Governance and Why It Matters

At the turn of the present century, Rod Rhodes wrote that governance ‘has now become the defining narrative of British government’ (Rhodes, 2000: p. 6). Although governance has long been a key point of discussion and debate across a range of different disciplinary fields, near the end of the New Labour government’s first term in office it was seen to characterise the story of contemporary British government. Of course, we might expect Rhodes to say something along these lines given that he (along with Gerry Stoker and a number of other leading political scientists) had been influential in developing mainstream understandings of this concept and played an important role in translating this into various spheres of government. Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that an interest in the concept of governance was a defining feature of the Labour governments of 1997–2010. Rhodes, Stoker and others argued that we were seeing profound shifts in the nature of civil society, the state and other forms of rule. Within this context, governance rose in prominence and was seen by some as the successor to government itself: the days of large, hierarchical government were gone and instead the state was to rule through combinations of markets and networks. However, by the end of Labour’s final term in office, even once hard-line network governance theorists had backed away from this position, acknowledging the limits of the ‘modernist-empiricist paradigm’ (Rhodes, 2011: p. 200).