ABSTRACT
In the contemporary Western democracies, politics is played out as much in the finegrain of public policymaking and its translations into policy practices as it is in the grander dramas of national political debates and electoral campaigns. This chapter explores on the experience of place-focused governance. It reviews the broader context of the struggles between such forms and the elite, technocratic forms of governance which came to dominate in the twentieth century, and the potential of the new governance forms developing in the 'interstices', 'voids' and broader relations which now surround the old forms of 'welfare states'. The chapter argues that in current times in countries such as the United Kingdom, some of these forms of 'network governance' hold a potential for people-centred practices to emerge, though their realisation is contingent upon struggles to resist other trajectories. It presents seven hypotheses about general qualities to foster and tendencies to resist as specific governance practices and political cultures evolve.
