Jürgen R. Grote

From Democratic Government to Participatory Governance

In July 2001 the EU Commission (200la) launched its long-announced White Paper on Governance. By that time, the conference where drafts of the contributions to this volume have first been presented had passed for almost one year. While discussing in Florence, we hardly had an idea about the salience the governance topic would have assumed only a couple of months later. Until then, it had mainly occupied the research agendas of a handful of political scientists in only some of the member states of the Union. Our project, indeed, was only in part related to the Commission’s initiative. The timing of this book, hence, is a mere coincidence. Whether it represents a more or less happy one has to be judged by the reader. Now, after the White Paper being published and after the rather unexpected noise it has triggered in and outside Brussels, it seems clear that, incidentally, we have caught the right moment with this present publication.

Local Governance und organisierte Zivilgesellschaft

In seiner Vieldeutigkeit dem Begriff des Netzwerkes vergleichbar, bestimmt der Topos Governance heute grose Teile des sozialwissenschaftlichen Diskurses. Dabei riskiert dessen Bedeutungsgehalt bei zunehmend inflationarem Gebrauch auf der Strecke zu bleiben. Eine Sichtung der unzahligen zum Thema vorliegenden Untersuchungen tragt kaum zum Erkenntnisgewinn bei sondern mundet letztlich eher in Gemeinplatzen wie etwa einer ‚Kooperation zum Erreichen gemeinsamer Ziele‘. Ausgehend von einer zunachst relativ abstrakten Begriffsbestimmung von Governance (G) wird hier deshalb versucht, sukzessive konkretere und empirisch gehaltvollere Begriffe wie Governance Arrangement (GA), Local Governance (LG) und Local Governance Arrangement (LGA) einzufuhren und in einem erweiterten, nicht ausschlieslich die deutschsprachige Debatte betreffenden Kontext zu diskutieren. Ein letzter Abschnitt wird dann das Verhaltnis von LGAs und Zivilgesellschaft, bzw. burgerschaftlichem Engagement erortern.

Horizontalism, Vertical Integration and Vertices in Governance Networks

Many working on communitarian bonds among members of small groups, on inter-firm arrangements in competitive markets, on new public management in state bureaucracies and, not least, on negotiations between public and private actors in new modes of governance tend to share two core assumptions being essential to their arguments. Firstly, networks aimed at cooperation are structured horizontally while vertical networks reflect power and subordination. Secondly, horizontal networks tend to be ascribed positive properties such as, for instance, trust, the ability of providing solutions to legitimacy problems, increased efficiency and participation while vertical ones, often seen to reflect pre-modern or outdated forms of governance, are not. This contribution tries to qualify these assumptions, firstly, by looking at the structural features of networks in different systems of societal order and, secondly, by presenting and then discussing counter-intuitive empirical evidence drawn from an older research project on territorial governance in Europe. We shall see that a generalized version, at least, of the horizontalist expectation is anything but warranted and that hierarchy may be more beneficial both to those cooperating in networks and to the production of public goods than believed by many.

Persistent Divergence? : Chemical Business Associations in Britain and Germany

In many comparative accounts of industrial sectors, Britain and Germany have been taken to highlight the features of two distinct ways of (regulatory) policy making and of managing state-society relations. Policy making in the UK has been described as informal, confidential, and based on close relationships between public authorities and firms, while regulation is ‘reasonable, practical, and flexible’ (Brickman etal. 1985: 225). At the same time, interest systems tend to be comparatively fragmented and state-society relations typically exhibit pluralist patterns (for many other characteristics, see Schmidt, 2006). In Germany, sectoral governance has been by self-regulation and policy making is significantly more formal and structured than in the British case. Both producer groups and public authorities prefer ‘statutory precision’ and a ‘faithful execution of regulatory requirements’ (Brickman et al. 1985: 231). Germany’s interest system, in turn, has been said to be relatively compact with state-society relations well ordered, highly formalized, and of an essentially corporatist nature. If this has been the case for many of the more traditional sectors, it has been even more pronounced in the chemical industry (see Grant et al. 1988).

Participation and Metagovernance: The White Paper of the EU Commission

The main objective of this book has been to review the theoretical, political and societal implications of participatory governance. Before turning to the latter two of these, let us first try to come up with some preliminary theoretical conclusions. We have found participatory governance to be located somewhere between theories of democratic government and theories of governance. On the one hand, participatory governance makes mandatory an extension of the theory of democracy taking account of both the format and the logics of the new type of polity shaping the European political space. Klaus-Dieter Wolf’s discussion of the legitimacy of governance beyond the state brought us towards the idea that the specific milieu of governance beyond the state is more conducive to deliberative democracy than to majority voting. However, the question of how to operationalize the idea of deliberative democracy is far from being solved. On the other hand, the notion of participatory governance has confronted us with the need to change our ideas about citizenship. More precisely, the transition from a traditional context of democratic control towards a context which almost unavoidably suffers accountability deficits involves a parallel transition from the concept of citizen to something else. At this point, we have elaborated on the notion of holder as the collective embodiment of participatory governance arrangements at the European and at other levels.

Organized Business Interests in Changing Environments: Introduction

During the last few decades the environment of political systems in advanced industrial society has changed dramatically. Growing international expansion of economic transactions, in large part driven by a revolution in communication technologies, has led to an unprecedented degree of mobility in capital, goods, and services. It has also caused national polities to be increasingly dependent on political and economic processes that are beyond their immediate control. Although this did not lead to the end of the nation state as some alarmist accounts predicted, it undoubtedly resulted in a change within power structures and the division of labor in political systems. A growing strand of literature argues that control is increasingly being transferred to the international level and that private actors such as trade associations, multinational corporations, and social movements are gaining in importance within political processes.

The Representation of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises: Yet Another Two Logics of Collective Action?

The internationalization of markets and the Europeanization of politics both have a number of implications for business and their associations in most of the EU Member States. While the size of firms has always been a dividing line within specific associations, this division is now becoming accentuated. This has to do with the differential salience the two major logics of organized collective action possess for both types of firms and their associations in a world of increasing complexity. The hypothesis raised in this contribution is as follows. Large firms are primarily challenged from the part of the LOGIC OF MEMBERSHIP. The INTERNATIONALIZATION OF MARKETS entails significant restructuring among larger companies. This often materializes in form of M&A activity, buy-outs and take-over and, subsequently, membership losses. Since dues paid by large firms represent a major source of income for business associations, organizational tasks located at the membership side of associative action (services, etc.) are increasingly more important. Small firms and their associations are less concerned by the internationalization of markets but meet significant pressure with respect to the REGULATION OF MARKETS by the EU. They are challenged, first of all, by developments within the LOGIC OF INFLUENCE dimension where they have always been in a disadvantaged position compared to larger companies. Moreover, large firms increasingly act on their own (direct lobbying) and often support EU-induced deregulation and liberalization. This creates an additional division both within and across business associations which, in a number of cases, has already resulted in the break-away of branch associations, the exit by members, and a declining loyalty vis-a-vis the organizational leadership. This paper seeks to present empirical evidence for these developments by drawing from research on large chemical and ICT interest associations in Britain, Germany and the US.

Intermediazione degli interessi e politiche regionali nel Mezzogiorno: il caso della Sicilia

Organized collective action and interest intermediation do not belong to the analytical repertoire habitually employed by the literature on industrial districts and on the institutional performance of local governments. By referring to a number of legislative acts in the domain of associative governance in Italy, the author argues that this negligeance is unwarrented and actually fails to take account of important determinants of local economic and institutional development. Focussing on the region of Sicily, and making use of network-analytic tools for the elaboration of two diacronic data sets (1992 and 1995), it is demonstrated that the fragmentation of the Italian interest system, albeit still being pronounced at both the national and the subnational levels, appears to be less proliferating today than has been the case until the late 1980s. Regional interest associations are shown to have solved many of the structural and behavioral deficiencies caused by political camp mentalities of the past and are today prepared to pool their resources in the general interest of improving the performance of an entire territory. Yet, the marginalized network position of the Sicilian government represents a disincentive for proper forms of interest intermediation and suggests that investments in associational solidity alone are no sufficient condition for arriving at the virtuous type of policy network often described in the literature on successful regional economies in Europe. As long as the regional administration remains the reference point for particularized contacting and for dyadic exchanges between individual members of society and the State, will collective demands for regional governance remain under-developed and will proper interest intermediation fail to emerge.