Advanced Liberal Governance Research Articles

Responsibilizing renovation: governing strategies and resistance in the context of the transformation of Swedish housing policy

This article contributes to the emerging body of literature in the field of urban studies that addresses the classical ‘division of labour’ between analyses of the workings of urban power at the macro- and micro-levels. Our theoretical framework aims to capture how processes of power are exercised in processes of urban restructuring. In the field of gentrification studies there have been calls for theoretical developments based on analyses of various local contexts in which rent gaps may be exploited in similar yet varied ways. We contribute to this discussion through an analysis of governing strategies and protests linked to urban restructuring in the context of the so-called Million Programme in Sweden’s two largest cities. In particular, we address the consequences of public housing companies being forced to operate according to ‘business principles’. Importantly, we demonstrate how advanced liberal government, under the influence of neoliberal ideology, has largely worked through a process of responsibilization. We discern a chain of responsibilization leading from the macro-, via the meso-, to the micro-level – ultimately involving the individual tenant; and highlight how a struggle that we call a politics of responsibility has taken place around each link in the chain.

Governing ‘Sustainable Urban Development’ Through Self‐Build Groups and Co‐Housing: The Cases of Hamburg and Gothenburg

AbstractThis article critically examines the governing of ‘sustainable urban development’ through self‐build cohousing groups in Gothenburg and Hamburg. The two case cities have been selected because both are currently involved in major urban restructuring, and have launched programmes to support self‐build groups and cohousing as part of their emphasis on promoting urban sustainable development through this process. Departing from a theoretical discussion on advanced liberal urban governance, focusing in particular on the contemporary discourse on sustainable urban development, we examine the interaction between political institutions, civil society and private actors in the construction of cohousing as a perceived novel and alternative form of housing that may contribute to fulfilling certain sustainability goals. Questions centre on the socio‐political contextualization of cohousing; concepts of sustainability; strategies of, and relations between, different actors in promoting cohousing; gentrification and segregation; and inclusion and exclusion. In conclusion we argue that, while self‐build groups can provide pockets of cohousing as an alternative to dominant forms of housing, the economic and political logics of advanced liberal urban development make even such a modest target difficult, particularly when it comes to making such housing affordable.

Between micro mappers and missing maps: Digital humanitarianism and the politics of material participation in disaster response

Crisis mapping is a new modality of participatory humanitarian action in which global publics are mobilized to trace digital maps of disaster-stricken sites and to classify, verify, and plot on maps Big Data produced by disaster-affected people. This article untangles the political rationalities behind this emergent form of digital humanitarianism by looking at two platforms that shape the self-organizing crowds in which crisis mapping is grounded: MicroMappers, a microtasking platform for processing messages from disaster zones, and the Missing Maps Project, which traces maps of disaster-prone areas in poor countries. While looking at the increasingly prominent interplay between device-based participation and technologies of advanced liberal governance in humanitarianism, I make two interrelated claims. First, I argue that ICTs do not promote the democratization of disaster response as much as they put at its disposal new tools for establishing order and security in crisis zones by facilitating the transfer of responsibility to humanitarian crowds. Second, I claim that the emergence of the crowd as a new humanitarian actor that serves the dual and potentially incommensurate purposes of resilience and witnessing perpetuates the ambiguities of a humanitarian endeavor whose inherent tensions had grown deeper since it gained its current political prominence.

From ‘fearing’ to ‘empowering’ climate refugees: Governing climate-induced migration in the name of resilience

The concept of resilience was born and grew up in the environmental sciences during the 1970s. After migrating into many other disciplines, resilience is now ‘coming home’ to the politics of the environment in the name of security. The field of climate change induced migration is investigated as a paradigmatic case of environmental security. On a theoretical level, resilience is studied as a governmentality; that is, as advanced liberal government which governs through contingency. On an empirical level, a brief genealogy of environmental migration is presented with a focus on the latest discursive shift towards resilience. It is demonstrated that climate change induced migration was once represented as a pathology to be prevented and, more recently, as an issue of refugee rights. However, the shift towards resilience has reframed the debate. Climate change-induced migration is now presented as a rational strategy of adaptation to unavoidable levels of climate change and the relocation of millions of people is rendered acceptable and rational. The most drastic policy implication of this shift is that the space of the political is eliminated. Climate change is presented as a matter of fact rather than as a social problem that could still be tackled by significant emission reductions and lifestyle changes by residents in the major developed economies.

The Anti‐Politics of Climate Finance: The Creation and Performativity of the Green Climate Fund

AbstractThis paper is an empirical case study of the institutional design process of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change from December 2011 to May 2014. Powerful countries, corporations and banks have favoured a deepening of neoliberal environmental governance, while civil society actors have argued over retaining movement concepts, won small representational victories, while participating in a process that has subjected them to a deepened practise of advanced liberal governance. The process has thus far produced “non‐outcomes” that fail to meet hopes that the GCF could provide a significant scaling up and paradigm shift in global climate finance. However, civil society engagement appears to be, somewhat inadvertently, exposing the “overflows”, limits and contradictions inherent in advanced liberal governance. The impasse created has prompted alternative governmentalities to emerge, not least of spectacle and (non‐)performativity, which may be generating an anti‐politics in environmental governance.

Tailored equities in the education market: flexible policies and practices

The term equity is ubiquitous in Australian education policy and evolves amidst ongoing debates about what it means to be fair in education. Over the past three decades, meanings and practices associated with equity have reflected broader shifts in advanced liberal governance, with equity being reframed as a ‘market-enhancing’ mechanism and melted into economic productivity agendas. In this paper, I argue that an emerging, yet, under-examined policy tension is the view that secondary schools are capable of being equitable, whilst simultaneously acting as adaptive service providers, tailoring education to different students and local markets. A dilemma here is whether or not schools should ‘tailor equity’ or whether tailoring equity is indeed antithetical to equity in so far as it implies unequal provision. To explore this tension, I draw upon fieldwork from ethnographic research in two socially and economically disparate government secondary schools in suburban Melbourne, Australia. In doing so, I explore how equity is enacted and governed by educators, how forms of equity at each school relate to versions of equity in policy and the extent to which each school tailors equity to its local community.

Being different and the same? The paradoxes of ‘tailoring’ in education quasi - markets

Abstract In Australia, market-based education policies promote the notion that government schools should flexibly tailor secondary education to the needs of young people and their local communities. Far from offering a “one size fits all” system, policies seek to enable clients (parents, students) to exercise freedom of choice in quasi-markets that offer different educational products to different individuals. The intended effect is a kind of bespoke education tailoring, whereby schools operate as flexible service providers, adapting to the needs and desires of local markets. In this paper, I analyse the policy turn towards market tailoring as part of broader shifts towards advanced liberal governance in education. Following this, I feature interviews with educators in two socially disparate government secondary schools in the Australian city of Melbourne. In doing so, I analyse the extent to which each school tailors its marketing practices to its local community. These interviews suggest inherent contradictions emerge when tailoring is attempted in a hierarchical market with normative and rigid indicators of ‘brand value’. Schools are caught, I argue, between paradoxical demands, requiring them to be simultaneously different and the same.

Paging Dr. Economicus: The Economics of ‘Obesity’ in the Canadian Medical Association Journal

Drawing on Rose’s (1999) theory of advanced liberal governance, this study examines the introduction of economic rhetoric into the Canadian Medical Association’s discourse on ‘obesity’ policy and considers the positioning of the fat subject within this discourse. Following Clarke’s (2007) suggestion that the subordination of the social to the economic in a neoliberal policy environment is imperfect and contested, I argue that there is evidence to suggest that the CMA has at times adapted an economized ‘obesity’ discourse to introduce the values of equity and social inclusiveness to policy debates. However, I suggest that existing debates in public health discourse need to be challenged and expanded in order to adequately acknowledge the problems of weight-based prejudice and discrimination.

Commodifying diversity: Education and governance in the era of neoliberalism

Abstract In this paper I explore the pedagogical and political shift marked by the meaning and practice of diversity offered through New Labour education policy texts, specifically, the policy and practice of personalized learning (or personalization). The aim of this paper is to map the ways in which diversity relays and mobilizes a set of neoliberal positions and relationships in the field of education and seeks to govern education institutions and education users through politically circulating norms and values. These norms and values, I want to argue, echo and redeem the kinds of frameworks, applications and rationalities typically aligned with modes of neoliberal or advanced liberal governance, e.g. marketization, monetarization, atomization and deregulation. I conclude the paper by considering how diversity in education renders problematic conventional antinomies of the citizen and consumer, public and private, state and civil society, etc., and forces us to confront the rhizomatic character of contemporary governance and education in the era of neoliberalism.

The sky is the limit: Global warming as global governmentality

The concept of governmentality has gained significant influence among scholars of International Relations. Recently, however, there is a growing literature engaging critically with the notion of a global governmentality. This article seeks to inform this debate with insights from global climate change politics as a paradigmatic case for applying governmentality to global politics. Drawing on an analysis of the Clean Development Mechanism, it makes three arguments, which seek to refine the global governmentality concept. First, governmentality does not necessarily centre on the notion of the ‘population’, but can also function as a governmentality of other ‘technological zones’. Second, the seeming failure of a governmentality in its own terms is better understood within a ‘post-foundational’ framework of depoliticization. Third, governmentality and sovereignty are not mutually exclusive. Instead, the former allows the latter to ‘govern at a distance’. The Clean Development Mechanism illustrates these points perfectly. Although it is based on a global ‘carbon governmentality’, it is able to conduct individual conduct directly. Its apparent failure in terms of carbon emission reductions is in fact a success of depoliticizing climate politics, excluding fundamental social structures. And although it is based on an international treaty, it establishes an advanced liberal government of the climate.

Managing Climate Risks or Risking a Managerial Climate

Current international climate governance from a risk-political perspective points to a paradoxical moment in world risk society. While the probability of negative climate impacts increases and we can see the emergence of a common risk perception among international decision-makers, nation states in the international climate regime fail to agree on effective preventive measures that could mitigate the harming effects of global warming. While at the discursive level climate change is constructed as one of the major risks in the twenty-first century, the focus in international climate governance remains on voluntary measures and market-based instruments. Drawing on discourse theory, this paradox can be explained as the outcome of a discursive struggle in climate politics. Risk, in this perspective, is a political technology to govern the future that is embedded within broader political rationalities. Until 2007, risk management in climate governance was established as a form of advanced liberal government based on individualisation and self-responsibility. The growing consensus on dangerous climate change ultimately reinforces this advanced liberal risk management by presenting climate change as a ‘naturalised’ de-bounded risk and blurring its socio-economic causes.

Self-Government and the Fashioning of Resilient Personae: Legal Education, Criminal Justice, and the Government of Mental Health

This paper explores attempts to shape resilient personae through relations of self-government, and highlights the way that this features as part of advanced liberal forms of rule. As an example of this process, it focuses on the way that undergraduate law students are encouraged to fashion resilient personae throughout their legal studies, so as to avoid, or effectively respond to, experiences that may have a detrimental effect on their mental health. This paper argues that the production of such resilience relies on students being encouraged to take up psychologically- and biomedically-infused subject positions, becoming well-disciplined subjects, entrepreneurs of the self, and even virtuous persons. It highlights that the fashioning of resilient personae in this way involves extensions to the targets and practices of self- government and reinforces advanced liberal government. The paper then suggests how insights into fashioning resilience in this context can inform further research on resilience, particularly resilience produced within criminal justice professionals.

Policing Markets: The Contested Shaping of Neo-Liberal Forensic Science

This paper addresses the effects of recent political and economic trends on the construction of forensic science in England and Wales. Using documentary sources and fieldwork, I show how neo-liberal initiatives have differentially reconstructed relationships between forensic scientists and the police. I argue that this stems from contested interpretations of scientific integration that have selectively appropriated elements of neo-liberalism. Neo-liberal reform of forensic science has, however, exposed actors to new risks, culminating in the UK Government's announcement to close the Forensic Science Service. Yet, rather than representing the end of ‘marketization’, debates concerning the organization of forensic science have entered a new phase. These hold significant implications for understanding the relationship between crime, science and advanced liberal governance.

Governing Depression in Australian Legal Education: Power, Psychology and Advanced Liberal Government

[Extract] This volume contains eight articles within the General Issue, Volume 22(1) and three articles within the Special Topic Issue on the Teaching-Research nexus, Volume 22(2). We are pleased that Lynden Griggs of the University of Tasmania has written a foreword for the Special Topic Issue, and readers are referred to that foreword for an overview of the contents.

Community-Based Interventions for At-Risk Youth in Ontario under Canada's Youth Criminal Justice Act: A Case Study of a “Runaway” Girl

This article presents findings from ongoing research on interventions for violent and at-risk youth in Ontario through partnerships authorized under Canada's 2003 Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA). After briefly describing and theoretically situating the YCJA's “preventative partnership” ( Garland 2000 ) strategy, we analyse an interview with a 16-year-old Ontario high school student (one of 85 interviews with female and male youth recruited through high schools, community agencies, youth advocacy networks, and correctional facilities between 2002 and 2006). In this interview, “Connie” describes her experiences with family and peer violence and her efforts to deal with these experiences through a range of escape and help-seeking behaviours. Drawing broadly upon governmentality discourses on advanced liberal governance, our analysis focuses on the ways in which victimization, running away, child protection involvement, criminal activity, and social exclusion are linked. We also discuss the promises and challenges of efforts to address the needs of youth caught up in this trajectory through community partnership strategies.

In the Name of Human Rights: Global Organizations and Participating Citizens

As a contribution to the growing literature on citizenship and advanced liberal governance, this paper focuses on how citizens—especially the poor—are brought into new policy platforms and new social relationships of responsibility, accountability, and participation. In making specific empirical reference to a range of global organizations and their poverty reduction initiatives, the analysis emphasizes the diverse ways in which individuals are governed as certain kinds of “free” persons through particular administrative practices. In this analysis, we underline how some organizations encourage citizens to participate in global practices, markets, and institutions, and train them to act in ways that are aligned with the principles and expectations imposed on them by advanced liberal governmental agendas. We argue that global organizations that are formally or informally linked to other organizations, agencies, and governments around the world, such as the United Nations and the World Bank, view citizens' participation in rights claiming and budgetary design practices as a crucial part of their responsibility to improve their well-being. We also analyse how specific global organizations promote citizens to become consumers of global financial services as a way of solving global poverty. In assessing programmes designed to encourage poor people to participate in global markets and institutions, we contend that these programmes are founded on governing practices that aim to make citizens, non-governmental organizations, and nation-states adhere to advanced liberal principles. We question whether these programmes improve the well-being of poor people. We suggest that future research needs to focus on how global organizations cultivate different discourses of freedom and liberty which serve to govern citizens as responsible consumers and participants.

Rendering climate change governable: From biopower to advanced liberal government?

This article generates a theoretical framework for analysing the politics of climate change on the basis of Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality. Foucault does not limit the exercise of power to sovereignty, but introduces discipline, biopower, liberal and advanced liberal government as alternative configurations of state and power. The article argues that the ways in which climate change is rendered a governable entity are best understood before the background of a shift from biopower to advanced liberal government. It will be argued that climate change was first rendered governable by biopower, which justified global management of spaceship Earth in the name of the survival of life on Earth. Since the mid-1990s, climate change has been captured by advanced liberal government, which articulates climate change as an economic issue that requires market-based solutions to facilitate cost-effective technological solutions. A governmentality analysis asks which visibilities, fields of knowledge, practices and identities this ‘global climate regime’ is actually producing, rather than assuming that what it does or is supposed to do is known. In that way, the ways in which programme failure has already been built into the very formation of the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol can be identified.

Talking about drug use: what are we (and our participants) doing in qualitative research?

This paper considers the use of qualitative research in the drugs field. Proponents have traditionally claimed that by capturing participants’ lived experience through language, qualitative approaches are either the ‘antidote’ or the necessary complement to quantitative methods. The present paper troubles this over-simplistic dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative: both approaches often share the same ontological assumptions, rely on the same representational logic and are, in the context of ‘applied’ research, subject to a ‘will to truth’ born of a specific relation to policy. Poststructuralist ideas about the production of knowledge and the relationship between discourse and power are presented. Drugs research as both praxis and knowledge base may be seen as part of the machinery of advanced liberal government, which seeks to govern at a distance through the inscription of subjectivity. The drug user is produced and re-produced as a subject within research, always already positioned in relation to certain ‘truths’. We need to conceive of qualitative research and what our participants tell us differently, such that the constructive and constructed nature of knowledge and talk becomes the focus of inquiry. Discourse analysis - with its focus on construction and function within discourse - is presented as compatible with poststructuralist ideas. To illustrate the use of this approach, three interview accounts of how participants first came to use heroin are analysed. The discourses and subject positions underpinning the ‘peer pressure’, the ‘response to distress’ and the ‘risk appraisal’ account are described, and we consider how these accounts might function as ‘harm warrants’ for intervention. Criticisms of a poststructuralist approach and its implications for qualitative research within the broader field of drugs research and policy are addressed.

Open co-ordination as advanced liberal government 1

This article applies a Foucauldian analytics of government to recent developments in the European Union (EU), focusing particularly on open methods of co-ordination (OMCs) in the EU. It argues that in the perspective of an analytics of government, the open method of co-ordination can fruitfully be understood as ‘advanced liberal government’, a particular conceptualization of government constituted of ‘practices of liberty’. These practices continuously presuppose, depend on and enable their subjects – in the case of the OMC most often the relevant national government agencies. At the same time, however, they shape and reshape them. There is thus a dual nature to the open method which is typical of advanced liberal government: the method enables and opens up new possibilities for its subjects and at the same time restrains these subjects as they are subjected to a certain calculative and disciplinary regime.

The mutuality of risk and community: the adjudication of community notification statutes

Although it has drawn significant attention in the legal literature, the adjudication of community notification statutes (often referred to as 'Megan's Law' in the United States) demonstrates a centrality of both risk and community that deserves attention from a governance perspective. In this paper, I focus on the ways in which concepts of risk and community are mutually constitutive, and how the adjudication of community notification statutes relies on particular visions of 'community' to engage particular ways of conceiving of 'risk', much of which relies on a rejection of expertise and a focus on 'common sense'. This focus on 'common sense', opens up new problematics of government: courts adjudicating community notification cases are working to define the particular mechanics of a state-civil society partnership, and thereby operationalize the preventive state without rendering the state redundant or obsolete, and without opening the state to new forms of legal and political accountability. While providing a case study in the move to advanced liberal governance in the area of criminal law, this adjudication also reveals the contingent nature of risk, and the ways in which judicial invocation of 'risk' and its management can constitute liberal subjects who continue to rely on the state, while no longer expecting the state to be accountable for crime or its control.