c, p. 3)

In the study, the Commission explores the impact4 of visa policies as well as bilateral labour and readmission agreements between the Member States and third countries on illegal migration. It cautiously concludes that ‘the current limits of the measures in place to manage the existing channels for legal immigration’ are in sight regarding the large number of people illegally working and residing in the EU (EC 2004c, p. 9). Even though the study was carried out within a short period and its results are therefore rather superficial, it can be read as an acknowledgement of the discursive exclusionary potential of prevailing migration policy narratives. Yet, in welcoming this step, it can also be ascertained that the Commission’s argument is founded on two problematic binary distinctions. First, the assumed discrimination between legal and illegal migration ignores the quasi-legal or ‘hybrid’ arrangements (Samers 2003, p. 571) by which state borders or labour market restrictions are circumvented. Particularly since these rent-seeking activities accommodate strong economic demands for flexible labour, a certain degree of hollowing out seems difficult to avoid. The examples quoted on these pages underline the heterogeneity of the actors involved in migrant control and selection, featuring the market indirectly through business pressures, responded to by migration managers, and directly through the interference of rent-seekers (see also Guild 2005b). Second, the Commission unjustly assumes that policy-making ends where policy implementation begins, underestimating the discretionary power of migration managers (Jordan et al. 2003a; Crowley 2005). In addition to the insides and outsides produced by the leitmotifs of the official policy narratives unfolding at the supranational level, the micro-politics of queues are crucial in understanding the management of borders and migration in the EU.

_________________________ 4 According to Sassen, this impact is always likely to have a ‘zero-sum’ character: ‘if a government closes one kind of entry category, recent history shows that numbers will increase in another’ (1996, p. 74).


5.6

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Conclusion

I started this chapter by referring to the long-standing discussion on the legal dimensions of European migration policy and the practices of control and strategic selection associated with it. Without denying the intrinsic importance of closely watching issues of legal equality, it could be argued that overly focused attention on issues of legal justice underexposes the geopolitical motives and implications of this form of European integration. Literature that has taken on and deepened this perspective in recent years was brought together in this chapter under the headings of governmentality and territoriality. The analytical lens of borders has raised a number of powerful metaphors denoting where, that is at what institutional and geographical loci, the European migration scenario is being outlined. As today it seems hardly possible to imagine this scenario without managerial migration states and migration managers, the management of the ‘queue’, of the waiting line in the waiting space, proves a surprisingly functional micro-political bordering instrument to control global economic and security risks. Having reviewed these conceptualisations, some have argued to excavate the geopolitics of migration in the EU even further. Most importantly, pleas are made to rethink ‘the more fundamental labour market dynamics’ underpinning the expectations that the capacities of migration management are ‘outstripped’ or that its ‘current limits’ are in sight (Favell and Hansen 2002, p. 597; Jordan and Düvell 2003; EC 2004c; Peixoto 2002). The issue alluded to in the previous section, namely that common ways to interpret legal and illegal migration and policymaking and implementation should not be taken at face value, can perhaps be more effectively addressed by neoliberal and neo-Marxist theoretical insights (Favell and Hansen 2002; Samers 2003). Within these theoretical frameworks, reflections on migration control and migrant selectivity are approached from the stance that non-state demand actors, hence the market, matter in steering these processes. Whereas neoliberal insights may remind us of some of the more normative objections to borders as barriers hindering mobility, neo-Marxist accounts impress upon us their weakening power. Although refraining from a deterministic political economy of migration, such inquiry ‘must recognize its spectre’ (Samers 2003, p. 575). This in turn would have implications for the analytical tool that is the border. The literature reviewed in this chapter mobilised the border first of all as a metaphor, thereby hoping to impress the exclusionary nature of spatial containment and alternative modes of control lastingly into the memory of its readership.5 In doing so, parts of this literature made a valuable contribution to the critical reading of the dynamics of borders and border spaces. However, the border offers a

_________________________ 5 The EU, too, has embraced the academic study of borders in its Fifth and Sixth Framework Programmes. Mutli-year research projects with appealing names have been/are: EXLINEA (Lines of Exclusion as Arenas of Cooperation), CHALLENGE (Changing Landscape of European Liberty and Security) and EU DIMENSIONS (Local Dimensions of a Wider European Neighbourhood).

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theoretical lens as well. Although the ratification process of the European Constitution was formally halted by just two Member States, reluctance to transfer decision-making authority in general and migration-related issues in particular to the supranational level exists in all Member States. It is desirable that future research inquiring this reluctance should entail ‘a large dose of post-rationality and post-functionalism’ (ibid.). This includes, for instance, the discretionary powers irrationalising policy implementation touched upon in this chapter. It also includes mounting concerns over security and employment issues, despite or thanks to efforts to calculate and assess risks, and perceived threats to national identity. Within border studies, ‘tangible’ institutional and territorial boundaries are theorised as reifications of largely ‘intangible’ processes of discursive differentiation. The phased inclusion of labour migrants from the EU’s newest Member States in the Internal Market, caused by intense fears of mass inflows of cheap labour and fuelling creative border circumvention strategies, constitutes a timely and promising case study to examine through this theoretical lens.

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Jordan, B., Stråth, B. and Triandafyllidou, A. (2003b). Comparing cultures of discretion. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 29(2), 373–395. Kostakopoulou, T. (2000). The “Protective Union”: change and continuity in migration law and policy in post-Amsterdam Europe. Journal of Common Market Studies, 38(3), 497–518. Lahav, G. (2000). The rise of nonstate actors in migration regulation in the United States and Europe: changing the gatekeepers or bringing back the state. In N. Foner, R. Rumbaut and S. Gold (Eds.), Immigration research for a new century (pp. 215–241). New York: Russel Sage Foundations. Menz, G. (2002). Patterns in EU labour immigration policy: national initiatives and european responses. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 28(4), 723–742. Mitchell, D. (2001). The devils arm: points of passage, networks of violence, and the California agricultural landscape. New Formations, 43, 44–86. Mitsilegas, V. (2002). The implementation of the EU Acquis on illegal immigration by the candidate countries of Central and Eastern Europe: challenges and contradictions. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 28(4), 665–682. Moraes, C. (2003). The politics of European Union migration policy. The Political Quarterly, 4(3), 116–121. Pastore, F. (2002). The asymmetrical fortress: the problem of relations between internal and external security policies in the European Union. In M. Anderson and J. Apap. (Eds.), Police and justice co-operation and the new European borders (pp. 59–80). Den Haag: Kluwer. Peixoto, J. (2002). Strong market, weak state: the case of recent foreign immigration in Portugal. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 28(3), 483–497. Thränhardt, D. and Miles, R. (1995). Introduction: European integration, migration and processes of inclusion and exclusion. In R. Miles and D. Thränhardt (Eds.), Migration and European integration (pp. 1–12). London: Pinter. Samers, M. (2003). Invisible capitalism: political economy and the regulation of undocumented immigration in FRANCE. Economy and Society, 32(4), 555–583. Samers, M. (2004). An emerging geopolitics of “illegal” immigration in the European Union. European Journal of Migration and Law, 6, 27–45. Sassen, S. (1988). The mobility of labor and capital: a study in international investment and labor flow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sassen, S. (1996). Losing control? Sovereignty in an age of globalisation. New York, Columbia University Press. Saybasili, N. (2004). Crossing borders. Paper presented at the ABS 2004 European Conference, University of Graz, Graz. Smith, M. (1996). The European Union and a changing Europe: establishing the boundaries of order. Journal of Common Market Studies, 42(1), 5–28. Verstraete, G. (2001). Technological frontiers and the politics of mobilities. New Formations, (43), 26–43. Walters, W. (2002). Mapping Schengenland: denaturalizing the border. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20(5), 561–580. Walters, W. (2004). The frontiers of the European Union: a geostrategic perspective. Geopolitics 9(3), 674–698. Walters, W. and Haahr, J. (2005). Governing Europe: discourse, governmentality and European integration. London: Routledge. Zielonka, J. (2001). How new enlarged borders will reshape the European Union. Journal of Common Market Studies, 39(3), 507–536. Zolberg, A. (2003). The archaeology of “remote control”. In A. Fahrmeir, O. Faron and P. Weil (Eds.), Migration control in the North Atlantic World. The evolution of state practices in Europe and the United States from the French Revolution to the Inter-War Period (pp. 195–222). New York: Bergahn.

Chapter 6

The Territoriality of Spatial-Economic Governance in Historical Perspective: The Case of The Netherlands Arnoud Lagendijk and Frans Boekema

Abstract: This chapter explores how shifts in governmentality and the rise of new forms of governance in the field of regional innovation policies have impacted upon perspectives on territoriality and practices of territorialisation. The debate centres on two dominant perspectives, both endorsed by neo-liberal thinking: (1) territories as ‘containers’ for national and international state bodies to execute innovation policies ‘at a distance’, and (2) territories as spatial entities that need to be well plugged into a broader space economy. These visions come with different understanding of the role territories play as a more or less autonomous agents. Against this background, a long-term historical analysis is made of the shifts in the position of the ‘province’ in Dutch policy-making. The results show the transformation of provinces from proactive, semi-autonomous substates to regionalised policy arms (container-like) of the central state. Subsequently, the analysis zooms in onto the recent impact of neoliberal trends in policy-making. While rhetorically a shift was produced towards ‘regions on their own strength’, in reality a highly convoluted territorial ‘gestalt’ has emerged, which continues to be strongly dominated by national policy practices. Keywords: Governmentality, regional innovation policy, regionalisation, The Netherlands, neoliberalisation

_________________________ Arnoud Lagendijk (,) Department of Spatial Planning, Radboud University of Nijmegen, PO Box 9108, NL-6500 HK, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] Frans Boekema Department of Human Geography, Radboud University of Nijmegen, PO Box 9108, NL-6500 HK, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] 121 B. Arts et al. (eds.), The Disoriented State: Shifts in Governmentality, Territoriality and Governance, 121–140. © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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6.1

Introduction

A field in which recent changes in governmentality, territoriality and governance has been pervasive is that of spatial economic policy. In particular, the impact of neoliberal perspectives has resulted in three major point of emphasis: namely on (1) indigenous growth and innovation (supporting ‘competitiveness’), (2) the region as a key site of economic development, and (3) multi-level and multi-actor forms of governance (Kaiser and Prange 2004; Charles et al. 2004; Malerba 2002) Obviously, the degree and specificities of changes manifest strong geographical variations. Some countries, like the UK, the Netherlands and Denmark have gone quite far in propagating indigenous development while others, like Germany and France remain more committed to the ‘welfarist’ objective of spatial equality through redistributive measures. To understand such specific outcomes, we need to examine how certain pervasive ideas and practices are performing in a particular context of national and regional political development and policy-making. As emphasised by Painter (2002) and Larner and Walter (2002), the analytical use of the concept of ‘governmentality’ and the method of genealogy can serve such a project well. Territorial formations such as regions can be seen as constituted objects of knowledge that result from the political scopes and rationalities, technologies, and discourses created by government, as contained, in particular, in ‘geographical knowledges’ and images and mappings of ‘spaces of rule’ (Dühr 2007). Genealogy places the inquiry in a historical context, by exploring the historical trajectories and mutations occurring in political rule and rationality, thus exposing time- and space-specific ‘self-evident’ truths. In this chapter we will focus on one dimension that, in our view, deserves particular attention, namely territoriality. More specifically, we want to explore how shifts in governmentality and the rise of new forms of governance, as extensively documented in the literature, have been accompanied by changing perspectives on territoriality, and practices of territorialisation (Jones 2009). We understand such territoriality basically in two ways. First, the development of economic policies is territorial as a practice. State and non-state organisations at different spatial levels and in different formations coalesce in constituting forms and practices of economic governance. Second, it is territorial as a target. Governance practices target a specific bounded territory, a region or locality, which is presented as in need of attracting investors, supporting innovation, developing skills etc. Neo-liberal governmentalities, for instance, with an emphasis on self-responsibility and self-help, proclaim a neat alignment between these two dimensions. Regions should basically look after themselves, linking subject (governance) and object (target), building their own institutional capacity to provide locally tailored and supported economic governance and aid, in what is considered a ‘global’ setting of ‘fair play’. What makes this an intriguing topic is that the issue of territoriality reflects a high level of ambivalence, and, compared with ‘neo-liberalising’ governmentality and ‘multiplying’ governance, less a sense of direction. On the one hand, territories, notably regions (from city-regions to sub-state areas or provinces), have been

6 The Case of The Netherlands

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defined as subjects of national policies involving redistribution or innovation in a rather a-spatial manner. Territories are then seen as ‘containers’ for state projects. Such a ‘container view’ has been characteristic for most post-war regional policies evolving at national and supranational (EU) level (cf. the EU NUTS division and its application in Structural Funds). This view is increasingly challenged, on the other hand, by what can been described by more spatially oriented approaches, that see spatial economic development more in terms of specific places and their connections, that is, in terms of nodes, networks, corridors and gateways. While the regional-economic approach still reigns supreme at the European level, and in some federal states, many countries, and the EU itself, manifest a move towards a more spatialised, ‘node and network’ territorial perspective. One of these countries is the Netherlands, in which economic and innovation policies have been grafted onto an explicitly neo-liberal governmental perspective, and on an elaborate division of labour between the central state (notably the Department of Economic Affairs and its developmental agency Syntens), provinces (notably through their engagement with European funding and initiatives), and localities (city-regions and cities). While changes in governmentality and governance are thus in line with general trends, this comes with clashing views and practices of territoriality. One illustration of this is the way the notion of ‘urban networks’ is understood and practised both as a form of spatial connection (gateway) and as a bounded space of strategically collaborating cities (cityregion). In part, this is a reflection of the broader tension between ‘container’ and spatialised views manifesting at a more global level. In addition, a specific role is played by the historical process of Dutch state formation. Both the ‘container’ and spatialised perspectives hark back to developments in the establishment of the federal republic and the institutionalisation of spatial planning centred on water defence in the 15th and 16th centuries respectively. What this paper seeks to do, therefore, is trace current perspectives on territoriality within economic development policy in a long-term historical as well as an actualised setting. The argument will be developed in three steps. After a brief introduction on the (perceived) significance of the region in innovation and knowledge production, the development of Dutch regional and spatial approaches towards economic development will be discussed from an historical point of view. Against this background, the final part will discuss recent shifts in the governance of territorially oriented economic policies.

6.2

Neo-liberal Governmentalities and Spatial-Economic Development Policies at the Level of the EU and The Netherlands

Economic development policies have undergone a radical change as a result of the rise of neo-liberal discourses, with its accompanying shift from egalitarian to entrepreneurial approaches. For spatially oriented policies, this has meant a change from territories considered primarily as statistical units under an overarching aim of

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convergence, to economic subjects endowed with agency to nurture their own (indigenous) economic position and development. Development practices shifted accordingly from investment support primarily for larger firms to encouraging innovation and local networking, with a stronger emphasis on SMEs. A clear manifestation of the entrepreneurial mood in the domain of spatial and economic policy is the proliferation of strategies and practices oriented towards building ‘regional innovation systems’ or ‘networks’, and ‘Learning Regions’ (Rutten and Boekema 2007). The support for indigenous development policies privileging the region cannot be traced back to one dominant neo-liberal perspective. In line with Cerny’s (Chapter 2) observations, this shift should be seen as resulting from a large variety of discursive practices occurring within, as well across, a large number of policy sites. A great number of organisations and networks, at the regional, national and international level, is occupied with the transfer of ideas, instruments and resources between regions, nations and even continents (Lagendijk 2005). In Europe, the EU has been playing a pivotal role in the facilitation and shaping of regional innovation strategies. At a global level, this role is played by organisations such as the OECD, UN, IMF and World Bank. There are also dedicated programmes and networks such as IRE (http://www.innovating-regions.org/) and EURADA (the European Association of Development Agencies) that specialise in the exchange of ideas and experiences, undertake comparative study work and serve to disseminate ‘good practices’ and tools. All these organisations translate and circulate their interpretations of neo-liberal imperatives and necessities into particular strategies and policies. As a result, under the surface of ‘global’ policy learning and networking, under the veil of ‘universal’ lessons and ambitions, differences tend to prevail, notably at the regional level. Policy documentation tends to highlight the variation in overall objectives, approaches and results, as for instance indicated by a recent EU evaluation of RIS/RIS+ projects (DG Regio 2002).What we can also learn from this overview, behind the concealing standardised formats through which the cases are presented, is the profound variation in forms of governance and even more of territoriality. Some of the programmes (notably from Spain, which is heavily overrepresented) clearly stem from established regional governance settings. They manifest and aim to develop alliances with other established regional plans, key actors, sectoral and business support structures, etc. English projects, in particular, appear to be aligned with ambitions of region formation, by contributing to the shaping of regional governance agendas and structures, in some case of a crossborder nature. Others (like in South-eastern Europe) are anchored more at the national level, reflecting national objectives of reducing spatial disparities and addressing problems of peripherality. Finally, some (as in the Netherlands) are overtly linked to the European level of policy making and funding, by stating that the projects present a follow-up or continuation of previous EU-funded projects at a regional (sometimes cross-border) level. In the latter case, the projects contain a bundle of activities located within a region demarcated for that purpose. These specific outcomes are not coincidental. They are mediated, as argued in Chapter 1, by the political and institutional context in which the initiatives have


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evolved. In particular, it is the national level that plays a critical role here. While the EU may act as inspirator, catalyst, sometimes even agitator, nation states are still in control of processes of regionalisation and the shaping of regional governance and policy structures, and of setting policy agendas (Jones 2004). The latter has been prompted, in particular, by the way Western countries feel the need to respond the pervasive ‘pressures’ of competition and innovation, and the ‘challenge’ to nurture appropriate productive and innovative infrastructures, for which the regional level is seen as particularly suitable. Yet, how this response is framed, voiced and practised differs markedly from state to state. In the case of England, for instance, Painter (2002) explains the recent process of regional strategy formation in terms of the asymmetric relations and tensions between the central level and various forms of regional/local organisations and voices, fuelled by the ongoing discourses on the regional shape of England (notably versus Scotland and Wales) and on the ‘persistent’ North-South divide within England. In Eastern Europe, one can also observe the prominent role of (national) discourses and practices of regionalisation in the shaping of regional agendas, often closely associated with the need to comply with EU demands for the implementation of Structural Funds and EU regional policy (Varró 2008). In Spain and Germany, on the other hand, the established federal structure provides a fertile basis for subnational initiatives, although, especially in Germany, regional programmes are often implemented at an often more arbitrarily defined level below that of the ‘Länder’. When placed in an historical perspective, the Netherlands presents a rather remarkable case. Its official ‘plural’ denomination (the Netherlands, Paises Bajos, Pays Bas, die Niederlande) refers back to a legendary federal past. This past ended at the turn of the 18th century, when, during and after the French occupation, unitary rule was implemented, in what can be seen as a period of major changes of state governmentalities, forms of governance and, in line with that, territoriality. Since then, the native denomination of the country is singular (Nederland), while the official name “Kingdom of the Netherlands” now refers to what is left of the Dutch colonial empire (including the Dutch Antilles and Aruba). The historical federal structure still lives on in the provincial division of the country, with two major changes: the subdivision of the dominant province of Holland into a Northern and Southern part (1840), and the addition of the province of Flevoland, encompassing land reclaimed from the former Zuiderzee (1986). Alongside the spatial division, the democratic and legislative provincial institutions also continue to exist, albeit in highly modified forms. What is remarkable, however, is not the transition from a federal to a unitary structure as such. Rather, what is significant is that this transition has been accompanied by a serious erosion of territorial governance capacity at the subnational level. Where, as illustrated above, in many European countries the regional agenda of the EU and similar tendencies have been embraced to instigate or revamp processes of regionalisation and even federalisation, this is largely absent in ‘the Netherland/s’. This absence does not point at something missing, but at a different perspective. Dutch territorial approaches have basically played a different set of cards. Not those of regionalisation and regional governance, but rather those of spatial formations (Dühr and Lagendijk 2007). The neoliberal wave of the 1980s and

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1990s prompted many countries to shift from a combination of direct forms of business support and Keynesian policies to supply-side oriented approaches along sectoral and regional approaches, often with EU support. In the Netherland/s the same shift occurred, but then more towards spatial approaches. In effect, the last two decades of the 20th century produced an intriguing confluence of spatial and economic policy. This occurred, first, through a pervasive ‘spatialisation of economic policy’ and ‘economisation of spatial policy’ (Hajer and Zonneveld 2000), inducing what Hajer and Zonneveld describe as new ‘institutional practices’ primarily oriented towards the facilitation of ‘flow’ through the provision of physical infrastructure. Two core spatial formations that dominate current practices are ‘mainports’ (an intriguing Dutch composite metaphor using English terms) and ‘urban networks’. The concept of ‘mainports’ signifies the way in which the port of Rotterdam and the airport of Amsterdam-Schiphol act as ‘gateways’ between Europe and the world, as well as national economic hubs. In addition, the Eindhoven area is marked as a ‘Brainport’ (continuing the local play on the English language) reflecting the importance of the interaction between Philips, the Technical University and high tech business – part of which is hosted on the prestigious Philips high-tech campus. ‘Urban networks’, on the other hand, stress the importance for cities located within polycentric urban areas to join forces to improve economic competitiveness, resource efficiency and combat sprawl. Such a ‘spatial’ emphasis and rationality is also reflected in the way the notion of ‘regional innovation’ has been embraced. While provinces and regions have taken the project and funding possibilities offered by the EU, this remained largely confined to self-contained activities geared to nurturing local collaboration, clustering and resource development. Where initiatives are embedded within broader regional agendas, this is often linked to the conceptualisation of specific spatial formation, such as the ‘Research Triangle’ between Nijmegen, Wageningen and Enschede. The only province that has developed a regional innovation strategy that serves substantively as a basis for other local initiatives in is Limburg (Van Gils 2000). In parallel, there have been several national attempts to instigate a regionalised structure of innovation support, but these remain strongly subjected to central forms of control and finance, as will be discussed below. Let us now trace these developments back to the period in which the Dutch state was founded. The next sections will relate how, since the ‘Golden Age’, major transformations have taken place in state governmentalities and governance structures, and how this bears on the territorial perspectives and practices with economic development policy. In brief, the historical trajectory runs from mercantilism, via developmentalism to entrepreneurialism. The latter shift will be examined, more specifically, by zooming in onto the performance of spatial development concepts that have emerged in the post-war period. As illustrated by the work of Van Duinen (2004), and Zonneveld and Verwest (2005), in recent times spatial development concepts have served to reconcile the more ‘abstract’ political and policy debates on spatial planning and the ‘concrete’ level of control and development (Van Duinen 2004). Consequently, delving into the genealogy of such concepts provides important clues to the broader connections between shifts in governmentality, governance and territoriality. An interesting issue highlighted


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by these authors is the way these concepts are, on the one hand, a major source of lock-in, through the way they reinforce established discursive and institutional practices, while they, on the other hand, can also embody major transformative capacities.

6.3

Territoriality and Practices of Territorialisation: From ‘Mercantilism’ to ‘Developmentalism’

The wealth of the Dutch Republic in the 17th century was primarily based on its central position in the circulation of goods, accompanied by rapid expansion of services in communication, contracting, financing and insurance. In terms of political rule, this position was sustained by a close coalition between a mercantilist state and ruling elites, structured along territorial (urban and provincial) and religious lines. While protecting land against water (sea and river) had always been a major concern, as well as a major drain on resources, the combination of wealth and the dispersed territorial governance structure triggered a wave of more ambitious projects of land reclamation and cultivation. This, in turn, produced some significant outcomes which still pervade spatial developments and perspectives in the Netherlands: the rapid expansion of agriculture and a clear divide between urban nodes and ‘open space’. Dutch landscape painters in 17th century would typically depict rural, idyllic pictures of grazing cattle and horticulture with the silhouette of a (trading) city visible in the distance. Such pictures are still relished in the context of the current debate on spatial planning, notably on the containment of ‘urban sprawl’. This ‘Golden Age’ was followed by a long period of slow but lasting decline. Not only did the Republic face a relative decline in its trading position, it was also unable to upkeep, let alone develop, basic infrastructure, except for the most necessary structures of water defence. The country’s federal structure, moreover, once a source of a certain strength, resilience, and pride, increasingly became a liability and factor of stagnation. In terms of political rationality and rule, times were changing across Europe. Neighbouring countries like Great Britain and France were moving to more ‘modern’, growth-oriented modes of economic management, partly driven by a subordination of the economy to social and political (including military) goals framed at the level of the nation state. The result was a fundamental turn from mercantilism to ‘developmentalist’ political rationalities and government actions (Larner and Walters 2002). Until the end of its existence, however, the Republic lacked the (super)vision and resources to follow suit. The end came when, in 1795, France occupied the impoverished territory of the ‘Low Countries’. The ‘French Age’, as the period is called, ushered in a series of fundamental transformations, most of which endured after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. The Netherlands was turning into Nederland, developing a structure and rule of governance markedly different from times gone by.

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6.4


Transformations in Territorial Governance Under ‘Developmentalism’

Under Napoleonistic rule, the Republic was dismantled and replaced by unitary state rule. In the third year of the occupation (1798), the Provinces were stripped of virtually all their powers and competencies. This centralisation was further consolidated in the post-French period 1815–1848. Across Europe, the traumatic years of the early 19th century triggered a restoration of conservative forces and ideas. The Netherlands, the former Republic, turned into a monarchy under the autocratic rule of William I. A major change carried out by William I was the almost complete subordination of the lower levels of government to a centralised system of finance and directives. The provinces only held on to certain devolved responsibilities in the field of physical infrastructure, notably water defence (Van der Woud 2004). In time, provinces and municipalities have acquired more competencies and responsibilities, but always subject to what have come to be known as the ‘golden strings’ of centralised finance and various forms of direct control (such as through the still prevalent, although seriously contested, system of state-appointed mayors) (Faludi 1994). This fate even struck the hallmark of Dutch territorial governance, the territorial ‘Water Boards’. Emerging in medieval times as independent, societal bodies to arrange for common water protection, the Water Boards were now the first to be subordinated to provincial rule and then converted into ‘normal’ state organisations (1848). The most fundamental devolution of power to the lower levels of government took place in the late 1840s. Induced by the wave of liberal revolutionary movements that swept across Europe, William II ordered the politician Johan Rudolf Thorbecke to draft a new Constitution that would substitute liberal for political rule. Besides founding a two-chamber system of representative democracy, the Constitution established the principle of co-government between the central state, provinces and municipalities. Co-government requires the different layers of government to seek consensus on virtually all core domains of policy-making: housing, infrastructure, economic development, social and environmental policy, etc. In time, the provincial level acquired a key role in planning and coordination for housing (Housing Law 1901), regional spatial and structural planning (optional from 1931 onwards, obligatory after 1964), environmental issues and transport development. Yet, despite what Toonen (1993) characterised as ‘silent accumulation’ of strategic tasks, provinces have evolved as primarily procedural and formal bodies that in general tend to avoid conflict (Faludi 1994). Provinces thus provide vital channels for the central state to rule ‘at a distance’ in what is characterised as a decentralised unitary state structure. Rather than through a topdown system of ‘command and control’ characteristic for centralised unitary states, hierarchy is enacted through a subtle combination of discursive practices and the ‘golden strings’ of financial control and overall supervision. The 20th century witnessed another sequence of sea changes in the political rationality and forms of governance. As a result of a growing emphasis on ‘welfare’, notably in the post-war period, the state moved from governing through


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the ‘individual’, calling on his (and more recently also her) moral responsibility, to governing through society (Rose 1996). The Dutch state, in particular, developed quite astute mechanisms to involve a great variety of societal organisations in processes of policy design and implementation, often making them co-responsible for key domains of state regulation (such as health, labour laws, education, etc.). This pervasive co-optation ranged from corporatist forms of political-economic decision making at the macro-level to all kinds and shapes of ‘joined-up’ policymaking. Accordingly, the principle of co-governance was not only applied to different levels of the state, but also to the spectrum of state-society. And once more, it is not ‘command and control’ that rules, but a subtle mix of inducement and dialogue primarily based on discursive practices, alongside a sophisticated system of financial support and control. One of the remarkable manifestations of such a far-reaching system of co-optation is the way the state has not only condoned but even subsidised certain radical opponents (such as the squatter and green movements). The way the Dutch have perfected what can be called a governmentality of the ‘Consensus State’ (cf. Toonen 1993) has incurred considerable praise as well as critique. It is a system that allows many voices to be heard, including more marginal ones. Yet it is also a system that is extremely complex and ambiguous, in terms of institutional arrangements, processes and outcomes. This raises critical questions such as: Who is invited to speak, and when? Whose voices are actually heard, and how? In time, the Dutch approach to consensus has become highly procedural, increasingly relying on input from experts, notably in process management and communication, operating at a distance from the issuing state bodies. Moreover, especially in an area such as spatial planning it is also deemed rather selective (Hajer and Zonneveld 2000), that is, used after core (‘frame’) decisions and choices have been made at a state level. Hajer and Zonneveld’s critical account of Dutch spatial planning points to the contrast between, on the one hand, the urge to ‘reach out’ and engage in inclusive methods, and, on the other hand, the persistence of a centralist ‘survey, analysis, and plan’ approach. The latter harbours the technocratic tradition in physical planning that has characterised the country since the mid-19th century. Key discursive practices remain rooted in a strong belief in predictability and stability, and the urge for order and control. Let us, with this tension in mind, explore what in Foucauldian terms are called the ‘technologies’ of government.

6.5

Technologies of Government in Spatial and Regional Planning

Alongside the ruling political rationality, the technologies of government also changed. In the 19th century, this was driven by a core characteristic of the new, ‘developmentalist’ mode of governmentality introduced by the French. Developmentalism entailed a discursive and functional separation between the ‘political’

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and its object of governance, like the ‘economy’, ‘population’, and ‘territory’. Key to this process is the definition, classification and subjecting of entities like ‘enterprises’, ‘citizens’, and spatial ‘plots/structures’, accompanied by ‘modern’ forms of accounting, population and business registration (e.g. census), spatial demarcation (e.g. cadastre) and classification. It was the introduction and, in the following decades, fine-tuning of such technologies that rendered the core ‘developmentalist’ ambitions feasible and increasingly effectuated. In doing so, a modern state apparatus and bureaucracy emerged that has been expanding ever since, developing ever-finer divisions of labour and more and more complex forms of governance (Rose 1996). Government practices bearing on spatial development did not involve only the demarcation and subjecting of spatial plots – measures which were initially implemented largely to modernise the system of tax collection. Right after 1795, a ‘modern’ nation state emerged that saw as one of its key aims to engage in “steering the spatial development of an area in order to promote the evolution of a system that serves the community best” (Van der Woud 2004). The result was a major shift from particularistic forms of regional planning to nationally rooted forms of planning, which manifested itself in two ways. First, induced by the French centralist and determined approach to public works, a national planning of infrastructural investments emerged, oriented to waterways, roads and, from the 1840s onwards, railroads. The French and Dutch rulers of the 19th century were confronted with a communication infrastructure which, due to the economic downturn in the 18th century and lack of planning, was literally falling apart. Few roads were paved, many rivers and ports had become inaccessible for most of the ‘dry’ seasons, while the need for water defence absorbed most of the resources available. To counter this, a process was started involving primarily piecemeal improvements, notably through the dredging and improving of waterways, and the development of an integrated toll-free ‘state’ road network (‘Rijkswegennet’), punctuated by major investments in canals and railroads. The second shift from particularistic-regional to state-based and national planning struck the heart of the country’s investments in its physical environment, namely land reclaiming. A milestone in this development was the successful transformation of a major lake Southwest of Amsterdam, the Haarlemmermeer, into a polder (now the site of one of the country’s ‘mainports’, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol). In the words of Van der Woud: “Perhaps it is this technical triumph, the domestication of the century-old water wolf at the heart of the Country, that present the decisive condition for the expansion of the concept of land reclaiming. The Netherlands discovered in this decade (1839–1853) that space, even when embodying large dimensions and a tough character, could be engineered in the interest of society” (Van der Woud 2004, p. 280, our translation). In addition to providing a link to a cherished past, national planning and implementation of land reclaiming could also build on extensive stock of expert knowledge accumulated over centuries. In contrast, the fields of infrastructure investments and other domains of spatial and regional planning only matured in the 19th and 20th centuries. Typically, however, the way these new fields developed echoes to a large extent the ‘engineering’ mores of land reclaiming practices. All


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are in line with what has been described before as a following a ‘survey, analysis, and plan’ rationality. While in the 19th century planning expertise was largely an offshoot of core technical disciplines (such as physical engineering), the 20th century witnessed the rise of a separate, self-defined policy and knowledge domain of spatial planning. Especially in the post-war period, and partly impelled by the German occupation, a massive apparatus emerged dealing with the design and implementation of spatial planning at the national, provincial and local levels. As a result, Dutch spatial planning is performed by a nested system of drawing, and putting into practice, land use maps. These maps range from national and regional ‘sketches’ providing images of major flows and structures, to local, legally binding, land use maps (bestemmingsplannen) that demarcate the physical limits of housing estates, business parks, etc. What, in a broad perspective, characterises Dutch spatial planning, is this persistent orientation of spatial planning towards the definition and control of land use, which also bears upon perspectives on, and practices of (regional) economic development. Besides politicians and bureaucrats, this apparatus also draws on an unprecedented number and variety of experts, ranging from specialist policymakers to ‘external’ consultants and academics. Such experts are the source of a vast output of spatial statistics, surveys and reports. Also, because of the need to ‘align’ the dynamics of knowledge production and policy making internally as well as with other departments and organisations (e.g. in economic development, agriculture, transport), a myriad of inter-departmental committees and advisory committees has come into being (Faludi 1994) A recent milestone in this proliferation of knowledge production has been the launching of the ‘Spatial Planning Bureau’ (RPB, launched 2001, recently merged with the Environmental Planning Office), where 50 academic experts churn out research reports at a rate of 2–3 per month. While, accordingly, ‘survey, analysis, and plan’ looms large in Dutch spatial planning, this has to fit in a broader ‘joined-up’ and consensus-based political rationality. So how is this fit achieved? A central role is played by the contrivance and, more significantly, frantic circulation of concepts of spatial development. Such concepts can be of a more substantive nature, such as the notions of the ‘Green Heart’ in the middle of the ‘Randstad’, or the ‘mainports’ of Rotterdam Port or Amsterdam-Schiphol Airport as economic hubs, or more of a more procedural or principal nature, such as ‘spatial quality’ or ‘mixed land use’ as general ambitions, or ‘participatory design’ to guide planning processes (Zonneveld and Verwest 2005). From a governmentality perspective, what is crucial is that these concepts, at a practical level, provide a nexus between political rule and technologies, including practices of territorialisation. On the one hand, these concepts act as the focal points and outcomes of collective discussions on spatial planning, and hence of the consensus-making process; on the other hand, they provide the starting points and frames of the ‘survey, analysis, and plan’ circuits.

Context

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‘70

‘80

RAPID URBANISATION (HOUSING EXPANSION)

URBAN SPACE Green Heart/ Randstad (ANTI SPRAWL) ‘New (growth) towns’ policy

‘90

ECONOMIC CRISIS/EUROPEANISATION

Regional (provincial) plans

‘SPATIAL QUALITY’

city-regions/ compact city/ transit focus polycentric urban regions/ urban networks ECONOMIC SPACE nodes ‘gateways: ’Corridors’(†/

‘60 First National Report on Spatial Planning ‘66 Second Report: rationalisation of rural areas highway planning urban zones vs. central ‘open spaces’ (CORs)†

‘00

GROWTH/SPRAWL

‘74-85 Third Report new town policy rural area policy urban renewal scheme

‘88 Fourth Report ‘urban nodes’† Spatial development perspective (‘mainports’) ‘daily living environment’

networks

th

‘92 4 Report ‘Extra’ ‘strategic core projects’ business location policy† (‘ABC’) Ecological Networks EHS

‘01 Report ‘Space’ policy decentralisation urban networks intensification (mixed land use) layering approach (embedding & flows)

Regional- economic policy

ENVIRONMENTAL SPACE Ecological Networks (EHS)/sustainability ‘spatial quality’

SPATIAL COHESION AND REDISTRIBUTION facilitating policy (improving business environment) (re)location subsidies

COMPETITIVENESS “Regions on their own strengths” ‘97 ‘Space for Economic Dynamics’: from regional to spatial economic policy

Regional projects granted via central ‘Provincial Fund’

‘52 development areas/ industrialisation nodes

‘76 IPR (Investment premium scheme) ‘75-83 SIR (Selective investment directive) ‘58 problem area policy/ development nodes

† discontinued concepts/ideas

‘72 Integral Regional Plan for the North (ISP) ‘72 Regional Development Perspective for Zuid-Limburg (PNL)

‘Peaks in the Delta’


Fig. 6.1 Post-War Territorial Approaches in The Netherlands: Core Threads in Discursive Concepts and Policy

‘50


6.6

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The Shift to Entrepreneurialism: The Rise of SpatialEconomic Imageries

As argued in the introduction, spatial development practices across Europe (and beyond) have been subjected to a hegemonic, neo-liberal discourse on economic development. In a nutshell, this discourse trumpets the capacities of territories – especially regions – to shape innovative capacities as well as ‘balance’ economic needs with other, notably social and environmental, ambitions. Its emergence can be associated with a broad shift in political rule taking place in the 1980s and 1990s from ‘developmentalism’ to ‘entrepreneurialism’ (Larner and Walters 2002). During ‘developmentalism’, the ‘economic’ was framed as one of the goals alongside, and serving, other political and social goals (e.g. population growth, democracy and equality). Entrepreneurialism, in contrast, promotes economic performance as a goal in its own right. A discourse that was once limited largely to the domain of business development, featuring ‘competitiveness’, ‘benchmarking’, ‘innovation’, etc., now pervaded the realms of other policy domains including that of spatial and regional development. Moreover, not only the aim of policy-making but also its methods, have been infiltrated by neo-liberal thinking. Many policy ambitions are pursued, for instance, through competitive programmes, in which the ‘best’ ideas and projects get rewarded. Entrepreneurialism, accordingly, does not only define the target, but also the gist of policy-making. After the belated, but vigorous embracement of ‘developmentalism’, the Dutch did certainly not miss out on the shift towards ‘entrepreneurialism’. Hit by a quite a severe and persistent economic recession in the late 1970s, the country was confronted acutely with the limits of its developmentalist model. The results were twofold. First, a dismantling of the regional policy approach focused on interregional redistribution, paving the way for a more selective and strategic perspective with a stronger spatial orientation. Second, a closer alliance was formed between regional-spatial development concepts and national accounts on economic growth and innovation. These two developments correspond to the notions of ‘spatialisation of economic policy’ and ‘economisation of spatial policy’ mentioned above, in discursive as well as institutional practices. Both these shifts will now be discussed in more detail. To support the discussion, an overview is provided in Figure 6.1. The overview provides a genealogy of core concepts and ‘technologies’ of regional policy (bottom half) and spatial planning (upper half) in the Netherlands after 1945.

6.6.1 From Regional Innovation to Spatialised Economic Policy From 1952 onwards, the Netherlands had adopted a distributional regional policy similar to what happened in other West-European counties. Specific support measures were targeting the northern and southern parts of the country. In line with a developmentalist perspective, this policy had been destined to divert some

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economic growth from the country’s core to the more peripheral areas in the North and South through a system of territorially bounded incentives and, for a shorter period, even disincentives. While some incentives have managed to survive until today, the entrepreneurial turn has prompted a shift from a (re)distributional practice to one stressing ‘regions on their own strength’ (Zonneveld and Verwest 2005). Instead of top-down allocation, regions (provinces) were now compelled to competitively bid for project grants from the so-called ‘Provincial Fund’. In line with this, initiatives were taken to nurture innovation networks and strategies at the regional level, promoted by the Department of Economic Affairs. Economic and innovation support at the regional (provincial) level started with the establishment of seven regional development agencies (Regionale Ontwikkelingsmaatschappijen or ROMs). Seven ROMs were founded, formally as private companies, between 1975 and 1982, in line with the neo-liberal emphasis on private initiative. Yet, through mergers, there are currently four agencies left: one in the north (the NOM), one in the east (Oost NV) and two in the south (the BOM in Brabant and LIOF in Limburg). Accordingly, there is no one-to-one correspondence with the provinces. Some of the agencies cover two or even three provinces, while the provinces in the West only have agencies at the urban levels. Seen in an international context, the remit of the agencies is quite limited. Their key instrument of support is the provision of financial support, ranging from consultancy to venture capital, notably to high-tech companies. Strategic planning and action remains in the hands of state bodies at the national, provincial and local levels. Two other sets of organisations emerged which were geared to the design and implementation of innovation policies and support practices at the regional level. In 1988, 15 so-called Regional Innovation Centres (Regionale Innovatiecentra) were established in an attempt to emulate the Danish model of regional innovation support. Alongside, so-called Institutes for SMES (‘Instituten voor het MKB’ or IMK’s) emerged, providing organisational and marketing support. In the mid1990s, evaluations of these two networks showed rather mixed results. While some centres were performing well, mainly due to effective and proactive leadership, others failed to build up competencies and produce effective results. Moreover, the overall structure of business support was seen as lacking in transparency, coordination and capacity to respond to business needs (Schulte 2002). In 1996, the Department of Economic Affairs thus decided to merge the Regional Innovation Centres and the IMK advisory departments into one national network, called the Syntens Innovation Network. Although before 1996, innovation support was subject to centralised control by the Ministry, the development of Syntens as a national organisation with regional affiliates sustained a more effective form of central control and resource allocation. The Chambers of Commerce, which over time had lost much ground to other agencies, were reorganised and assigned a role as onestop ‘front offices’ for starters. Besides the provision of information and basic coaching, the Chambers were to act as gatekeepers with the remit to refer SMEs to the specialist services of Syntens and other organisations. Compared with, for instance, Germany or Belgium, support to SMEs remains a rather weakly developed (and researched) activity.


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One of the outcomes of the reorganisation and centralisation has been a stronger similarity in the overall approach of, and attitudes towards SMEs. In the view of Clarysse and Duchêne (1999), Syntens sees itself as a ‘missionary’ in the field of innovation, oriented to the more knowledge-intensive types of business. This is based on a view that, by and large, SMEs do not systematically explore the possibilities for knowledge absorption, and that they often lack competencies to use new knowledge effectively. The Syntens consultants help SMEs to improve their absorptive capacity and sensitivities for using knowledge. For the Department of Economic Affairs, moreover, Syntens provides an important vehicle to liaise with other agencies, and to pursue particular strategies, across the country. Syntens has now partitioned the country into just three regions (the North/East, served by six offices; the West, with five offices; and the South, with four offices). Collaborative activities are mostly developed at a more local level, together with the Regional Development Agencies, the Chambers of Commerce, local authorities, etc., in a large variety of regional settings. In doing so, Syntens has evolved as an organisation that effectively bridges the national and regional levels, with the capacity to initiate and support local activities pursuing a national agenda of innovation support. After the consolidation of the regional innovation systems, the alignment with established regional territories – the provinces – was further weakened by the launching of a new policy, ‘Peaks in the Delta’ (Pieken in de Delta, MINEZ 2004). This pinnacle of spatially oriented nation-state entrepreneurialism sets out to identify the regional innovative ‘hot spots’ across the Dutch economic landscape. To quote the secretary of state: The Netherlands enjoys a richly variegated economic landscape, and every region has its own strengths and opportunities. From an economic perspective, we are far from a ‘low country’ – we can see these peaks arising throughout the delta (…) the cabinet wants to exploit all these regional strengths, because in a competitive world economy, only entrepreneurial regions can lead the Netherlands to the top of the national economic league table. (Van Gennip, in introduction to Pieken [MINEZ 2004, p. 9], quoted in Benneworth 2006, p. 40)

Promoting ‘regions on their own strengths’, accordingly, seems to boil down to a state practice of ‘picking the winners’, pushing for a new territorialisation of economic development support. More specifically, Peaks in the Delta carves up the national space into six major areas (the North, the East, North-Randstad, South-Randstad, the Southwest and the Southeast) each with their own perspectives and targets. While this continues to respond, to some degree, to the ‘egalitarian’ wish to cater for the entire national space, it spatiality tends to be much more strategically selective.

6.6.2 Claiming Economic Space Peaks in the Delta and other state initiatives, notably by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, have resulted in a marked spatialisation of regional-economic policy, bringing it in line with strategic forms of spatial planning. The latter, as explained

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above, was traditionally grafted onto the mission to combat sprawl by urban containment and the protection of large open spaces, such as the ‘Green Heart’ of the Randstad. From the late 1980s onwards, comparable to the change of (re) distributional discursive practice of regional policy, entrepreneurialism started to invade the hegemonic discursive practices of spatial planning by challenging its dominant concepts. In concrete terms, the Department of Economic Affairs sought to promote a more economic orientation of spatial policies and planning by articulating and broadcasting a variety of lead images of spatial-economic development (Figure 6.1). Backed by a series of reports and studies (Licher 1998), this started with the above-mentioned concept of ‘mainports’ to denote core ‘nodes’, complemented by the concepts of ‘corridors’ (spatial-economic gateways between Amsterdam-Utrecht-Eindhoven-Aachen, along the A2 highway; Rotterdam – Utrecht-Arnhem/Venlo-Ruhr [A12]; Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Brussels-Paris [A4], also denoted as the Triple-A connections). Through these concepts, the Ministry sought to provoke a break with the existing anti-sprawl practice by designating ‘greenfield’ zones suitable for the expansion of industrial estates. However, while ‘mainports’ were easily absorbed in the mainstream of spatial planning, the concepts of ‘corridors’ met with overwhelming resistance. In the end, despite very intensive lobbying, the Dept. of Economic Affairs (1997) and its allies could not counter the negative images of untrammelled industrial expansion evoked by the notion of ‘corridors’. In the national planning document that came out in the early 2000s (Priemus 2001), the concept was replaced by the notion of ‘urban networks’. Despite the resistance against notions such as corridors, the third and fourth national spatial plan published in 1988, its addendum from 1992, and the Report ‘Space’ (Nota Ruimte) from 2001, all adopted a strongly entrepreneurial vocabulary in setting out their overall ambitions, thus rhetorically underscoring an ‘economisation of spatial policy’. In terms of the broader spatial vision, as argued by Benneworth (2006), the Nota Ruimte dovetails well with Pieken in the Delta. In the Nota Ruimte, the regional hotspots are embedded in a broader perspective on territorial development encompassing infrastructure, housing, business estates, nature areas, etc. One of the core ambitions behind this embedding has been to accommodate the wish for more proactive and entrepreneurial forms of planning within a planning context that is largely focused on land use restrictions. However, at the level of more concrete spatial concepts, the Nota Ruimte tends to reproduce the traditional orientation towards urban containment (anti-sprawl, see Figure 6.1, second box). This is manifested, in particular, by the development of the concept of ‘urban network’ as a substitute for corridors. Like ‘corridors’, ‘urban networks’ were introduced as a new core planning concept meeting the new demands of the mobile ‘network society’. In practice, however, the concept entailed more of an up-scaling of urban containment practices from the (single) urban level to the regional (inter-urban) level than a reference to economic gateways, contrary to the original intentions of the Department of Economic Affairs. Unlike the broad-brush nature of corridors, ‘urban networks’ came to refer to bounded urban spaces, much in line with the notion of ‘city-regions’ or ‘agglomerations’, and hence with the dominant anti-sprawl stance. So, in the end, despite its extensive lobby and its


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preparedness to embrace a ‘land use’ perspective on spatial-economic development, the Department of Economic Affairs did not manage to provoke a genuine change in prevailing discursive practices (Van Duinen 2004). This failure partly demonstrates the resilience of the hegemonic discourse starring urban containment. Like in most Western countries, environmental concerns and the public demand for open ‘breathing’ space near urban areas continue to exert considerable influence on debates in spatial planning. In addition, the economic conditions in the1990s, in which a recession was succeeded by an almost unprecedented boom, stemming the perception of a need for fundamental change. In effect, two opposing trends emerged. While, on the one hand, economic growth provided a new impetus to the ‘space for the economy’ discourse and the increase in wealth; on the other hand, it thwarted the political mobilisation required for a ‘paradigmatic shift’ at the national level. The hegemony of anti-sprawl managed to persist. What was to stay, however, was a much more economically oriented perspective on spatial planning, as well as a regional policy firmly rooted in a spatial-entrepreneurial perspective. More than by ‘regions on their own strength’, spatial-economic and innovation policies are shaped by, on the one hand, national networks and frameworks of local business support and, on the other, a spate of spatial imaginaries seeking to accommodate pervasive entrepreneurialism tendencies within a prevalent anti-sprawl, integral stance on spatial planning.

6.7

Conclusion

At first sight, the Dutch situation seems to have come full circle. Once a federal republic, with each province having its own set of economic regulations and policies, it went through a phase of unitary, national developmentalism to return to an image of regions “on their own strength”. The latter appears to hark back to a cherished past of more locally embedded initiatives, with less top-down control and less reliance on the national state. This return to the region, however, is only partial. It primarily concerns the object of spatial economic policies and not the governance structures in which policies and practices are brought about. This chapter has shed light on the historical development, as well as recent strategic moves that have enabled this result. One historical development has been the imposed transformation of provinces from proactive, semi-autonomous substates to regionalised policy arms of the central state. Together with the rise of a myriad of territorial divisions (such as Chamber of Commerce regions, Syntens regions, Education regions etc.) that do not match provincial boundaries, this has dramatically weakened the regional capacity to constitute a subject of economic governance. In this sense, there is no indication of a move towards multi-scalar meta-governance as advocated by Jessop. Moreover, an important trend over the last century has been the rise of a strongly spatially oriented perspective on economic development. The Dutch have a long-standing tradition in effective spatial planning, pushed by the need to

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defend the country against the sea and rivers. In Republican times, this state activity was not linked (at least not conceptually) with the pursuit of regional (provincial) economic ambitions. Subsequently, the loss of provincial autonomy and the build-up of the ‘decentralised unitary’ state provoked a stronger link between economic and spatial policy. The post-war period first witnessed the development of a top-down, distributional form of regional development policy, focusing on improving the economic conditions in more peripheral areas. A full fledged spatial orientation emerged in more recent years, in which, under the influence of neo-liberal thinking, the Department of Economic Affairs promoted a regional-spatial agenda in order to expand the ‘room’ for economic development. Given the dominance of spatial conceptualisations and planning, these agents had little choice other than to frame their agendas in the prevalent spatial policy language and plan-making cycles, in an attempt to steer developments in a more entrepreneurial way. It is this discursive-institutional setting that explains why ‘global’ accounts on regional innovation and competitiveness are translated in such a particular way in the Netherlands. It also explains why economic policymaking has taken on such a highly complex and, in parts, messy spatial and scalar ‘gestalt’, which is actually far removed from the neo-liberal idea of ‘regions on their own strength’. What is telling, though, is that it is the governance dimension, rather than territorial aspects, that produces this messy gestalt. Attempts to move towards a more articulated network concept, or to overcome the urban-rural binary, have all been short-lived. Despite the enormous volume of ‘knowledge’ produced, Dutch regional economic and spatial planning remains caught in a traditional mindset, which is highly self-referential (cf. Van Assche 2005). Or more likely, it is this particular production of knowledge, underpinning a particular governmentality, that make more radical changes difficult to achieve. To quote Faludi (1994, p. 487): “In a way, the planners are thus the prisoners of their own brainchild.”

Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Stefanie Dühr and Barrie Needham for their thorough comments on an earlier version, and for the suggestions that have helped to improve the line of argumentation.

References Benneworth, P. (2006). Bringing Cambridge to Consett? Building university-centred entrepreneurial networks in peripheral regions. Case Study Report 2: Twente, The Netherlands. Newcastle upon Tyne: University of Newcastle.


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Charles, D., Perry, B. and Benneworth, P. (2004). Towards a multi-level science policy: regional science policy in a European context. Seaford: Regional Studies Association. Clarysse, B. and Duchêne, V. (1999). Geïntegreerd innovatiebeleid naar KMO’s. toe. Case studie: Nederland. Brussels: IWT-Vlaanderen. DG Regio (2002). Regional innovation strategies under the European Regional Development Fund Innovative Actions 2000–2002. Brussels: European Commission. Dühr, S. (2007). The visual language of spatial planning: exploring cartographic representations for spatial planning in Europe. RTPI library series. London: Routledge. Dühr, S. and Lagendijk, A. (2007). The application of spatial concepts and visuals in regionallevel planning policy text and maps in The Netherlands. Paper presented at the Regional Studies Association International Conference: Regions in Focus? Lisbon, 2–5 April 2007. Nijmegen: Radboud University. Faludi, A. (1994). Coalition building and planning for Dutch growth management – the role of the Randstad concept. Urban Studies, 31, 485–507. Hajer, M. and Zonneveld, W. (2000). Spatial planning in the network society – rethinking the principles of planning in The Netherlands. European Planning Studies, 8, 337–356. Jones, M. (2004). The regional state and economic regulation: regional regeneration or political mobilisation?. In D. Valler and A. Wood, A. (Eds.), Local and regional economies: institutions, politics and economic development (pp. 177–200). Aldershot: Ashgate. Jones, M. (2009). Phase space: geography, relational thinking, and beyond. Progress in Human Geography, 32, forthcoming. Kaiser, R. and Prange, H. (2004). Managing diversity in a system of multi-level governance: the open method of co-ordination in innovation policy. Journal of European Public Policy, 11, 249–266. Lagendijk, A. (2005). Regionalisation in Europe. Stories, institutions and boundaries. In H. Van Houtum, O. Kramsch and W. Zierhofer (Eds.), Bordering Space (pp. 77–92). London: Routledge. Larner, W. and Walters, W. (2002). The political rationality of “new regionalism”: toward a genealogy of the region. Theory and Society, 31, 391–432. Licher, H. J. (1998). De ruimte tussen analyse en beleid: EZ-discussienotitie ‘Ruimte voor Economische Dynamiek’. Stedebouw & Ruimtelijke Ordening, 79, 35–79. Malerba, F. (2002). Sectoral systems of innovation and production. Research Policy, 31, 247–264. MINEZ (2004). Pieken in de Delta. Den Haag: Department of Economic Affairs. Painter, J. (2002). Governmentality and regional economic strategies. In J. Hillier and E. Rooksby (Eds.), Habitus: a sense of place (pp. 115–139). Ashgate, Aldershot. Priemus, H. (2001). Corridors in The Netherlands: apple of discord in spatial planning. TESG 92(1), 100–107. Rose, N. (1996). Governing ‘advanced’ liberal democracies. In A. Barry, T. Osbourne and N. Rose (Eds.), Foucault and political reason (pp. 37–64). London: UCL. Rutten, R. and Boekema, F. (Eds.) (2007). The learning region, foundations, state of the art, future. London: Edward Elgar. Schulte, F. (2002). Die Förderung von Unternehmensgründungen in Deutschland und in den Niederlanden – Eine vergleichende Analyse mit Fokus auf regionale Gründungsnetzwerke. Bochum: Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Fakultät für Sozialwissenschaft. Toonen, T. A. J. (1993). Dutch provinces and the struggle for the meso. In L. J. Sharpe (Ed.), The rise of Meso government in Europe (pp. 132–133). London: Sage. Van Assche, K. (2005). Brief aan mijn moeder. Over efficiëntie, controle en het goede voorbeeld; Nederlandse planningscultuur. Topos, 2005(1), 26–28. Van der Woud, A. (2004). Het lege land: de ruimtelijke orde van Nederland 1798–1848. Amsterdam: Olympus.

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Chapter 7

Producing Urban (Dis)similarity: Entrepreneurial Governance, Consumer Mobility and Competitive Consumption Spaces: The Case of the Enschede Region * Bas Spierings

Abstract: A pervasive urban phenomenon in the Netherlands is the implementation of large-scale and ambitious city centre redevelopment projects to upgrade the functional structure and physical form. Within the context of national policy restrictions and incentives, city centre actors – i.e. local authorities, property actors and (organisations of) retailers – are mainly responsible for designing upgrading plans to make city centres appealing to mobile and fun-seeking consumers. In this chapter, the upgrading of the city centre in Enschede is critically discussed while focusing on the process of competition at the urban and regional level for shoppers and their spending. Upgrading projects are implemented to produce dissimilarities with other shopping centres in the city, with town centres surrounding the city as well as with other city centres – as a response to increasing similarities at the intra and inter-metropolitan level. In Enschede, the city centre actors intend to foster the urban economy through the implementation of an opportunistic redevelopment project, demonstrating the entrepreneurial stance in contemporary urban politics. Entrepreneurial conservatism, however, seems to produce similarities between city centres whereas city centre actors aim to achieve and claim urban dissimilarities.

Keywords: Entrepreneurial city, consumer mobility, retailing, entrepreneurialism, redevelopment paradox, The Netherlands

_________________________ *

This chapter is partly based on the author’s dissertation (Spierings 2006a).

Bas Spierings (,) Department of Human Geography & Urban and Regional Planning, Van Unnikgebouw, office 614, PO Box 80.115, 3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] 141 B. Arts et al. (eds.), The Disoriented State: Shifts in Governmentality, Territoriality and Governance, 141–159. © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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7.1

Introduction

Contemporary local governance strategies increasingly focus on the competitive bidding for leisure events and consumption spaces to remake the image of cities and to generate mobile consumer spending (Hubbard and Hall 1998; Brenner and Theodore 2002; Swyngedouw et al. 2002). In this context, a pervasive urban phenomenon in the Netherlands is the implementation of large-scale and ambitious city centre redevelopment projects to upgrade the functional structure and the physical features of the consumption space in the urban core (Spierings 2006a). The main motive for upgrading was a declining economic position of the city centre. Cooperating public and private actors – i.e. local authorities, property actors and (organisations of) retailers – designed upgrading plans to make city centres more competitive at urban and regional levels. Urban quarter centres, regional town centres as well as other city centres were offering both increasingly similar functional facilities and more appealing physical features. It is to be able to compete successfully for mobile, fun-seeking consumers that city centre actors strive to create urban (dis)similarity. They want to offer what other consumption spaces have to offer and something different at the same time. For that reason, the local authorities, property actors and retailers cooperate to implement large-scale and distinctive redevelopment projects. Altogether, this is done to maintain, strengthen and reconfirm the economic position of the city centre as supported by the spatial retail policy of the national government (Spierings 2006b). Considering the more and more overlapping market areas of city centres due to assumed increasingly mobile consumerism, the upgrading plans of surrounding city centres has been an important incentive to perceive and act on its supposedly worn-out physical features and its supposedly old-fashioned and/or incomplete functional facilities. There is a competitive pressure to at least keep up with and also surpass other consumption spaces in the region, as can be illustrated by an entrepreneurial strategy in Enschede. It is within the context of societal and political changes that the city of Enschede developed an entrepreneurial form of governmentality to produce a competitive consumption space in the core of the city.

7.2

Entrepreneurial Governance and Strategies

According to Harvey, ‘… urban governance has become increasingly preoccupied with the exploration of new ways in which to foster and encourage local development and employment growth’ (1989, p. 3). This is what he calls ‘urban entrepreneurialism’. It differs from urban policies in earlier decades, ‘… which primarily focussed on the local provision of services, facilities and benefits to urban populations’ (1989, p. 3) – typified by Harvey as ‘urban managerialism’. A revealing illustration of the latter is the planning of a hierarchical retail system in the Netherlands, to ensure an equal distribution of retailers offering daily products to the population. The carefully-planned retail system contains a city centre at the

7 The Case of the Enschede Region

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top of the hierarchy and several complementary consumer service levels, i.e. quarter centres, district centres and neighbourhood centres. Going down the hierarchical retail system implies more food products and fewer specialised products in the product range. However, the entrepreneurial approach of cities focuses on competition for investment capital of retail property developers and retail conglomerates, for example, to stimulate urban economic development. In short, cities used to have a rather ‘inward-looking’ stance, which changed when cities adopted an entrepreneurial approach to urban development, resulting in a much more ‘outward-looking’ and proactive approach (Wood et al. 1998; Jessop and Sum 2000). In the 1980s, city centre actors in Dutch cities usually adopted the entrepreneurial strategy of ‘city marketing’ due to a combination of factors such as the processes of de-industrialisation, suburbanisation and the decentralisation of government tasks, restrictions on government spending at the national level causing decreasing financial budgets at the local level, and an international economic recession (Cornelisse and Ros 1990; Van den Berg et al. 1990). In doing so, a more outward-looking and proactive strategy was implemented in an attempt to solve socio-economic problems and to spur economic growth ‘… by creating jobs, expanding the local tax base, fostering small firm growth and (crucially) attracting new forms of investment’ (Hubbard and Hall 1998, p. 5). By marketing the city, the city centre actors try to ‘sell’ the city as a commodity to ‘target groups’ such as enterprises, institutions, inhabitants and visiting consumers (Ashworth and Voogd 1990). Entrepreneurial city centre actors – comprising cooperating public and private actors – strive for economic growth by competing with other cities. They try to compete for mobile capital, consisting of both ‘footloose’ investment capital and mobile consumption capital (Buursink 1990). To be able to compete for capital, cities are geared towards the needs and wants of their ‘customers’ by implementing (re)development projects.

7.2.1 Consumer Mobility One of the groups of customers of cities is the group of consumers. In contemporary urban development literature, consumers are considered to be of increasing importance to the urban economy. The literature emphasises the rise of a consumptionorientated economy. In this context, Crawford (1992) talks about shopping malls as ‘trump cards’ in the increasing competition between cities. Urban development plans therefore increasingly aim for upgrading existing consumption facilities and adding new facilities. As Hall and Hubbard argue, ‘new urban forms, such as shopping malls, cultural centres, heritage parks, conference centres and science parks, are characteristically emerging in many cities, offering a concentration of entertainment and leisure facilities, tourist attractions and business services’ (1996, p. 162). Gottdiener adds that these spaces contain ‘… image driven, themed environments that are attractions themselves but also contain outlets for the sale of commodities’ (1998, p. 15). More specifically, shopping facilities and the

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shopping environment have been designed to attract travelling purchasing power and thereby to make the urban economy grow. It is the belief in highly mobile consumerism that creates a high degree of rivalry among cities. In this context, Zukin argues that ‘the future development of urban consumption spaces is predicated on a continuously mobile lifestyle’ (1998, p. 834). Because consumers are considered to be highly mobile, they are expected to go anywhere and come from anywhere at the same time. In the extreme case, as described by Kooijman (2000), the location of a (cluster of) shop(s) does not seem to matter anymore, due to mobile consumerism. More specifically, the argument is raised that the shopping experience counts nowadays to attract consumers, not the location of the shop or shopping centre. A more realistic scenario, however, is that the catchment areas of city centres have increased in size and thereby increasingly overlap, due to the belief in travelling purchasing power. This makes city centre actors feel that they could compete with other cities. At the same time, the travelling purchasing power that city centre actors are aiming for is assumed to be able to shift from one location to another very easily, which makes them feel that they should compete with other cities. This is not to say that city centre actors never competed before on consumption-related issues, however. The belief in the current, highly mobile consumer has at least resulted in a revival – and perhaps even a diversification and augmentation – of urban rivalry. It has increased the number of considered competitors of a city, which now can be located at (more) distant locations and include both domestic and perhaps even foreign cities. This belief runs parallel with the conviction that it is possible to attract mobile shoppers from more distant locations. In that respect, city centre actors have indeed adopted a more outward-looking approach. Because city centre actors also aim to provide goods and services to local consumers to generate consumer spending and urban economic growth, an ‘outward-looking’ approach was adopted in addition to and not instead of an ‘inward-looking’ approach. By taking both approaches into account, the ‘retail planning research’ to found centre (re)development projects is based on the available spending power at the local and regional levels as well as on attracting travelling purchasing power from more distant locations. In doing so, the belief in a larger catchment area could be used as an argument to found largescale projects in the city centre. The more money that is expected to be spent in the city centre, the more plans will be made to add retailing to the city centre. In this context, an entrepreneurial approach often results in ambitious and speculative projects (see Swyngedouw et al. 2002).

7.2.2 Retail System Dynamics City centre actors consider many other shopping centres, including other city centres, as their competitors, by assuming that the catchment area of the city centre has increased in size and thereby increasingly overlaps with the catchment areas of other cities. In the case of the Netherlands, the main competitors are nearby city and town centres as well as quarter centres and perhaps even the urban ‘fun fringe’ – but not the more distant shopping centres (Boekema et al. 1996).


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Several retail developments have taken place in urban peripheries in addition to the traditional hierarchical retail system, such as hyperstores, peripheral, largescale retail locations containing shops selling cars, home furnishings, DIYmaterials as well as gardening equipment and plants, and recently also factory outlet centres and multifunctional leisure centres. Such retail developments outside the traditional, carefully-planned, functional hierarchy of shopping centres were restricted by the national government, however, to ensure that the city centre remains the main location for small-scale and specialised retailing. Small-scale shops and several retail branches have been excluded from locating in the urban peripheries. Peripheral retail locations have been allowed to contain large-scale retail stores that could not be located in the traditional shopping centres. According to national guidelines, (leisure) shopping centres in the urban periphery should fulfil a complementary and supporting function. They should not be able to threaten the functioning of shopping centres within the hierarchical retail system in general and should not compete for the economic position of city centres at the top of the system in particular (Spierings 2006b). By putting restrictions – at the national level – on the development of shopping centres in addition to the traditional hierarchical retail structure, frequent development initiatives in city centres – at local levels – seem to be guaranteed. A lack of investment opportunities in urban peripheries creates attention for investment opportunities in city centres. At the same time, national policy incentives also directly promote the redevelopment of city centres by means of subsidy programmes, designed to keep vital and vibrant urban cores. Despite the many peripheral retail developments, the Dutch retail structure is less decentralised – i.e. it has fewer retail locations outside the shopping centres constituting the traditional hierarchical retail system than in most other WesternEuropean countries. An important reason for this is the strict control of peripheral retail developments (Guy 1998; Evers 2004). The retail structure can still also be characterised as finely-meshed, in comparison to countries like the United States of America, Germany, France and the United Kingdom (EIM 1997). Furthermore, the recent deregulation and decentralisation of retail planning in the Netherlands has not caused a massive upsurge of new retail formats. Such an upsurge due to less strict planning regulations could have caused a reinvention of and might also have complicated the aim to maintain and strengthen the economic functioning in city centres. Moreover, recent political discussions signal the return of a restrictive retail planning ideology, to prevent retail innovations in urban peripheries which could threaten the functioning of the highly-appreciated city centres (Spierings 2006b). Considering the traditional urban hierarchical typology of shopping centres according to Dutch retail planning, the city centre was assigned the top position of the urban and regional retail system. It was meant to be functionally dissimilar by supplying consumers with the more specialised products that could not be supplied on any other service level due to an insufficient trade area support. It was due to the ‘flattening’ of the hierarchical retail system at both the urban and regional levels that city centre actors felt the need to compete with shopping centres at lower levels in the shopping centre hierarchy, In fact, retailers looking

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for larger market areas built chain(s of) stores, starting in city centres, mostly, in surrounding town centres and, subsequently, in quarter centres. In doing so, a larger market area is achieved by establishing shops in several service levels of the urban and regional hierarchical system. Chain stores mostly spread out from the top of the functional hierarchy to quarter centres and town centres. As a consequence, the retail offer of city centres became less dissimilar to shopping centres at urban and regional levels (Jansen 1989; Boekema et al. 1996). This is even more the case when the increase of food retailing in city centres is taken into account. Shopping centres within the urban and regional retail system, therefore, became less supporting, in the traditional sense, and more competitive to city centres.

7.2.3 Competitive Pressure The main customers of Dutch city centres are local and regional consumers. These consumers did not have to go to the city centre for certain products and services anymore, because they were offered in shopping centres closer at hand – i.e. in town and quarter centres. Arguments have been raised therefore to upgrade city centres in the Netherlands (DM 2001). In fact, the number of shoppers in city centres was diminishing compared to the rising number of shoppers at new, upgraded locations, such as town centres and peripheral shopping centres. Dutch consumers also occasionally like to visit more distant city centres, but that does not mean that mobile shoppers could be attracted from all over the place. What it does imply is that city centre actors in Dutch cities should not expect to make the city centre prosperous by trying to get consumers coming from distant locations (DM 1999). Consumers mostly still visit the nearest city centre (see BRO 1999; Van Middendorp et al. 1999; Esselink et al. 2001). When surrounding nearby and more distant shopping centres, including town and city centres, are making (re)development plans, city centre actors also feel the need to make plans to upgrade. This is not to say that things such as street pavement and furnishings do not have to be renewed occasionally because they have become worn-out. What it does mean is that large-scale plans in other cities work as incentives to perceive and act on the worn-out physical features and the outdated or incomplete functional facilities of the city centre. The reason for this is that the demanding, mobile shopper is assumed to go to another upgraded city centre easily, if he cannot find satisfaction. (Re)development plans in other cities therefore are considered as external threats, acting as stimuli to upgrade city centres (Van der Velde et al. 1996). This implies that city centre actors get the feeling they cannot stay behind and perhaps even want to surpass other cities. The ‘status quo’ does not seem to be an option when other cities are being redeveloped (Van den Berg et al. 1990; Judd 1999). City centre actors act on their image of highly mobile consumerism by making redevelopment plans and implementing redevelopment projects. In doing so, entrepreneurial visions are articulated by dealing with ‘past failures’ of city centre redevelopment, ‘present problems’


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regarding the socio-economic functioning of city centres and ‘future possibilities’ by upgrading the city centre (see Jessop 1997, 2004). City centre actors are looking at and comparing the city with other cities, because the latter are needed to assure the existence of the city. City centre actors claim to offer what other cities have but, at the same time, differences between them are being stressed (Van Houtum and Ernste 2001). In this context, Zukin (1998) argues that claims of uniqueness can become increasingly intense because of competition. Cities are similar and dissimilar at the same time. Or perhaps it is better to argue that cities are not supposed to become too dissimilar, in the sense that they should try to remain ‘familiar’ to mobile shoppers. More specifically, city centre actors want to make shoppers feel ‘at home’ by not making the city centre too dissimilar from competitors. Perhaps this could explain why (re) development strategies of cities are being copied from city to city, as in the case of main street revitalisation and waterfront renovation (Boyer 1992; Crewe 2003). As Harvey (1989, p. 10) puts it, inter-urban competition brings cities ‘… closer into line with the discipline and logic of capitalist development’ that ‘… may even force repetitive and serial reproduction of certain patterns of development …’. Because new strategies are being copied by many other cities, the ‘leadership’ of a city is nullified quickly. When city centre actors realise that leadership is ephemeral, it could cause an intense competitive pressure to keep innovating the city centre in order to stay ahead of competition. This implies an increasing need for city centre actors to repeatedly implement city centre redevelopment projects and to produce new, innovative consumption spaces. Or maybe city centre actors mostly devise redevelopment plans which are in line with strategies that have proven successful in other cities? If so, city centre actors could be typified better as cautiously competitive and entrepreneurially conservative (Griffiths 1998) than as drastically innovative while redeveloping city centres.

7.2.4 City Centre Redevelopment Since the rise of retail planning in the 1950s, city centres in the Netherlands have gone through several similar phases of (re)development, according to Van de Wiel (1996). After World War 2, some cities were occupied with the ‘reconstruction’ of their city centres by creating large-scale morphological structures, including linear and wide shopping streets. In the 1960s, many cities focused on the ‘modernisation’ of the morphological structure by creating larger blocks of buildings and adding shopping arcades, for example. Starting at the end of the 1960s, the shopping streets in most, if not all, city centres were ‘refurbished’ to become pedestrian zones. In the 1980s, many cities focused on a ‘change of function’ by renovating waterfronts and other historic buildings. In the 1990s and onwards, the focus of (re)development projects has been on ‘upgrading the quality’ of city centres by redeveloping vacant and non-shopping areas to create denser shopping spaces. Within the context of the upgrading phase since the 1990s, it was as a response to the perceived effect of international chain stores on the look and offer of city

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centres in the Netherlands, i.e. an increasing similarity (Clement 1997), that city centre actors endeavoured to achieve dissimilarity by upgrading city centres.

7.3

Upgrading City Centres: An Empirical Case

The Dutch city Enschede, having approximately 150,000 inhabitants and located in the eastern part of the Netherlands, close the Dutch-German border, is focussed on here to discuss the empirics of city centre upgrading. The groups of actors taken into account to analyse the planning and implementation of urban redevelopment plans are the local authorities, property actors and (the organisation of city centre) retailers. They are considered mainly responsible for devising upgrading strategies to improve the economic functioning of city centres. The city centre actors as well as policy, strategic and research documents will do most of the ‘talking’ here.1 In doing so, the rationale, the targets and the outcome of the upgrading process are discussed in connection with the interests and input of the groups of city centre actors. The plan-making process to upgrade the city centre of Enschede in general and the Van Heekplein project in particular started at the end of the 1980s. The redevelopment project analysed in this section opened in 2003. Firstly, the competitive feeling of the cooperating groups of city centre actors in Enschede is elaborated on. Following that, the upgrading of the functional structure and the physical form of the city centre, which were meant to (re)establish the position of Enschede as ‘the regional centre’ for shopping, will be discussed.

7.3.1 Enschede: The Regional Centre Based on periodic visitor counts and an analysis of the development of retail sales in the city centre of Enschede, in the late 1980s, the local authorities observed a stabilising number of shoppers and a stabilising amount of consumer spending. Moreover, this implied a declining regional position of the city centre by taking into account retail developments in surrounding places, according to the policy advisor on Economic Affairs. In fact, many consumers including the inhabitants of the city of Enschede that used to shop in the city centre, were considered to visit other shopping centres surrounding the city of Enschede. It was the average quality level of retailing as well as the poor quality of the physical appearance of

_________________________ 1 The following part on the upgrading of the city centre of Enschede in general and the Van Heekplein area in particular is based on an analysis of several data sources. Policy, strategic and research reports as well as records of meetings and debates were studied. City centre actors were interviewed in-depth and interview transcripts were analysed. Furthermore, newspapers and newsletters, promotional material and websites as well as historiographical publications and archives were studied (see Spierings 2006a).


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the city centre, compared to other city centres and surrounding town centres, that was thought to be responsible for the declining regional position. Furthermore, shoppers were considered as increasingly ‘mobile’ causing the ‘floating’ of spending power. Increasingly, shopping centres in surrounding municipalities were seen as competitors. Shoppers were assumed to turn to surrounding shopping centres easily if they cannot find what they are looking for (MAB 1992b). As the retail advisor of the Dutch Retail Federation put it while discussing increased consumer mobility: Retail market areas have increased in size but less spending power is retained in the same area at the same time.

Within the context of mobile consumerism, several cities and towns in the Enschede region were considered to be equally and also more attractive to shoppers, by offering similar and even better shopping facilities. Some shopping centres were seen as having an advantage to compete for shoppers and their spending because they had recently been upgraded. Moreover, many other cities and towns had plans to redevelop shopping centres. The development of city centres in the Netherlands regained attention due to the decline of investment plans for retail locations in the peripheral zone of cities, according to the retail advisor of the Dutch Retail Federation. Regarding the competition with other shopping centres, most city centre actors in Enschede mentioned the places of Hengelo, Almelo, Oldenzaal and Haaksbergen in the Netherlands as well as Münster and Gronau in Germany as important competitors (see Figure 7.1). The councillor for Economic Affairs explained the similar retail offer of the city centre and the surrounding town centres by arguing: I do not hold anything against shops such as Etos, Trekpleister, Kruidvat [– selling chemist goods –] and Blokker [– selling household goods –], but all shopping centres such as Haaksbergen, Losser and Oldenzaal offer these shops. For that reason, these shops do not attract shoppers to Enschede. The city centre should have an exclusive offer, it should be fun-shopping. Vriezenveen Hellendoorn

Denekamp Almelo

Nijverdal

Nordhorn

Oldenzaal

Rijssen Deventer

Hengelo Goor

Steinfurt Gronau

Neede

Zutphen

Ochtrup Emsdetten

Haaksbergen

Lochem

Rheine

Losser

Enschede

Borculo Eibergen Groenlo Doetinchem

Borghorst Vreden

Greven

Ahaus

Lichtenvoorde Stadtlohn Aalten

Winterswijk

Coesfeld

Source: Gemeente Enschede (1996a) Fig. 7.1 Map of the Enschede Region

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Considering that Enschede is the largest city in a wide geographical area containing both places in the Netherlands and Germany,2 by taking into account the location of Enschede near the Dutch-German border, the city centre had to have a different image. The time had come to achieve this, according to the city centre project manager. The city of Enschede’s number one position in the crossborder region had to be (re-)established. In that respect, the aim was to increase the number of shoppers coming from the Twente region by 3% points and the number of German visitors by 5% points (Gemeente Enschede 1996b). In this context, the councillor for Economic Affairs argued that: In economic terms, it was the explicit intention to draw people from ‘outside’ which implies that people living in the entire catchment area had to be attracted.

More specifically, the adding of a large retail space to the city centre of Enschede cannot be justified by the existing, small, local retail market area, according to the policy advisor on Economic Affairs. However, the upgrading of the city centre was mainly founded by means of an opportunistic strategy to attract shoppers and their spending power from a large region surrounding the city (Gemeente Enschede 1997). In this context, the retail advisor of the Dutch Retail Federation argued that the local authorities wanted to improve the quality level of the city centre substantially, all at once, compared to other shopping centres in the region, while adding a large amount of square metres of retailing in an attempt to attract a large number of shoppers and a large amount of spending power. He explained: By observing retail developments in Twente since the 1980s, it shows that the relative position of cities hardly changes. However, it is the extent in which the spending power of the inhabitants is kept in the city centre that changes. The decline of consumer spending of inhabitants is usually counterbalanced by attracting more spending power from other places. The relative position of Almelo, Enschede, Hengelo and Oldenzaal hardly changes. In this context, a certain amount of square metres of retail space could be added to the city centre by taking into account the economic development of the city and the different kind of consumer spending. What is happening these days, however, really is an enormous scaling-up that cannot be justified by means of regular retail planning research.

Retail planning research is usually applied to justify an expansion of shopping centres in the Netherlands. In doing so, the admissible additional amount of square metres of retailing is calculated, based on a predicted growth of the population and on the assumed rise of purchasing power in the catchment area of the shopping centre. The main reason for performing retail planning research is to make sure that shopping centre developments will not disrupt the carefully-planned, hierarchical retail system at both urban and regional levels, by adding too much retail area to shopping cen tres. According to the retail advisor, however, the

_________________________ 2 Enschede city has about 150,000 inhabitants and the nearest and large city, Hengelo, has about 80,000 inhabitants. Other near places are Almelo (70,000 inhabitants) and Gronau (45,000 inhabitants).


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adding of a very large retail space to the city centre of Enschede was based on the opportunistic aim of (re) establishing the position of the city centre as the regional centre for shopping, instead of on thorough retail planning research. Several places in the urban region, including towns surrounding the city, were considered to be(come) equally or more attractive and thereby were held to be (come) responsible for the stabilisation of the number of shoppers and the stabilisation of consumer spending in the city centre. Many nearby and more distant shopping centres had only just been upgraded and others had plans to do so. As a consequence, the perceived freeze and the fear of a drain of spending led to the conviction that the city centre should ‘keep up with the Joneses’. The feeling of the city centre actors that the city centre of Enschede should not lag behind in the competition for mobile consumers was the main driving force for upgrading functional facilities and physical features. As the property developer working at MAB put it: The capital of Twente could not stay behind. They had to do it due to the fact that the neighbours were up and at it as well.

More generally speaking, the policy advisor on Economic Affairs argued that all city centres in the Netherlands are redeveloped once every 10–15 years. Consequently, there is a perceived need to keep pace. The ‘status quo’ was not considered an option because this would imply loosing out to shopping centres surrounding the city in the competition for regional consumers and their spending power. In this context, the chair of the Organisation of City Centre Entrepreneurs argued that there was a felt need to invest: The local authorities have quite a long-term perspective in the sense of feeling the need to put the city of Enschede on the map.

By upgrading the city centre of Enschede to oppose stabilising consumer spending, the local authorities wanted to gain spending power of consumers living in the cross-border region around the city. The consumers inhabiting towns surrounding the city were considered more affluent shoppers, compared to most inhabitants of the city of Enschede. According to the councillor for Spatial Planning, these inhabitants should be attracted to the city to live and spend money. Considering the increasingly mobile lifestyles of shoppers, the catchment areas of city centres are assumed to overlap more and more at the same time. The city centre actors in Enschede therefore felt the need to compete with other city centres for the same more affluent consumers living in the urban regions. Affluent inhabitants living in Enschede also had to be kept in the city, since they easily go somewhere else to spend their money.

7.3.2 Entrepreneurial Redevelopment Approach The city centre actors in Enschede adopted an entrepreneurial approach to counter the declining regional position of the city centre. They opportunistically added a large retail surface area in order to successfully compete with other shopping

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centres. In doing so, the city centre actors intend to maintain and strengthen the economic position of the city centre, which also implies that the traditionallyassigned position at the top of the urban and regional hierarchical retail system is reconfirmed. The city centre is meant to offer the same as other shopping centres, while offering something different at the same time. In short, city centre actors create a (dis)similar consumption space at the urban and regional level – by upgrading functional facilities and physical features – to compete for consumers and their spending power.

7.3.3 Upgrading the Function and Form The upgrading plan for the functional structure and the physical form of the city centres in Enschede was designed to enable and encourage contemporary, mobile consumerism. During a shopping visit, consumers are assumed to stroll and gaze around the shopping streets and squares of the city centre looking for things to do and things to sense (Clarke 2003). They are looking for ‘dissimilarities’ in particular – consumers are on a ‘quest for difference’ (see Baudrillard 1988), searching for things they have not done and seen before –, in addition to ‘familiar’ experiences. In doing so, shoppers perform window-shopping, use several additional consumption facilities while presumably spending money on commodities and services, and also consume in the visual sense the physical features of the city centre (Schroeder 2002). They not only want to shop but also want to be entertained being a ‘homo ludens’ looking for the fun in shopping (see Huizinga 1938). By upgrading both the function and form of city centres, the local authorities, the property developer and (an organisation of city centre) retailers try to create a ‘home’ in the sense of a ‘living room’ for the contemporary, funseeking shopper. By focusing on retailing and comparing the city centre with other shopping centres, a relative lack of high-quality retailing was observed in Enschede by the city centre actors. This was assumed to have a negative impact on the appeal of the city centre for contemporary consumers. In fact, the average quality of chain stores in the high streets was not considered to attract shoppers to the city centre because these stores often could be found in other shopping centres in and surrounding the city as well. The city centre therefore had become less dissimilar from other consumer service levels within both the urban and regional retail system. Furthermore, the available high-quality shops showed a dispersed pattern in both city centres (MAB 1991). Many shoppers were assumed to visit town centres offering similar, average-quality chain stores as the city centre, and other city centres offering both more and clustered exclusive shops. City centre actors wanted to add clustered, high-quality retailing to make the city centre offer different from the retail offer in other shopping centres. Several retail themes – such as ‘chain stores’, ‘specialist shops’, ‘couleur locale’ and ‘designer shops’ – were planned by city centre actors. The city centre was also redesigned to become a more multifunctional space. To achieve this, several urban themes – such as


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‘shopping facilities’, ‘cultural facilities’ and ‘restaurants’ – were assigned to urban areas. (Gemeente Enschede 1996a). By making use of the full range of consumption facilities, shoppers were expected to extend their stay in the city centre. The redevelopment of the Van Heekplein area in the southern part of the city centre was defined as the main upgrading project to make the city centre more appealing to contemporary consumers. The new shopping plaza had to accommodate specialist shops and high-quality chain stores in combination with some additional consumption facilities. These days, the offer of the shopping plaza contains many chain stores – including a new department store – and a casino, for instance. The new department store, in particular, was added to strongly increase the distinctiveness of the city centre and to attract a large number of shoppers from surrounding places. The department store should function as a crowd-puller at regional level and beyond. City centre actors considered ‘couleur locale’ as another element of a distinctive retail offer (SAB 1999). Adding the high-quality type of chain stores to the Van Heekplein area had to increase the regional distinctiveness in another manner. Generating a large inflow of regional shoppers was expected to improve the economic performance of ‘couleur locale’ as well as increase their number in side streets of the city centre.

B

Fig. 7.2 Morphological Structure of the City Centre Before Redevelopment; Boulevard 1945 and Parking Spaces ((a) Gemeente Enschede 1996a, (b) Photo by Carlo ter Ellen, De Twentsche Courant Tubantia)

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In addition to upgrading the functional facilities of the city centres, the physical features were also upgraded. By comparing the city centre with other shopping centres, physical shortcomings were exposed. In particular, the large-meshed structure of the area designated for redevelopment – which resulted from the postwar reconstruction period – was not considered appealing to contemporary consumers. The urban area had been added to the mostly undamaged, finely-meshed and ‘egg’-like structure of the city centre (see Figure 7.2a) and included several large blocks of buildings, a wide carriageway – called Boulevard 1945 – and lots of open space (see Figure 7.2b). The open space was used for market activities and for parking cars. The carriageway made the city centre well-accessible by car. The buildings circumscribing the area contained mostly public or business services. The combination of the square, the carriageway and the blocks of buildings were in line with the modern urban planning philosophy during the post-war period. These days, however, such a morphological structure is considered ‘outmoderned’. The post-war reconstruction approach was even described as a ‘historical mistake’ by the city centre project manager. The impact of the reconstruction on the urban core therefore had to be ‘undone’ by means of the Van Heekplein project. According to the city centre actors, it was due to the urban form of the Van Heekplein area that consumers were not encouraged to continue their shopping strolls in the plaza. More specifically, shoppers were not inclined to do so because of the disconnected structure of the city centre. Due to the fact that the Van Heekplein was a large and empty area, people felt ‘lost’ in space, The area did not function as a real urban square, according to the architect working at West 8. The shopping crowd did not spread sufficiently through the network of shopping streets and squares in the city centre of Enschede. Shoppers mostly walked in the (south)eastern part of the city centre, not so much in the southern part that included the Van Heekplein (MAB 1992a). To make the Van Heekplein area a well-functioning part of the shopping circuit, it had to be connected to the historical ‘egg’-like structure. The area was ‘enclosed’ and the square was made smaller in size to appeal to shoppers (West 8 1999; see also Figure 7.3 for a visual

Fig. 7.3 The New Van Heekplein Area (Enschedestad.nl 2005)


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presentation of the new Van Heekplein area). In doing so, a more coherent network of shopping streets and squares in the city centre was constructed (Gemeente Enschede 1996a). Creating a coherent street network also implied the physical as well as functional upgrading of other city centre parts. Moreover, the historical, morphological structure of the city centre had to be revealed, according to the city centre actors. This was done by renewing the street furnishings and by making guidelines for the upgrading of the exteriors of shops. Any constructions in shopping streets and on historical shopping façades, which concealed the historical appearance of the city centre, had to be removed. In doing so, the existing, curved street pattern – which was seen as constituting the distinctive character of the city centre of Enschede – would be revealed to shoppers. By changing the morphological structure of and adding more retailing to the shopping plaza, a smaller, more intimate shopping square and a denser consumption space was created in the historical urban core of city, designed to be more appealing to contemporary consumers. A coherent city centre was created in Enschede to make shoppers spend more time and money while strolling through shopping streets and squares as well as consuming several clusters of consumer services such as ‘couleur locale’, chain stores, catering and cultural facilities. The shopping environment in general was upgraded in an attempt to fit contemporary consumerism. Street furnishings were renewed, historical features of the urban morphology and shop façades were revealed and new shopping buildings with contemporary architectural styles were added for visual consumption. Accessibility and parking facilities were also upgraded to facilitate a large inflow and outflow of both consumers and commodities.

7.4

Conclusion: Redevelopment Paradox and Entrepreneurial Conservatism

Within the context of the competition for shoppers and spending power, functional and physical (dis)similarity is meant to maintain, strengthen and also reconfirm the traditionally assigned position of the city centre at the top of the urban and regional, hierarchical retail system. By focusing on functional dissimilarity, the position at the top of the hierarchical retail system traditionally implied that the city centre was dissimilar from other consumer service levels at both the urban and regional scale, by offering the more specialised commodities. By definition, only the city centre was able to offer these commodities due to sufficient trade area support. The city centre therefore was able to generate consumer spending from both local and regional shoppers. In that respect, the declining regional position due to increased functional similarity of surrounding shopping centres – together with the observed malfunctioning of physical structures and the downgrading of physical features – gave cause for the making of redevelopment plans to achieve and claim dissimilarity. It is by aiming for different functional facilities

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and for dissimilar physical features that city centres were designed by city centre actors to meet the demands of mobile, fun-seeking shoppers. The city centre actors in Enschede made upgrading plans due to the freeze of consumer spending and the fear of a decline in spending power. They upgraded the function and form of the city centre to (re-)establish its position as the centre of the region. New consumer services were added, including a department store, a better connection between the shopping square and the urban core was constructed and the historical morphology of the urban core was revealed at the same time. In addition to upgrading the functional facilities and physical features of the city centre to be able to compete for mobile shoppers more successfully, accessibility and parking facilities of the city centre were also upgraded to facilitate a large inflow of consumers. A large amount of retailing was added to the city centre by constructing an opportunistic redevelopment project. The aim was to attract a substantially extra amount of regional consumer spending. An incremental approach by redeveloping parcel after parcel in city centres does not seem to be popular these days. A property developer, in cooperation with local authorities and in consultation with retailers, predominantly redevelops large city centre areas in one go. A parcel-by-parcel approach does not fit the entrepreneurial ideology to make a big step forward in an attempt to keep up with competitors and perhaps also to (temporarily) surpass competitors. The construction of large-scale projects also reflects a neoliberal stance to urban development by adhering to the market principle of achieving economies of scale regarding retail property development. Trying to achieve economies of scale implies extracting large value from the city due to rising property values on the one hand and decreasing average fixed costs of urban redevelopment processes on the other hand (see Weber 2002). The redevelopment plan for the city centre of Enschede was designed to leapfrog regional competitors by fixing failures and problems and by finding possibilities. In line with Jessop (1997, 2004), the redevelopment plan was expressed in the entrepreneurial sense by dealing with ‘past failures’ – concerning the rise of chain stores and the reconstruction of the morphological structure, according to post-war principles –, ‘present problems’ – such as similarities of the retail offer within urban and regional retail systems as well as stabilising consumer spending – and ‘future possibilities’ to attract more consumers and their spending by upgrading the functional structure and physical form of the urban core. Generally speaking, a dense functional structure is created in the urban cores of Dutch cities, offering clustered consumption facilities that are available in most city centres. The offer mostly contains a museum square, clusters of catering facilities and a shopping zone that includes several similar shopping themes. A finely-meshed physical form offering shopping circuits is revealed and, if no longer present, (re) constructed in Dutch city centres at the same time. Such an urban morphology consists of curved streets and shopping circuits which connect consumption facilities in the city centre (see Spierings 2006a). Paradoxically, therefore, similar ‘tools’ are used to create differences in an attempt to compete with other city centres for mobile consumer capital. City centre actors try to achieve and claim urban dissimilarity while simultaneously opting for the same kind of solutions to similarity. This makes that city centres


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converge in both the functional and physical sense. It is urban competition that makes local authorities, property developers and retailers clearly perceive any physical and functional shortcomings and makes them act on these shortcomings at the same time by devising repetitive redevelopment strategies. This does not mean that plans are imitated completely, however. Functional and physical adjustments to local circumstances are made, indeed, revealing a constant struggle between the erasure and homogenisation of places and processes of spatial revitalisation and heterogenisation (Jackson 2004). What it does mean is that city centres are not made too different, since too much dissimilarity could make visiting shoppers feel displaced. They should feel at home ‘mentally’ when they are not at home ‘physically’ (Tester 1994). City centre actors therefore keep a close watch on their competitors and create only small differences with and little divergences from other places. Drastic innovations are avoided to make sure that consumers are not scared off. Such entrepreneurial conservatism encourages the copying of successful urban strategies and ‘best practices’ of other cities.

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Chapter 8

A Narrative Understanding of an Entrepreneurial City: The Case of Tilburg Stefan Dormans and Arnoud Lagendijk

Abstract: Over the last few decades cities are increasingly redefined as subjects of interurban competition. In this neoliberal perspective cities are seen as products that have to be ‘sold’ to possible investors, visitors and inhabitants. Yet, such products appear to have become too much detached from ‘daily’ social urban life, which has resulted in a call for a more inclusive reconceptualisation of urban identity. This chapter will respond to this call by employing Margaret Somers’ (1994) notion of narrative identities. In Somers’ view, narrative identities spring from the way people locate themselves and their environment within in a set of emplotted stories. Stories become emplotted through pointing out significant issues and clues bearing on compositions of people, phenomena and events. Struggles over identities manifest themselves as competition over narration. Different groups may tell different stories, and articulate different plots about what a city is and where it goes. As a consequence, cities host a repertoire of stories, with plots that will generally centre on key issues believed to affect the city. Citymarketing strategies draw on this repertoire, selecting and polishing those elements that serve the promotional aims pursued. It is in the selection of elements and their emplotment that a more inclusive strategy can be sought.

Keywords: Neoliberalisation, urban identity, narrative identity, city-marketing, entrepreneurial city, The Netherlands

_________________________ Stefan Dormans Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Cruquiusweg 31, 1019 AT, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] Arnoud Lagendijk (,) Department of Spatial Planning, Radboud University of Nijmegen, PO Box 9108, NL-6500 HK, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] 161 B. Arts et al. (eds.), The Disoriented State: Shifts in Governmentality, Territoriality and Governance, 161–180. © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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8.1

Introduction

Over the last few decades, under the influence of neoliberal thinking, cities have increasingly been redefined as subjects of interurban competition (Harvey 1989; Hubbard 1996; Lever 1999). The idea is that they need to compete with each other to attract increasingly footloose capital, as well as ‘consumers’ of city services and amenities. In this neoliberal perspective cities are seen as products that have to be sold to possible investors, partner-cities nearby, visitors and possible future inhabitants. More often than not urban actors use these entrepreneurial narratives as a starting point for their local strategies. This has led to many efforts to position and reposition the own city, often by creating certain attractive images or tales about the identity of the city. However, these practices have recently been criticised by different scholars for their exclusionary tendencies. Even seen from a neoliberal perspective, narratives on urban positioning seem too narrowly focused on a rather limited repertoire of economic targets (cf. Cerny, Chapter 2). As Brenner (Chapter 3) argues, the contemporary entrepreneurial framework of urban governance privileges the goals of local economic development and territorial competitiveness over traditional welfarist, redistributive priorities. This implies a shift in attention from substantive priorities such as democracy, equality and social justice to narrowly defined economic imperatives such as competitiveness, growth and efficiency. Such a strong economistic focus poses two major dilemmas. First, it may undermine a city’s collective capacity to balance out and align economic and social-environmental ambitions, because of the one-sided emphasis on the former. Second, it may also weaken the effectiveness of economic strategy-making itself. When an economic development perspective is well rooted in local stories and images coming out of the city itself, it is more likely to reflect local needs and conditions, and to produce more social-economic impact. Boilerplate stories of a city’s attractiveness are bound to produce disillusionment. In this chapter we will explore to what extent public accounts that narrate the wider position and aspirations of a city should take account of local stories, to what extent they should be inclusive. By evaluating public accounts with the notion of inclusiveness we aim to reintroduce some of the social welfarist priorities aimed at alleviating inequality, uneven development and unfettered market competition (cf. Brenner, Chapter 3). A useful concept for conceptualisation inclusiveness is the notion of narrative identities. According to Somers (1994, p. 624) “a narrative identity approach assumes that social action can only be intelligible if we recognise that people are guided to act by the structural and cultural relationships in which they are embedded and by the stories through which they constitute their identities – and less because of the interest we impute to them.” A narrative understanding of urban identity starts from the idea that people tell tales about the identity of a city and that these tales together make up an important part of the identity of that city. This explicitly discursive understanding of identity relates to the idea that we come to know ourselves and the world we live in through the tales we tell to ourselves and to others (Whitebrook 2001). From this idea follows that different people (or groups of people) may tell

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different stories, and articulate different plots about what a city is and where it goes. As a consequence, cities host a wide variety of stories, with plots that will generally centre on key issues believed to affect the city. We will focus here on a particular set of stories told about a particular city, namely marketing tales told about the city of Tilburg. As a medium sized city in the south of the Netherlands, Tilburg is a well-known example of city marketing in the Netherlands. Since the 1970s the city has been subsequently marketed as the ‘Heart of Brabant’ (the province), an ‘Education City’, a ‘Modern Industrial City’ and, recently, as an ‘Innovative and Entrepreneurial City’. Each of these city marketing campaigns told its own tale about the identity of Tilburg, but also about city marketing practices in general. The most recent effort to market the city of Tilburg, the so-called Tilburg-T campaign, is the subject of this chapter. The second part of the chapter will analyse this campaign on the basis of an urban identity narrative that will be explained in the next section.

8.2

A Narrative Understanding of Urban Identity

As Barbara Czarniawska (2002, p. 2) put it: for the Chicago sociologists, the city was its inhabitants; for economists, the city is an area of economic activity; for political scientists, the city is its governance; for urban planners and architects, the city is a stage to be built and rebuilt. We would like to add that for narrative scholars the city is a collection of tales, told and retold by individuals and groups inside ánd outside the city. Accordingly, narrative scholars equal the identity of a city with urban identity tales. This does not mean that the identity of a city consists just out of tales, that the city is only text. Just like the planner knows that the city is more than its built environment, the narrative scholar acknowledges that there is a city beyond the text. Stories are just one way of articulating the identity of the city. However, the focus of a narrative understanding of urban identity is the tales people tell about the identity of a city. As already mentioned, the focus will be here on city marketing tales. These tales are told primarily by local politicians, policy makers, marketeers and communication experts. The main aim of these tales is to sell the city to external investors, higher authorities, visitors, and possible future inhabitants. The city marketing tales are part of a wider set of entrepreneurial policies that are aimed at creating jobs, expanding the local tax base, fostering small firm growth and attracting new forms of investment (Hubbard and Hall 1998, p. 5). According to Brenner (Chapter 3), these urban locational policies are grounded upon state strategies that explicitly target cities and urban regions as sites for the enhancement of territorial competitiveness. As such, these policies actively intensify uneven development within states and reflect, what Brenner calls, newly constituted, state-organised interscalar rule-regimes. In an effort to promote such entrepreneurial policies particular metaphors and discourses are used to (re)shape imaginations and to bring certain ‘readings’ of a city to the forefront and allowing other readings to fade away into the background (Griffiths 1998; Raco 2003). As we have argued elsewhere (Dormans et al. 2002) the selective and strategic

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making of an urban identity masks important elements of a city. As researchers, we should critically analyse and follow what the consequences are for these excluded, so-called unmarketable aspects and dimensions of a city which might well make the city alive in the first place and a place worth and attractive to live in. Recently, some changes can be witnessed with regard to these city marketing tales. Under a new heading, city branding, a shift in emphasises has been made to the image of the city, instead of the physical city. In line with recent marketing insights the focus is now on the perception of the product, instead of on the product itself. So it is not the city but the image that has to be planned (Vermeulen 2002). In marketing terms, this process is called ‘concepting’, which is basically ‘marketing the other way round’ (Van Synghel 2002). Unlike marketing, the process does not start with a product that consequently defines price, place of distribution and promotion. Concepting starts with the promotion or communication of an idea or vision. Later on, everything else including the product is established to sustain the original concept. (Van Synghel 2002). In order to identify a city, branding involves the frequent use of a specific name, symbol, logo, or design (or combination of these), so that the city can be distinguished from its competitors in a succinct and easily assimilated way (cf. Bramwell and Rawding 1996). According to Mommaas (2002) brands derive their attraction largely from the fact that they introduce a certain order or coherence to the multiform reality around us and that they thus enable us to more easily ‘read’ each other and our environment of places and products. There should be a balance, as a result, between recognition, i.e. reference to commonly accepted symbols and values, and distinctiveness, through a unique and appealing combination of elements. These conditions do not pose a strong limit on what kinds of accounts on a city are feasible. On the contrary, in theory, every city consists of a seemingly endless pool of stories. In practice, however, one can see recurring themes, overlapping storylines, similar topics, which suggests that some stories and themes are more preponderant than others. So while the scope for stories is virtually unbounded, the repertoire of themes they draw on is much more limited. This selective outcome cannot be determined in advance. It is an empirical question (cf. Somers 1994). By analysing concrete urban tales closely this chapter shows how marketing tales opt for certain themes, and how this forms the basis for their exclusionary character. The use of a narrative approach can serve to illuminate processes of selection and the shaping of narratives on urban identity. This is achieved in various ways. Firstly, by conceptualising urban identity as a pool of stories the different articulations of this identity are put in perspective. The emphasis on tales implies that more tales can be told about a city and that this is just one of many. This resonates with the idea that there is not one essential identity of a city, but that the identity of a city is a collection of individually articulated identities. Every inhabitant, but also people from outside the city, constructs her own version of the identity of a city and can do this by telling a story. In the case of a marketing tale, this is done in a particular way as to serve the particular aim and scope of the tale.


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A narrative understanding of urban identity thus pays attention to the specificity and contingency of any identity construction. Besides this, it also directs attention to the author of the story. A narrative scholar will always take into account who it is that tells the story and how he or she tells it (Hinchman and Hinchman 1997). Finally, a narrative approach may shed light on the way particular repertoires develop. This happens through repetitive selection and also cross-referencing, but also by alluding to other narratives, such as, in our case, the rise of neoliberal thinking. Three concepts will thus stand out in our analysis, which will be further explained in the next section: emplotment (which makes a narrative distinctive), interpretative repertoire (which makes it recognisable and understandable) and relationality (which serves to embed a story in a wider context).

8.2.1 Interpretative repertoires When telling urban tales narrators play, according to Finnegan, on images of urban life likely to be both familiar and intelligible for themselves and their listeners (1998, p. 158). This make storytelling unambiguously a social process in which the narrator tells a story which (s)he expects that the listener recognises and accepts. In doing that, the narrator makes use of common social and cultural understandings and connections to characterise and evaluate actions, events and other phenomena. Interpretative repertoires are in the first place analytical concepts which can be used for exploring the social or cultural understandings and connections which shape and enable talk and are assumed to be common to different speakers (Taylor 2003). The idea is that different speakers have common social resources which shape and enable talk. Potter and Wetherell (1987) define interpretative repertoires as “recurrently used systems of terms used for characterising and evaluating actions, events and other phenomena”. Elsewhere in their book, this system of terms is described as “basically a lexicon or register of terms and metaphors” which people can draw upon to characterise and evaluate actions and events (Potter and Wetherell 1987). In a later publication Wetherell elaborates on the concept (1998, pp. 400–401) charging it with a more normative connotation: These interpretative repertoires comprise members’ methods for making sense in this context – they are the common sense which organises accountability and serves as a backcloth for the realisation of locally managed positions in actual interaction (which are always also indexical constructions and invocations) and from which, as we have seen, accusations and justifications can be launched.

The main point about interpretative repertoires, according to Edley (2001), is that they are relatively coherent ways of talking about subjects and events in the world. Edley sees them as the ‘building blocks of conversation’, a range of linguistic resources that can be drawn upon and utilised in the course of everyday social interaction (2001). A central element of interpretative repertoires is that they do not determine individual discursive work (Wetherell 1998; Taylor 2003). There is choice and flexibility for the speaker in using a repertoire. A repertoire

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allows flexible use, although there are constrains on this flexibility: not all options are available. They offer possibilities for discursive work; somebody can, for instance, accept or deny one of the common places of a repertoire.

8.2.2 Emplotment and relationality When producing a tale, a particular interpretative repertoire (or combination of repertoires) is invoked to tell a specific story. However, a repertoire does not prescribe storylines: everybody has the choice of what to tell and what not to tell (Whitebrook 2001). Tales are constructed and the narrator chooses the events which will be part of the story. The narrator not only chooses which events will be used for this particular story, but also arranges the different events into a particular order. This selection and arrangement of events is called emplotment and suggests some relationship between the events (Whitebrook 2001). Every tale has a certain plot and the idea of emplotment draws attention to the construction of the plot: why are these events selected and why are they arranged in this manner? According to Somers, emplotment is an accounting of why a narrative has the storyline it does (1994). “To talk of narrative identity entails attention to how the story is told, the mode of construction, structures and techniques, and why the story – ‘this story’ – is being told, and whether it is convincing” (Whitebrook 2001). While the selection of interpretative repertoires is important for the positioning of a discursive practice in a broader debate or domain (for instance, the production of city marketing tales), it is emplotment that plays a key role in how a certain story performs. This is a significant point for our understanding of urban narratives. Several scholars claim that a narrative approach can contribute to a better communication in the public sphere. A narrative understanding of, for instance, urban identity could create a discursive space which allows for different voices in the field to be heard. This aligns with Healey’s (2002) call for a new understanding of the city. She argues that the challenge in the contemporary period is to mould multidimensional conceptions of ‘city’ which both reflect and interrelate the rich diversity and complexity of contemporary urban life, while generating a discursive public realm within which people can argue about what their city is and should be (Healey 2002, p. 1779). Healey continues to argue that these new conceptualisations of the city should be lodged within a richer shared resource of collective argumentation, more deeply embedded in the mentalities of people in all kinds of situations in an urban area. They need to frame people’s thinking about ‘their place’ and be grounded in people’s experiential and imaginary encounters with place, rather than positioned above them as some kind of logo or colour wash on an advertisement hoarding. (Healey 2002, p. 1785)

Besides the attention for different stories, a narrative approach can also give insight into the way particular stories shape meaning. As Throgmorton (2003, p. 127) points out, it is through emplotment, characterisations, descriptions of settings, and rhythm and imagery of language, that stories unavoidably shape the


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readers’ attention, turning it this way instead of that. A similar argument is made by Ronald Jacobs (2000, p. 21): Of all the features of narrative that influence public sphere communication, perhaps the most important is plot, which refers to the selection, evaluation and attribution of differential status to events. It is plot, more than anything else, that encourages the public concentration of attention on to specific events.

So the way the story is told tells readers and listeners what is important and what is not, what counts and what does not, what matters and what does not (Throgmorton 2003). In the next part of the paper we will zoom into the production of city marketing tales in Tilburg, with emphasis on the construction of plots and their performance. In the first place, this is a story about historical change. Two critical moments occurred in which a marketing tale was developed, first in the late 1980s–early 1990s, and second from 2003 onwards. Both periods resulted in a specific characterisation of the city, accompanied by a careful selection of slogans, symbols and stories. In the second place, we are interested in how these discursive practices were part of the wider urban environment and experiences, and how these interactions were seen and managed.

8.3

Tilburg: From Old to Modern Industrial City

Tilburg is situated in the middle of the province of Noord-Brabant. With the cities of Breda, Den Bosch, Helmond, Eindhoven and Tilburg the province of NoordBrabant is one of the most urbanised areas in the Netherlands and after the Randstad it is one of the strongest economic regions. The province is located in the south of the Netherlands and is one of the major routes between the Randstad and Belgium as well as between the Randstad and the Ruhr area. In January 2006 Tilburg welcomed its 200,000th inhabitant, which makes it the sixth largest city in the Netherlands. Until the 1970s the main source of employment in Tilburg was the textile industry. Beside textile other products were manufactured as well (for example shoes in the leather industry), but this could not avert the high unemployment rates and low economic potential after the breakdown of the textile industry in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the old textile factories have been demolished since the 1970s and only a few characteristic chimneys can be found in the contemporary city. The then mayor of Tilburg, Cees Becht, already tried to turn the tide in the 1960s. In his 8 Years Plan (the Achtjarenplan) he made proposals to diversify the monoculture of the local economy by focussing more on education. The focus on education also had the aim to increase the level of education and the regional function of Tilburg (Tops and Klink 1986). In the 1980s Tilburg was even selling itself as an ‘Education City’. However, these early city marketing efforts remained small scale. This changed when Gerrit Brokx became mayor of Tilburg in 1988. Brokx, a former State Secretary with a large strategic network in national politics, was

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successful shortly after his arrival when he made it possible that Tilburg was awarded the status of stedelijk knooppunt (urban node). In the Fourth National Policy Document on Spatial Planning (Ministerie van Volkshuisvesting, Ruimtel ke Ordening en Milieubeheer 1988) the Dutch government stated that the aim was to create several nodes in the urban field, which should be the international centre of economic and infrastructural developments. After years of national policies that focussed on the development of the Randstad as the engine of the national economy, now the urban nodes should become the new economic engines. This meant a substantive amount of extra funding for Tilburg to create more economic growth, but also the obligation to make a new economic profile. The municipality commissioned a study on the economic profile of the city by EIT, the Economic Institute of the University of Tilburg. An important aspect of the Fourth National Policy Document on Spatial Planning was that the chosen urban nodes all had to have a different (economic) identity, so they could be complementary to each other. By stressing different sectors of the economy national government tried to encourage a more diverse and flexible national economy. Besides this national guideline there was an other development which increased the demand for a distinguished urban identity. In the Brokx-era the image of Tilburg was too much that of an old industrial city. Many people involved wanted to change this internally ánd externally unattractive image. A new and more positive identity was needed, not only as a consequence of national policy, but above all things to get rid of the negative connotations the public had when thinking of Tilburg. At the time, representatives of several economic sectors tried to influence the discussion on the new image of the city. The educational sector emphasised the fact that Tilburg had a growing reputation as an educational city. Besides an important life sciences university, the city seated also many other institutions for higher education. As already mentioned, in the 1980s the city presented itself as an ‘Education City’ and prolongation of this slogan was an option. Another option was to focus more on the transport and logistics sector. Partially due to its location in the centre of the province of NoordBrabant in the south of the Netherlands, Tilburg is a city with a relatively large portion of transport and logistics. The health sector also played and plays a dominant role in the economy and social life of the city. The St. Elisabeth Hospital is generally regarded as one of the best hospitals in the Netherlands. These three options (education, transport and health city) where strongly promoted by the actors representing these sectors, but all were not selected as new strategic identity. Although Tilburg can be seen as above average in all these sectors they decided to select another aspect of the local identity and to limit the new profile to one sector of society. The study by the Economic Institute of the University of Tilburg, published in 1991, showed that Tilburg had, compared to national standards, a relatively strong modern industrial sector and, in contrast to national trends, this sector managed to grow during the 1980s. The first recommendation of this report was taken over by the local government: In view of the importance of the industry for the employment, the process of conversion and modernisation which has taken place in the previous period, the (innovative)


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potentials of the industries, and its history as industrial city, Tilburg should in its profile clearly emphasise the city as a modern high grade industrial city. (Dagevos et al. 1991, p. xxiii, our translation and emphasis)

The recommendation continues by stating that several modern industrial concerns already located in Tilburg possibly could support this profile in external image formation. The importance of transport and logistics, education and health for the local society can be found in the recommendations at the second, third and fourth place. The modern ‘global and mobile’ industrial sector was thus seen as the most important carrier of the local economy. Investments in this sector were seen as a major way to tackle a serious problem in the city: the high unemployment rate of 19% in 1990 (Grit 2000). In April 1992, inspired by the EIT study, a large majority of the city council choose for a new strategic mission: ‘Tilburg Modern Industrial City’ (TMI). According to the municipality the idea of Tilburg as a modern industrial city is a unique selling point (Grit 2000). By creating a distinctive identity the city should be better equipped to compete with other cities. In the same year a new city marketing campaign was started which used this mission as a slogan. The campaign was controversial from the beginning and became one of the most mentioned examples of city marketing practices in the Netherlands. An important question then is why the municipality, together with other strategic actors in the city of Tilburg, decided for this new identity. Why did they choose to identify the city with the modern industry? All the four options mentioned were plausible and defendable. Every choice would be a selection and in every case some interest groups would be disappointed. What made the decision-makers ultimately chose for TMI? The municipality put it like this: In 1992 Tilburg embarked on a distinctive course for the city, namely Tilburg Modern Industrial City (TMI). With this strategic choice, the municipality has given a clear signal that the economic development and employment are of great interest for the development of the city. This course came into being in close collaboration with the industrial circles of Tilburg. The mission is elaborated through some policy notes for which there was an even more intensive collaboration with concerns and societal organisations. (Gemeente Tilburg 1999, our translation)

So the emphasis seems to rest on economic development and employment, but the municipality of course does not say if the other sectors were supposed to give less economic growth. In our view, the initial success of the motto stems from its characteristic as a strategic identity effectively mobilising the city’s industrial past, and hence from using an industrial-urban repertoire in a plot featuring the modern, strategically positioned city. The new motto seems to comply with the demands of strategic identity-making – to be coherent, selective, polished, unique, and ambitious but realistic, while at the same suggesting continuity from the past. It refers, at the same time, to the instrumental notion of creating a new, modern, industrialised city, and the industrial culture of the past. This characteristic has given the proponents of the motto a decisive advantage in the identity competition. The extent of competition is manifested by the way the slogan of ‘Tilburg Modern Industrial city’ (TMI) is considered controversial. An often mentioned reason for the controversy is the word ‘industrial’. In a discussion on the image of

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American cities Jakle and Wilson (1992) state: “To call a city ‘industrial’ in the present period in the U.S. is to associate it with a set of negative images: declining economic base, pollution, a city on the downward slide” (quoted in Short et al. 1993, p. 208). Cities with more positive imagery are associated with the postindustrial era, the future, the new, the clean, the high-tech, the economically upbeat and the socially progressive (Short et al. 1993). By using the word ‘industrial’ the TMI-slogan evoked and still evokes a lot of negative associations. Critics said that an industrial city made them think of smokestacks, chemical pollution, and greyness, instead of a city where one could live, work and study pleasantly (Bruijnius and Van Corven 1993). Within a year the municipality started to communicate a broader interpretation of the slogan: the slogan had to be understood as a reference to modern industry ánd to modern city (Grit 2000). The use of the word ‘modern’ seems to be an attempt to counteract this negativity with some positive ‘post-industrial’ connotations. The word ‘modern’ is used not so much as a reference to the industrial era of modernity, but to the high-tech and the clean of the postmodern. So on the one hand the TMI-slogan tries to make a link to the industrial past, and on the other hand it tries to move away from the negative connotations of ‘industrial’ and to tap the positive imagery of ‘postindustrial’. The question is, to what extent has such a plot been able to perform? And what kind of counteraction did it evoke? The TMI-slogan is an often discussed slogan with many opponents, mainly from the economic sectors earlier mentioned (transport, health and education), but also from the civic population. Probably the same amount of energy put into the slogan by the municipality to promote it, was put into the opposition to the slogan. The enthusiasm and discursive rhetoric by which it was promoted, and the widespread use of the slogan, evoked much criticism. Especially the industrial connotations of the slogan created an ongoing discussion about TMI. Despite the discussion ‘Tilburg Modern Industrial City’ was reaffirmed in 2001 in the new economic policy of the municipality. This new economic policy was an attempt to become less dependable on the logistical sector ánd on the industrial sector. The central idea of the new policy was to focus on the office market, because more office jobs will increase the average income in Tilburg (Brabants Dagblad, 26 April 2001). Although the industrial sector was less prominent in this policy, the TMI-slogan was not abandoned. However, after a few years the municipality nonetheless decided to fully open the window for developing a city marketing strategy.

8.4

City Promotion and the Strategic Choices

In 2003 the TMI-slogan was dropped and replaced by a strategy centred on the initial character ‘T’ in the city’s name. Instead of a slogan the identity of Tilburg is nowadays communicated by a logo: a simple and robust T. In the subsequent section this new city marketing approach is described, thereby focussing on a proposal written by the mayor and the aldermen in collaboration with members of


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the Concern Communication in April 2003 under the heading ‘Stadspromotie, de strategische keuzes’ (City Promotion, the Strategic Choices). This proposal tells the story of why a new form of city promotion is needed, how it should look like, and why it should look that way (Gemeente Tilburg 2003). In this section this city marketing tale will be analysed elaborately by looking both at its emplotment and at the interpretative repertoires which are used. While going through the proposal step by step, we will highlight the contribution the various events make to the whole argument and additionally show how the authors draw creatively on specific interpretative repertoires to support their story. The introduction of the proposal starts with the statement that the image of Tilburg needs a new impulse. Although the image of Tilburg has become better than it used to be, the authors argue, some clear and updated strategic choices have to be made. These choices need to do justice to the current diversity in the city and the authors question if the profile modern industrial city still fits the strongly enriched identity of Tilburg. Although the question is not if Tilburg needs a profile at all, the actual proposal nevertheless starts with an argumentation why the ‘product Tilburg’ has to be put in the market: The reason is simple: one benefits from it, especially in economical sense. It is good to position the city as an attractive city for visitors, investors, and students. It helps also to implement municipal policies as effectively as possible. In other words: every self respecting city markets itself professionally. (Gemeente Tilburg 2003, no page number, our translation)

As this extract shows, the need for city marketing is not questioned – on the contrary – and consequently a new impulse for the image of Tilburg should be just as self-evident. This opening argument helps to legitimise the process which led up to this proposal and which is described in detail in the first section of the proposal. Two important and related steps were made during this process. The first step was a consultation of several local partners by the municipality. The goal of this consultation was to see what Tilburg had to offer and during this process four core values were established: decisiveness, innovation, space, and attachment. According to the authors, “these are distinctive values which characterise the city and will be recognised as such. These core values can be used to depict Tilburg in years to come” (Gemeente Tilburg 2003, no page number, our translation). All the values are subsequently explained in further detail. The value innovation is, for instance, linked with the cultural industry, creativity, trendiness, and the tendency to take risks and seize opportunities. The value decisiveness is linked with an entrepreneurial spirit and several industrial and working class associations. The debate on values thus served to build up a new repertoire by a wider, although still selective group of urban actors. The second step in the process leading up to the proposal was a further examination of these four core values in an image study by the research bureau Polyground. This study comprises a quantitative part that focuses on households inside and outside Tilburg and a qualitative part that focuses on local key actors. Some of the results of the study which are mentioned in the proposal are the nondescript image of Tilburg, the spatial fragmentation, and the lack of high-quality

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services. The characteristics make it difficult to articulate a positive plot on the city’s position and development. The main conclusion of the study is that the two core values decisiveness and innovation are recognised most inside and outside of Tilburg. The study ends with the following conclusion: “Tilburg is an innovative, entrepreneurial city which creates space for people to achieve results and be successful” (Gemeente Tilburg 2003, no page number, our translation). In line with contemporary trends in city branding the focus is on the perception of the city, instead of on the city itself. The search for core values that characterise the city relates to the idea that in marketing the associations people have with a city have become more important than the actual physical city. In what can be seen as a change of repertoire, whereas city marketeers used to focus on landmark buildings or well-known events and festivals, they now look more and more at a selection of core values to distinguish cities. This can also be seen in other recent Dutch examples of restyled city marketing campaigns. Almere, for instance, is nowadays presented as a colourful and pioneering city (Snel 2006), Amsterdam is associated with the core values innovation, creativity and mercantile spirit (Gehrels et al. 2003), while Maastricht is presented as a European city with quality and style (Gehrels et al. 2005). Incidentally, all these campaigns were based on a study by the same consultancy agency: Berenschot. In all these studies the core values were established after a discussion with local key actors who had to select those values that they thought represented their city best. In the subsequent section of the proposal the authors argue that the results of the Polyground study are the basis for a communication strategy that needs to be simple and clear. The core values will not be communicated, but will be the guiding principles for choosing those elements of Tilburg that will be communicated. So, in building a narrative and a plot, decisiveness and innovation will thus only be communicated indirectly. The authors of the proposal mention three elements which are important with regard to the tone of voice of the communication (Gemeente Tilburg 2003). Firstly, it should not be loud and impersonal, because research and trend-watching have shown that this does not work for public communication. There is a need for local specificity and intimacy. The communication of Tilburg responds to this by showing small, personal things and emphasising the human touch. Besides that, people nowadays want to experience and practice a city. This is presented as a chance, because Tilburg is a city that can be experienced well; something that the authors primarily link to the fact that many things happen in Tilburg. A third point mentioned in the proposal is the fact that people are tired of the presentation of successes and positive results in public communication. They want to hear about the process, the way to success. So the new strategy emphasises the personal experience of individuals and steps away from ‘traditional’ public communication which used to focus on successes and positive results, the authors argue. So, while discussing the tone of voice of the new communication strategy the authors simultaneously make a case for the abolishment of the ‘traditional’ public communication. In doing so the authors already set the scene for the next section of the proposal in which a comparison is made with the preceding city promotion campaign. Just as in the previous section the TMI-campaign is not mentioned


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explicitly. The authors constantly refer to ‘previous campaigns’ or ‘former days’. Four main differences between the proposed strategy and city promotion in the past are mentioned in summary in the proposal (Gemeente Tilburg 2003). The first difference mentioned, is that the current approach is based on research. This is contrasted with earlier marketing activities which are presented by the authors as random choices. This criticism comes over as somewhat unfair, since as recounted before, the TMI-campaign was for instance based the EIT study. On the basis of that argument the choices made then cannot be qualified as more random than the choices made for this strategy. Possibly, the authors refer to the fact that this campaign was based on an image study, while the EIT study focussed on the economic profile of Tilburg. The second difference mentioned in the proposal is, in this respect, more clear; the current campaign is presented as a collaboration from the municipality with other strategic actors in the city. The image of the city is after all, the authors argue, the sum of the image of various groups in the city. The unmentioned reference is the previous campaign, which was too focussed on one sector. In line with this should the new city promotion be supported more widely, officially as well as politically. In the past city promotion was mainly the responsibility of two departments, Concern Communication and Economic Development, and now it should be something for the whole municipal organisation. A last difference mentioned in the proposal is that the new city promotion is based ánd focussed on emotions instead of facts and figures. Up until this point in the proposal the confrontation between the old and the new campaign was somewhat indirect. Much emphasis has been on the process leading up to the proposal and on the preconditions of the new strategy, but the existing campaign and slogan, Tilburg Modern Industrial City, is only mentioned occasionally. In the last part of the proposal the existing and the new strategy are set against each other, at last, under the heading ‘Tilburg Modern Industrial City, yes or no?’. Before deciding on the practical plan of implementation it is, according to the authors, first necessary to decide whether TMI should stay the central slogan in the positioning of the city. The central question asked in this respect is: “To what degree can Tilburg Modern Industrial City really support the strategic choice of core values, in close collaboration with parties in the city?” (Gemeente Tilburg 2003, no page number, our translation). The authors continue by asking if TMI is still contemporary and if it fits a widely supported repositioning. An interesting enumeration of pros and contras is subsequently listed. The first argument to keep on to the slogan is that the distinctiveness of the TMI slogan remains significant. In addition to this the authors mention the fact that it is used for such a long time now that it makes a recognisable label for Tilburg. This argument is linked explicitly with the opinion of marketing practitioners, who say that one should never throw away a good slogan or logo because then you have market a complete new product all over again. A third argument in favour of the TMI slogan is that it can also be used as label in a new approach. A link with the core values of the newly proposed campaign, innovation and decisiveness, could be another possibility. A last favourable argument for the TMI slogan is related to the costs. The future omission of the TMI-logo from all the municipal

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letterheads, advertisements, and other utterances would cost a lot of money. This list is juxtaposed to the following counterarguments. The first argument is that a new approach needs a new start and the abandoning of TMI could function for this. It would also be an example of decisiveness and innovation to get rid of the old slogan and get a fresh start. Besides that, the image-study did not prove, in any way, that Tilburg is more known through the TMI-campaign. Another argument against the slogan is that TMI does not reflect current developments in Tilburg. TMI is deemed too economical and too sectoral. It is too limited to economy in general and the industrial sector in particular and it does not reflect the diversity in the city with regard to culture and educational services. This point relates to the argument that there is no broad support for the slogan in the city. Especially among those sectors which are mentioned as strong sectors (education, culture) the TMI-slogan does not reflect their interests. In this sense the TMI-slogan frustrates the network idea of the new approach. A last argument which is mentioned in the proposal is that TMI is 10 years old and thus outdated. Although a link with the core values innovation and decisiveness was presented as a possibility earlier, here a contrasting argumentation is given. After presenting arguments for and against holding on to the TMI-slogan, several options for further steps are proposed by the authors. The formulation of the first option is telling (note the exclamation marks): Stop using TMI. The name ‘Tilburg’ (without further additions or extra slogans) subsequently becomes the basis for all city promotion activities. TILBURG is the brand!! (Gemeente Tilburg 2003, no page number, our translation)

The second option is retaining TMI, but with a new, updated logo. The third option is maintenance of TMI as the basis for all city promotion activities. The mayor and the aldermen conclude that the best option is the first one: stop using TMI. Two arguments are mentioned in particular (and for the second time): the fact that TMI does not reflect the current diversity in the city ánd the idea that TMI will slow down the collaboration with other parties in the city. A broad support for the new city promotion is deemed essential for success. A new slogan, on the other hand, is not seen as a possible option. Some variations on TMI are mentioned (modern culture city, modern sports city, modern university city) and rejected for being, just like TMI, too limited. At the end of the proposal the T-logo is mentioned for the first time and introduced as an appropriate symbol to represent the core values decisiveness and innovation: “The ambition to make TILBURG a brand gets its visualisation with a potent (and already existing) image” (Gemeente Tilburg 2003, no page number, our translation). The most important reasons for this choice, mentioned in the proposal, are: • The T-style goes very well with the core values innovation and decisiveness. • The style has a seemingly endless amount of creative applications. • The T is an already existing image, which saves developmental costs (see next section).


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• The T is developed for local partners (the city centre organisation) and thus fits the principle that city promotion needs to be a project with broad support. • The T-style has no emotionally charged history, is neutral and not the exclusive domain of a few sectors. Tilburg-T is presented as the prime carrier of the new campaigning style of the city. “The ‘T’ will make all means we employ recognisable. There will be no single slogan, although we will make use of various pay-offs. Such pay-offs will be employed situationally, that is, contingent upon the subject at hand. Yet a key condition is that the pay-off alliterates with the city’s initial” (Gemeente Tilburg 2003, no page number, our translation). Some examples of this are given: ‘Typisch Tilburg’ (Typical Tilburg), ‘Tilburgs Trots’ (Pride of Tilburg), ‘Tintelend Tilburg’ (Tingling Tilburg), ‘Tappend Tilburg’ (Tapping Tilburg), ‘Thuis in Tilburg’ (At home in Tilburg), and ‘Treffend Tilburg’ (Striking Tilburg). At this point the reader is given the idea that he or she can make a choice for or against the existing campaign and slogan, but the proposal is set up in such a way that change stands out as the most obvious step. This is largely a matter of the way the plot of this strategy story is framed. By making a clear distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’, the latter is bound to win. The old does not fit current expectations and perceptions. The old is outdated and needs to be replaced with something new. We should realise however that the old is only old because the way the story is framed. This is accompanied by a change in repertoire. The suggestion is to step over from the existing industrial-urban repertoire to a marketing repertoire based on a simple but malleable symbol. This has important benefits for the creation of an urban identity script. Rather than having to search for a new, singular plot to replace the ‘modern industrial city’ story, a more flexible practice can be created. Relying less on a single plot, it allows for the building of a more loose network around the symbol of the T.

8.5

The T-Campaign

The proposal of the mayor and the aldermen was discussed in the commission Modern Bestuur (Modern Governance) in May 2003 and in the city council in June 2003. After a discussion and with some minor amendments the proposal was accepted. The Tilburg-T was accepted as central logo for the new campaign and the TMI-slogan was abandoned. In the following section I will discuss the preceding history of the T-logo, which was already hinted at in the last part of the proposal, and materials which were and are used to promote the T-style. The Tilburg-T was originally – since January 2001 – used by Tilburg Binnenstad, a collaboration of shopkeepers and the catering industry in the city centre of Tilburg. The idea came from several local actors: the municipality, the Chamber of Commerce, the Tilburgse Kunststichting (a local art foundation), and Stichting Stadskern (a local collaboration of some larger economic actors in Tilburg, like the local branch of the cooperative bank Rabobank and health insurer

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CZ, which has its head office in Tilburg). The logo was developed by the ‘dESIGN_UC studio for design and sustainable communication’ from Amsterdam. On their website1 the project is described as follows: The city centre of Tilburg does not attract enough shopping visitors. The municipality wants to promote the city center anew. The typical characteristics of the city and its inhabitants are of great importance in this process: common sense, no nonsense, powerful, unpolished, and manifest. This is the reason that unpolished, enthusiastic, and involved with the center has become the house style and city marketing of the city center: the T-style. This city style makes a binding element. It is the first urban style which is accessible for everybody and publicly available. From the baker on the corner until the marketing bureau from the marathon: the city style promotes itself. (our translation)

According to Rick Van Wandelen, the head of the municipal department Concern Communication, it was an option from the beginning to use the T for the whole city (Schrameijer 2003). Van Wandelen says that the T definitely has a modern and decisive appearance, but it is also mysterious. According to him, this fits the character of the city. A comparison is made with historical cities like Breda and Den Bosch which present an unambiguous image. Tilburg lacks a distinctive urban image, which makes it somewhat inscrutable. The quality is there, according to Van Wandelen, but it is hidden (Schrameijer 2003). In a promotional leaflet from the municipality (Gemeente Tilburg 2004a, no page number) Tilburg’s new approach is explained as follows: “Unlike many other Dutch cities, Tilburg no longer has a slogan. The former ‘Tilburg Modern Industrial City’ has been replaced only by a capital T. Through this trademark the name of the city should speak for itself.” An explanation which is elaborated in a municipal brochure from October 2004 (Gemeente Tilburg 2004c, no page number, our translation): “Many cities in the Netherlands have a slogan. Tilburg no longer has one. That felt too much like a straitjacket. The city does not have one particular aspect that sets it apart. It is the diversity that appeals. The ‘T’ stands for: ‘That too is Tilburg’.” The introduction for the brochure is written by the then recently appointed mayor Ruud Vreeman: When I used to think about Tilburg, I couldn’t really picture it. The city lacks a clearly defined image. Now that I am mayor I know that Tilburg is basically a city that you need to discover. You can’t wait until the city’s finer points come to you, because they won’t. To get to know Tilburg you need to take action yourself and you will be rewarded. There is plenty to see and a surprising amount of things going on. On all fronts. A great many events, an exciting and varied nightlife, an active business network. If someone were to ask me to typify Tilburg in a single sentence I would say: there’s something for everyone! The city doesn’t revolve around one or two eye-catchers. That also explains why people often say with hindsight: ‘I had no idea it was such a great city’. I can still hear myself saying it! That surprise is typical of Tilburg. It is an action-city that invites people to live, work and enjoy themselves in it. (Gemeente Tilburg 2004c, no page number, our translation)

_________________________ 1 http://www.designunderconstruction.nl/duc_identity.htm


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In the rest of the brochure an overview of all the positive aspects of Tilburg follows. Similar brochures on the T-style were published in the course of 2004 and a municipal website on the new city style was launched as well. In the brochure ‘City Promotion Tilburg, a city in style’ the new style is explained and justified under the heading ‘Being distinctive to remain visible’: Tilburg has a lot of experience in the field of city promotion. On the basis of the conviction that a city needs to be distinctive to remain visible for the environment, Tilburg has been working for years on its position and profile. In the light of the growing competition of other municipalities, cities and regions, this is a necessity. In the course of time economic and societal developments cause adjustments. During the economic recession of the eighties the focus of the campaign ‘Tilburg Modern Industrial City’ was on industry and attracting companies. The current profile is much more aimed at diversity in the city. (Gemeente Tilburg 2004b, no page number, our translation)

So instead of one target group, the new image of Tilburg was projected on a wide variety of target groups and people. The ‘potent and concise’ capital letter T is seen as a ‘straightforward logo’ and is described as a visualisation of the values innovation and decisiveness. The logo can be used by everybody in Tilburg. People or organisations can download the ‘toolkit’ from the internet and use it in their own communication. Examples of people and organisations using the logo are presented on a municipal website. Most of these examples are directly or indirectly linked to the municipal organisation, which uses the T-logo on many of its outings. On the T-style website2 there is also a brochure that addresses questions people could have with regard to the new logo. It is not clear if these questions were actually asked, or if it is a choice of style to present the information in this way. One of the questions is: ‘Why is there no slogan (anymore)?’. The answer: The city has enough to offer on its own. Tilburg says it all. So a slogan is not necessary. Besides that is it difficult to come up with a slogan that encapsulates the diversity of the city. (http://www.tilburg.info/stadsstijl, our translation)

So, since it turned out to be difficult to come up with a positive plot, the outcome was to rely primarily on a creative use of a marketing repertoire with a broader appeal to the city’s interest groups.

8.6

Conclusion

What a city is, where it stands for, and where it wants to go, is, in the first place, a matter of meaning. While assets, practices, interests all play a role in the positioning of a city, it is the way these items become stories, and made part of broader urban narratives and ‘governmentalities’ that matters. Although the material reality is there, it is only through stories that we can make urban complexity intelligible and

_________________________ 2

http://www.tilburg.info/stadsstijl

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manageable. To achieve this, in line with the previous chapter, stories need to build on recognisable themes and metaphors, i.e. on what have been described here as interpretative repertoires. Such repertoires are used to create story plots that help to locate entities like individuals or cities in wider webs of meaning and associations. While many different stories exist about a city, they may share certain common repertoires, and hence foreground certain shared sets of interpretations and meanings. Here we have explored to what extent this applies to a specific type of urban narrative, namely strategically framed stories intended to market and ‘sell’ a city. Waves of neo-liberalist thinking have provided a strong incentive to this kind of narrative, particularly through the impact of a variety of marketing repertoires. Such a move, however, runs the risk of creating a stronger gap between strategic story-telling and the material conditions of social-economic development. The question thus arose to what extent such ‘strategic’ stories also require and seek a certain degree of local embedding and associations with local stories. The Tilburg case discussed here reveals some of the intricacies and twists that surround the issue of inclusion and association. City marketing tales selectively draw on a variety of themes and images, alluding to different aspects of the urban environment, and appealing to different segments of the local population. They are also part of a wider narrative, in the sense that they respond to other, older or alternative stories that position a city. Yet, within this relational and heterogeneous field, local embedding and inclusion manifest a certain weight. The use of an ‘old’ repertoire associated with the ‘past’ industrial city, despite its ‘modern’ plot, stemmed from a specific, and contested, economic heritage of Tilburg. The new ‘marketing’ repertoire unmistakably draws from an entrepreneurial vocabulary that creatively mixes a language of competitive positioning with a variety of cultural tropes and images. However, both the way the repertoire has been selected, through intensive consultation, and its wide and playful applicability, picture it as more embedded. The new narratives thus appear to be more inclusive, and intentionally so, although this also comes with what could be described a certain ‘lightness’. The question is now to what extent this lightness can survive. How will the new tales perform? Will there be more calls for a stronger plot, a more marked identity, with more affinity to the city’s current socio-economic conditions? And will, on the other hand, people build up an affinity with tales that are so impregnated by a marketing rhetoric? It is the many veins of city life and politics that the answer will emerge.

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Chapter 9

River Basin Management in Europe: The ‘Up- and Downloading’ of a New Policy Discourse Sander Meijerink and Mark Wiering

Abstract: River basin management has become an important steering concept in contemporary water management and governance. This chapter asks to what extent the shifting territorial focus in water management from the administrative scales of states, regions and municipalities to the multi-level scale of entire river basins or sub-basins, exerts pressure on the existing institutional arrangements. Using the concepts of policy arrangements and multiple venues, it will be shown to what extent the discourse of river basin management, and the institutionalisation of this discourse on the European level, have an impact on Dutch water management. The results indicate that changes are neither paradigmatic nor revolutionary, but fit in the more evolutionary shifts towards more, integrated, ecologically inspired water management, which has been going on for a few decades now.

Keywords: European policy, policy arrangement, policy discourse, river basin management, up- and downloading

9.1

Introduction

River basin management (RBM) has become an important steering concept in contemporary water management. Because of the many hydrological and ecological relationships within a catchment area, river basins are increasingly conceived of as

_________________________ Sander Meijerink Department of Spatial Planning, Radboud University of Nijmegen, PO Box 9108, NL-6500 HK, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] Mark Wiering (,) Department of Political Sciences of the Environment, Radboud University of Nijmegen, PO Box 9108, NL-6500 HK, Nijmegen, The Netherlands [email protected] 181 B. Arts et al. (eds.), The Disoriented State: Shifts in Governmentality, Territoriality and Governance, 181–200. © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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the best units for water planning and management. With the concept of river basin management policy actors strive for different ways of policy integration: between the management of water quantity, water quality, ground water and surface water (internal integration) and between water management and adjacent policy domains, such as spatial and environmental planning (external integration). Finally, in case of a cross-border river, there is a need for integrating policies of different basin states as well. Clearly, river basin management calls for co-operation between government agencies at multiple levels of government, policy sectors, and NGOs. The shifting territorial focus from the administrative scales of states, regions and municipalities to the scale of entire river basins or sub-basins, puts pressure on the existing institutional arrangements within the water policy domain. In many countries water management, and related issues such as safety and risk management, have mainly been the domain of domestic and national policy making. What, then, does the new perspective of river basin management imply for the long standing traditions and institutions in domestic water management? Is there a territorial shift from nation state decision making towards the international and European level, towards the (regional) river basin scale, – or both? This question is at the heart of this volume that explores the relationship between territoriality, governmentality and governance. One of the most important advocates of the concept of river basin management in contemporary European water management is the European Water Framework Directive (WFD 2000/60/EC, October 23, 2000). Admittedly, the concept only partially fits in our ideal-typical description of river basin management with the three levels of integration, because – at least in the Dutch implementation process – it mainly focuses on the water quality and ecological part of water management and not on flooding management and other forms of quantitative water management. Yet, the WFD is generally considered to be a major change agent for water resources management across Europe. In this chapter, we will analyse what we call the ‘uploading’ and ‘downloading’ of the concept of RBM. It will be shown that both decision making on the WFD and the implementation of this directive are central to these processes. For our analysis of ‘uploading’ and ‘downloading’ we draw on two theoretical frameworks: the Punctuated-Equilibrium framework (Jones and Baumgartner 2005; True et al. 2007, for applications in the field of water management see Ingram and Fraser 2006; Meijerink 2005, 2008) and the perspective of Policy Arrangements (PA) (Van Tatenhove et al. 2000; Arts and Leroy 2006; Wiering and Arts 2006; Wiering and Immink 2006). Section 9.2 explores the possibilities for combining these frameworks in the analysis of up- and ‘downloading’ processes. Subsequently, Section 9.3 gives a short introduction to the concept and discourse of river basin management. The Sections 9.4 and 9.5 present the core of this paper. They report on the analyses of the ‘uploading’ and ‘downloading’ of this new discourse respectively, where the analysis of ‘downloading’ is confined to the Netherlands. Finally, in Section 9.6 we present some conclusions on the patterns of policy change in multi-level governance processes and reflect upon the implications of our conclusions for this book as a whole.

9 River Basin Management in Europe

9.2

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Combining Two Theoretical Lenses: The PunctuatedEquilibrium Framework and the Perspective of Policy Arrangements

For our analysis of up- and ‘downloading’ processes we draw on concepts of two different theoretical frameworks: the Punctuated-Equilibrium framework (PE) and the perspective of Policy Arrangements (PA). To start with this last perspective, the PA has been developed to characterise and describe both the existing institutional ‘order’ (stability) and processes of structuration and institutionalisation (change) in a certain policy domain (such as flooding management, water quality management, spatial planning, agriculture, nature conservation). A policy arrangement is defined as the “temporary stabilisation of the content and organisation of a specific policy domain at a certain level of policy implementation” (Van Tatenhove et al. 2000, p. 54). The approach distinguishes between four dimensions of policy fields (See Figure 9.1): policy discourse (content), actors and coalitions, power and resources and rules of the game (organisation). resources/power

actors and coalitions rules of the game

discourses

Fig. 9.1 The Tetrahedron, Symbolising the Interconnectedness of the Four Dimensions of a Policy Arrangement (Arts and Leroy 2003, p. 17, see also Liefferink 2006)

These dimensions enable us to specify types of institutional change. What exactly is changing within a policy domain? Is there just a change of policy discourse, or have the rules of the game changed accordingly? Have new actors entered the arenas, and/or has the power balance between these actors changed? The concept of PA serves to answer these questions. Using this approach, Wiering and Arts (2006) analysed the implications and possible institutional impact of a discursive shift in Dutch flooding management, from ‘the battle against water’ to ‘living with water’. The study showed how the new (somewhat ambiguous) discourse only had a partial impact on the organisational dimensions of the Dutch flooding policy arrangement. A rather similar approach to the institutional analysis of a policy domain is the analysis of governance patterns. In their account of EUpolicy implementation, Huitema and Bressers (forthcoming) make a distinction between levels of governance, actors in the policy network, problem perceptions

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and policy objectives, strategy and instruments, and, finally, responsibilities and resources for implementation. Whereas the perspective of PA has proven to be a useful analytical tool for distinguishing various types of institutional change, it is not in itself a causal theory, nor does it focus on specific mechanisms of institutional change. That is why we have decided to include the Punctuated-Equilibrium framework (PE-framework) in our analysis of institutional dynamics in the European water policy domain. The PE-framework is a theory about agenda setting (Jones and Baumgartner 2005; True et al. 2007), which is aimed at explaining long term policy stability and (radical) change. The central argument of the PEframework is that policy domains can remain stable for many years because of the institutionalisation of a policy image or frame, which is often connected to the core values of a policy community. This is often called a ‘policy monopoly’ (ibid). According to the PE-framework such policy monopolies do not last forever, since upcoming new and competing policy images brought forward by opponents of the existing policy monopoly may disrupt stable policy networks. But how do these groups of actors manage to get accepted their ideas, in other words to get institutionalised a new policy image? Here, Baumgartner and Jones introduced the concepts of venue change and venue shopping. They argue that opponents of an existing policy monopoly may strategically exploit the multiple venues within a policy domain to gain support for their newly fashioned policy image, and it often is the interplay between new policy images and policy venues that accounts for policy change. The added value of introducing the PE-framework here is that it sheds light on an important mechanism of policy change, which is the interplay between the discursive framing of policy issues on the one hand, and the multiple venues where the newly framed issues are placed on the agenda and addressed, on the other. We must point out that we make use of the terms ‘uploading’ and ‘downloading’ differently from what is common in Europeanisation literature, which is much more focussed on the specific role of Member states governments in shaping European policy according to their interests, institutional structures and traditions on the one hand, and to their institutional adaptation to European legislation on the other (Börzel 2002, p. 163). When applying the PE framework, we mainly focus on political processes at the level of European policy arenas and not on the specific role of Member states in uploading their own policy concepts and other parts of domestic policies. The case of Dutch coastal flooding policy provides an interesting example of such policy dynamics (Meijerink 2005). The Dutch coastal flooding policy domain used to be captured by the national Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management and an influential epistemic community of civil engineers (Meijerink 2005). Their policy paradigm of controlling the water by means of technical infrastructure was institutionalised in formal legislation, such as the Delta Act, which was adopted since the storm surge of 1953, and prescribed the closure of various estuaries in the south western Netherlands. From the 1970s onwards, however, a new group of actors, the epistemic community of the ecologists and environmental NGO’s particularly, began to challenge the prevailing policy paradigm and managed to shape a new policy image. They claimed that the


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Rhine, Scheldt and Meuse estuaries are unique ecosystems that need to be preserved, and would be destroyed by the construction of large dams. So a breakthrough in coastal flooding policy was made possible. To make this happen, this new coalition of actors used strategies of venue shopping to get their ideas accepted. They launched their ideas in various committees, the provincial administration and the Dutch Parliament. Eventually, a new national government took on their ideas, and decided to construct the semi-permeable Eastern Scheldt storm surge barrier, presenting a turning point in Dutch coastal flooding policy (and water policy more in general).

9.3

River Basin Management

Back to River Basin Management, we are curious about the ‘route’ or pathway of the discourse of RBM, the influence of this discourse on the framing of water management issues, and on actual water management practices. Our central hypothesis is that RBM is a relatively new discourse which is promoted by specific groups who have an interest in changing water management practices, and who exploit the multiple venues on various levels of decision making to get support for their (new) discursive framing of water management issues (as issues that have to be solved according to the principles of river basin management). It will be shown that the concepts of venue shopping and venue change are helpful in understanding the ‘uploading’ of the river basin management discourse to the European level, and the translation of the new discursive framing of water issues in a coherent and ambitious European water policy arrangement. This new complex of ideas and rules is finally ‘dropped’ back to be picked up by the various EU-member states, thus affecting national and regional policy practices. Before we present our analysis of this dynamics of multi-level governance, we first introduce the concept and discourse of river basin management. Whereas in the past river management was confined to the main course of a river, and often focused on a single river function, such as navigation or water pollution, nowadays water managers try to adopt a river basin approach. The concept of river basin management emphasises the need to address the various interrelations within a river basin. Therefore, the basin scale is seen is the best scale for addressing river issues (Caponera 1992; Newson 1992). A river basin not only includes the main river, but the tributaries and drainage area as well. Very similar concepts used are drainage basin or catchment area. From the literature on integrated water management we borrow a definition offered by Jones, cited in Tucker Gilman et al. (2004, p. 3): “[RBM] is the process of coordinating conservation, management and development of water, land and related resources across sectors within a given river basin, in order to maximise the economical and social benefits derived from water resources in an equitable manner while preserving and, where necessary, restoring freshwater ecosystems”. Tucker Gilman et al. point at the integration of functional features of water and stress the position of water ecosystems as an “essential prerequisite” for RBM – and not

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merely as one of the stakeholders’ interests. Thus, behind the use of river basin management as a policy concept lie different layers of ambition. The integration of different parts of the water system can be described as (system-) internal integration; these system-approaches can have a hydrological (water system based) or ecological (eco-system based) bias. Furthermore, RBM includes the ambition to manage water resources “across sectors” in the context of river basins. This is addressed towards integration with other policy fields, such as spatial planning, agriculture, nature conservation, tourism etc., and is often categorised as external integration. Finally, as a river is not bound by geographical nor administrative borders, the third ambition is about crossing national borders in RBM (Verwijmeren and Wiering 2007). Consequently, the discursive shift from managing water courses to the management of entire river basins can be related easily to the hydrological ‘reality’ of river basins, the various cause-effect relationships within a basin particularly. To put it differently, the discourse of river basin management is strongly related to what is perceived as problematic in river basins, from access to water bodies to water pollution or extinction of certain species and river floods. The modern concept of river basin management reflects the increasingly complex relationships between hydrological systems, eco-systems and mankind. It combines a system approach to water with a system approach towards ecological issues; it is an integrative concept towards various water policy issues and it is a solution concept that responds to problems of risk management (flooding). Moreover, the concept comes with a shift in emphasis from the territory of single administrative units, such as municipalities, regions, provinces and states, to the territory of a river basin. Such a territorial shift potentially has far reaching consequences for water management policies and practices. The need to address the various relationships within a river basin urges parties to start deliberations and negotiations with a variety of governmental and non-governmental actors. These either have an interest in the issues at stake or possess the resources needed for solving these issues. Exactly because these parties do mostly have different problem perceptions and interests, this is a troublesome undertaking. What compounds river basin management even more are the so-called upstreamdownstream power asymmetries within a river basin (Wolf 1997, Meijerink 1999). Downstream actors may face problems of water pollution, which are caused by waste water discharges by actors situated upstream. Moreover, they may face problems of water shortage which are caused by the diversion of river water in the upstream parts of a basin. Finally, they may face problems of high river discharges or floods, which are caused by deforestation and river training in the upstream parts of a basin. All these issues are characterised by strong upstream-downstream power asymmetries, i.e. the downstream parties are largely dependent on the willingness of the upstream parties to cooperate. For some issues, however, the power asymmetry may be the other way round. As an example, the maritime access to an inland port may be controlled by a downstream basin state, and for fish migration, upstream actors may be dependent on downstream actors as well. Upstream-downstream relationships explain why downstream actors, suffering


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from either a lack of clean fresh water or river floods, are often strong protagonists of adopting a river basin approach.

9.4

Uploading a New River Management Discourse: The Drafting of the European Water Framework Directive

The European Water Framework Directive, by putting the concept of river basin management at the centre of water policies, is potentially a marking point in the development of water management in Europe. In the following, we will successively discuss the main elements of this directive, and analyse the process of ‘uploading’ the concept of river basin management to the European level.

9.4.1 The European Water Framework Directive The WFD aims to harmonise water quality policies in European member states. The central feature of the WFD is the use of river basins as the basic unit for all water planning and management actions. Since the adoption of the WFD, the concept of river basin management has become central to European water policies. Moreover, the WFD explicitly addresses the need for stakeholder participation in implementing the directive. The WFD’s overall policy objective is the achievement of ‘good status’ and ‘good potential’ for all of Europe’s surface water and groundwater within a 15-year period. In contrast to preceding European water directives, the WFD is a framework directive. It does not contain detailed regulations on policy objectives for each water system, nor does it prescribe the policy measures to be taken. It leaves a considerable degree of freedom to Member states as regards the ways in which the directive is implemented. This, for example, concerns: • The number of and delineation of water bodies (or sub basins) distinguished • The classification of these water bodies as natural, heavily modified or artificial • Giving reasons as to why it is impossible to reach water quality standards in 2015, and why obligations are postponed to 2021 or 2027 The implementation process is a rather open process of deliberation and negotiation. In this process national, regional and local government agencies and NGOs have to reach an agreement on policy objectives and the policy measures needed to reach these objectives. Once member states have drafted a river basin management plan with specified water quality objectives for the defined water bodies, however, the EU will supervise and enforce achievement of these objectives within the time frames indicated. This legally binding character of the framework directive confers a strong obligation on member states to live up to the river basin plans they have developed themselves.

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The European Water Framework Directive is an important, though presumably not the final step in the development of an European water regime. In the development of this regime, generally three stages are distinguished (Kaika 2003). The first stage of European water policies, which covers roughly the period between 1975 and 1990, was characterised by directives which contain water quality standards for surface waters. These, for example, concerned the Surface Water Directive (75/440/EEC) and the Bathing Water Directive (76/160/EEC). In the second stage, from 1990 to 2000, new policies and directives, such as the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive (91/271/EEC), were aimed at reducing emissions primarily. The European Water Framework Directive, then, presents the beginning of a new era in European water policies. This era is characterised by the integration of sector based water policies on a basin scale, and by an increasing influence of non-governmental actors, both at the European level and at the level of individual river basins. This, of course, should be related to the more general process of political modernisation and shifts in governance. In the following, we will focus on this latest transition in European water policies.

9.4.2 Historic Roots and New Ecological Images of River Basin Management The concept of river basin management is strongly rooted in the United States and France. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), established in 1933, is an early example of river basin administration. In the Tennessee Valley the main objective was to train the river for economic purposes. Hence, the TVA was a very limited form of river basin management. Because of the recognised need to coordinate between upstream and downstream water users, however, and the establishment of a separate organisation for the entire valley, it still is a exemplary case of river basin management. France has an interesting tradition in river basin management as well. As from 1964, there are six large basin agencies (the Agences de l’Eau) for the main French rivers. Solidarity amongst water users and the polluter pays principle have been important triggers for the development of river basin authorities with competencies to levy charges. Next to the recognition of the various hydrological relationships within river basins and the desire for solidarity among water users, the increasing awareness of ecological issues has been an important trigger for the territorial shift in contemporary water management. The epistemic community of ecologists and biologists contributed much to the diffusion of knowledge about river ecosystems and the need of ecosystem oriented water management. This community managed to shape a new policy image of rivers. Rivers were no longer framed as an economic resource to be exploited be human beings, but as a natural resource representing unique ecological values that need to be preserved. Discharge of pollutants, geomorphologic disturbances, canalisation, and diversion of water may all have a negative impact on the entire river ecosystem. Therefore, water management issues should be dealt with on a basin scale. In Europe, the discourse


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of river basin management gained prominence in the 1980s and 1990s of the 20th century. It is an interesting question as to how the protagonists of a river basin approach and ecosystem oriented water management managed to influence the agendas of policy makers, and how the river basin management discourse has affected policy practices. In the following, we will focus on the process preceding the adoption of the EU water framework directive.

9.4.3 The Exploitation of Venues and Changing Decision Making Rules Kaika (2003) and Kaika and Page (2003) have made a detailed account of decision making on the European Water Framework Directive. They focused particularly on the impact of the changing decision making rules on the European level, and newly created opportunities for NGOs to influence European decision making. The Amsterdam Treaty, signed on 17 June 1997, came into force on 1 May 1999. It significantly altered decision making rules on most environmental issues in the European Union. Whereas in the past, the Council of Environmental Ministers (CM) had a primacy over the European Parliament (EP), as from 1999 environmental policymaking is a co-decision process between the CM and EP, which implies a shifting power balance in favour of the EP. The CM had no choice but to negotiate draft proposals for the WFD with the EP (Kaika 2003). The EP, whose members are not directly connected to individual member states, was more inclined to adopt new legally binding environmental policies than the CM whose members primarily tried to serve the economic interests of their respective countries. The EC (European Commission), CM and EP are the three crucial venues on the European level. NGOs focussing on European political decision making employed different strategies to influence decisions in these venues. Kaika (ibid.) argues that the NGOs representing economic interests mainly lobbied at the national levels, and with that tried to influence the opinion of the Ministers representing their country in the CM. The lobby of the environmentalists, however, was not only directed at the national governments, but at influencing decision making in the European venues as well. Several environmental NGOs had established good contacts within both the Brussels bureaucracy, DG Environment particularly, and the European Parliament, and therefore managed to influence decision making in these forums. Environmental NGOs successfully lobbied for a much tighter implementation scheme, stricter standards for some dangerous substances, and new obligations for member states to involve NGOs and the public in the drafting of river basin plans. Kaika and Page (2003) are rightly asserting that the change of decision making rules at the European level, and the increased possibilities for environmental NGOs to influence European environmental policies, are crucial to an understanding of the development of the WFD. This not to say, however, that individual

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member states have not played an important role in the drafting of the WFD. As regards the development of European environmental policies, often a distinction is made between forerunners, such as Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark, and foot-draggers, such as Portugal, Greece, Spain, Italy and Ireland (Börzel 2002). Although this distinction roughly applies to the development of new water quality policies, there is an important difference. Because of the upstream-downstream relationships and interdependencies within international river basins, the member states’ position within these basins influences their position in the debate as well. In general, downstream basin states, such as the Netherlands or Portugal are strong protagonists of river basin management, whereas typical upstream basin states, such as Spain, often show less interest in new obligations. The Netherlands are situated within the delta of four international rivers, the Rhine, Meuse, Scheldt and Ems. For river issues, such as water pollution, sediment contamination, water distribution and flood control, the Dutch are largely dependent on the co-operation of the upstream basin states, such as Germany, Belgium and France. Not surprisingly, the Dutch have always been strong protagonists of the development of international regimes for the management of these rivers. They deliberately tried to influence decision making in the various bilateral and multilateral negotiation commissions in which international river issues were discussed. In the Rhine basin, the riparian states have been rather successful in developing a set of international agreements dealing with issues, such as navigation, water pollution, ecological rehabilitation and flood control. The international Rhine regime is generally considered to be a good example of international river basin management. The Dutch, however, also tried to influence negotiations over the UN-ECE convention on the protection and use of transboundary water courses and international lakes (Meijerink 1999). The concept of river basin management was central to this convention. By signing this convention, the contracting parties obliged themselves to take part in negotiations over international river issues, and to allow for all basin states to take part in these negotiations. Because of their strong interest in solving international disputes over the management of the Rhine, Scheldt, Meuse and Ems rivers, the Dutch were strong protagonists of the European Water Framework Directive as well. The Dutch interest, however, was not so much in changing governance practices in the Netherlands, but in creating new legal obligations for upstream basin states to clean-up their waters, and to take into account the impact of their actions for downstream basin states.

9.5

Downloading the New European River Discourse: The Implementation of the European Water Framework Directive in The Netherlands

In our introduction we posed the question what the new perspective of river basin management implies for the long standing traditions and institutions in domestic water management. In this section, we will investigate the ‘downloading’ of


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the new European water management discourse and regulations by exploring the implementation of the WFD in the Netherlands, and how it affected the development of RBM. Applying the PAA, RBM can be considered as an integrative river management discourse which is accompanied by new rules of the game (stemming from the European Directive). The discussion will follow the four PAA dimensions distinguished above.

9.5.1 The Dimension of Policy Discourse The first question that has to be answered is whether the WFD changes domestic water policy discourse. As we saw before, river basin management is a concept which includes an integrative system-based approach and is strongly ecologically and water quality – focussed (see Section 9.2). Is it new for the Dutch? The Netherlands already initiated the idea of a water system approach in the 1970s, while struggling with decisions on building the famous Delta works. It was introduced as an official policy principle in the mid-1980s and was further elaborated in governmental policies in the 1990s (Van Leussen 2002; Wiering and Crabbé 2006). Thus, a system approach is not alien to Dutch water policy making and the WFD-RBM discourse is supporting these concepts of system management. The WFD is stressing the importance of environmental and ecological elements of water policy and is thus fostering the ‘ecological turn’ in water management (see Disco 2002). Here again the WFD is reinforcing existing developments in Dutch water policy The most important incentive is not so much the change in policy goals or programmes itself, but the integrative and suggested binding character of (environmental) water quality obligations as a result of the Directive and the necessity to put them on societal and political agendas. Thirdly, putting things in a broader institutional context, the WFD was staged in a time wherein other water related issues, such as flooding and ‘space for rivers’-concepts where setting the Dutch water scene. The WFD touches upon certain water quantity elements, but not all water related issues, and is not fully water system oriented (as we have already stated in the introduction). It follows that the WFD-implementation is partly accompanied by other important Dutch policy programmes such as Water Policy 21st Century, in which separate obligations and tasks towards sub-river basin management plans were formulated – but now from the perspective of water quantity issues. In short, recent water management practices in the Netherlands clearly are inspired by the discourse of river basin management, but we should bear in mind that these practices have developed rather autonomously, and are not always the results of European water policies. So far, the prospect of substantial institutional change is limited. On the other hand, we may expect that the accompanying new rules of the game of the WFD, do have an impact on policy practices.

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9.5.2 The Dimension of Policy Actors and Coalitions Wiering and Arts (2006) give three indicators of institutional change in this dimension: • Do we see new players entering in the policy field? • Are there new interaction patterns or new organisational relationships between (new and) existing policy players? • Are there structuring processes towards new policy coalitions in the field? Before analysing institutional change here, we must give a short notion of the existing policy arrangement. Traditionally, Dutch water management is dominated by a relatively autonomous layer of functional administration, the water boards (going back to the 12th century), which watch over regional surface water management – both water pollution and flooding management. On the national level, the 200-years-old Directorate-General for Public Works and Water Management (Rijkswaterstaat) is responsible for the main state water system and infrastructure of large rivers, canals, coastal waters and estuaries (Kuks 2004, Wiering and Immink 2006). Next to these players, the provinces and municipalities also have specific tasks. This suggests that the water policy organisations have their own functional policy domain in which water system approaches have been important for many years. The last few decades a remarkable strong restructuring and upscaling of the important regional water boards has been taken place creating larger units of organisation. The amount of water boards decreased from 2,500 in the 1950s to 255 in 1985 and about 27 regional water boards nowadays. So, are there new players or new coalitions in the field? When we look at the actual implementation of the WFD we could say that the WFD is creating ‘soft’ organisational structures which are geared towards river basin management plans, but all of this is absolutely within the bounds of the existing Dutch organisational framework. In other words, there are no new organisations initiated because of the WFD or the concept of RBM, there is no new organisational ‘hardware’ implemented. Another crucial element of the river basin management-discourse is the idea that the boundaries of river basins do not coincide with the boundaries of nation states, which calls for a strong coordination between efforts made by the various basin states. Although this sounds self evident, we do not witness, in the context of this analysis, a strong shift towards international cross-border co-operation in water management. Until now, the nation states have been concentrating on the new tasks and responsibilities within their own national and regional realms, while further cross-border fine-tuning, co-operation and co-policy making still seem a bridge too far (Verwijmeren and Wiering 2007). In the East of the Netherlands, bordering Germany, the WFD- process created a river basin district crossing national borders (the sub-river basin Rhine East). Although they are part of the same river basin, we find differences in the pace and WFDcategorisations in The Netherlands and Germany (Van Leussen et al. 2007).


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Is there substantive change in interaction patterns between organisations in the field and do we see changing policy coalitions? On this part it is difficult to judge the exact implications of RBM and the WFD. The WFD (in the Dutch context) explicitly focuses on water quality and the ecological state of water bodies; it follows that the frequency of relationships between the functional water management organisations and both the nature conservation departments at different administrative levels and the environmental and nature conservation NGOs will increase. Besides the general ecological sensibility of Dutch water management, we indeed, gradually, see initiatives towards connecting water policy with nature conservation, but we cannot yet consider these initiatives to be structural. Also on the part of new policy coalitions we see the potential for new coalitions between water policy agents, the environmentalist and the nature conservation agents, but do not really see it happening on a larger scale. So what we observe is that the administrative units encompass larger parts of Dutch river basins and regional water boards are further emancipating, so we can conclude that the administrative structures more and more fit the scale of river basins. In this dimension we clearly see a form of rescaling of the organisational structure, and some indirect impact, but it cannot directly be related to the ‘downloading’ of the river basin management discourse through the WFD as such.

9.5.3 And Shifting Resources? Turning to the dimension of power and resources, the WFD (in due time) will give (more) incentives and resources to those policy actors that are working on different environmental and nature-conservation – policy programmes. These programmes aim at combining water quality and water quantity issues (groundwater levels), nature conservation and development in river surroundings, ecological networks, riverine ecosystems and biodiversity goals. It can be expected that policy actors simply need more knowledge of this dimension of the water ecosystem; e.g. the effects of ground water levels on chemical and ecological quality of water bodies, to mention just one issue (Milieu en Natuurplanbureau 2006). The WFD contains various obligations for the European member states. States, for example, have to set the boundaries of water bodies; they have to define water quality standards, and have to develop an implementation scheme. As such, the framework induces a change in the power balance in favour of the protagonists of river basin management. They can use the WFD to make other parties work in accordance with the principles of river basin management. To sum up, we can foresee that the ecology of river basins will be an issue of increasing importance, and resources will go in this direction. This points at evolutionary changes towards a continuing integrative and system oriented ecological turn in water policy rather than major changes in existing actor coalitions.

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9.5.4 Changes in Rules of the Game The fourth and last dimension we will discuss is that of changes in the rules of the game of Dutch water management. Because the WFD not only introduces a policy discourse, but also a set of new rules and legislation, we find more explicit implications in the rules -dimension. We will go into the changes in the formal rules that are brought about by the implementation process and we will try to envisage the expected procedural and informal changes in interaction rules in the field as well. At the moment, the WFD is implemented in the Dutch legislative framework by a separate WFD Implementation Act (Implementatiewet KRW; TK 2002–2003, 28 808, Nos. 1–3; EK 2003–2004, 28 808 A) that is put into force on 22nd June 2005 and which draws the main objectives and principles of the WFD (Driessen and Van Rijswick 2006). This transitional legislation is directed towards the implementation of the Directive’s goals, mainly through using the existing Dutch framework, the Water Management Act (Wet op de Waterhuishouding). Existing organisational structures and formal responsibilities will not be changed. But on the long term the Dutch water legislation is restructured and reframed towards a new integrated legislation, the Integrated Water Act (Integrale Waterwet). This Act, which is an institutional novelty, will focus on the ambitions of river basin management and water system approaches. It is expected to make the organisational structures more transparent and to create adequate and efficient policy instruments for implementing water policies. It will, in the end, replace eight existing regulations on separate water issues, both water quality and water quantity, thus reduce rule fragmentation and foster integrated water resources management (Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management/RIZA 2004; Van Rijswick 2003a, b). Accordingly, this integrated Water Act is institutionalising the discourse of river basin management, with an emphasis on the integrative ambitions of the concept. When it comes to informal and procedural rules of the game in water management, we see both internal and external integrative tendencies. In concrete policy practises the WFD is more important for internalising system-thinking than we would find at first glance. The WFD stimulates discussions on the internal administrative organisation of water management and is used as an argument to make the whole of the water legislation more system-oriented. On the ambitions concerning the external integration of water issues, we must look at the changing relationships between water management and other policy fields, such as spatial planning, agriculture, nature conservation and tourism. Discussions on the role of water issues in spatial planning are highly relevant here, as we already stressed elsewhere (Wiering and Immink 2006). The external ambition of the water policy field is targeted at making water a much more fundamental “guiding principle” in spatial planning than is the case now. In Dutch spatial planning, water issues are seen as important, but only a ‘basic planning principle’ and not as ‘a necessary pre-condition for spatial planning’ (Wiering and Immink 2006, p. 75). Furthermore,


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new policy practises show changes in interaction patterns between water management and spatial planning, but these are not stemming from the concept of RBM related to the WFD, but from the programme that originated from the water quantity and flooding part of the water problem (the Water Management in the 21st Century policy programme). One of these new procedural instruments is named the ‘water survey’ (Watertoets), and consists of a sort of Water Impact Assessment for spatial plans (Wiering and Immink 2006, p. 75). Again, the concept of RBM is not new in stimulating external integration towards other policy fields but together with the potential and suggested ‘big stick’ of European legislation it encourages the different policy actors to discuss basic view points and goals relating water issues and other activities in the river basin. Besides this all, the WFD also has governance -implications – as it specifically asks for public consultation on its program and targets (WFD article 14). This can in the long run produce a change in the way water authorities inform and consult the public. At this moment, however, these processes of participation have hardly been started, and it is our perspective that the broader public is hardly aware of the sometimes heated discussions between the involved stakeholders in the WFD. To conclude this section on the ‘downloading’ of the concept of river basin management, we can summarise some of our findings: the discourse of RBM is not really new in the Dutch context. What is new is the comprehensive, integrative and suggested binding character of (environmental) water quality obligations. The RBM-discourse thus reinforces the holistic and scientific water system approaches and the ecological turn in water management. The WFD gives it substance. On the organisational dimension of actors and coalitions, we find in recent years a strong up-scaling of water boards in accordance with the idea of administrative units for river basins. But, on the other hand, we witness no new organisational hardware in this dimension, as the existing functional framework is reproduced. We see possibilities for new interactions between ‘water’, ‘environment’ and nature conservation, but no signs of new policy coalitions yet. We see potential resources for new ecological research ahead, but important shifts in the water knowledge infrastructure are not expected (compare Wiering and Arts 2006). The strongest forms of institutional change can be found in the rules of the game -dimension: the implementation of the WFD is accelerating the process of integration of fragmented water legislation towards an Integrated Water Act.

9.6

Conclusions

The discourse of river basin management clearly has gained prominence in European water management in the past decade. It draws our attention to the need for a coherent management of hydrological units, i.e. taking account of the relationships between water quality, water quantity, groundwater and surface water, upstream-downstream relationships, and land-water interactions. For realising such a coherent management, co-operation is needed between a wider range of

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government agencies, NGOs and citizens, and if necessary cross border cooperation. The WFD, adopted in 2000, on the one hand reflects this new discourse on the management of (shared) water resources, on the other hand stimulates the further dissemination and realisation of these ideas. River basin planning is an essential feature of the new European water policies, and the need for co-operation between basin states, government agencies, NGOs, and the public is recognised and expressed. How, then, has the discourse of river basin management reached the European level? In other words: how can we account for the ‘uploading’ of this discourse? New ideas and discourses need an agent for being transmitted to decision makers. Our review of decision making on the WFD has shown that downstream basin states, the epistemic community of ecologists and environmental NGOs have been important change agents. They all tried to get their ideas accepted of a more ecosystem oriented water management. Moreover it was shown how some of these agents have successfully exploited the multiple venues on the European level as well as the changing decision making rules. These observations are in line with the results of earlier research (Richardson 2000), which has shown that the multiple venues within a policy domain are an important resource for interest groups. The analysis also corroborates a central argument of the Punctuated-Equilibrium framework. According to Jones and Baumgartner (2005), it is the interaction between a policy image (the discursive framing of a policy issue) and venues that accounts for policy change. In our case, the interaction between the strong discursive framing of water management issues (river basin management as a comprehensive solution concept to different problems) and the impression of an ‘open process’ Directive in combination with strategic use of multiple venues on the European level, turned out to be important mechanisms of policy change. The new European water policy arrangement comprises a complex new set of rules of the game for water management in Europe, the most important being the obligations to draft river basin management plans, and to define water quality objectives that will have to be achieved in 2015. All this means that – at least at the level of the policy discourse – both an Europeanisation process and an ‘areaisation’ process (at the level of river basins) have taken place in water management, potentially implying certain forms of de- and re-territorialisation. For a better understanding of the actual impact of these new discourses and rules of the game on the European and river basin levels, we have taken a closer look at the implications of the European Water Framework Directive and the RBM -discourse in the Netherlands so far. In Section 9.5 we have applied the policy arrangement approach to changing institutions in the content and organisations of Dutch water management. The RBM-discourse has further stimulated the system approaches and ecological notions in water management. The upscaling of the water boards fits perfectly with the idea of river basin -based administrative units, although this upscaling was a highly autonomous process in Dutch public administration. We have found that the RBM-discourse is used, almost as a resource, to de-fragmentise Dutch water legislation in an already existing process of integrating water rules and regulations. Not withstanding these developments,


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we see, on the other hand, no new actors entering the policy stage and relatively marginal changes in organisational structures, resources and policy coalitions. Let us now turn to one of the pressing questions in the introduction: is Dutch water management in territorial terms shifting towards supranational levels or towards the river basin region, or both? As is the case in other policy fields and with other issues, it is useful to distinguish between the level of norm-setting and the level of actual implementation; rules and regulations concerning the normsetting are clearly being harmonised with the implementation process of the European WFD; although the EU-Directive is not as top down oriented as some of its predecessors, it forces the member states to formulate their own ambitions in water quality management, and furthermore, hold them to their promises. In the actual carrying out of the water policies the role of the regional water boards is increasing, due to its upscaling. Some of the water boards are already larger in size than the provinces and have to coordinate provincial policies. But in the WFD implementation process decentralised authorities are also staring at the national authorities in expectation of answering questions on at what level national ambitions are set in water quality management. We also conclude with some words on actual ambitions of the Dutch implementation process. The Netherlands has a strong international reputation in water management. As a downstream basin state, situated in the delta of the Rhine, Scheldt and Meuse rivers, the Dutch have always pleaded for more and better international co-operation on the management of these rivers. It is interesting, however, that the Dutch face serious problems with implementing the WFD now. A first reason for that is that water pollution is not leading on the societal and political agendas. Understandably, after the (near) river floods of 1993 and 1995, and with climate change ahead of us, the attention of politics and the public has shifted towards the issue of flood protection and related policies. The most important managerial challenge in Dutch water management today is to combine the two different pillars of Dutch water management: the newly developed policies for flood alleviation and protection, and the implementation of WFD. A very obvious explanation for the Dutch hesitation in implementing the WFD may be that they simply try to protect existing economic interests, such as those of agriculture, and that they do not want to bear the full costs of ecosystem rehabilitation. At this stage of the implementation process it is impossible to indicate which factors are most important. What we can conclude though, is that the Dutch favour a pragmatic approach aimed at minimising future obligations towards Europe. This seemingly contrasts the initial ambitions in the uploading stage. In any case, despite efforts to minimise the impact of the WFD (‘pragmatic implementation’) the WFD has placed issues of water pollution on the political agenda again, and, the Netherlands, just like any other European member state, has to take into account ecological issues more seriously than it used to do in the past. Therefore, the discourse of river basin management and the institutionalisation of this discourse on the European level have brought about institutional change. This change is neither paradigmatic nor revolutionary, but fits in the more evolutionary shifts towards more, integrated, ecologically inspired water management, which has been going on for a few decades now.

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More theoretically, this paper has shown that the perspective of Policy Arrangements serves to describe and distinguish various types of institutional change. It helps to draw detailed conclusions on what dimensions of a policy arrangement have actually changed, and what other dimensions have largely remain stable. Finally, this paper has illustrated how other theories of the policy process, such as the PE-framework, by explicitly addressing the mechanisms of policy change may contribute to the perspective of policy arrangements, which lacks an elaborate theory of institutional dynamics so far. Finally, if we reflect upon the above findings from the broader perspective of this book, the gap between ‘grand’ re-territorialisation discourses (EU, RBM) on the one hand and the actual realisation of these at the level of individual countries (the Netherlands) on the other is striking. Obviously, nation states tend to stick to their classical governmentality structures and processes vis-à-vis Europe, while paying lip-services to new transboundary and area-oriented approaches. Internally, though, re-territorialisation has taken place, particularly the ‘upscaling’ of the water boards. This seems to point at a try to accommodate for RBM within national boundaries at the cost of a transboundary approach. The nation state model still seems dominant. And, hence, countries still show strong autonomy versus European policies. However, one may wonder whether this situation will last. In nature policy, for example, we have observed a similar, initial response to European policy, but a lack of implementation at the national level led to convictions of the Netherlands by the European Court of Justice and to a subsequent and quick Europeanisation of domestic politics (see next chapter). Future will show whether the story of water management produces a similar outcome or whether the parallel between nature and water policies is less obvious than at first sight. At least we should immediately acknowledge the fact that the WFD is a framework directive, which in principle gives more room to manoeuvre than a conventional one, like the Birds and Habitat Directive (BHD).

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Chapter 10

Environmental Governance Failure: The ‘Dark Side’ of an Essentially Optimistic Concept Rikke Arnouts and Bas Arts

Abstract: This chapter discusses the extent to which new forms of multi-actor and multi-level governance may actually induce governance failure. The case to explore is the implementation phase of the Bird- and Habitat directives (BHDs, European nature conservation policies) within the Netherlands, in which new forms of governance were introduced a decade ago. Governance failure is conceptualised through the various dimensions of the policy arrangements approach (1) actors and coalitions, (2) power and influence, (3) policy discourses and (4) rules of the game. The findings show that new forms of governance were only able to address some of the existing problems, while it could not prevent new problems from arising. For instance, under the new arrangements, power struggles became more overt, discursive conflicts occurred between the state department and the lower administrative levels as well as between advocates and adversaries, and rules of the game faced similar contestations. What becomes manifest, at least for this case study, is the persistently dominant role of the state in orchestrating the policy-making process, while being subject to Europeanization processes at the same time. Keywords: Multi-level governance, governance failure, policy arrangements, bird- and habitat directives, The Netherlands

10.1 Introduction One of the current buzzwords in social and political sciences alike is the concept of ‘governance’. Although interpreted quite differently, some general notions about

_________________________ Rikke Arnouts Environmental Sciences Department, Wageningen University and Research Centre, PO Box 47, 6700 AA, Wageningen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] Bas Arts (,) Chair of the Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group, University of Wageningen, PO Box 47, 6700 AA, Wageningen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] 201 B. Arts et al. (eds.), The Disoriented State: Shifts in Governmentality, Therritoriality and Governance, 201–228. © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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its meaning are prominent. For example, it refers to (1) new steering mechanisms for social change, e.g. through public–private networks, (2) a blurring of boundaries between state, market and civil society, leading to new divisions of tasks between these institutions in the public domain, (3) a relocation of politics to international and sub-national levels, implying the emergence of multi-scalar governance, and (4) a transformation of the territorial nation state and its governmentality structures and processes. Particularly the fourth characteristic of governance is at the core of this book. In the introduction and the theoretical part (Chapters 1–4), the transformation of the state is related to structural trends such as globalisation, post-Fordism, neo-liberalism and de-territorialisation. These trends run parallel to a diffusion of power, authority and competencies from the nation state to private, international and sub-national players and levels. With that, the ‘art of governing’ – also referred to as governmentality – has changed. Not only seem non-state actors to have become much more prominent in political structures and processes, states have also adapted their steering strategies and techniques to the new structural trends, thus remaining (or regaining) their prominence in various domains at the same time. This all come together in the notion of governance. However, only part of this picture is generally portrayed in the governance literature. In many cases, an optimist, actor-oriented and normative image remains, in the sense that it is said that the governance era offers new opportunities for nongovernmental as well as trans- and sub-national players, a fact which would definitely increase the problem-solving capacity of policy arrangements. With that, the ‘dark side’ of governance as well as its structural features remain undertheorised. To overcome these shortcomings and in line with Jessop’s arguments in this book (Chapter 4), we will (also) focus on governance failures and structural features of governance in this chapter. The first is done by hypothesising and testing certain implementation problems associated with new governance arrangements, the second by considering the notion of governance not only as an instrument, bus as a structural trend as well. The latter is also referred to as ‘political modernisation’ in the literature. This concept refers to new relationships between state, market and civil society in national, international and multi-level policy making, while moving beyond the ‘retreat of the state’ thesis at the same time. In contrast to Jessop, though, we stick to the level of one individual policy domain (implementation of European nature conservation law in the Netherlands). Consequently, meta-governance is beyond our focus. To sum up, in this chapter, we would like to pursue a more critical approach towards governance. We will start from the idea that the involvement of more governmental and non-governmental actors dispersed over different policy levels is not always a guarantee for solving policy problems. Hence, naive governance optimism is in our eyes not justified. Therefore, we want to critically assess the problem solving capacity of governance arrangements in this chapter. In so doing, we analyze the case of the implementation of European nature conservation policy in the Netherlands in the period 1979–2005 (its choice will be justified below). By taking one case, we hope to contribute to answering the main research questions of this book, namely how grand discourses and global trends manifest themselves in

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specific policy practices, and whether the latter still exhibit (some) autonomy vis-à-vis these discourses and trends.

10.2 Governance When looking at profound developments in policy scientific literature over the last years, the attention that is paid to the term governance stands out (Pierre 2000). Many political and policy scientists, especially since the 1990s, have paid attention to new governance practices in policy making. Also, heated debates have been going on about the theoretical nature, development and characteristics of governance. For example, Rhodes (2000) distinguishes seven definitions of governance, stemming from different disciplines, whereas Hirst (2000) introduces five. These different definitions express the various characteristics analysts attach to governance. The academic debate, next, focuses on whether, how and to what extent a shift towards governance has taken place. In general, this shift is perceived as going beyond or leaving behind the idea of government, the ‘classical’ model of the nation state that steers society in a hierarchical fashion (de Baas 1995). This shift has resulted in a relocation of power, authority and competencies, expanding the development of politics and policies outside the formal framework of the nation-state, implying new modes of policy making and implementation (Van Kersbergen and Van Waarden 2001; Van der Zouwen and Van Tatenhove 2002). Van der Zouwen (2006) discerns three characteristics, or major trends, that are more or less common when looking to shifts in governance. First, governance notions embrace the idea that the nation state is no longer the only dominant actor in the policy process. Policy making is a matter of both governmental and nongovernmental actors, though there is no common ground on the extent of influence attributed to these two factions. As a second characteristic, which is derived from the first, policies are created and implemented in networks, which are alternatives for hierarchical steering by the state. Third, the boundaries between the spheres of the state, market and civil society become blurred, which results in expanding interference zones between the three spheres. The appearance of these new modes of governance can be seen as inherent to societal trends. Pierre and Peters (2000) mention several of these societal trends that have functioned as driving forces for the rise of governance. They refer to the financial crisis of the welfare state, the ideological shift towards market steering, globalisation, failure of many state policies and programmes, the emergence of new public management, new international sources of governance (cf. the EU, WTO and IMF) and a lack of formal political accountability. On the other hand, new modes of governance are strategically used as instruments to respond to arising ‘policy gaps’. Policy makers are no longer able to create and implement policies in the ‘classical’ fashion and are adopting new modes of governance – public–private partnerships, voluntary mechanisms, certification programs, market instruments, etc. – to improve their performance. This instrumental use of the term ‘governance’ has gained a lot of popularity over the years in all kinds of

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disciplines and practices, and people are generally enthusiastic when it comes to the problem-solving capacity of these governance instruments (Kooiman 1993; Pierre 2000; Van Kersbergen and Van Waarden 2001, 2004). To put it bluntly, invoking new ‘governance instruments’ is seen as a solution to various kinds of policy implementation problems, which are caused by ‘traditional’ government.

10.3 Positive or Negative Governance? To be able to analyse the potential problem solving capacity of new governance arrangements, two analytical steps have to be taken first. First, we need to elaborate upon the concept of governance in order to design a ‘conceptual benchmark’ – a starting point – for our own analysis. Second, we have to connect this elaboration to a suitable analytical framework, since governance is in our view more a concept or metaphor than a theory. In this section, as a first step, we will reflect upon the theoretical idea of a shift from old to new governance, while introducing the notion of governance failure. Pierre (2000) sketches a governance continuum, in which two extremes are distinguished. On the one extreme the state-centric approach is positioned. This approach sticks to the classical notions of the nation state and of hierarchical governance. It addresses the steering capacity of the state and claims that, although the state has to find ways to deal with societal change, its sovereignty, power and role have not dramatically changed. On the other side of the continuum, the society-centred approach is situated. This approach focuses on network coordination and bottom-up steering mechanisms in contemporary policy processes and claims that the state has merely become one of the players in policy and steering alike, with no exceptional position. Peters (2000) emphasises these two ends of the governance continuum as well, although he refers to ‘old’ and ‘new’ governance. In the notion of ‘old’ governance, the question is to what extent a government has the capacity to steer a policy process or even broader social change. This question has an empirical character and thus can only be answered by focusing on a specific case. From a normative perspective, ‘old’ governance implies that the state has to keep a certain form of control in order to safeguard the public good. Peters states that ‘society can not reach that higher good on its own, but instead requires the imposition of the authority of the state’ (p. 40). As such, the notion of ‘old’ governance can be connected to the more classical ideas on steering and policy making (hence government). From now on, and in line with Peter’s arguments, we will use the term ‘old’ governance as the starting point of a possible shift towards new(er) modes of governance. In ‘new’ governance, interactions between state, market and civil society in public domains have substantially increased. Policy making and implementation are no longer the exclusive domains of the government. Besides Peters (2000), for example Hajer et al. (2004) and Kooiman (2000) mention this characterisation too. However, Peters makes a distinction between two kinds of ‘new’ governance. He


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states that the literature about ‘new’ governance seems to acknowledge the existence of positive and negative new governance. ‘Positive new governance’ claims that there are societal actors that possess the resources to shape policy processes. They can assist governmental actors in designing policies, in mobilising legitimacy for policy support and in putting policies into effect. This implies (more) effective governance within policy areas. Society is more capable of managing its own affairs, while the state has less need to intervene. Moreover, new governance is considered more democratic because of the involvement of more societal actors. On the other hand, ‘negative new governance’ stresses the ‘capacity of social forces to resist the regulations and impositions of the state’. From a normative perspective, it is argued that actors are justified to avoid ‘incursions of authority and bureaucracy’, because they know better what they need than the state does. This means that actors have sufficient means and are resourceful enough to resist government intervention. Governments are portrayed as clumsy and bureaucratic. The ideas of Peters on negative and positive new governance are very interesting from the perspective of this study. The negative version of new governance can be connected to the perspective of governance failure, because it implies that a shift towards governance does not result in policy processes that fill perceived policy gaps. On the other hand, the positive version of new governance can be connected to governance success, or good governance. Whereas in positive new governance policies are considered as becoming both (more) effective and democratic, given the co-operation with citizens in policy making, non-governmental actors are resisting the steering capacity of the state in negative new governance. This also increases the democratic value of policy processes, given the democratic right of citizens to resist, but at the expense of policy effectiveness. As such, the notion of negative new governance implies the possibility of governance failure (compare Jessop, this book). Also, it represents a sceptical approach towards the problem solving capacity of new modes of governance, because of the problematic relationship between governmental and non-governmental actors that is implied in the approach itself.

10.4 Conceptualising Governance Arrangements As a second step, an analytical framework is required to structure our analysis and to be able to test our claims. Therefore, we will connect our ideas on (a shift towards) governance to the policy arrangement approach. We have chosen this approach, because it critically addresses the issue of governance, while offering an interesting model to analyze it more in depth at the same time (see Van der Zouwen and Van Tatenhove 2002; Van der Zouwen 2006; Arts and Leroy 2006). The connection of the governance concept to this approach will result in an analytical framework that enables us to conceptualise the possibility of governance failure from four separate dimensions. Also, the structural aspect of governance is addressed through the notion of political modernisation. Below, we will briefly introduce the approach and its main characteristics.

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10.4.1 The Policy Arrangement Approach A policy arrangement is defined as a temporary stabilisation of a policy field in terms of (1) actors and coalitions, (2) power and influence, (3) policy discourses and (4) rules of the game, within the context of the long-term process of political modernisation (Arts and Leroy 2006; Van Tatenhove et al. 2000). This definition needs some clarification. Temporary stabilisation refers to the extent to which a policy arrangement is institutionalised, i.e. has become (well) structured and (more or less) stable over time. This institutionalisation process is influenced by strategic conduct of actors on the one hand and by structural developments on the other. As such, the policy arrangement approach is inspired by the duality of structure thesis of Giddens (1984). By paying explicit attention to this duality, the policy arrangement approach incorporates the distinction, which was mentioned in the above, between governance as a societal trend (structure) and as a policy instrument (agency). To further elaborate the structural part of this duality, the policy arrangement approach introduces the concept of political modernisation. This notion refers to transformations within current political domains of (western) societies, particularly related to changing relationships between state, market and civil society as well as to the emergence of new modes of governance, enabling some types of policy arrangements to flourish more than others. With this position, the political modernisation thesis definitely incorporates insights from literatures on governance trends as well as on the transformation of the state (see Jessop and Cerny in this volume). Yet it deliberately distances itself from ‘retreat of the state’ or ‘hollowing out of the state’ theses (Albrow 1996; Strange 1996). In our view, it would be misleading to think that political modernisation would always imply less state and more market and civil society in politics, as if we talk about a sort of zero-sum game. Although this might be the case in specific fields, it is definitely not a general trend. One might for example think of the regulation of the internet, which has evolved from a highly anarchic and private field into one in which states strongly intervene today (Knill and Lehmkhul 2002). Developments within a policy arrangement can be analyzed from the perspective of four separate dimensions. The first dimension relates to actors and coalitions that are involved within a certain policy field. Coalitions bind actors who share (elements of) policy discourses, exchange resources and/or share rules of the game that enable cooperation (compare Sabatier 1999). Secondly, power is about the dependency relations that exist between actors involved as a consequence of the (often uneven) distribution of available resources (Clegg 1989). Given these power relations, actors might exercise more or less influence in policy making. Thirdly, a policy discourse is a specific ensemble of ideas, categorisations and narratives that is being produced, reproduced and/or transformed in policy practices (Hajer 1995). These discourses mediate the thinking, speaking and acting of policy actors. Finally, rules of the game (co)determine how and by whom policy is being designed, decided upon and executed (through what procedures and policy styles) (Ostrom 1999). Formal rules have been written down and are


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embedded in formal legislation and regulations. Informal rules, in contrast, refer to tacit conventions and represent the dominant political culture.

10.4.2 Governance in Policy Arrangements Van der Zouwen and Van Tatenhove (2002) explicitly link the policy arrangement approach to the governance debate. They build this connection on the idea that multi-actor and multi-level governance – the two types of governance they distinguish – can be interpreted as processes of political modernisation. Moreover, the structuring of policy arrangements is, according to them, influenced by strategic action from relevant actors on the one hand and by trends of multi-actor and multi-level governance on the other. These two trends are in turn the result of several, overarching ‘meta-processes’, of which Van der Zouwen and Van Tatenhove (2002) refer to the political emancipation of civilians (multi-actor) and to the transnationalisation of policy making (multi-level). Their elaboration is presented in a research model (see Figure 10.1).

Political modernization

Multi-actor governance

Multi-level governance

Changing policy arrangement • Actors and coalitions • Distribution of power and resources • Policy discourses • Rules of the game

Implementation (problems)

Innovations caused by strategic action Fig. 10.1 Research Model of Van der Zouwen and Van Tatenhove (2002)

In this study, we will use Van der Zouwen and Van Tatenhove’s research model as main source of inspiration, yet we will amend it at the same time. Firstly, we follow the distinction between multi-actor and multi-level governance, attributing a vertical and horizontal dimension to governance. The vertical character refers to the policy levels that are involved. The traditional domesticinternational order is complemented with sub-national and regional levels (for

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example the appearance of the European Union), whereas the top-down character is complemented with bottom-up processes, by which levels have become much more mutually influencing and overlapping (Börzel 2000; Marks and Hooghe 1996). The horizontal character, next, refers to the increasing diversity of actors that participate in the design and implementation of policies. Kooiman (2000) states that governance is based upon a broader, systematic interaction between those who are governing and those who are being governed. Whereas some authors (like Van Kersbergen and Van Waarden 2001) attribute a horizontal and a vertical dimension to multi-level governance, we would like to stick to the term multiactor governance to emphasise the horizontal character. In this, we follow Van der Zouwen and Van Tatenhove (2002). Secondly, when it comes to the interpretation of the structure – agency duality of Van der Zouwen and Van Tatenhove, we however feel the need to adjust their model. An important distinction in the governance debate is being made by Hajer et al. (2004), who state that the shift from government to governance is a result from a friction between existing political institutions on the one hand and new patterns and spaces of political interaction on the other. This distinction points to different approaches of governance. On the one hand, governance is considered a structural trend, referring to meta-institutional dynamics in current societies, and on the other hand, governance is seen as an instrument, as a new way of intervening and steering. This distinction, already mentioned in the above, stresses the difference between structural and strategic elements of policy processes (compare the duality of structure thesis, Giddens 1984). The policy arrangement approach incorporates this duality. Van der Zouwen and Van Tatenhove, however, connect governance to political modernisation only, i.e. to the structural side of the equation. However, following Hajer et al. (2004), we believe that the concept of governance not only refers to societal trends, but to the deliberate use of certain instruments by policy actors as well. This latter meaning of governance is part of the strategic action of involved actors. Given this double connotation, we would claim that a policy arrangement is influenced by governance as a trend ánd as an instrument, and not merely by the former. Moreover, we feel that the two structural processes mentioned by Van der Zouwen and Van Tatenhove – emancipation and trans-nationalisation – do not do justice to the diverse character of governance. For example, as mentioned earlier, Pierre and Peters (2000) distinguish eight structural processes related to governance. However, the question which of these are relevant is in our view dependent on the empirical research at hand. As a consequence, we will not decide at forehand which trends are theoretically relevant, but induce these empirically in our case analysis below. Thirdly, we would like to introduce another distinction in the governance debate that is not being referred to by Van der Zouwen and Van Tatenhove. This distinction involves the difference between the legitimacy and the effectiveness of governance processes. Hajer et al. (2004) argue that in most of the governance literature the emphasis lies on increasing the problem solving capacity of governance arrangements. As a consequence, the essence of politics is being reduced to technical problem-solving, focussing on the effectiveness of a certain


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outcome, while neglecting the legitimacy of the process leading towards this outcome at the same time (p. 11). Taking the latter seriously would however imply that policy processes and a focus on legitimacy are taken into consideration as well. Peters (2000) confirms this reasoning. He states that it is important to look both at the policy processes and at the policy outcomes that result from these processes. This notion can be connected to the idea of governance failure in the sense that such failure can occur both from a legitimacy perspective and from an effectiveness perspective. As argued above, both negative and positive new governance reflect this distinction. As such, we feel the need to address it in this study, even though it is not represented in the model of Van der Zouwen and Van Tatenhove. Yet we would like to incorporate this distinction into our own study by focussing on policy outcomes (effectiveness) and policy processes (legitimacy). Finally, the model implies that governance trends may lead to new implementation problems. This idea supports the main assumption defended in this chapter, namely that a shift towards governance may result in failure. Van der Zouwen and Van Tatenhove translate these implementation problems into four propositions. They claim lack of horizontal and vertical harmonisation, hampered (or encouraged) policy implementation due to increased stakeholder potential, pluralisation and negotiation of rules and the occurrence of controversial or contradictive discourses. However, they do not elaborate these intriguing ideas in depth. Therefore we take their analysis one step further by hypothesising that the shift from government to governance should be (mainly) read as ‘a shift from old governance to negative new governance’, implying different sorts of governance failures. These failures will be operationalised in accordance with the four dimensions of the policy arrangement approach. As a consequence, four hypotheses on governance failure will be formulated, which will be tested in our case analysis below.

10.4.3 Hypotheses on Governance Failure When a shift from government to governance occurs, the number of actors that is involved in the design and implementation of policies is assumed to be increasing. Policy making and implementation is no longer the sole concern of governmental actors (and/or vested interests, as is the case in traditional or neo-corporatism). New actors with a private background, both from market and civil society, are entering the policy arrangement, either because they are invited to do so or because they simply feel the need to get involved. Moreover, these actors might stem from various policy levels (local NGOs, transnational corporations, etc.). In such a multi-actor and multi-level setting, social processes become more complex. This might create additional tension within and among policy levels, especially through the eyes of those actors who need to coordinate or guide interaction within the policy arrangement concerned. Also, communication problems between the actors involved are more likely to occur and might further complicate the

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already complex interaction patterns. Put bluntly, a shift towards governance can easily generate what we would like to call an actor overload. The power relations that exist within a policy arrangement are determined by the resources that the actors involved can mobilise and use strategically vis-à-vis others. As we have just explained, when a shift towards governance occurs, new actors are entering the scene. This causes a re-arrangement of dependency relations based on the resources the new actors bring in. For example, non-governmental actors from several policy levels are increasingly having the capacity to resist governments’ decisions by mobilising opposition. Also, governmental actors will experience more difficulty in using coercion as a means to steer the more complex policy arrangement. Consequently, they will have to resort to less intrusive ways to achieve their goals, for example by using communicative or financial incentives. Moreover, a problematic situation arises when governmental actors from different scale levels are beginning to meet within one policy arrangement. In an ‘old governance situation’, national governments are dominant, but when a shift towards governance occurs, new authority relations between governmental actors from several levels have to be established. In short, pressures from different sides are increasing, it is no longer always clear which actor is in charge and it becomes harder to steer the policy arrangement as a whole in a certain direction. These developments lead to a situation in which there is an increase of power struggles. The increase of actors not only implies a re-arrangement of dependency relations, it also might bring with it new discursive frames. Because the new actors stem from the spheres of state, market and civil society and from different policy levels, it is likely that the variety of policy discourses within a policy arrangement will increase. As such, the notion of one hegemonic discourse being advocated by the entire policy arrangement – the ideal type situation related to ‘old governance’ – is no longer valid. Therefore, new governance will probably bring with it more disagreement concerning existing and emerging discourses. This creates a situation in which ideas, concepts and narratives are more often challenged, while ways for integration, coexistence or assimilation become less obvious. Concluding, a shift to governance implies the occurrence and emergence of conflicting discourses. The increase of actors, finally, also affects the rules of the game that mediate the access to as well as the decision-making and interactions within a policy arrangement. In order to reach consensus, longer and tougher negotiations will probably take place, even if public actors still remain formally responsible for the adoption of regulations. This implies that the existing rules of the game become strained and, moreover, will no longer suffice. In addition, other rule systems are introduced by new policy actors and levels, rules which might contradict or confuse existing ones. As a consequence, actors are confronted with new rules implied or designed by others, while they are not yet sure of how to adapt or innovate their own rules at the same time. This easily leads to confusing situations based on unclear rules. Until now, our line of our argumentation has followed the assumption that a shift towards new governance does indeed take place, with a focus on its negative implications. Moreover, we have extended the definition of governance by pointing at the difference of governance as a trend and as an instrument, to the horizontal


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and vertical character of a shift towards governance and to the distinction between governance effectiveness and governance legitimacy. In addition, to further theorise about governance failure, we have argued about four hypothetical governance failure situations, based on the dimensions of the policy arrangement approach. To provide an overview of this line of argumentation, we have revised the research model of Van der Zouwen and Van Tatenhove into our own framework (see Figure 10.2). The main difference is that we have further operationalised the implementation problems proposed by them. Also, we have added our governance elaborations, as mentioned in the above, to the model. Finally, at the end of this section, we will now present our four working hypotheses, which will be at the core of our case analysis below. • Hypothesis 1: ‘The more a shift from old to new governance will emerge, the more it is likely that policy arrangements are characterised by an actor overload’. • Hypothesis 2: ‘The more a shift from old to new governance will emerge, the more it is likely that policy arrangements are characterised by power struggles’. • Hypothesis 3: ‘The more a shift from old to new governance will emerge, the more it is likely that policy arrangements are characterised by conflicting discourses’. • Hypothesis 4: ‘The more a shift from old to new governance will emerge, the more it is likely that policy arrangements are characterised by unclear rules’. multi-actor and multi-level governance as a trend

Changing policy arrangement • Actors and coalitions • Power and resources • Policy discourses • Rules of the game

• Actor overload • Power struggle • Conflicting discourses • Unclear rules

multi-actor and multi-level governance as an instrument

Shift from old to new governance

Fig. 10.2 Theoretical Framework

Governance failure from a legitimacy perspective Governance failure from an effectiveness perspective

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10.5 Some Notes on Methodology Below, we will test our hypotheses on the basis of a case study. The selected case concerns the implementation of European nature conservation policy within the Netherlands, divided into two periods. Before the analysis is carried out, though, we have to address some methodological issues related to our research design. Moreover, the case will be briefly introduced and we will shortly argue why we have chosen it. The aim of this study is to investigate whether a shift from old towards new governance is occurring, and whether this shift can be called negative. From a methodological perspective, this aim implies addressing three issues. First, such a shift cannot be investigated in general, i.e. covering the entire society as a whole. As such, a separate part of society, above referred to as a policy arrangement, has to be singled out and studied. Second, because we are studying a shift, we need to carry out a longitudinal study, focusing on a dynamic policy arrangement developing over time. Third, in order to be suitable for our test, the policy arrangement which we will select must show some general signs of increasing governance characteristics. To address the first methodological issue, the research design that best suits our needs is the case study. Such a study focuses on complex processes and on a variety of interesting variables. These complex processes need to be studied in depth, in order to gain relevant knowledge, so only one or a few of them can be analyzed. In our study, we want to focus on one policy arrangement, which we call ‘our case’ from now on. With regard to the second methodological issue: in order to be able to focus on a shift towards governance, we will need to focus on changes over time. To enable this, we will divide the development of our case in two separate periods (or sub-cases). By analyzing what happens within the first period (of government) and comparing these developments with what happens in the second period (of governance), we will be able to determine whether a true shift occurred and how this shift manifested itself. It is of course important to choose a valid ‘turning point’, which separates both periods. When addressing the third methodological issue, it is important that in the first period an ‘old governance’ situation is indeed present. As a selection criterion, the number of multi-level and multi-actor characteristics can be used. This number should be low in the first period. In the second period, a new governance situation should emerge, with higher numbers of actors and levels involved. The analysis will then show whether a shift is positive or negative (or both), whether a shift towards governance is visible in policy processes or in policy outcomes (or both) and whether governance appears as a trend or as an instrument (or both). The third methodological issue has been the main guiding principle in our search for a suitable case study. Of course it is not possible to fully determine at forehand whether a shift towards governance occurred in a specific case, because this would require the sort of in-depth analysis which we are about to carry out afterwards. Therefore, we made a selection based on more general criteria. We have focused on finding a case, which has developed for quite some time, with


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signs of an increasing number of actors, both governmental and non-governmental, and who are, moreover, organised over several policy levels. Besides, two clear periods had to be visible, with an evident ‘turning point’ between them. In addition, we have (of course) focused on our own fields of expertise, which lie in the field of environmental, forest, nature and landscape policies. As a consequence, we have selected the case of the implementation of the Bird- and Habitat Directives (BHD) within the Netherlands.

10.6 Short Introduction to the Case Study The Bird- and Habitat Directives, representing the nature conservation policy of the European Union, have followed upon one another (Osieck 1998). First, as a response to the catch and consumption of large amounts of birds in the Mediterranean countries, the Bird directive was designed to safeguard the European bird population in 1979. In 1992, this directive was complemented with the Habitat directive, which installed similar measures for the protection of other species and their habitats. The member states of the EU subsequently had to implement these directives into their own legislation and policy, while focusing on a habitat oriented and a species oriented perspective. In the Netherlands, the directives were not immediately implemented. The original target of the Bird directive (to comply within 2 years) was missed by far (see Table 10.1). The Ministry of LNV (Dutch abbreviation for Agriculture, Nature management and Food quality), responsible for the implementation, did not prioritise the implementation of the directive, because it thought that Dutch policy already covered the main elements of the EU directive, while preferring its own national approach, compared to the European one, at the same time. When the Habitat directive was introduced, again no priority was given to the national implementation process, for similar reasons, resulting in a tremendous delay. Over the years, the European Commission (or EC) tried to speed up the Dutch implementation of both directives by issuing several reminders. From 1996 onwards, the EC however started to loose patience (Van den Top and Van der Zouwen 2000), and in 1998, the Netherlands was convicted by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for failing to implement the two directives. This incident awoke numerous Dutch actors who were involved in nature policy one way or the other. From that moment on, they either tried to improve and speed up the implementation of both directives or hinder and slow down this process. Consequently, the Ministry of LNV had now to deal with other Ministries and lots of nongovernmental actors too, who all had their own ideas about the BHD, while handling the increased pressure being issued by the EC at the same time.


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Table 10.1 Implementation of the EU Directives in The Netherlands (Milieu- en Natuurplanbureau 2002) Tasks to be carried out by NL Policy achievements by NL Transposing directives into national legislation within 2 years (1981)

No achievements; this commitment is being complemented by the Habitat directive in 1994

1986: First five areas

Bird directive

1986–1998: 24 new areas after several Selection of special protected reminders by the European Commission (EC) areas within 2 years (1981) 1998: Conviction by the European Court of Justice 2000: 49 new areas; list completed Transposing directives into national legislation, to be in effect in 1994

2000: EC: proof of default concerning the Habitat directive; Dutch legislation refitted

1996: 27 areas assigned Habitat and bird directive

1998: Conviction by the European Court of Justice 1998: 62 areas assigned, 36 with preliminary Selection of special protected status. This status is cancelled later on; new areas; lists have to be adapted list with 76 areas completed in 1995 2000: Judgement EC: list needs further adaptations 2001: Work in progress; adapted list confirm the demands of the EC

In this research, we assume that in the period from 1979 until 1998, from the issuing of the Bird directive to the Dutch conviction by the ECJ, the influence of multi-actor and multi-level governance was relatively low, because only a few policy actors at two administrative levels were involved (EC and NL). Moreover, the Dutch showed a national-oriented policy approach as far as the implementation of EU legislation was concerned. After 1998, when the second period commenced, a lot of new actors became involved (new advocates and opponents of EU legislation) at more different administrative levels (including the subnational one, i.e. the growing influence of provinces and municipalities). The second period ends in 2004, when it was 25 years ago that the Bird directive was introduced. Also, the BHD process stood at the brink of a new period at that time, so we have not gone beyond the year 2004. What stands out is that the first period is considerably larger in time frame than the second one. This discrepancy,


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however, is in our eyes not problematic, because the second period shows an immense acceleration of events compared to the first one.

10.7 Bird- and Habitat Directive: Governance Failure? In this section, we will start our analysis with paying attention to developments in the first and second periods as discerned in the above. For each period, we will briefly describe the overall setting and analyze the relevant policy developments more in detail, while paying attention to the four dimensions of the policy arrangement approach. Then, we will focus on the validity of our hypotheses as well as on the governance characteristics that we theoretically posited in the previous sections. Finally, we will present a brief comparison of the two periods.

10.7.1 Developments in the First Period (1979–1998) When the implementation of the Bird directive formally started in 1979, three important actors were involved in the Dutch context. Firstly, there was the Ministry of LNV, responsible for Dutch nature- and landscape policies.1 This Ministry was tasked with the implementation of the new directive, but did initially not pay a lot of attention to it, as was already referred to in the above. Although it supported the goals of the Birds directive, it preferred to focus on a more integral discourse of nature conservation, in which for example agricultural, recreational and economic values were taken into account. This was reflected in the so-called Relatienota, issued in 1975, which contained the vision of the Ministry on rural areas (Van Kleef 2004). Also, LNV maintained its own plans, programs and policies to deal with nature conservation throughout the entire period, more or less ignoring the Bird directive. It did so, because the Ministry assumed that its own policies were already sufficient enough to cover commitments implied in European law. An example of such a plan was the Dutch Nature Policy Plan of 1990, which focused on the design of the so-called Ecological Main Structure in the Netherlands, however without neglecting the relationships between nature conservation on the one hand and rural area functions on the other (Ministerie van LNV 1990). Secondly, the European Commission played an important role, because it had (and has) the task of monitoring whether European directives, including those on nature conservation, are complied with. The EC interpreted the Bird directive quite strictly, arguing on the basis of a strong sectoral approach and ecological

_________________________ 1 In 1979, however, this responsibility was still quite informal. It became formalised when the Ministry of LNV was created in 1982. Before that, the Ministry was called LV. As such, the ‘N’, which stands for Nature protection, was officially added in 1982 (Van Kleef 2004).

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criteria. With this Bird directive, the EC became a ‘new’ actor in Dutch nature conservation policy, quite unfamiliar with the domestic situation. Formally, a top down relation between the EC and LNV became established, as European law subsumes national law. But this new formal hierarchy did not really become apparent in this period, because the EC did initially not put too much pressure on member states, while LNV in turn seemed not really aware of the new formalities. In fact, the EC waited for the development of ECJ jurisprudence on the new Bird directive before it started to monitor more strictly. Therefore, the Ministry remained the most dominant actor in the first period, emphasising its own domestic approach, even though the EC was formally the higher authority. This difference in practice and theory is mainly explained by the relationship between these two actors – LNV and EC – that was not yet very intense nor clear at that time. Thirdly, there was one Dutch non-governmental organisation (NGO) involved, Vogelbescherming (VB), which is the national branch of Bird Life International (BLI).2 This NGO focused on the protection of birds and was of course very happy with the sectoral and rather strict approach of the new Bird directive. Because of its extensive knowledge on birds and their habitats, VB was often consulted by the Ministry of LNV at that time (and still is today). As such, this NGO gained a rather influential position in Dutch nature conservation policy, at least concerning birds. Initially, because of the attitude of the Ministry of LNV, the implementation of the Bird directive went very slowly. The Ministry was supposed to assign Bird directive status to several areas, while incorporating the directive into national legislation. However, this designation hardly progressed and no attempts were undertaken to change Dutch legislation. For example, the 1990 Nature Policy Plan, already referred to in the above, did not refer to the Bird directive at all, although it was published 10 years later. Moreover, the Ministry persisted in conducting its policy of first assigning areas under the umbrella of the ‘Natuurbeschermingswet’ (Nature Protection Act) before giving them a Bird directive status. This further delayed implementation. Meanwhile, the EC began to get used to its watchdog role over EU nature policy implementation. In addition, European jurisprudence began to develop. Because it lacked an ornithological system of reference, the EC asked Bird Life International (BLI) to design an Europe wide list of areas suitable for a Bird directive status. This empowered BLI enormously. At the domestic level, Vogelbescherming (VB) used this list to put more pressure on the Ministry of LNV to start implementing the Bird directive. In addition, VB threatened the Ministry of LNV to start a procedure before the European Court of Justice, now the 1992 Maastricht Treaty had made it possible for private organisations and individual citizens to stand before this court. Also, through BLI, VB lobbied in Brussels as well. It urged the EC to keep a closer eye on the Netherlands, which was not investing enough efforts in implementing the Bird directive.

_________________________ 2

Until 1994, Bird Life International was called the International Council for Bird Preservation (ICBP).


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However, the Ministry of LNV did not immediately give in and kept on following its own approach, claiming that it did enough to act in the best interest of the directive. In 1992, when the Bird directive was complemented with the Habitat directive, now called the Bird and Habitat Directive (BHD), the Ministry followed a similar approach. However, the pressure from the EC began to rise. Eventually, the Ministry realised that it could no longer ignore the wishes of the EC, so it tried to keep the EC satisfied with a number of new designations. Meanwhile, VB was continuously looking over the shoulders of the Ministry, maintaining additional pressure. Finally, the EC had enough of the lagging attitude of the Ministry of LNV. Although the latter continued arguing that it was doing enough to comply with the directives, not enough areas were designated in time. As well, the directives were not formally being integrated into the Dutch legal system. As a consequence, the EC started a legal case before the ECJ. In 1998, the Netherlands was indeed convicted for not implementing the Bird- and Habitat directive adequately. This conviction hit the Netherlands by surprise, strangely enough, because until then the Bird- and Habitat directives had hardly had any attention, neither from politics nor from society. All of a sudden, the two directives were in the centre of societal and political attention and many actors from different policy levels began to get involved. This led to the start of the second period.

10.7.2 Governance in the First Period When assessing the hypotheses for governance failure in this period, the first observation is that three important actors were strongly involved. From a multilevel perspective, the Ministry of LNV and the EC started to interact in the field of nature conservation. With that, LNV’s Directorate of Nature experienced the presence of a higher policy level for the first time. At the same time, as we have seen in the above, the Ministry maintained its domestic approach, somehow denying the new ‘Europeanised’ situation. From a multi-actor perspective, LNV and VB were involved, the latter being the watchdog of the former, exercising considerable pressure, which was not always appreciated by the Ministry. However, the involvement of NGOs in Dutch nature policy was not new at all. Even more so, private organisations stood at the birth of nature conservation at the end of the 19th century (Van der Zouwen 2006). In a similar vein, VB was an important policy actor far before the introduction of the Bird directive. Yet the role of environmental NGOs considerably changed recently, both in the Netherlands and Europe. Their numbers increased, their action vocabulary expanded and they as well Europeanised (e.g. with the VB being active at the domestic level, BLI at the European level, simultaneously putting pressure on the Netherlands from above and below). Overall, the number of actors involved in Dutch nature conservation policy increased with the entrance of the EC in the first period, but one can hardly speak of an ‘actor overload’ with these few key players at hand.

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Secondly, the balance of power changed during this period, although this was not immediately recognised by all parties. The change mainly took place behind the scene. Originally, the Ministry of LNV was the central authority in Dutch nature conservation policy, but this began to change when the EC Bird directive was introduced. Now a regulation with higher legal status than national law had emerged in nature conservation.3 As a consequence, LNV and EC now shared formal competencies in this field. Initially, this was hardly felt so, since the EC did not immediately used its powers to push member states forward. However, when implementation fell short, the EC started to increase the pressure on the Ministry, urging it to comply with both directives. In doing so, the commission was supported by evolving European jurisprudence as well as by NGO pressure. So power has surely shifted in this period, but intense power struggles were hardly visible. In fact, when these really became apparent, the second period commenced. Third, two (conflicting) policy discourses can be distinguished in this period. On the one hand, the EC and VB wanted a strong directive, with a strict sectoral approach, based on ecological criteria. On the other hand, LNV propagated a more integral discourse, with emphasis on other than ecological functions of nature as well. Later on, the introduction of the Habitat directive faced similar contradictory approaches at the European and national levels. Since LNV considered its own approach on nature policies as (more) innovative, it was unwilling to abandon it, thus complicating the implementation of the two European directives. As such, the two policy discourses indeed conflicted with each other. Finally, it can be stated that the rules in this period were rather unclear. This profoundly comes to the fore in LNV’s misinterpretation of the strict character of the directives. The Ministry thought that it would suffice to generally act in line with the directives, but made a critical mistake by not following European obligations. Over the years, the EC tried to make clear that this misconception had to be corrected, using strong legal means to achieve this in the end. For LNV, the conviction by the European Court of Justice indeed clarified the rules of the game, however in a quite painful manner. Given the above considerations, it cannot be entirely hold true that old governance is dominant in the first period. This is partially because of the role and impact of NGOs (which was not new, by the way, but profoundly changed in this period) and partially because of the first steps towards the Europeanisation of Dutch nature conservation policy and of NGO activism. Although that process was hardly recognised by the Dutch authorities, it came to the fore in the interaction between LNV, VB, EC and BLI. Nonetheless, power relations at the surface hardly changed for the most time of this period, whereas national and European policy discourses started to clash. This was mainly caused by the

_________________________ 3 Of course, LNV had experience with international law before, such as the Bern convention. International law also subsumes national law, in case the international treaty concerned is signed and ratified by a country. Yet international law has less legal status and is less enforceable than European law. In that sense, the Netherlands experienced a new situation regarding nature conservation policy with the adoption and entry into force of the Bird directive.


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unclear rules concerning the interpretation and implementation of the BHD. LNV and the EC held different views on that. As a consequence, governance failure was in the making. Both from a perspective of governance in policy processes (legitimacy) versus governance in policy outcomes (effectiveness), this period was not successful. The implementation targets of the Bird directive and of the Habitat directive later on were missed by far. In addition, the nature of the policy making process was questioned by NGOs (VB and BLI). So the ‘hybrid’ governance structure of this period – an old domestic governmental approach in combination with emerging European governance – was not very successful, which eventually led to the top-down EC intervention, in fact announcing the start of the second period.

10.7.3 Developments in the Second Period (1998–2005) With the conviction of the Netherlands by the European Court of Justice, the EC had really shown its teeth in nature conservation policy for the first time. The Ministry of LNV had no choice but to comply with the BHD and to immediately start its implementation by adapting Dutch legislation and by designating new areas. It abandoned its integral approach for the time being and adopted the sectoral one of the EC. LNV considerably increased its efforts to implement the directives too. The delay which had arisen in the first period was compensated for. However, the Ministry still maintained its own ideas on nature policy making outside the BHD. For example, it introduced a new integral nature policy plan in 2000 (Natuur voor Mensen, Mensen voor Natuur, Ministerie van LNV et al. 2000). Nevertheless, the implementation problems described in the first period, caused by the struggle between LNV and the EC over the interpretation of the BHD rules, were for a large part being resolved. Meanwhile, however, the conviction and the increased Ministerial attention for the BHD mobilised several new actors within the Netherlands. These started to interfere in the policy process because they felt that their interests were at stake. Although some of these actors were organised at the European, provincial and local levels too, the main ‘battlefield’ in this period was the national level. From an analytical perspective, we can categorise these actors into three coalitions. The Ministry of LNV was more or less situated in the middle of these. First, there were the adversaries, who were afraid that the (in their eyes) rigorous character of the directives would put far too much emphasis on nature conservation. They had the idea that their activities were going to be hampered when the BHD would be literally implemented. In their eyes, the Netherlands would then become ‘closed off’ for further developments in and around designated areas. Therefore, they wanted to amend current and future legislation and to prevent further designation of BHD areas. Some of them even wanted to change the European directives themselves. This coalition was formed by several Ministries (Economic Affairs, Finance, Defence and Transport, Public Works and Water Management) and by several non-governmental organisations like VNO-NCW

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(Dutch entrepreneurs), LTO (agricultural interest organisation), RECRON (branch organisation for recreational entrepreneurs) and KNJV (hunting association). Second, a coalition of advocates could be discerned. The EC was the most important supporter of the directives, and kept a close eye on the Ministry of LNV. Over time, its approach broadened with the idea of spatial ecological networks. Assigned Bird- and Habitat directive areas, together with corridors, had to make up a pan-European network of natural areas in the future. In the EC approach, the sectoral discourse based on ecological criteria nonetheless remained dominant. In this period, the VB was joined by other nature conservation organisations that advocated the BHD. Profound were the three large Dutch natural terrain owners Staatsbosbeheer (State Forest Agency), Natuurmonumenten (Society for the Protection of Natural Monuments) and Provinciale Landschappen (conglomerate of provincial nature and landscape protection organisations), and two other Dutch NGOs, Stichting Natuur en Milieu (Nature- and Environment Association) and Das en Boom (Badger and Tree). As a third coalition, the Dutch provinces and municipalities were involved. These actors could not be considered either advocates or adversaries, because individual provinces and municipalities had their own ideas about the BHD. They nonetheless started to get involved as one group because it was not clear at all what the implications of the BHD would be at provincial and local levels. They were represented by their two national associations (IPO for the provinces and VNG for the municipalities). The aim of this coalition was to get more clarification on the provincial and municipal role in the preparation and implementation of the BHD. The new, increased attention for the BHD came to the fore in several important events. Firstly, a large scale investigation started, in which all relevant Ministries were involved, in order to assess the effects of the BHD implementation (Bastmeijer and Verschuuren 2003; Werkgroep VHR 2003). This enabled other Ministries to interfere with LNV’s approach. They resisted the strict and sectoral approach that LNV had recently adopted. Although the latter did not want to ignore the wishes of the other Ministries, it had also learned that it was no longer possible to ignore the requirements of European law. As such, the Ministry felt frustrated, because it was attacked by the other Ministries, while it felt it had no choice at the same time. Secondly, the Ministry issued public hearings and participation rounds on the BHD. More than 6,000 comments were handed in, most of which criticised the Ministry’s approach (Ministerie van LNV 2000, 2004). Besides the advocates and adversaries, mentioned in the above, a lot of individual citizens were responding too, mainly from a NIMBY perspective. The Ministry of LNV had to deal with all these public responses, but claimed that it was impossible to process all complaints. Therefore, comments that were based on other than ecological criteria were not being addressed at all. As such, actors that had issued NIMBY type of responses felt that they were not taken seriously either. Consequently, the feedback rounds were publicly perceived as only providing ‘fake influence’. Thirdly, the adversaries were blaming LNV for being far too strict, at the expense of economic development and social welfare. They claimed that the Ministry listened to the EC too much. Therefore, they framed the sentiment


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that the Netherlands would become ‘closed off’ from future investments, implying that economic and social interests would suffer (VNO-NCW 2002). All this put the directives in a very bad light. They as well tried to stop the implementation of the directives by going to Dutch and European courts. However, because their arguments were seldom based on ecological criteria, their litigation attempts were not very successful. In addition, non-governmental adversaries started lobby campaigns at several Ministries, in the Dutch parliament and at the European level. They also approached several members of parliament, who were for example able to amend the Dutch Nature Protection Act and the Flora and Fauna Act. The former was being updated to incorporate the BHD requirements concerning habitats, the latter was being designed to deal with the species oriented part of the BHD. However, these amendments were so extensive and numerous that the new laws were becoming severely complicated. As such, the fear was that both laws would become unworkable in practice. At the end of this period (the year 2005), however, these effects were not yet visible. Because of all criticism, the Ministry of LNV looked for ways to ensure some degree of integration of different interests. It started to stress the importance of Article 6 of the Habitat directive, which justifies an integral approach, by allowing exceptions to the strict character of the directives. However, this article would only become operational when its implications were embedded into national legislation and after the designation of BHD areas. Furthermore, it as well needed adequate elaboration on the provincial and local levels. However, one of the main points of critique framed by IPO and VNG was that the provinces and municipalities had no idea on how to deal with the BHD. Although the Ministry had delegated responsibilities on the Article 6 procedures to lower administrative levels, municipalities and provinces were not at all prepared. They also claimed that they were not adequately supported to deal with their new responsibilities. Because the above criteria were not met yet, Article 6 procedures could not be invoked, and thus Article 6 had to be interpreted in the strictest manner for the time being. This resulted in the ironic situation that an article that was meant to guarantee a more integral approach in fact endorsed a very strict framework. Consequently, adversaries were not aware of the future possibilities that Article 6 offers. For as far they addressed Article 6, they saw it as a current bottleneck and not as a future opportunity, because it had to be interpreted in the strictest manner while full implementation was being awaited. Because the Ministry kept trying to strive for an integral approach within the context of the BHD, the advocates protested as well. They claimed that the strict characteristics of the directives were necessary to adequately protect Dutch biodiversity and natural areas, and they were afraid that the Ministry was giving in to the adversaries’ pressure. Consequently, advocates initiated their own lobby campaigns as well, both at European and national levels, and tried to hinder the issuing of Article 6 procedures in courts, stating that this article was not yet ready to be implemented. Contrary to similar attempts by the adversaries, these were often successful, because they were based on ecologically and legally sound arguments.

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To solve the implementation problems at lower policy levels, the Ministry of LNV eventually established the Project Doelen en Beheer (Project Targets and Management), which was meant to elaborate the directives at lower administrative levels, while involving provincial and local stakeholders. For each assigned area, a specific management plan was designed, in cooperation with stakeholders from that area. Also, the project aimed at clarifying the role of sub-national authorities and at elaborating the implications of Article 6. The first responses from the field were positive, because people felt that their problems were taken seriously. However, these project have only started recently, so their results are not visible yet (at least not in 2005).

10.7.4 Governance in the Second Period When assessing the hypotheses on governance failure that have been formulated in the above, our first conclusion that an ‘overload of actors’ emerged in the second phase seems justified. The policy arrangement was overrun by all kinds of actors, governmental and non-governmental, provincial as well as local, who all tried to interfere with the BHD implementation. As a result, the Ministry of LNV was hampered both by advocates and adversaries. Because LNV positioned itself somewhere between these two coalitions, it had to cope with a lot of criticism from both sites. Since the advocates and adversaries did not coordinate their interventions much among one other, all individual responses were directly addressed to the Ministry, causing an overload of interferences. Moreover, problems arose with sub-national stakeholders, because the directives were being introduced at the lower administrative levels without accompanying support. As to the power dimension of this case, the struggle between the EC and the Ministry of LNV more or less came to an end in this second period. At the same time, though, a lot of new actors were trying to influence the implementation of the BHD at the national level. The adversaries for example did so trough lobby activities, investigation, public hearings and legal procedures. They were able to delay and amend the policy process to some extent, but they could not stop the implementation itself. The advocates pursued their own lobby activities and legal procedures to ensure a strict interpretation of the directives. In their case, legal instruments were quite often successful. As such, an encompassing power struggle emerged on the horizontal axis. In addition, whereas the power struggle of the first period between the EC and LNV had waned, the provinces and municipalities had to deal with new responsibilities delegated to them by the Ministry in this period, but they were unable to adequately manage their new power positions. As a consequence, a power struggle at the vertical axe became visible over time as well, however moving down to lower levels, so to speak, from the European to the sub-national scale. In this second period, four nature policy discourses can be discerned. The coalition of advocates aimed at a strict and sectoral interpretation of the directives. The EC, BLI and VB, who already advocated this view in the first period, were


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now joined by other nature and landscape conservation NGOs. As a second discourse, the perspective of the adversaries – several Ministries and interest groups – is to be distinguished. Their discourse constituted of an integral approach with much more emphasis on economical and social aspects of nature conservation. Some of the adversaries even strived for a radical amendment of the original directives. A third discourse, pursued by IPO and VNG, focused on the elaboration of the directives at the lower policy levels. They mainly called for clarification concerning their role in the preparation and implementation of the BHD. Finally, the Ministry of LNV was situated somewhere in the middle of these three discourses. It tried to combine the views of adversaries, advocates and the lower policy levels. Although it simply had to comply with the EC requirements, it nevertheless looked for ways to pursue a compromise approach. As a consequence, the advocates claimed that the Ministry listened too much to the adversaries, whereas the latter turned this argument around. Moreover, the communication with the lower policy levels was problematic. Conflicts among the three mentioned discourses were being fought out through the Ministry of LNV, which had to find its own way in between. This period began with LNV’s recognition of the EC interpretation of the directives as the valid rule, solving the conflict that had led to the conviction of the Netherlands by the ECJ. The Ministry now started to follow European rules by assigning BHD areas and by adapting Dutch legislation, but over time it was more and more criticised by adversaries for doing so. Along the way it nonetheless became clear that exceptions to the BHD rules were possible with Article 6. However, this article could not yet be operationalised, because neither the directives had been implemented yet nor were lower administrative levels ready to deal with the implications of this article. As such, and quite ironically, this rule, meant to facilitate some leniency, did not result in a more integral approach so far. In this second period, informal rules were characterised by inexperience and unease. Actors that were new to the policy arrangement, mainly adversaries, had no experience with the BHD and often acted out of fear. Relationships between actors involved were new and for that reason often uneasy. All in all, the situation was quite chaotic. As such, a rather unclear set of rules was visible. The above analysis seems to verify a shift from a hybrid situation in the first period (domestic government plus the emergence of European governance) to a full governance situation in the second period (multi-actor and multi-level). Overall, this shift can however not be considered (fully) positive, given the (partial) confirmation of all the four ‘governance failure hypotheses’. Moreover, there were no explicit indications of governmental and non-governmental actors harmoniously working together to design legitimate and effective policies. Rather, non-governmental actors tried to safeguard their own interests by hampering the Ministry of LNV, which was responsible for the implementation of the directives. Moreover, other governmental actors besides LNV – such as the Ministry of Economic Affairs – complicated this situation by criticising LNV’s approach and by mobilising societal support for their own approach. As such, it can be concluded that characteristics of ‘negative new governance’ prevailed.

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Nonetheless, an important comment has to be made from the perspective of governance in policy processes versus governance in policy outcomes. As far as the latter is concerned, this period witnessed the rapid designation of BHD areas and the start of the alteration of Dutch legislation. Therefore one can argue that the ‘new governance situation’ resulted in important policy outcomes, although rather old governance techniques were used to achieve this (top-down legislation and designation enforced by EU law). But the shift towards ‘negative new governance’ was nonetheless visible in the policy processes that appeared in this period. Especially the Ministry of LNV was the ‘victim’ of this shift, as it had to deal with much opposition and criticism.

10.8 Comparison and Conclusion Compared to the first period, the number of actors involved in Dutch nature policy drastically increased in the second period. This ‘overload’ led to serious problems. For example, the Ministry of LNV had to deal with thousands of public complaints. While trying to accommodate for all these comments the best way possible, LNV nonetheless proceeded in strictly implementing the BHD ‘in the shadow of EU hierarchy’ during the second period. This of course fuelled opposition, which was neglected by LNV to a large extent. Although new legislation passed parliament and areas were designated, one can question the social acceptability of these policy successes and hence their legitimacy in the longer run. Furthermore, it remains to be seen how well the two new nature conservation laws, which integrated the BHD in Dutch legislation, will work in practice. Clearly, the turning point between the two periods was the conviction of the Netherlands by the ECJ. Suddenly, the new power structure, until then latent, became more than obvious. Whereas initially the Ministry maintained to follow its own domestic approach, the EC and ECJ forced LNV to change its course. The delay in implementing the BHD was already severe by then. However, this new power structure was not accepted by a lot of nationally organised actors. They tried to strengthen their position vis-à-vis LNV and EC by mobilising various power instruments (lobby, legal procedures, interdepartmental studies, public hearings, feedback rounds), causing a severe power struggle. Moreover, the position of the lower governments was unclear. Formally, they were given new responsibilities, but they were not able to adequately deal with those. As such, a power struggle arose between various actors on the national and sub-national levels. When it comes to conflicting discourses, it can be observed that in the first period, the more sectoral, ecology based discourse of the EC (supported by environmental NGOs) was clashing with the integral discourse of the Ministry of LNV, linking nature conservation issues to social and economic ones. In the second period, LNV was forced to abandon this approach with regard to the BHD implementation. The integral discourse was then taken up by its adversaries. At the same time, the discourse of the EC and NGOs was joined by other advocates.


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In addition, actors with provincial and/or local discourses were entering the policy arrangement too. Discursive conflicts occurred between the Ministry and the lower administrative levels as well as between advocates and adversaries, who fought each other views, while pressurising the Ministry of LNV. As to the rules of the game, the dominant one – EU law is binding and overrules national law – was not recognised as such in the first period. Formally, LNV was obliged to comply with the obligations of the BHD. However, the Ministry made the mistake to consider this obligation too open for own interpretation. The EC tried to overrule this over the years, but was only able to do so by going to the European Court of Justice in the end. This dispute, strengthened by the new and uneasy relationship between the EC and LNV, caused the enormous delay in BHD implementation. The second period began when this dispute was solved. However, it was quickly replaced by several new conflict situations at the national level. The adversaries did not agree with the new rules of the game, while the advocates feared that the Ministry was trying to find new ways to circumvent them. Moreover, lack of clarity with regard to the position of the lower policy levels and the elaboration and implications of Article 6 of the Habitat directive occurred. This situation was complicated by the fact that the actors involved were not yet familiar with the policy arrangement and its new rules. Based on this line of argumentation, it can be claimed that a more critical approach towards the problem solving capacity of new governance seems justified, because most hypotheses on negative new governance and governance failure are to a large extent confirmed by our case study, particularly in the second period. Hence, multi-level and multi-actor governance are not necessarily ‘good governance’, in the sense that effective and legitimate policies are its result. This bias, so often found in the governance literature, should be put into perspective. However, some comments related to this conclusion have to be made. First of all, we would not claim that we have tested our hypotheses in such a way that we can generalise our findings empirically. After all, these are only based on one case study. Yet we claim that we can generalise in a theoretical sense, namely that our findings are theoretical propositions which can be further scrutinised in next rounds of empirical research (Yin 1991). Secondly, the conclusion that a full shift from old governance towards negative new governance heading towards failure is not justified. For example, the first period is more characterised by a hybrid governance arrangement than by old governance sec. This is due to the emerging Europeanisation of Dutch nature policy at that time. Moreover, NGOs do already play important roles then, even ‘skipping’ the national level as arena of influence and immediately addressing Brussels, which is often considered an indicator of new governance (although their impact on nature conservation dates back to the end of the 19th century). In addition, the second period is not only characterised by governance failure, which the confirmation of our hypotheses seems to point at. Yet, in terms of formal implementation, legislation and area designation, the second period is successful. However, this success was realised at the expense of policy legitimacy. Dutch nature policy is confronted with severe opposition and criticism at that time. This questions the policy effectiveness in the longer run, because the operational implementation in the field is highly dependent on the

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cooperation of many stakeholders. When these do not support the policy, its effectiveness becomes highly disputable. Finally, another issue should be addressed too: the distinction between governance as a trend versus governance as an instrument. From the above we learn that both are ‘at work’ in our empirical case. As a trend, governance manifested itself as Europeanisation processes, for example. Also, a trend of ever more involvement of actors from the spheres of market and civil society seems observable in Dutch nature conservation since 1979. These two trends are also referred to as political modernisation in the policy arrangement approach. As an instrument, governance refers to new types of steering and governing, which are deliberately applied by policy actors. Here we for example observe new communication strategies of authorities (LNV addressing Dutch society in the second period), new coalitions between governmental and non-governmental actors (EC and BLI in the first period) and the devolution of competencies (LNV and sub-national authorities in the second period). However, one should not exaggerate the impact and dominance of these new governance mechanisms. Topdown, hierarchical steering remains rather prominent, both as a trend and as an instrument. As a trend, European law simply functions as a ‘shadow of hierarchy’, governing policy actors into a certain direction. Similarly, at the level of strategic action, both LNV and EC acted as ‘hierarchical sovereigns’ in several instances (conviction of the Netherlands and area designation in the Netherlands, for example). As such, this case study functions as a next falsification of the ‘retreat of the state’ thesis. If we put the above conclusions in the overall perspective of this volume, the following two observations seems valid. Firstly, we definitely observe a manifestation of structural trends in ‘our’ policy practice. Prominently present in Dutch nature policy have been Europeanisation processes and multi-level governance structures. Interesting to note is that it took some time for both national authorities and interest groups alike to get fully aware of this ‘rescaling of statehood’ process, to interpret its consequences appropriately and to act accordingly. Obviously, a delayed awareness of structural change did occur and shaped the perspectives and conduct of people and organisations involved. However, this rescaling process, once acknowledged, did not imply an ‘emptying’ of the Dutch state. On the contrary, it adapted its governing structures and strategies – or its governmentality – to the changing circumstances over time, for example by building new coalitions with the EC and (some) NGOs in the second period and by using its legal competencies against (other) private pressures at the same time. Less visible, though, were the manifestation of the grand global discourses, notably the ‘embedded neo-liberal consensus’, in (Europeanised) Dutch nature policy. This has to do with the fact that European nature policy is built on a regulatory logic, namely on the objective to safeguard European biodiversity for future generations, and not on a logic of market harmonisation (although this logic has definitely played a role in the background). Thus strongly influenced by Europe, we would nonetheless claim, secondly, substantial autonomy for Dutch nature policy. It still has its own integral nature conservation and nature development discourses, its own political culture


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(so called polder model), its own types of instruments (e.g. Ecological Main Infrastructure) and its own discretionary space to interpret and implement European policy (although this was hardly used the last decade for fears of another conviction by the ECJ). For that reason, one could argue that the implementation of EU nature conservation law has (partly) been a parallel process on top of developments within Dutch nature conservation itself (such as the making of new, ‘wild’ nature, the building of ecological corridors, the integration of nature into landscape, recreation and agriculture, etc.). Hence, one can observe partial Europeanisation of national policy making, implying a complex interaction setting of European and domestic politics within a country. But it remains to be seen how this delicate balance between European determination of Dutch nature policy on the one hand and domestic autonomy of Dutch nature management on the other will evolve over time, particularly in the near future.

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Chapter 11

The Disoriented State Bas Arts and Arnoud Lagendijk

Abstract: On the basis both the theoretical arguments and the empirical observations presented so far, this chapter introduces the thesis of the ‘disoriented state’. This concept serves as an alternative for the ‘retreated’, ‘hollowed-out’ or ‘dead’ state, as proclaimed by others. The concept pictures the state as being ‘lost’ in a diffuse, multi-scalar and partly unknown geographical setting, and to being ‘uncertain’ about the nature, characteristics, consequences and, hence, governance of complex issues. Paradoxically, the state seems to remain the power container in international and domestic politics, given its abundance of resources, locus of political authority, de jure recognition of national sovereignty, etc. However, it is ‘surrounded’ by: (1) distanced governance arrangements; (2) re-territorialised political spaces; and (3) decentred statehood. While states also promote these changes, through their various neo-liberal programs, they feel plagued by these at the same time. Calls made earlier for more meta-governance, reflexivity and even irony should be seen in this light.

Keywords: State theory, governmentality, disoriented state, meta-governance, territoriality, policy practices

11.1 Introduction The starting point of this book was formed by a discussion on three major shifts: in governmentality, territoriality and governance (Chapter 1). In this chapter we will reconsider these shifts. We will focus, in particular, on the extent to which they have become empirically manifest, and how they intersect. In doing so, we

_________________________ Bas Arts (,) Chair of the Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group, University of Wageningen, PO Box 47, 6700 AA, Wageningen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] Arnoud Lagendijk Department of Spatial Planning, Radboud University of Nijmegen, PO Box 9108, NL-6500 HK, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] 231 B. Arts et al. (eds.), The Disoriented State: Shifts in Governmentality, Territoriality and Governance, 231–247. © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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pursue an approach that is somewhat different to the first part of the book. Grounding our discussion in the empirical findings both at a more general (Part II) and specific level (Part III), we are able to follow more of a ‘bottom-up’ approach. In developing our argument, however, we will also seek to identify certain common threads and trends, with a particular interest in how the core themes of our work intersect. The structure of this chapter is as follows. The three shifts are first related to the case studies of this book. We then provide a further reflection from the perspective of the ‘grand theories’ with which this book started. Subsequently, we will discuss, in a schematic manner, the way we see governmentality, governance and territoriality bearing upon each other. In this section, we make explicit how certain links are already made obvious in the preceding chapters, and we will provide further theorisation. The final part will focus on the position and role of the state. Under the heading of the ‘the disoriented state’, we argue that recent transformations have compounded the fragility of the state even further, despite the pervasiveness of neo-liberal ideas and practices. On the other hand, we also confirm the notion that the state continues to be the political ‘power container’ of the contemporary world. This situation can only, in part, be attributed to external conditions, such as economic, social and broader political developments. It is specifically our focus on governmentality, in conjunction with governance and territoriality, that helps to shed light on a series of (partly) state-internal developments representing both cause and outcomes of increased ‘disorientation’.

11.2 Triple Shift: New Territorialities, Governmentalities and Governance Practices This book posits three shifts: in governmentality, territoriality and governance (see subtitle of the volume). Moreover, as explained in Chapter 1, it links the emergence of these shifts as ‘grand narratives’ to local practices. As a matter of practice, largely following from the set-up of this volume, the narrative presented so far has tended to adopt a top-down logic. In this conclusion, we seek to balance this by starting, in a more ‘bottom up’ fashion, from the empirical observations. As a consequence, we start this section with new governance practices, after which higher level implications in terms of (state) territoriality and governmentality will be scrutinised.

11.2.1 Shifts in Governance The shift in governance is generally understood as the emergence of multi-level, multi-actor and multi-sector governance. Jessop (Chapter 4) refers to the localisation of social policy and the Europeanisation of employment policy, both domains that have been (mainly) nationally organised and steered by state bureaucracies

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before. Since the argument is not that we observe a full rescaling of these domains to higher or lower administrative tiers, a multi-levelling of policy-making remains as a consequence. Similar patterns are to be observed in migration, innovation, urban, nature and water policy (although to a different extent and with different types of consequences). Migration policy has been strongly Europeanised, yet member state authority in this policy domain remains firmly in place (see Pijpers, Chapter 5). European neo-liberalisation and national protectionism go hand in hand and create a patchwork of regulatory practices. A more fully developed ‘multi-scalar division of labour’ seems to have been developed in the domain of innovation policy (Lagendijk and Boekema, Chapter 6). Europe is now strongly dedicated to innovation (see Lisbon agenda); urban regions however have become important sites of innovation practices (such as clusters) at the same time. But national governments do not retreat from this domain either (see the Dutch innovation platform, directly steered by the national government). These three-tier developments are of course strongly related. City redevelopment and marketing is another case in point (Spierings, Chapter 7; Dormans and Lagendijk, Chapter 8). Cities position themselves in local, national and global markets, addressing both consumers and producers. But they are also ‘forced’ to do so, by economic competition in the first place, and by ‘higher’ politics in the second. Both EU institutions and member states strategically mobilise cities and urban regions to become ‘glocal’ sites of innovation, development and leisure. Here again, different tiers of government are involved. Finally, current nature and water policies in Europe are examples of multi-level governance practices pur sang (Meijerink and Wiering, Chapter 9; Arnouts and Arts, Chapter 10). Municipalities, water boards, provinces, national governments, Euregions and the EU all play their (formal and informal) roles. Moreover, new authoritative layers are being developed as well, for example at the level of (transboundary) river basins. Multi-level governance also implies multi-actor governance, since more administrative tiers become involved in policy domains that were previously strongly attached to only one. But the meaning of this concept is broader, referring to the increasing involvement of private stakeholders as well (see Chapter 1). This is illustrated by (nearly) all the case studies too. For example, local entrepreneurs play influential roles in urban redevelopment policy, whereas the impact of local, national and international NGOs on water and nature policy is hard to deny. Private stakeholders do so both formally, being part of officially organised participation processes in local, national and European governance practices, and informally, as interest groups lobbying for political influence at different tiers of government (from Tilburg to the Hague to Brussels). Multi-sector governance is less inherently and necessarily related to either multi-level or multi-actor governance, but definitely as important as a governance trend. It stems from the wish to compensate for sectoral functionalism, a heritage of Weberian, rational bureaucracy, while addressing the complexity of current policy issues at the same time. Both sustainability policy and integrated water management are examples of multi-sector governance, whereby functionally organised governmental departments as well as private stakeholders are mobilised to cooperate in (more) integrated governance arrangements. Particularly in Chapter 9

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on river basin management, this issue of multi-sector governance is thoroughly addressed.

11.2.2 Shifts in Territoriality All these new governance practices have territorial implications. New political spaces, besides the nation state, are emerging. Here again, the case studies provide interesting examples. The EU itself is of course an intriguing territorial entity, although one should be careful not to overstress this image too much by (implicitly) conceptualising it as an emerging, federal European state that – slowly but surely – replaces the member states (as some anti-EU campaigners have done in the European Constitution debate; see the referenda in France, the Netherlands and Ireland). Nonetheless, the ‘Schengen Area’ in European migration policy is a strong case of a newly emerging territoriality, to which images like ‘Fortress Europe’ refer to. Similarly, new political spaces are coming to the fore in the other case studies. One might think of individual, yet ‘glocalised’ cities, urban regions, metropolitan networks and transboundary regions and river basins. These are not just ‘new territorialities’ in the sense that they have been successfully promoted as such by either European or local politicians, bureaucrats and interest groups involved, but they are also ‘loaded’ with new competencies, authority and power vis-à-vis their national states. Territoriality has also changed in another, more fundamental way. As Cerny (Chapter 2, p. 36) argues, we need to go beyond a notion of container space and even that of networks, and move towards a “paradigm of complex linkages across space and time”, that is able to account for “a more complex range of institutional forms, economic structures, social processes and patterns of politicking.” This has important repercussions for policy-making. What need to be avoided, as spelled out by Jessop (Chapter 4), is policy perspective that are either strongly placecentric (type 1 territorial trap) or excessively extra- or supra-local (type 2 territorial trap). To deal with current entanglements and complexities, he thus advocates new forms of multi-scalar meta-governance and governmentalities.

11.2.3 Shifts in Governmentality From the perspective of the state, new governmentalities – new mentalities and arts of governing – have risen, partly parallel with, partly as a response to, these new governance practices and newly emerging territorialities. Cerny (Chapter 2) analyzes such developments from the perspective of neo-liberalisation. According to him, an ‘embedded neoliberal consensus’ has been institutionalised world-wide over the last three decades, in which values and goals such as an open world economy, state reform, privatisation and good governance have become dominant.


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These values and goals are the building blocks of a new governmentality. Through these, states believe they can create spatial and functional ordering as well as produce well-being for the people, and maintain their authority at the same time. However, Cerny also speaks of ‘social neo-liberalism’ and ‘plural neo-liberalisms’. The ‘social’ refers to a broader neo-liberal discourse rather than just the economy and the market, hence including issues such as social justice, political democracy and cultural freedom, whereas the ‘plural’ refers to the various ways the grand discourse of neo-liberalism has been embedded in different countries and regions around the world, each giving it its own shape. These social and plural perspectives should prevent theorists and politicians from considering neoliberalism as one monolithic bloc or as one pro-market discourse too easily. This is also expressed in some of the case studies. Neo-liberalisation has definitely shaped city redevelopment and marketing in the Netherlands. At the same time, local traditions and narratives have also had an impact on the redevelopment and marketing practices that finally resulted from this. For Brenner (Chapter 3), the new governmentality is expressed in what he calls ‘rescaled competition state regimes’ (RCSRs). At first sight, this concept seems very different from Cerny’s ‘embedded neo-liberal consensus’, but they do nonetheless exhibit many overlaps. Implicitly, RCSRs refer to neo-liberalism too (competition state), whereas Cerny also includes rescaling processes in his elaboration of the embedded neo-liberal consensus (open world economy, global governance). Yet both authors have different backgrounds – political economy versus political geography – and different foci – international politics versus urban governance – which explains their different conceptualisation of the ‘new governmentality’. Considering the notion of RCSR itself, one can argue that it covers three general transformations: (1) from nation state regulation to regimes of various political agencies (the EU, regions, cities); (2) from the welfare to the competition state (the neo-liberal turn); and (3) from the national level to supranational and de-national ones (summarised in the term ‘glocalisation’). No longer do states try to govern their economies through nation-wide interventionist programs and national bureaucracies, but by strategically selecting and facilitating spatially differentiated, entrepreneurial nodes of economic growth, be it cities, metropolitan areas or European regions. It is believed that competition among these new territorialities will yield higher growth figures than the old Keynesian, state-driven programs. In the case studies too, a belief in rescaled (here local) competition regimes is visible. Cities try to market themselves vis-à-vis others (see Tilburg and Enschede) and regions try to be better ‘engines of innovation’ than their competitors (see the various ‘clusters’ in the Netherlands). However, Brenner is somewhat sceptical about the (propagated) success of RCSRs. According to him, these lead to new social inequalities and new uneven spatial development patterns. Although these adverse effects are not specifically thematised in the case studies of this book, other ‘cons’ of RCSRs come to the fore. The main one is Spierings’ ‘(dis) similarity paradox’. While cities redevelop their shopping precincts and try to market themselves to become ‘special’ in comparison with others, they all do this in the same manner, copying the strategies of their competitors. With that, the added value of city marketing can be questioned.

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Finally, there’s Jessop advocacy of what he has coined ‘multi-scalar metagovernance’ (MSMG). This concept has a lot in common with Brenner’s RCSR. In both notions, (re)scaling processes are at the heart of theorising as is the withering away of politics from the nation state to new modes of co-ordination and steering, respectively in regimes and governance. Yet the state remains highly relevant, not so much in governing issues itself, but in governing the various, multi-scalar governance practices of others (which is expressed by the notion of ‘meta-governance’). This places the state at a distance from day-to-day politics, an approach which has commonalities with state reform programs as propagated by several forms of neo-liberalism. Hence, there is an overlap with Cerny’s conceptualisations too. Yet, compared to both Cerny and Brenner, Jessop is much more focused on organisational-administrative matters. After all, governance is at the heart of his analysis (and not so much the nation state itself and its transformation process, or from a political-economic or political-geographic perspective). This approach has an obvious advantage: not only is the shift in governmentality thematised, but there is a (more concrete) shift in governance as well. Here Jessop adds new ideas to the mainstream governance literature when he analyzes the problematic of the need for complexity reduction and, as a consequence, unavoidable governance failure, which he promotes to address through flexibility (issue-specific and tailor-made), reflexivity (taking into account uncertainties and risks, as well as learning processes) and irony (to prevent sarcasm and pessimism). Many of these themes come back in the case studies on migration, water and nature policy in the second part of the volume (Chapters 5, 9 and 10). Here the complex, issue-specific multi-scalar nature of European governance comes to the fore. In migration policy, both Europe and its member states have strong competencies; in water management, Europe sets the framework and member states can fill in the details; and in nature conservation, a rather strict juridical approach is followed by the EU. Also, governance failure is (implicitly and explicitly) addressed. Migrants are dealt with on the basis of double standards (migrant labourers versus asylum seekers) and European policy discourses on water and nature management are poorly implemented at a national level. So far in this section, we have dealt with the three shifts individually and in a certain sequence (governance å territoriality å governmentality). We will now turn to the way these three aspects are intrinsically connected, both theoretically and empirically. The former is, for example, expressed in Brenner’s concept of ‘rescaled competitions state regimes’, which refers to a new type of governmentality in the first instance, but definitely to re-territorialisation trends as well. The empirical connectedness, next, is illustrated by the six case studies in the book, in which (aspects of) the three shifts are intertwined. Take migration policy in Europe, where enhanced member state authority (border policing) and emerging new state spaces (Schengen) go hand in hand. As a graphical summary, Figure 11.1 exhibits the interconnectedness of the three shifts, which will be more systematically elaborated upon in the next sections following the three legs of the triangle. This exercise results in Figure 11.2, to which new concepts to address this interconnectedness will be added.


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Governmentality

3

1 Role of the state

Territoriality

Governance

2 Fig. 11.1 The Three Shifts Connected

11.3 The First Leg: ‘Distancing’ and ‘Governmentalising’ Governance Our inquiry here started with questioning the link between basic political rationalities and government technologies on the one hand, and more (policy) specific modes of governance on the other. We questioned the nature of this link, in particular the extent to which central state discourse and practices determine specific policy development, and to what extent the latter can enjoy a certain autonomy and have a broader impact. Which role do specific policy domains play in the articulation and performance of ‘hegemonic’ ideas and practices? As summarised above, the first three chapters primarily supported a comprehensive top-down perspective. Shifts towards, and the institutionalisation of, dominant perspectives of neo-liberalisation, RCRSs, and multi-scalar meta-governance, amongst others, are setting the stage for more specific political and policy developments. These concepts define the principal stakes (economy versus social and environmental issues), political imaginaries (competitive city-regions, balanced or integral spatial development), and preferred modes of governance (use of ‘market forces’, and participatory approaches) and hence constitute basic governmentalities. In the academic debate, there is a temptation to read off the development of specific forms of governance from such perceived overarching tendencies and imaginations, and even to see these forms of governance as mere channels for hegemonic practices. Admittedly, the rise of entrepreneurial forms of governance, such as in urban development (city-marketing), is undoubtedly connected to the ascendancy of neo-liberal thinking and associated forms of governmentality. The ambiguities manifested in migration policies reflect the clash between, on the one hand, the drive for labour market liberalisation and, on the other hand, the wish to secure an imagined social-cultural integrity and safety. The setting up of border-crossing policy areas for environmental management reflects the search for more inclusive and responsive modes of governance. Yet, in our view, in trying to

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explain these connections, a ‘top down’ temptation should be resisted, on theoretical as well as empirical grounds. Theoretically, therefore, we draw on the Foucauldian insight that governmentalities emerge out of interplay between various practices of governing, in ‘central’ sites of decision making as well as more ‘peripheral’ operational sites. Hence, not through ‘grand’ structures ‘from above’, but through the operation of ‘the micro-physics of power’ (Gunn 2006). From that perspective, urban entrepreneurialism is not just a logical response to the rising, external stimulus of the competition state. It is also the obsession of locally embedded urban agents with rankings, competitive biddings and image construction that makes current forms of urban entrepreneurialism conceivable and acceptable. Entrepreneurialism, seen in this light, is primarily a political stance, drawing on strong economic imaginaries. A trend such as neo-liberalism, to follow on, should be seen primarily in terms of practices that have been discursively associated with the concept of neo-liberalism, rather than in terms of functional fixes, or political ideologies (Gunn 2006). Drawing from our case studies, the founding of integrated forms of territorial management, like integrated water management, should not be seen as simply the product of the ‘grand territorial discourse’ to address increased urgencies, interdependencies and complexities within the environment. It is as well ‘the small story’ of the environmental activists, ecologists and hydrologist at local level. Changes in political, economic, social and environmental conditions are, beyond doubt, critical factors in shaping (discursive) practices in politics and policymaking, and their connections. What turns this into a set of more dominant practices and governmentalities is the process of state(hood) formation, and more specifically the set of dominant ideas, modes of coordination and practices through which the state governs an ever rising number of activities and domains. Essential for the state are mechanisms to govern, in a reflexive way, ‘at a distance’, along two routes (Dean 1999). First, the state can steer state(-dependent) operations by internal mechanisms of planning and bureaucratic control, and by strategically or conditionally subjecting these operations to ‘outside’ pressures (such as market forces and performance indicators). Core ideas and practices thus become inscribed in the state’s manifold political and administrative structures and their connections. Second, the state can seek to influence the collective mentalities, morals and attitudes of its ‘subjects’ – citizens, firms, collective actors – to bring their conduct in line with state missions and ‘projects’. Dominant governmentalities, accordingly, do not stem from a collective need to respond to an external (notably economic) set of imperatives, but from the need to steer the collective as such in light of the manifold aims state actors seek to pursue (including those geared to the functioning of the state organisation itself). What seems to be at stake at present, as emphasised in the conceptual as well as empirical part of our volume is a further proliferation of the mechanisms and practices of ‘distancing’. Major domains of state governance, as pointed out in the chapters by Jessop, Pijpers and Lagendijk and Boekema, have become such strong ensembles of institutions, discourses and modes of coordination themselves, that they appear to constitute and employ their own governmentalities and associated means of (self)disciplining. This is becoming manifest through a variety of


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discursive and extra-discursive displays of self-reflection, self-regulation, and the self-demarcation of strategic terrains in which core political stances can be contested. The result is that policy domains become more and more governmentalised themselves. At the level of (central) state, this calls for another level of framing and supervision, which has been described by Jessop as the need for multi-scalar meta-governance and meta-governmentalities. So, initially the notion of governmentality pointed to the significance of the ‘conduct of conduct’. Current development seems to go a step further, towards the way governmentalities themselves become the subjects of ‘meta governmentalities’ at the level of the state (or at least, that we see attempts and tendencies to do so). At present, however, discourses and arts of ‘meta governance’ are far from manifesting into a coherent whole. Indeed, the major challenge state actors are facing while contributing to, and working in, increasingly complex and articulated mechanisms of governing at a distance, rests with the need for a well-aligned and coherent mode of rule. Against this background, the initial bifurcation between governmentality working through individual subjectivities on the one hand, and through the institutionalisation of separate policy domains on the other (manifesting two routes for the ‘conduct of conduct’), already provided a major tension which still lives on today. Poignant examples are the way the state, while having formally endowed policy domains (education, health, economic development, monetary policy etc.) with a certain level of strategically controlled autonomy, continues to intervene directly in the way students, patients, firms etc. are being dealt with. Further distancing (the ongoing governmentalising of governance, in other words moving to the ‘conduct of conduct of conduct’) is not only reinforcing this tension, it is also producing new tensions. As illustrated in the second half of this volume, there is an enormous variety in the way dominant ideas and practices evolve and circulate within the various domains of policy-making discussed. This is not to deny that there are strong connections between these domains, and with prevailing discursive practices at state level. However, the nature of these connections appears to be one of contingency more than dominance. As the various case studies here have shown, certain domains strongly embrace and contribute to neo-liberal values of competition and competitiveness, resulting in governance through ‘market’-based modes of rule. Others advocate collaborative approaches. Although of a very different kind, these can also be seen as a form of ‘distancing’ too, because they project a major role onto ‘external actors’, such as NGOs and representatives of social groups. One can also find significant traces of more ‘classical’ values of a (perceived) public interest and more standard practices of policy implementation, in which rule is exercised through Weberian forms of control. In all cases, however, we see policy domains adopting more and more complex structures of governance, with their own ideas and practices of ‘distancing’ as well as monitoring and control. Governmental regulation and practices have always been fraught with tensions and difficulties. Increased ‘distancing’ on the basis of governmentalities has made the exercising of government much more effective and encompassing, notably at the level of specific policy domains. But it has, in turn, created new tensions and problems, particularly at state level. Some of this could be addressed by resorting

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even more to the disciplining power of the ‘market’ through means of marketisation or support from the social collective (‘civil society’) through collaborative and ‘open’ methods of planning and coordination. But so far, these various routes and practices have proven difficult to encompass within an overarching mode of rule, at the ‘meta’ level of meta-governance and governmentalities. For the state, as a result, increased distancing has been accompanied by rising disorientation.

11.4 Second Leg: ‘Bordering’, ‘Layering’ and ‘Selecting’ Territorialities As indicated by Cerny, territoriality was a key part of Foucault’s original concept of ‘governmentality’. This contribution was primarily centred on the construction and role of borders that “simultaneously enclose and order a range of fundamentally disparate human activities” (Cerny, Chapter 2, p. 16), and that become associated with various forms of ‘body politic’ (Pijpers, Chapter 5). Not only state border control, but also basic practices as the demarcation and regulation of public and private space (properties) are key features of state territorialisation. Drawing from our previous discussions on the exercise of government, we can add at least two other key aspects of territoriality. A second aspect is the spatial and scalar organisation of political and administrative structures. While governmentality is intrinsically linked to the level of the nation state as the core domain of governmental practices, states have generally sought to govern through various (three to four) political-administrative levels, from national and provincial to regional and local (municipal) ones. Relations between these levels are generally defined in hierarchical or – if strong identities and competencies exist at the regional level – federal terms (cf. Lagendijk and Boekema, Chapter 6). Thirdly, and building on the two aspects identified so far (bordering and spatial-scalar governance), we can point to the spatial and scalar selectivities inherent in, or actively pursued by, governmental action. The latter refers to the way the state strategically privileges particular sites for social, economic and cultural development. As Brenner (Chapter 3) points out, such selectivities are partly based on historically evolved layers of regulation, but they also reflect the search for new spatial fixes and configurations. In concocting such fixes, a key role is played by certain conceptions (or ‘spatial imaginaries’, in the words of Lagendijk and Boekema, Chapter 6, p. 137) of the potential and desired role of places and scales. Historically, much priority has been given to capital cities and resource-rich regions, and, notably in the second half of the 20th century, the support of less favoured regions. Current examples of spatial-scalar selectivity include processes of devolution of state regulatory power to the regional and even local level and, pushed by neo-liberal ideas the way city regions are presented as ‘Rescaled Competition State Regimes’. Within the historical context of nation-state formation, this constitution of various forms of territoriality has been closely intertwined with the shaping of an


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ever-growing number of state functions, as outlined by Cerny. The emerging forms of state territoriality meant a clear break with traditional place-based social geographies. Functional developments have been driven by the aspiration to create ‘modern’ political and administrative systems, of Weberian bureaucracies with a clear managerial separation of goal-setting and operational activities, and with their own (mostly ‘top down’) forms of territorial organisation and divisions. Against this background, current changes in state governance, with more varied and complex forms of ‘distancing’, are pressing for change. As illustrated by our case studies, borders are reworked and reinvented through the juxtaposition of ‘containment’ and ‘networked spatialities’ in the search for more effective forms of migration control (Pijpers, Chapter 5). Second, ‘modern’ (now effectively ‘classical’) tiered systems of scalar state governance are complemented with (and partly replaced by) new arrangements such as city-regions, or cross-border regions, charged with specific responsibilities in the areas of competitiveness, land use planning, sustainability transport, etc. and their integration (often under the rubric of strategic or integral spatial/regional planning). Thirdly, certain spatialscalar selectivities have become much more prominent, animated by geo-strategic ambitions at national and supranational levels (Pijpers, Chapter 5), the selection of regional hotspots as part of neo-liberal economic development ambitions (Lagendijk and Boekema, Chapter 6), and environmental pressures pitched at various spatial levels, such as Pan-European or river-basin ones (Meijerink and Wiering, Chapter 9; Arnouts and Arts, Chapter 10). The latter studies show, moreover, that it is not only territoriality as an object of ‘top down’ strategic manipulation that is at stake. The rise of substate and suprastate sites of strategic governance (one dimension of what Brenner and Jessop characterise as the ‘decentring of statehood’) implies that the reworking and strategic manipulation of territoriality has in itself become a multi-actor and multilevel (or ‘multi-place’) game, subject to new forms of meta-governance and metagovernmentalities. In orienting and reshaping different aspects of territoriality, the state is confronted with strategic interventions (and associated spatial-scalar selectivities) from other territorial agents below (such as globally operating cityregions) and above (the EU). So even within the same functional domain, different perspectives and practices bearing upon territoriality may be pursued and clash. In the words of Brenner (Chapter 3, p. 74): “the spatiality of state power has become the very object and stake of such struggles rather than a mere arena in which they unfold”. What makes this situation even more intricate is that, to a considerable extent, it is a product of the state’s own pursuit of different forms of devolution, regionalisation and inter-state alliances, which all, in one way or another, fire back on the state’s own position, This leads to our third leg, that between territoriality and governmentality.

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11.5 Third Leg: ‘Decentring’ and ‘Neo-liberalising’ Governmentality With the third leg, our story comes full circle. Animated by increased ‘distancing’ and reflexivity, modes of governance have tended to become more governmentalised. Changes in governance, in turn, are accompanied by the (partly conflicting) searches for new forms of territoriality, through modifying borders and territorial institutions, scales and spatial selectivities. Changing territorialities, on their turn, affect the forgings and workings of governmentalities. We should add, at this point, that the relationship between territoriality and governmentality goes two ways. • Governmentalities shape governance spaces: by being practiced, mediated, and translated in a variety of governance forms, governmentalities are inscribed in multifarious spatial and scalar geographies – notably political, administrative, economic and social geographies. • Governmentalities enrol in ‘given’ complex geographical settings, currently dominated by nation states and their interactions, but increasingly in a setting of ‘decentred statehood’; spatial-political settings thus also exert selective effects upon governmentalities. Governmentalities cannot simply be associated with the exercising of government in an acclaimed, bounded territory, subjecting borders, scales and places to its own strategic selectivities. As already indicated above, the exercising of government has become entangled with a much more complex political and administrative geography, largely of its own making. To do justice to history, it is apt to say that the territoriality of nation state has never been unproblematic nor fully consolidated, and that transnational frameworks have always played a substantial role alongside bounded territories. Cerny goes to great lengths to contextualise the prevalence of the ‘nation state’ as a key politicaladministrative unit. Historically, this arrangement emerged as an almost accidental ‘by-product’ of state formation process, as a ‘second best’ option after the political projects oriented towards empire building met more and more resistance and failure in the 18th and 19th centuries. What made the nation state particularly successful was that, in sharp contrast to the dispersed patchwork geographies characterising previous political orders, functional and territorial integration was achieved within a single, bounded, territorial setting. Moreover, the autonomy, sovereignty and integrity of these unified, political-territorial settings were mutually recognised in the 17th century, after a long period of religious-political wars in Europe (Treaty of Westphalia, 1648). This evolution produced the core assets of the governmentalities that started to prevail, notably state sovereignty and legality, institutionalisation of citizenship, individual freedom linked to private ownership and democracy, the pursuit of economic, social and physical development targets, and modern, rational forms of administration. Effective forms of governance, moreover, were forged through strong organic relationships between state, civil society and economic actors located within the state’s bounded territory.


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Yet, according to Cerny, this national container has always been a frail construction, one interlaced with a myriad of transnational and supranational connections, tensions and arrangements. Nation states have always had to put up with other powerful institutions and developments, over which they could only exert partial control. One can point a long list including religious and academic institutions, organisations and alliances dealing with international trade and finance, multinational firms, a myriad of international civil society organisations, against the backdrop of rising ‘global’ flows of capital, goods and people. For many centuries, this global connectivity has been the source of an intense circulation of practices, ideas and ideologies, that have impinged upon the parallel forgings of governmentalities across Europe. As a result, while being driven by nation states and the proliferation of national political and policy practices, the shaping of governmentalities has manifested clear (although never totalising) ‘global’ trends. Against this background, we should consider the ‘broad’ shifts of today as another episode in the continuously changing relationship between territoriality and state governmentalities and operations. The prelude to these shifts consists of what has been described before as the decentring of statehood, occurring along two closely linked dimensions: (1) shifts in political and administrative responsibilities from national to supra- and super-national levels and shifts (2) from the state to non-state actors. An illustration of this is provided by Jessop’s portrait of European social and economic policies (Chapter 4, p. 89): “Its policies are evolving within a broader framework of growing involvement in agenda-setting and policy-making by international institutions, supranational apparatuses, intergovernmental organisations and forums, transnational think tanks, and transnational interest groups and social movements”. In a similar vein, Brenner (Chapter 3, p. 50) points to the significance of the city-regional level in economic strategymaking: “Urban governance must be viewed as a key institutional arena in which states attempt to influence the geographies of capital accumulation and everyday social reproduction within their territories”. Moreover, to emphasise the relation to spatiality: “[It is also] an important politico-institutional force field in which the geographies of state activity are themselves continually forged and reworked.” Changing territorialities thus result in more complex and articulated modes of governance and governmentalities, which feeds back into our first ‘leg’. With that, we close the core circle of our theoretical endeavour.

11.6 The State Between ‘Neo-liberal’ and ‘Disoriented’ The political state of today faces an unprecedented paradoxical situation, in which it has to meet a still growing number of ambitions within a more and more complex and diffused setting of policy-making. Yet, our work here confirms that the various modes of decentring and devolving – organisational as well territorial – have far from dethroned the centre. The challenge for the central state does not so much stem from a overall shift in the balance of power vis-à-vis other major

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institutions (market, civil society, other state levels), but from the complexity of governing in a multi-actors and multi-level setting. So, while still representing the central locus of political authority and a successful player in all sorts of policy arrangements, the state’s position and role are being debated and transformed at the same time. Political and scientific discourses on the nation state are definitely being re-framed, questioning its effectiveness and legitimacy, governance competencies are being re-located, installing new forms of governmentality at sub- and supranational levels, and territorial spaces are being re-constituted, creating new forms of territoriality outside conventional state spaces. A double image emerges of being both a Goliath (military and policing resources, capacity to use these, omnipresent bureaucracy, etc.) and a David (retreating state, distancing governance, hollowing out of legitimacy, etc.). Also, as indicated through our triangle (Figure 11.1) above, states are both subjects and objects of these transformation processes. States deliberately promote these kinds of changes through their own reform programs. But they are also ‘victims’ of structural, external trends and ‘forced’ to adapt, for example to globalised (and rather unpredictable) capital markets. However, it is not always clear whether states are objects or subjects of certain changes – or both – and how to act upon these as a consequence. Finally, it is similarly unclear whether transformations are just ‘discursive’ in nature, proclaimed by politicians, scientists, entrepreneurs, NGOs, etc., for whatever reason (interests, preferences, brilliant insights, miscalculations, etc.), or refer to ‘real’ practices of change. Although post-modernists and poststructuralists would proclaim this paradox as non-existent and hence nonproblematic, since discourse and practice fuse into one conception of ‘hyper-reality’, we acknowledge that this paradox does pose a problem for politicians and bureaucrats, or broader: for all who are supposed or willing to intervene in society, because changing practices just for the sake of discursive trends is potentially catastrophic in terms of outcomes and, hence, potentially (further) undermining political legitimacy. One basic response to the current challenges for the state is presented in the second part of our volume. Referring to processes of decentring and devolving, Cerny’s (p. 23) observes in Chapter 2: “Nevertheless, that process (….) has not thus far smashed the nation-state as such. Rather, it has enmeshed the nation-state and the states system in cross-cutting webs of governance and of trans-nationally embedded social, political and economic processes, creating complex non-territorial – functional – boundaries. Deconstruction and reconstruction constitute dialectical politics of reinventing space in a globalising world – a politics that has come to be characterised and shaped by neo-liberalisation.” In the conclusion he adds: (p. 36): “This neoliberal world requires not domination and rule but (…) ‘orchestration’ and ‘political choreography’ – a ratcheting upwards of Foucault’s art of governmentality to complex translocal, transnational, international and global levels”. Brenner and Jessop make similar statements, also stressing the importance of neoliberalism in evolving modes of governance and governmentalities. In making these links, the authors place current developments and shifts in the context of a perceived relentless development of a growth-driven, and crisisridden, capitalist economy. Specifically, the territorial expressions of governmentality


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are interpreted in terms of ‘spatio-temporal’ fixes. Effective as they may be, such fixes represent always fragile, regulatory arrangements, serving capitalist accumulation. In a more detailed way, Jessop refers to the way the logic of capitalist economic calculation is invading political and policy-making processes. Given the broader theoretical perspective developed in this volume, and given the empirical findings in the cases studies, we are tempted to question such an economic stance. Of course, we would not deny the rise of economic globalization and neo-liberal governmentalities and the way the new political-economic architecture seeks to cope with, and provoke, major shifts in governance and territoriality. But these governmentalities, and the neo-liberal strands of thinking on which they are based, should, in our view, be interpreted as a set of discursive and institutional practices, driven by economical, political and cultural trends alike, rather than as an expression of economic imperatives alone. Moreover, in line with our findings as well as the work of Hay (2004), we would prefer to see the impact of neo-liberal thinking more in terms of (political-economic) contingencies than (economic) necessities. Such contingencies arise from the way responses to crises (real or perceived) are always politically inflected, and hence charged with political ambitions, preferences and predispositions. In Hay’s (2002) terminology, state responses are always based on discursive selectivities. There is no room, in such a view, for ‘grand’ economic imperatives, but only for concrete limitations and challenges that stem from the way economic and political dimensions intersect. Following a Foucauldian perspective, this intersection can be depicted as follows. It is the political that, through concrete discursiveinstitutional actions, provides and delimits the basic space (organisational and territorial) of action and opportunities for the economy; yet, through its own dynamics, the economy consequently confronts the state and other political agents with unforeseen developments (from strong growth to deep crises) that solicit response. In time, state actions geared to managing the economy often rebound in highly unexpected ways. This then triggers new perspectives, imaginaries and courses of action that reorient the realm of the economy. Alongside certain pervasive economic trends (such as a rising impact of the financial sectors and processes of globalisation), this evolution is guided through the shifts in the broad way state actors seeks to exercise governance, as expressed through the notion of (meta)governmentality. In line with Cerny’s emphasis on the ‘many roads’ to neoliberalism (para 2.7), we characterise neo-liberalism (or more specifically the ‘embedded neo-liberal consensus’) as a diverse set of ideas and practices, that respond to current political ambitions and fashions as much as providing some ‘fixes’ for certain economic difficulties and challenges. What our volume has sought to show, is that neo-liberal consensus only provides an attempt to come to new (meta) modes of governance and governmentalities. We have pointed out the diversity in the conception and implementation of neo-liberal approaches, as well as the resistances neoliberal ideas have met from within as well as outside the state. What remains, indeed, is a notion of a disoriented state. From a political perspective, this concept serves as an alternative for the ‘retreated’, ‘hollowed-out’ or ‘dead’ state, as proclaimed by others (Albrow 1996; Ohmae 1996; Strange 1996). The concept of the ‘disoriented


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state’ is attractive in the sense that it has a literal territorial and a more symbolic substantive meaning. It refers to being ‘lost’ in a diffuse and partly unknown geographical setting, and to being uncertain about the nature, characteristics, consequences, etc. of a specific issue. This double meaning thus helps to combine political-economic, public-administrative and political-geographical insights into the current position and role of the state as discussed throughout this book.

11.7 Conclusion

Governmentality Decentring / neoliberalising The disoriented state

Territoriality (re)Bordering/ layering/ selection

Distancing/ governmentalising Governance

Fig. 11.2 Interconnectedness of the Three Shifts

Figure 11.2 summarises our argument. It expresses a central role for the political state, given its (potential) Goliath role (abundance of resources, locus of political authority, de jure recognition of national sovereignty, etc.). However, it is ‘surrounded’ by processes of (1) distancing governance to rescaled and empowered arrangements, thus creating new and rather autonomous sites of sub- and transnational governmentality; (2) re-territorialisation of political spaces, through the re-bordering of political units, the re-layering of administrative structures and the (strategic) selection of new territorial nodes of economic development, growth and innovation; and (3) decentring statehood, not only to new spatial scales and administrative levels, but to private players as well, both from the market and from civil society. Most states today actively promote these processes of distancing, re-territorialisation and decentring, given the ‘embedded neo-liberal consensus’ they share, but paradoxically, they feel plagued by these processes at the same time, pressing them to certain political measures they seem to dislike. This paradox can be understood by taking into account – amongst others – the mere facts that states are no unitary actors, but complex institutions, that political and bureaucratic elites prefer different governing strategies for different societal issues and that states are often confronted with unintended – and unwanted – consequences of their own reform initiatives, for example global governance


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failures. Moreover, comparable to what we have said about the management of the economy, these reforms are subject to distancing, re-territorialisation and decentring processes themselves, so that they catch political states ‘as boomerangs by surprise’. Whatever the case may be, today’s states are faced with a paradoxical situation that is hard to handle and urges – in Jessop’s words – for flexibility, reflexivity and irony in meta-governance. But these characteristics are rather scarce in today’s state bureaucracies, which are legacies of the past and – therefore – often fall back into territorial traps and into producing governance gaps. So we conclude with a characterisation of ‘the disoriented state’ as lost in space, uncertain about interventions, but (potentially) as strong as ever.

References Albrow, D. (1996). The global age. State and society beyond modernity. Oxford: Polity. Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. Gunn, S (2006). From hegemony to governmentality: changing conceptions of power in social history. Journal of Social History, 3, 705–719. Hay, C. (2002). Political analysis, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Hay, C. (2004). Re-stating politics, re-politicising the state: neo-liberalism, economic imperatives and the rise of the competition state. The Political Quarterly, 75, 38–50. Ohmae, K. (1996). The end of the nation state. The rise of regional economics. Washington, DC: Free Press. Strange, S. (1996). The retreat of the state. The diffusion of power in the world economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Index Cluster, 25, 51, 126, 144, 152, 155–156, 233, 235 Coalition, 13, 25, 27–34, 58, 62, 67, 127, 183, 185, 192–193, 195, 197, 201, 206, 207, 211, 219–220, 222, 226 Colonial frontier, 110–111 Command and control, 128–129 Common agricultural policy (CAP), 105 Comparative politics, 59 Competition, 4, 9, 19, 24, 25, 27, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 41, 44, 60, 62, 63, 65–69, 71–73, 93, 103, 125, 141, 143, 147, 149, 151, 155, 157, 161, 162, 169, 177, 233, 235–236, 238–240 Competition state, 9, 24, 30, 33, 34, 41, 44, 63, 67, 72, 235, 238, 240 Competitive consumption space, 141–157 Competitive pressure, 44, 68, 142, 146–147 Complexity, 7, 9, 18, 79, 80, 86, 93, 166, 177, 233, 236, 244 Complexity reduction, 7, 80, 236 Compliance, 33, 87 Conflict resolution, 200 Consultation, 156, 171, 178, 195 Consumer mobility, 141–157 Consumerism, 142, 144, 146, 149, 152, 155 Corporatism, 58, 88, 209 Cost-benefit analysis, 29 Cultural context, 26, 27

A Accountability, 5, 165, 203 Administrative capacity, 69 Advocacy coalition, 31 Agenda-setting, 88, 125, 184, 243 Agriculture, 20, 31, 53, 88, 105, 127, 131, 183, 186, 194, 197, 213, 215, 220, 227 B Bargaining, 16, 35 Biodiversity, 193, 221, 226 Biopolitics, 16, 19, 113 Birds and Habitat Directive (BHD), 198, 201, 213, 214, 217, 219–225 Border, 6, 7, 9, 13–36, 42, 45–47, 49, 50, 53, 82, 89, 96, 101–118, 124, 148, 150, 151, 182, 186, 192, 196, 236–237, 240–242, 246 Border management, 101–118 Bordering, 13–15, 29, 49, 117, 192, 240–241, 246 Bottom-up governance, 8, 204, 208, 232 Bottom-up steering, 204 Bureaucracy, 6, 16, 18–20, 24, 30, 33, 47, 52, 60, 104, 108, 115, 130, 131, 189, 205, 232–235, 238, 241, 244, 246–247 Business interests, 24 C Capitalism, 20, 22, 42–46, 50, 62, 67, 81, 91, 101–102, 106, 114, 115 Centralisation, 27, 51, 128, 135 Certification, 203 Citizenship, 42, 242 City, 6, 14, 45, 46, 50–51, 53, 54, 57, 60, 61, 64, 122, 123, 127, 132, 136, 141–157, 161–178, 233, 235, 237, 240, 241, 243. See also Urban City centre redevelopment, 141, 142, 146–148 City image, 142, 164, 168–170, 173 City marketing, 143, 161, 163, 164, 166, 167, 169–172, 176, 178, 235, 237 City marketing tale, 163–164, 166–167, 171, 178 Civil society, 86, 202–204, 206, 209, 210, 226, 240, 242–244, 246 Climate change, 197

D Decentralisation, 6, 43, 51–54, 63, 132, 143, 145 Decision making, 7, 35, 60, 93, 107, 118, 129, 182, 185, 189–190, 196, 210, 238 Delayed awareness, 226 Deliberation, 90, 186, 187 Democracy, 18, 20, 22, 34, 44, 128, 133, 162, 235, 242 De-nationalisation, 95 Deregulation, 8, 24, 34, 35, 59, 66, 145 De-territorialisation, 202 Development, 3–5, 7–8, 13–14, 17–19, 21–23, 26, 28, 33, 34, 36, 44, 46, 48, 50. 52–66, 68–73, 81, 86–89, 104, 106, 108, 109, 112, 122–138, 141–152 249

250 Developmentalism, 55, 66, 126–129, 133, 137 Devolution, 43, 63, 65, 66, 128, 226, 240–241 Differentiation, 13–14, 23, 27, 46–49, 55, 65, 66, 68, 72, 118 Diffusion, 5, 58, 60, 61, 64, 68, 188, 202 Diffusion of politics, 5 Diffusion of power, 202 Disciplinary power, 240 Discourse, 3, 7–9, 25–27, 33–34, 86, 102, 112, 122–123, 125, 133, 137, 163, 181–198, 201–203, 206–207, 209–211, 215, 218, 220, 222–226, 235–239, 244 Discourse analysis, 182, 185, 192 Discourse coalition, 183, 206 Discursive framing, 184, 185, 196 Discursive power, 112 Discursive practices, 124, 128, 129, 136, 137, 166, 167, 238, 239 Discursive space, 166 Disempowerment, 112–114 Dissimilarity paradox, 156 Domination, 36, 244 Downloading, 181–198 Downscaling, 43, 69 Duality of structure, 206, 208 E Economic development, 4, 8, 22, 44, 50, 52, 54–55, 57, 61, 63, 64, 66, 68, 70, 71, 81, 104, 122–128, 131, 133, 135–138, 143, 150, 162, 169, 173, 178, 220, 239, 241, 246 Economic growth, 20, 22, 33, 47, 50, 57, 63–64, 66, 68, 89, 133, 134, 137, 143, 144, 168, 169, 235 Economic instrument, 52, 106, 117 Economic space, 52, 53, 58, 66, 72, 104, 132, 135–137 Economics, 15, 18, 28–29, 32, 35 Economics of scale, 14, 18, 30, 156 Ecosystem, 185, 188–189, 193, 196, 197 Effectiveness, 25, 35, 162, 205, 208–209, 211, 219, 225–226, 244 Efficiency, 34, 35, 44, 65, 92, 126, 162 Elite, 24, 27, 33, 64, 127, 246 Embedded neoliberal consensus, 6, 25–27, 32, 34, 234 Empire, 14, 16–18, 20–22, 26, 110, 125, 242 Emplotment, 161, 165–167, 171

Index Employment policy, 79, 86–91, 93, 95, 232 Empowerment, 91, 216, 246 Entrepreneurial approach, 43, 72, 123, 143, 144, 151 Entrepreneurial city, 141, 143, 161–178 Entrepreneurial conservatism, 141, 155–157 Entrepreneurial governance, 141–157 Entrepreneurial narratives, 162 Entrepreneurial strategies, 142–143 Entrepreneurialism, 41, 61–62, 67, 69, 71, 126, 133, 135–137, 141–142, 238 Environment, 4, 7, 42, 48, 58, 65, 72, 84, 86, 88, 94, 128, 130–133, 137, 143, 144, 155, 161–164, 167, 177–178, 181–182, 184, 189–191, 193, 195–196, 201–227, 237, 238, 241 Environmental governance, 201–227 Environmental policy, 128, 189 Environmental politics, 7 Environmental protection, 136, 190, 215, 216, 220, 221 Equity, 35, 63, 64, 67 European citizenship, 42, 242 European Commission (EC), 87, 103–104, 108, 110–112, 116–117, 182, 189, 213–220, 222–226 European Council, 88, 189 European Court of Justice (ECJ), 107, 108, 198, 213–214, 216–219, 223–225, 227 European law, 215, 216, 218, 220, 226 European Parliament (EP), 107, 189 European Union (EU), 5–8, 34, 41, 43, 56, 73, 87–90, 95, 96, 101–118, 123–127, 185, 187, 189, 197, 198, 203, 208, 213–214, 216, 224, 225, 227, 233–236, 241 Europeanisation, 7, 86–91, 93, 95, 103, 110, 115, 132, 184, 196, 198, 218, 225–227, 232 Exclusion, 68, 73, 88, 91, 102, 109, 112, 114–117, 162, 164 Expertise, 81–82, 92, 94, 96, 131, 213 External integration, 182, 186, 194, 195 F Federal state, 64, 123, 234 Federalism, 4 Flexibility, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 79, 87, 89–91, 96, 104, 111, 113, 165–166, 236, 247

Index

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Flooding, 182–187, 190–192, 195, 197 Fordism, 5, 18, 25, 44, 51, 54–60, 65, 66, 69, 70, 73, 85–87, 202 Formal rules, 194, 206 Fortress Europe, 110, 234 Functional differentiation, 13, 23, 27

Hierarchical steering, 203, 226 Hierarchy, 83, 90, 92, 93, 128, 143, 145, 146, 216, 224, 226 Hollowing out, 6, 107, 109, 116, 206, 244 Horizontal shifts, 5 Hybrid governance, 219, 225

G Geopolitics, 42, 46, 55, 59, 66, 101, 102, 110–112, 115–117 Geostrategies, 110–111, 114 Global capitalism, 42, 67 Global cities, 67, 233 Global competition, 36, 103, 108, 233 Global governance, 5, 23, 28, 31, 33–35, 90, 235, 246 Global politics, 15, 34, 42 Global regions, 86 Globalisation, 4–7, 13–14, 17, 19, 22–25, 27–28, 30–31, 33–36, 42–43, 87, 102, 111, 113, 202, 203, 245 Glocal, 4, 5, 25, 27, 34, 85, 233–235 Glocalisation, 25, 27, 235 Golden strings, 128 Good governance, 205, 225, 234 Governance, 3–9, 15, 16, 23, 28–36, 41–74, 79–96, 105–107, 109–110, 121–138 Governance arrangement, 94–96, 202, 204–211, 225, 231, 233 Governance as a trend, 208, 210–211, 226 Governance as an instrument, 211, 226 Governance failure, 7, 9, 68, 71, 79–96, 201–227, 236 Governance gap, 4, 79, 90, 247 Governance optimism, 7, 202 Government, 3–9, 13–14, 16, 20, 24–25, 28, 30–31, 33, 35–36, 47, 49, 54, 56–67, 72, 80–82, 85–90, 94–95, 101–110, 115, 117 Governmentality, 3–9, 13–14, 16, 36, 80–82, 101–103, 105–110, 115, 117, 121–123, 126, 129, 131, 138, 142, 182, 198, 202, 226, 231–232, 234–237, 239–246

I Illegal migration, 104, 112, 116, 117 Imaginary, 166 Immigrants, 18, 26, 107–108, 112 Immigration, 103, 107, 109, 111, 113, 116 Implementation, 15, 89, 90, 95, 107–109, 115–118, 125, 129–131, 134, 141–142, 148, 173, 182–184, 187, 189–195, 197–198, 201–204, 207–209, 211–216, 218–225, 227, 239, 245 Inclusion, 102, 109, 115, 118, 178 Index, 165 Individualisation, 23 Industrialisation, 18, 20, 47, 48, 62, 132 Industry, 17, 18, 20, 25, 29–32, 35, 41, 44, 46–48, 50–68, 70, 81, 88, 132, 136, 143, 163, 167–171, 173–178 Informal rules, 194, 207, 223 Innovation, 7–9, 32, 87, 93, 115, 121–126, 133–135, 137, 138, 145, 157, 171–174, 177, 207, 233, 235, 246 Innovation policy, 7–9, 32, 121, 123, 133–135, 137, 138, 233 Institution adaptation, 184 analysis, 183, 184 arrangement, 9, 66, 129, 181, 182 change, 6, 7, 183, 184, 191, 192, 195, 197, 198 dynamics, 8, 184, 198, 208 ‘order,’ 183 practices, 126, 127, 133, 245 Institutionalisation, 21, 34, 43, 46, 65, 72, 90, 105, 111, 123, 181, 183, 184, 197, 206, 234, 237, 239, 242 Integrated water management, 195, 233, 238 Integration, 4, 5, 20, 21, 31, 34, 57, 60, 61, 66, 67, 69, 73, 87, 90, 105, 112, 117, 182, 186, 188, 194, 195, 210, 221, 227, 241, 242 Interaction rules, 194, 196, 210 Interest group(s), 24, 28, 30, 33, 34, 88, 169, 177, 196, 223, 226, 233, 234, 243

H Hegemonic discourse, 133, 137, 210 Hegemony, 5, 19, 137 Hierarchical governance, 29, 204

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Intergovernmental, 24, 47, 49, 54, 57, 64–67, 87, 88, 94, 103, 104, 243 Intergovernmental relations, 54, 64 Internal market, 18, 35, 103–105, 108, 111, 115, 116, 118 International agreement, 190 International (economic) institution, 23, 88, 243 International law, 218 International organisation, 124, 243 International politics, 235 International relations, 15 Internationalisation, 22, 24, 88, 92, 95 Interpretative repertoire, 165–166, 171, 178 (Inter)urban competition, 147, 161, 162 Irony, 79, 80, 94, 96, 231, 236, 247 J Justice, 15, 22, 23, 44, 73, 103–105, 107–110, 115–117, 162, 171, 198, 208, 213, 214, 216, 218, 219, 225, 235, 242 K Keynesianism, 44, 51–56, 58–62, 65, 69, 70 L Labour migration, 103, 107, 108, 114 Landscape policy, 213, 215 Law, 19, 31, 89, 94, 105, 113, 128, 129, 202, 215, 216, 218, 220, 221, 224–227 Learning, 36, 96, 124, 220, 226, 236 Learning region, 124 Legal immigration, 116 Legality, 242 Legitimacy, 19, 23, 24, 33, 46, 68, 71, 94, 171, 205, 208, 209, 211, 219, 223–225, 244 Legitimation, 33, 46, 68, 71, 94 Leisure, 142, 143, 145, 233 Liberalisation, 24, 28, 33, 59, 92, 116, 233–235, 237, 244 Liberalism, 3, 20, 24, 92, 96, 206, 235, 238, 245 Limes, 110, 111 Local governance, 4, 61, 63, 86, 107, 142 Local narratives, 86, 232, 235 Local tales, 163 Localisation, 25, 27, 52, 87, 232, 235 Locality, 23, 62, 67–69, 71, 90, 122

Index M Mainport, 64, 126, 130–132, 136 Mainstream, 5, 25, 42, 44, 45, 61, 136, 236 Management, 3, 4, 7–9, 32, 35, 47, 51, 52, 56, 59, 68, 71–73, 79, 82, 85, 92, 93, 95, 101–118 Managerialism, 52, 59, 70, 142 March, 111, 112, 115 Market environmentalism, 144, 155 failure, 87, 91, 92, 203 forces, 91, 92, 237, 238 instrument, 203 liberalism, 92, 96 mechanism, 29, 92 Marketing, 9, 25, 64, 66, 71, 134, 143, 161, 163, 164, 166, 167, 169–173, 175–178, 233, 235, 237 Marketing tales, 163, 164, 167, 171, 178 Marketisation, 8, 28, 30, 31, 34, 36, 240 Marxism, 113, 117 Materialism, 8, 86 Meta-governance, 7, 9, 68, 71, 79–96, 137, 202, 231, 234, 236, 237, 239–241, 247 Metropolitan region, 5, 50, 51, 53, 55, 68–72, 141, 234, 235 Metropolitanism, 60, 69 Migration, 4, 9, 17, 101–118, 186, 233, 234, 236, 237, 241 Migration policy, 9, 101–105, 107, 110, 113, 115, 117, 233, 234, 236 Modern, 6, 7, 14–19, 21–23, 25, 26, 35, 36, 42, 44–47, 50, 62, 110, 127, 130, 163, 167–170, 173–178, 186, 241, 242, 254 Modernisation, 17, 23, 56, 147, 168, 188, 202, 205–208, 226 Modernism, 56–58, 64, 244 Modernist approach, 205–208, 226 Modernity, 170 Modes of governance, 80–82, 93, 203–206, 237, 242–245 Monetary reform, 88 Multi-actor governance, 3, 122, 201, 207, 211, 214, 223, 225, 232, 233, 241, 244 Multilateral agreements, 190 Multi-level governance, 3, 15, 32, 34, 35, 79–96, 182, 185, 201, 207, 208, 211, 214, 226, 232, 233 Multi-nodal politics, 15, 18, 32, 36 Multi-scalar governance, 96, 202, 231, 236

Index Multi-scalar innovation practices, 233 Multi-scalar meta-governance (MSMG), 7, 9, 79–96, 137, 234, 236, 237, 239 Multi-sector governance, 232–234 N Narrative approach, 164–166 Narrative identity, 161, 162, 168 Narrative understanding, 161–178 Narratives, 9, 26, 86, 94, 103–105, 113, 115, 116, 161–178, 206, 210, 232, 235 Nation, 4–7, 14–26, 30, 31, 34, 36, 113, 125, 127, 130, 135, 182, 192, 198, 202, 203, 234–236, 240, 242–244 Nation building, 6, 17, 19, 22, 25 Nation state, 5, 7, 14–27, 30, 31, 34, 36, 127, 130, 135, 182, 198, 202, 203, 234–236, 240, 242, 244 National identity, 112, 118 National policy, 57, 61, 89, 121, 141, 145, 168, 182, 227 National state space, 41, 43, 44, 67, 72 Nationalisation, 95, 208 Nationalism, 6, 20–22 Nature conservation, 4, 9, 183, 186, 193–195, 201, 202, 212, 213, 215–220, 223–227, 236 development, 203, 226 management, 7, 213, 217, 236 policy, 198, 213, 215–217, 219, 222, 224–227, 233, 236 Negative governance, 109, 204–205, 209, 210, 212, 223–225 Negotiations, 24, 33, 93, 94, 186, 187, 190, 209, 210 Neo-corporatism, 58, 209 Neo-liberalism, 3, 92, 96, 202, 235, 236, 238, 245 Neo-marxism, 113, 117 Network, 4, 6, 7, 13, 24, 26, 28, 36, 47, 60, 73, 80–83, 87, 88, 91, 93–96, 101, 102, 108, 109, 111–115, 123, 124, 126, 130, 132, 134, 136–138, 154, 155, 167, 174–176, 183, 184, 202–204, 220, 234, 241 Network society, 6, 136 Networked spatiality, 109 New governance, 202–205, 209–212, 223–226, 232, 234 New governmentality, 235

253 New Labour, 33, 89 New public management, 203 New social neoliberal spatiality, 35–36 NIMBY, 91, 220 Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), 31, 35, 90, 182, 184, 187, 189, 193, 196, 209, 216–220, 223–226, 233, 239, 244 Non-state actors, 33, 108, 109, 117, 202, 243 Norms, 35, 87 O Old governance, 204, 209, 210, 212, 218, 224, 225 P Paradigm shift, 137, 197 Partial Europeanisation, 218, 227 Participation, 5, 187, 195, 220, 233 Patchwork Europe, 105–106 Place, 3, 4, 6, 13–36, 47–49, 51, 58, 62–66, 70, 71, 79–86, 93, 95, 96, 105, 107, 108, 113, 116, 122 Planning, 5, 50, 53–55, 57, 59–61, 63, 64, 93, 123, 126–138, 142, 144, 145, 147, 148, 150, 151, 154, 168, 182, 183, 186, 187, 194–196, 238, 240, 241 Plural neoliberalisms, 36, 235 Policy analysis, 9, 121, 183, 185, 212 arrangement, 8, 181–185, 192, 196, 198, 201, 202, 205–212, 215, 222, 223, 225, 226, 244, 245 arrangement approach, 196, 205–207, 209, 211, 215, 226 change, 182–184, 191–193, 196, 198 design, 53, 64, 65, 73, 129, 131, 134, 145, 205, 206, 208, 209, 215, 223 diffusion, 60, 64, 68 discourse, 8, 25, 181–198, 201, 206, 207, 210, 211, 218, 222, 236 domain, 4, 8, 9, 23, 29, 32, 34, 36, 128, 129, 133, 182–184, 192, 196, 204, 206, 232, 233, 237, 239 entrepreneur, 33, 36, 41, 123, 124, 133, 136–138, 142 evaluation, 93, 124 field, 7, 183, 186, 192, 194, 195, 197, 206 frame, 47, 56, 107, 109, 184

254

implementation, 15, 116, 118, 183, 204, 209, 216, 239 innovation, 9, 32, 121, 123, 134, 137, 233 instrument, 52, 63, 184, 194, 195, 203, 204, 206, 208, 212, 226, 227 integration, 87, 90, 105, 182, 186, 194, 195 monopoly, 7, 19, 184 narratives, 103, 105, 113, 116 network, 183–184 outcome, 209, 212, 219, 224 output, 131 performance, 5, 68, 126, 203, 237, 238 practices, 3–5, 9, 84, 101, 102, 106, 121, 185, 189, 191, 203, 206, 231, 233, 243 strategy, 87, 90, 116, 150, 184 style, 206 Political change, 5, 8, 9, 27, 57, 59, 114, 202, 238 choreography, 36, 244 context, 5, 8, 15, 27, 28, 55, 63, 66, 72, 122, 124, 142, 206, 242 economy, 4, 13–15, 29, 117, 127, 235, 237, 245 geography, 4, 5, 28, 29, 44, 46, 48, 59, 73, 235, 236, 246 modernisation, 57, 58, 70, 188, 202, 205–208, 226 parties, 25 sciences, 28, 42, 201 sociology, 4 Politics, 4–9, 13–36, 41–70, 72, 73, 81–83, 85–89, 93, 94, 101–103, 105–117 Positive governance, 204–205, 209, 223 Post-Fordism, 5, 25, 51, 85, 202 Post-modernism, 26, 170, 244 Post-national statehood, 79, 90 Post-Westphalian order, 42 Power, 5, 6, 9, 15–19, 21, 22, 25, 28, 33, 35, 42, 43, 45, 46, 48, 49 asymmetries, 186 relations, 114, 206, 210, 218 structure, 224 struggle, 201, 210, 211, 218, 222, 224 Pragmatic approach, 197 Principles, 15, 24, 34, 35, 46, 79, 89, 94, 96, 103, 128, 129, 156, 172, 175, 185, 188, 191, 193, 194, 198, 212

Index Private organisation, 13, 28, 216, 217 Privatisation, 6, 24, 28, 30, 35, 59, 87, 92, 234 Procedures, 6, 7, 9, 90, 101, 108, 111, 115, 206, 216, 221, 222, 224 Pro-market discourse, 235 Progress, 17, 24, 44, 56, 73, 87, 104, 114, 170, 214, 216 Protectionism, 233 Public administration, 64, 93, 94, 196 goods, 52, 55 interest, 21, 239 organisation, 13, 28 Public-private partnership, 24, 28, 61, 90, 203 Punctuated-equilibrium framework, 182–185, 196 R Rational choice, 228 Rationality, 92, 118, 122, 126–129, 131 Redevelopment, 61, 64, 141, 142, 145–148, 151–157, 233, 235 Redevelopment paradox, 141, 155–157 Reflexivity, 79, 80, 95, 96, 231, 236, 242, 247 Regime, 9, 23, 35, 41, 44, 52, 54, 55, 63, 65, 67, 72, 81, 87, 88, 92, 95, 96, 102, 104, 107, 112, 116, 163, 188, 190, 235, 236 Region, 4–9, 14, 23, 25, 34, 35, 41, 44, 47–73 Regional governance, 34, 35, 124, 125 Regional planning, 55, 64, 129–132, 241 Regional policy, 8, 63, 105, 125, 133, 136, 137, 185 Regionalisation, 5, 69, 121, 125, 241 Regulation, 5, 7, 8, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34, 35, 41, 44, 47, 48, 50–55, 59, 62, 65, 66, 68, 70–74, 86, 104, 106, 107, 111, 129, 137, 145, 187, 191, 194, 197, 205–207, 210, 218, 235, 239, 240 Regulatory approach, 42 Regulatory reform, 28, 32 Re-inventing government, 28 Relocation of authority, 203 Relocation of politics, 202 Relocation of power, 203 Representative democracy, 128

Index Requisite variety, 80, 96 Rescaled competition state regime (RCSR), 9, 41, 44, 67–70, 72, 73, 235, 236, 240 Rescaling, 41–44, 55, 56, 59–69, 71–73, 83, 87, 90, 93, 96, 193, 226, 233, 235 Resource distribution, 85, 206, 207 Resources, 18, 24, 51, 57, 81, 82, 85, 90, 91, 94, 115, 124, 127, 130, 165, 182–186, 193–197, 205–207, 210, 211, 231, 244, 246 Retailing, 141, 144–146, 148, 150, 152, 155, 156 Re-territorialisation, 42 Retreat of the state, 6, 34, 202, 206, 226 Revolving doors, 113, 114 Risk assessment, 118 Risk management, 109–112, 182, 186 River basin management, 181–198, 234 Rules, 19, 30, 88, 104, 129, 183, 185, 189–190, 194–197, 201, 206, 207, 209–211, 218, 219, 223, 225 Rules of the game, 19, 183, 191, 194–196, 201, 206, 207, 210, 211, 218, 225 S Safety, 35, 182, 237 Safety and risk management, 182 Scalar division of labour, 83–85, 89, 233 Scalar politics, 5 Scale, 4, 5, 8, 9, 14, 15, 18, 20, 23, 30, 41, 42, 45–60, 62, 63, 66, 67 Scaling, 41–44, 55, 56, 59–69, 71–73, 83, 86, 87, 90, 93, 96, 136, 150, 192, 193, 195–198, 233, 235, 236, 266 Schengen regime, 102, 104, 112, 116 Science parks, 143 Self-governance, 3, 4, 51, 226, 236 Self-regulation, 239 Shadow of hierarchy, 90, 92, 226 Shifts in governance, 188, 203, 232–234, 245 Shifts in governmentality, 3–9, 121, 122, 126, 231, 232, 234–237 Shifts in territoriality, 5–6, 234 Shopping, 92, 107, 109, 141, 143–156, 176, 184, 185, 235 Social capital, 91, 93 Social change, 202, 204 Social context, 5, 8, 52, 84, 142 Social movement, 17, 19, 88, 90, 243 Social problems, 84–86

255

Social sciences, 42 Social structure, 42, 45 Social work, 79, 83–86, 91, 93, 95 Socio-spatial convergence, 23 Socio-temporal fix, 16, 245 Solidarity, 18, 80, 81, 87, 91, 93, 188 Sovereignty, 5, 16, 20, 25, 42, 46, 105, 204, 231, 242, 246 Space, 4, 5, 8, 9, 13–16, 23, 25–30, 32–36, 41–74, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85 Spatial containment, 109–112, 117 Spatial development, 52, 54, 55, 68, 69, 73, 126, 127, 130–133, 235, 237 Spatial differentiation, 46–49, 65, 68, 72 Spatial fix, 4, 240 Spatial formation, 125, 126 Spatial planning, 50, 53–55, 60, 63, 64, 123, 126, 127, 129, 131–133, 135–138, 151, 168, 183, 186, 194, 195 Spatial policy, 44, 47, 56, 126, 133, 136, 138 Spatial politics, 242 Spatial practices, 48, 101, 102, 126, 130, 131, 133, 136, 241 Spatiality, 3, 4, 8, 15, 29, 35–37, 41, 43–51, 59, 64, 67, 72, 73, 79, 82, 91, 96, 109–112, 135, 241, 243 Spatiality of governance, 3, 4, 79 Spatio-temporal fix, 16, 245 Stakeholders, 82, 186, 187, 195, 209, 222, 226, 233 Standards, 29, 32, 52, 87, 88, 168, 187–189, 193, 236, 239 State, 3–9, 13–28, 30–36, 41–74, 79–87, 89 agencies, 13, 28, 61 control, 53 departments, 201 formation, 6, 123, 240, 242 interventions, 24, 26, 28, 47, 62 rescaling, 41–44, 56, 59, 68, 69, 71–73 restructuring, 43, 44, 48, 71 spaces, 5, 41–74, 236, 244 spatiality, 41, 43–51, 59, 64, 67, 72, 73 Statehood, 5, 42, 44, 48–50, 70, 79, 90, 95, 105, 106, 226, 231, 241–243, 246 Statism, 18, 81 Steering, 6, 7, 80, 106, 117, 130, 181, 202–205, 208, 226, 236 Steering concept, 181

Index

256 Strategy, 45, 51, 52, 86–88, 90, 109–111, 116, 125, 126, 143, 150, 161, 162, 170, 172, 173, 175, 184, 243 Structural change, 226 Structural trends, 202, 208, 226 Structure, 4, 6, 8, 13, 15, 18, 21, 28–36, 42, 47, 48, 50–56, 58 Subject, 24, 65, 80, 81, 89, 95, 114, 115, 122–124, 126, 128, 130, 133, 134, 137, 161–163, 165, 175, 201, 238, 239, 241, 242, 244, 247 Subjectivation, 81 Supranational circuits, 62 Supranational relations, 62, 114 Sustainability, 132, 233, 241 Sustainable development, 88 T Territorial fix, 16 Territorial focus, 181, 182 Territorial governance, 5, 6, 72, 73, 83, 125, 127–129 Territorial shift, 182, 186, 188 Territorial space, 16, 29, 34, 42, 90, 244 Territorial trap, 4, 42–44, 79, 83, 87, 90, 93, 234, 247 Territoriality, 3–9, 16, 18, 19, 23, 36, 42, 46, 48, 49, 101–103, 109–115, 117, 121–138, 182, 231, 232, 234, 236, 237, 240–246 Territorialization, 79 Time, 4, 6–8, 15, 16, 18–24, 31, 33, 36, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 57, 58, 60, 65, 68 Top-down governance, 219, 224, 232, 237 Trade liberalisation, 59 Tradition, 7, 13, 14, 19, 25, 28, 30–33, 35, 44, 45, 54, 56, 59, 63, 64, 71, 72, 88–90, 105, 112, 113, 129, 136–138, 145, 146, 152, 155, 162, 172, 182, 184, 188, 190, 192, 204, 207, 209, 235, 241 Transboundary co-operation, 6 Transnational organisation, 13, 31, 35, 243 Transparency, 30, 134 Trust, 104

U Uncertainty, 70 Uploading, 8, 182, 184, 185, 187–190, 196, 197 Upscaling, 43, 71, 192, 196–198 Urban, 4, 7, 9, 22, 34, 41–74, 123, 126, 127, 132, 134, 136–138, 141–157 entrepreneurialism, 41, 61, 62, 67, 69, 71, 142, 238 governance, 9, 41–74, 142, 162, 235, 243 identity, 161–168, 175 image, 176 locational policy, 59–67, 69, 71, 72 managerialism, 52, 59, 70, 142 narrative, 166, 177, 178 regime, 9 tale, 164, 165 V Venue change, 184, 185 Venue shopping, 107, 109, 184, 185 Vertical shifts, 211 Voluntary mechanisms, 203 W Water management, 4, 8, 9, 181, 182, 184–198, 219, 233, 236, 238 policy, 182, 184–186, 191–194, 196, 233 pollution, 185, 186, 190, 192, 197 quality, 182, 183, 187, 188, 190, 191, 193–197 quantity, 182, 191, 193–195 Water Framework Directive (WFD), 182, 187–196 Weberian bureaucracy, 18, 233, 241 Welfare state, 17–20, 24, 30, 32, 34, 46, 54, 57, 59, 60, 66, 71, 87, 107, 203 Westphalian geopolitical order, 42

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