Introduction

Participative governance is important in terms of our focus in this book on ‘remaking’ governance because it apparently offers not only a response to the problem of the legitimacy of government institutions, but also the potential solution to a range of social problems. It is linked to a decentred form of governance in which the role of the state – and the institutions of representative democracy on which it rests – is viewed as unable to deal with the complexity of policy problems and to respond to the differentiated needs and identities of citizens (Kooiman, 1993, 2000). This chapter examines the turn towards participative governance, focusing on two related issues. The first is the constitution of the public sphere in which participation is enacted. As earlier chapters of this volume have argued, the boundaries between public and private are fluid and contested (see especially the Introduction and Chapter Four). As power flows to transnational bodies such as the European Union (EU), down to ‘communities’ as a newly significant site of governance and outwards to a multiplicity of service providers, how is the public sphere delineated? What issues are deemed to be the province of public deliberation as opposed to the privatised choices or voices of individual consumers?

The second issue focuses on the public itself: how the technologies of power associated with participative governance produce classifications and divisions that shape the forms of political and social imaginaries from which the public sphere is constituted. The interest here is in the ways in which, by drawing citizens into more direct and involved relationships with governance practice, collaboration and participation may serve to enable the production of new forms of governable subject; but also, how the spaces which are opened up may form points around which social identity and agency is mobilised.

Remaking the public sphere

The concept of a public sphere in which citizens openly engage in deliberation on policy issues and problems is most closely associated with the work of Habermas.