No abstract

No abstract

There is widespread agreement in mainstream participation studies that social capital and civic engagement in Western democracies are in steady and continuous decline. How did it happen, then, that Barack Obama was able to mobilize tens of millions of volunteers and supporters for his spectacularly successful and novelty-creating presidential campaign? Part of the answer is that his campaign was directed to building political capital for solving common policy concerns. This marks a creative shift in political communication from being oriented towards keeping government effective and legitimate to getting people freely and actively to accept and help in executing what has to be done in order to solve common concerns. The paper discusses why this shift has not been detected by mainstream participation studies, following their development in Almond and Verba's civic culture, through Putnam's social capital framework, to Norris's cause-oriented politics. Later, Marsh et al.'s new politics of lived experience is introduced and connected to the project politics model for studying 'everyday makers and expert citizens'. The conclusion is that Obama's rhetoric in particular appeals to everyday makers and expert citizens, and that their reciprocal resonance opens for a fusion of identity politics and project politics in a new, much more communicative and interactive democratic model for doing what neither neoliberalism nor statism apparently can do: getting things done in prudent manner by establishing more balanced and discursive two-way relations of autonomy and dependence between political authorities and lay people.

Political and administrative analysis is today said to be taking a narrative turn: to learning by telling and listening to the different stories that constitute political life. However, this new approach to studying the decentring of politics and policy as multiple discursive practices carries a new grand narrative too. A new connection between political authority and political community is taking shape outside the spheres of modern government and representative democracy. Political authority is becoming increasingly both communicative and interactive in order for it to be able to meet complexity with complexity. It is employed for reforming institutions by opening them towards the culture and by tying them to the political attributes and capacities of self-reflexive individuals and to the transformation and self-transformation of their conduct. I call this development culture governance. Culture governance is about how political authority must increasingly operate through capacities for selfand co-governance and therefore needs to act upon, reform, and utilize individual and collective conduct so that it might be amenable to its rule (Bang 2003;Dean 2003). Culture governance represents a new kind of top-down steering; it is neither hierarchical nor bureaucratic but empowering and self-disciplining. It manifests itself as various forms of joined-up government and network governance and proclaims itself to be genuinely democratic and dialogical. This I shall show by a study of local Danish politics and policy in Copenhagen. Culture governance, I shall argue, constitutes a formidable challenge and threat to democracy, in attempting to colonize the whole field of public reason, everyday political engagement, democratic deliberation, and so on, by its own systems logic of success, effectiveness or influence. It seeks to take charge of the working of the more spontaneous, less programmed and more lowly organized politics of the ordinary in political communities, thus undermining the very idea of a non-strategic public reasoning as founding the practices of freedoms.

This paper critically assesses the implications of the "good governance" program and its underpinning network approach to public governance-that is, the increased reliance on more or less informal networks as a way to mobilize and engage citizens, firms, and organizations in the development, implementation, and monitoring of public policy. We begin by positioning the network approach to public governance within the broader notion of an emerging network society. Second, we present the claim that, on a systemic level, the result of the network paradigm and good governance as a reorientation of the political system from "politicspolicy" to "policy-politics." Third, we highlight the normatively ambiguous nature of the network paradigm and good governance, based on a discussion of the two major critical positions: governmentality studies and critical theory. Finally, we suggest some initial guidelines on how to pursue a theory of ethical political action within the parameters of the network paradigm. Good GovERNANCE oN tHE RiSEThe basic purpose of this paper is to trace the transformation of the political system brought about by the emergence of control society and the development of good governance as a constitutive paradigm of political organization and administrative practice. The term good governance not only refers to the programs of proper political organization and suitable policies so named and vigorously pursued by international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), United Nations (UN),