One - Depoliticisation, governance and the state

Summary

Introduction

Crisis and contingency; delegation and democracy; exceptions and excuses; fate and fear; autonomy and apathy; control and contradictions: these are just some of the issues that underpin this special edition, and which serve to shed new perspectives on the changing constellation of relationships that concern depoliticisation, governance and the state in the twenty-first century. The need for new perspectives can hardly be denied. These – as we are constantly reminded – are ‘exceptional times’ and it is therefore likely that our analytical toolkit, those concepts, theories and methods that were forged in an arguably more conventional historical period, are no longer sufficient for the tasks of understanding the intellectual puzzles that are likely to shape future decades. Indeed, it is possible – albeit imperfectly – to place the three concepts that form the main pillars of this collection within some form of historical flow; with the concept of ‘the (modern) state’ emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the concept of ‘governance’ towards the end of the twentieth century and then ‘depoliticisation’ emerging as an increasingly visible but strangely nebulous concept in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

The concept of depoliticisation, while contested, essentially refers to the denial of political contingency and the transfer of functions away from elected politicians. Moreover it has arguably evolved as the dominant model of statecraft in the twenty-first century. Efforts to insulate decision-making processes beyond the direct control of elected politicians or even place complete areas of policy beyond the reach of the state have become prevalent across the world (Roberts, 2011). Depoliticisation has been proposed by think tanks and pressure groups as a solution to both public policy and constitutional challenges, and is described by the European Policy Forum (2001) as ‘one of the most promising developments since the last war – the depoliticisation of many government decisions’. At the global level the World Bank (2000) has advocated large-scale depoliticisation as a central aspect of building state capacity and market confidence while in the United Kingdom (and beyond) national politicians have sought to depoliticise significant elements of the state. In 2003, for example, the then Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs argued that what defined the approach of the New Labour government was ‘a clear desire to place power where it should be: increasingly not with politicians, but with those best fitted in different ways to deploy it…