Abstract
Research on governance, network governance and metagovernance has shown how the practice of governing involves a diversity of actors in and beyond the state. Much attention has been paid to the role of powerful state and non-state actors while less consideration has been directed at less visible and marginalised actors who are recognised as participants but whose agency is rarely subjected to in-depth research. In this article, we address this lack by studying the micropolitical practices of place-based self-governing networks in the Danish countryside and their role in governing rural places. Our theoretical point of departure is Bob Jessop’s notion of multispatial metagovernance which we seek to enhance by considering marginalised actors around the edges of the state apparatus. Our findings suggest that these marginalised and overlooked actors are not just subjected to governance but actively partake in shaping the governance landscape by enveloping rural places for self-governance in four distinct ways: (1) subverting municipal micro-technologies of power; (2) filling the void created by scalar fixes; (3) keeping local organising efforts fluid and opaque to outsiders and (4) orchestrating strategically selective cooperation with extra-local actors. Without downplaying asymmetries of power and their influence on governance outcomes, we conclude that metagovernance and collibration are not just prerogatives of the powerful. Generating adequate understandings of such practices is therefore only possible if we consider the full breadth of involved actors without taking for granted that outcomes are always decided in advance by the powerful. The study that the article reports on shows one of the ways in which this task may be approached empirically.
Highlights
In this paper, we investigate the role played by rural, place-based self-governing networks in shaping and performing governance and metagovernance through micropolitical practices
Three prominent topics are worth discussing at length: (1) how local agency relates to neo-endogenous normativity and how local actors practice metagovernance in neo-endogenous ways; (2) how micropolitical practices may be put in their place by drawing on the Gramscian notion of the integral state and (3) how metagovernance from below may be captured by the notion of enveloping rural places as an act of collibration and territorialisation
By studying micropolitical practices around the edges of the state apparatus in the Danish countryside we have attempted to gain a better understanding of the agency of marginalised actors in the governance landscape
Summary
We investigate the role played by rural, place-based self-governing networks in shaping and performing governance and metagovernance through micropolitical practices. In a reality where governance arrangements involve a heterogenous multiplicity of actors, the role of public authorities – that is, the state apparatus – is reconfigured This leads to calls for the development of collaborative and adaptive state strategies that focus on connecting, motivating and committing actors while bridging differences between them Governance has become the primary arena for addressing one of the key issues of political organisation: ‘how to combine unity and diversity and craft a cooperative system out of a conflictual one’ (March and Olsen, 2011: 485) The danger of such a pursuit is that the focus on fostering cooperative relations and consensus may result in a blindness towards conflict and power, where we fail to adequately appreciate that asymmetric power relations and antagonisms are inescapable aspects of political reality (Allen, 2003; Mouffe, 2013). They are, in other words, located on the margins of the state terrain, but not on the margins of society
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