Putting Civil Society in Its Place. Jessop, Bob

topic. It does not provide one more analysis of the concept through a conventional history of ideas or a normative theoretical approach, but seeks to locate how CSOs, partnerships and associations (in various guises and linked to different discourses) are being mobilized in response to market failure and state failure. In other words, it locates civil society in the context of critical governance studies and seeks to show how it has become the point of intersection between two contrasting sets of political strategy that seek to revive and recontextualize the significance of civil society. One strategy is to promote individual and collective self-responsibilization in order to lighten the governance burdens of local and central states. The other is to facilitate collective self-emancipation through social innovation, community mobilization and creating the commons to limit or escape the constraints of market and state. In both cases, governance can be located at the intersection of networks and solidarity as alternatives to market exchange and hierarchical command.

      Given growing disillusion with the neoliberal formula, ‘more market, less state’, civil society has become a central stake in political struggles, as seen in new forms of resistance, such as the Occupy movement, the appeal of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, the gilets jaunes, the rise of right-wing populism, the vote for Brexit in 2016 or the increasing incivility in political discourse. It is also evident in the churning of terms like ‘Big Society’ or the development of community initiatives such as food banks as austerity tightens. Self-responsibilization and solidarity are also evident in responses to the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. This makes this book relevant to current political debates.

      Governance is clearly a notion whose time has come. It appears to move easily across philosophical and disciplinary boundaries, diverse fields of practical application, the manifold scales of social life and different political camps and tendencies. Yet even a cursory glance at the literature reveals that the meaning of governance varies by context and it is being deployed for quite contrary, if not plain contradictory, purposes. These range from philosophical and theoretical ends through shaping problem construals and policies (including the marketing of quick governance fixes as one-size-fits all solutions to quite heterogeneous problems) to efforts to implement new constitutional and ethical solutions to global problems (for example, the concept of ‘good governance’ as advanced by the World Bank).

      Thanks to these terminological uncertainties and heterogeneous applications, it is doubtful whether governance sans phrase can really provide a persuasive theoretical entry-point for analysing contemporary social transformation or, again, a plausible practical entry-point for coping with complexity and turbulence. It is this paradox that I wish to pursue and resolve in this text. Its ultimate intention is to provide a clear account of the nature and limitations of governance and metagovernance in a complex world. It also introduces a typology of forms of governance related to their distinctive coordinating logics, principal domains of application and tendential forms of failure.

      This set of objectives has two aspects. First, I want to put governance, governance failure and metagovernance at the centre of the analysis rather than treating them as having secondary significance at best. Second, I want to put governance, governance failure and metagovernance in their place within a more comprehensive analysis of social relations. These practices have distinctive features and effects that cannot be theorized or explained without a broader theory of social relations. Thus, rather than develop a state-or society-centred account of governance, which comprise two well-rehearsed perspectives in the literature, I develop a strategic-relational analysis of governance that identifies its general and specific features, its strengths and weaknesses, and associated responses to the inherent improbability and empirically recurrent experience of governance failure. In this regard, I follow Foucault’s analysis of civil society as a set of governmental discourses and practices (see Chapter 7).

      This book seeks to avoid one-sided interpretations of the shift from government to governance by combining four main theoretical approaches: complexity theory, institutional and evolutionary economics, including especially a ‘plain Marxist’ approach that treats Marxist analysis as posing important problems even if the answers given to date are not always satisfactory (or, indeed, relevant to all potential topics of investigation), and the strategic-relational approach (hereafter SRA) (see especially Jessop, 2007c). These elements are presented in Chapters 1 to 4.

      Different governance arrangements are better suited to the pursuit of some types of strategy than others because they mobilize different resources, appeal more to some identities, values and interests than others, have different operational logics and are prone to different kinds of failure. Indeed, following disillusion with the turn to ‘more market, less state’ in the 1980s, in the 1990s there was growing recognition of failures in the new (or newly revived) forms of governance intended to address these earlier failures. This was followed from the mid-1990s by growing theoretical and practical interest in different kinds of metagovernance. In its most basic and general sense (but also most eclectic sense), metagovernance denotes the governance of governance. Other work on governance and/or metagovernance has examined the self-organization of organizations, the constitution of organizational identities, the modalities of coordination of interorganizational relations, and issues of organizational intelligence and learning. Overall, metagovernance occurs on many sites and scales and with different orders of ‘meta-ness’. Higher-order metagovernance, or collibration, has become a key activity of states and can be seen as a countertrend to the shift from government to governance. In other words, while the early interest in governance was associated with this alleged shift, there has been growing interest in a shift from governance to metagovernance.

      In this context, the SRA adopted below advances four more or less distinctive claims. First, it identifies four ideal-typical modes of governance – market exchange, imperative coordination, reflexive networks and unconditional solidarity – and argues that each of these ‘first-order’ forms of governance is prone to its own distinctive kinds of failure. They can also exist in hybrid forms. The same growing complexity that generated the demand for new governance mechanisms also contributes to their tendential failure to achieve what is expected of them, resulting in repeated patterns of failed attempts to resolve problems through promoting first one, then another, form of governance. These governance cycles prompt attempts to modulate the forms and functions of governance. This is the field of different kinds of metagovernance. Thus, second, the SRA identifies four ideal-typical responses that correspond to these four main modes of governance. These ‘second-order’ responses aim to improve, respectively, the efficiency of markets, the effectiveness of command, the responsiveness of networks and the level of trust and solidarity in communities. Third, in addition to attempts to improve the operation and outcomes of the first-order modes of governance through second-order governing practices, there can be efforts to alter the weight of the four individual modes of governance so that the overall ensemble of governance arrangements at a higher or more comprehensive level of social organization is better adapted to coordinate complex social relations. This can be described as ‘third-order’ metagovernance.

      And fourth, whereas second-order governing occurs in many arenas and policy fields and need not involve the state (which is primarily concerned in these terms with the effectiveness of command), third-order governing is more likely to involve the state as the addressee in the last instance of appeals to solve societal problems by taking responsibility for the overall balance among modes of governance. This is where the shift from governance to metagovernance directly involves the state or close substitutes for the state. In all cases, however, despite significant differences between their respective modes of complexity reduction (which inevitably marginalizes some features essential to effective governance), the continuing excess or surplus of complexity – especially deep complexity – is a major cause for failure in efforts at governance and metagovernance alike. Collibration reorders the relative weight of alternative modes of governance (Dunsire, 1996). It can also be seen as ‘third-order’ metagovernance based on observing how first-order modes perform and how second-order attempts to improve them succeed or fail. It involves reflexive governance of the articulation of social conditions and relations and their modes of governance. We should note here that there is no master meta-governor, no single summit from which metagovernance is performed: the sites, stakes and agents of metagovernance itself are highly contested and