Introduction

It has been noted that the concept of governance has been both underused as a tool of analysis and underresearched as a set of practices by social policy scholars (Daly, 2003). In response, this chapter will argue that governance can provide a useful framework for understanding recent shifts in the organisation and delivery of welfare in the UK. ‘Governance’ is a nuanced process open to various interpretations and enactments (Davies, 2005) and in this chapter the focus is on its contribution to the rescaling of social policy through processes of spatialisation and localisation, which increasingly structure welfare activities around the sociopolitical lifeworlds of local territories (Lowndes and Sullivan, 2008). The chapter regards the drive towards the self-governance of neighbourhoods as a genuine, if contradictory, strategy of UK governing practice. However, it is mindful of the contributions of the critical governance literature, which contends that processes of ‘localisation’ are occurring alongside a deepening of the control of the central state (Davies, 2005) and of those who point out that a rhetoric of self-governance often struggles to translate into meaningful local autonomy (Marinetto, 2003). However, the main thrust of the chapter is that localised governance is an unstable but genuine goal of government policy justified with reference to a set of assumptions about the ‘active’ civic community. This generates some problems for those ‘on the ground’ who are invited participants within the nexus of self-governance (Taylor, 2007). This is not the same as arguing that governance is a deliberate means of control on the part of the central state (see, for example, Raco and Imrie, 2000). Self-governance, it is argued here, is a top-down driven process, but one that the New Labour government has attempted to shape and implement according to a particular model of the local-social. The chapter will begin by sketching the current localising impulse apparent in the rhetoric of both main UK political parties. The chapter shares Daly's (2003) belief that governance as an explanatory concept allows us to map some of the continuities in recent political debates and illustrate how the Labour and Conservative Parties have outlined similar critiques of centralised policy practice. The chapter will continue by examining the raft of recent measures under consideration or implemented by the UK government designed to hybridise local governance and place ‘communities in control’ (DCLG, 2008).