performing governance through networks
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Abstract Governance networks typically function in the absence of clearly defined constitutional rules. Network actors, therefore, have to develop a common understanding of the problem as well as build a basis for mutual trust. We suggest that discourse-analytical and dramaturgical concepts can be helpful instruments to analyse these dynamics of trust building in governance networks.
Keywords
governance networks; analysis; dramaturgical analysis
institutional
‘All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.’ (Goffman, 1959: 72)
NETWORK REALITIES: ‘WHAT TO DO WITH THE ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES?’
P
olitics has changed, both in nature and in topography. Even if we would like to continue to regard the state as the sole legitimate locus of political power and authority, we have to acknowledge that the state often lacks the power to solve pressing policy problems on its own. This is what is addressed by the literature on governance networks. Many of our most pressing problems are transnational in nature and require some form
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ambiguity;
discourse
of political collaboration, both with governmental agencies from other states and with NGOs of various kinds. The governance of international financial markets, global environmental change, migration or terrorism, to name just a few major contemporary policy issues, are central tasks for politics that cannot be meaningfully addressed under the comfortable cupola of ‘classical-modernist’ political institutions (Hajer, 2003). In the classical modernist conception, political institutions complied with an implicit conceptual ‘matrouchka’ system. Like Russian dolls, governments were conceived of as fitting inside one another (local fits into regional, fits into national, fits into international). The various administrative units derived their legitimacy from professionalism, the input of scientific expertise and, above all, the democratic authority granted by representative
european political science: 4 2005 (340 – 347) & 2005 European Consortium for Political Research. 1680-4333/05 $30 www.palgrave-journals.com/eps
democratic councils. Governance networks break with that logic. Governance networks are relatively stable sets of interdependent, but operationally autonomous and negotiating actors, focused on joint problem solving. Governance networks characteristically consist of a polycentric, often trans-national and almost by necessity intercultural collaboration of multiple actors. In terms of political legitimacy, contemporary network governance differs from ‘normal politics’, or, as we called it above, classical-modernist politics. Those who were on top in the classical-modernist order, the elected representatives, now often occupy a more peripheral role. Indicative is the sigh that can be heard when people operating in such networks have worked out a policy solution that they all regard as fair and intelligent: ‘What do we do with the elected representatives?’ To suggest that contemporary network realities
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