ABSTRACT
An emphasis on governance – and governance agencies – has rapidly become a central feature of contemporary studies on the ‘architecture’ of the British State. Within this literature there has been a strong focus on the national level. The ESRC’s Whitehall Research Programme, for example, has charted the shift away from the Westminster model – in which a strong executive runs a unitary state – to a system of governance in which a range of non-governmental actors increasingly participate in public policy-making and delivery (Rhodes, 2000). As well as capturing the involvement of new structures, governance also refers to new processes and forms of co-ordination. For the Director of the ESRC Programme, governance refers to ‘self-organising, inter-organisational networks, characterised by interdependence, resource-exchange, negotiation and significant autonomy from the state’ (Rhodes, 1997). Recent studies of governance have also explored developments at the local level, emphasising the increasing fragmentation of institutional arrangements (Stoker, 1999), the continuing importance of local quangos (Skelcher et al., 2000) or Local Public Spending Bodies (Greer and Hoggett, 2000), and the consequences for local democracy of the growth of new governance networks (Skelcher, 2000).
