Austerian Realism and the Governance of Leicester
Draft Chapter March 2015
Jonathan S. Davies Professor of Critical Policy Studies Faculty of Business and Law De Montfort University Leicester LE1 9BH E-‐mail:
[email protected]
Ed Thompson Research Student Faculty of Business and Law De Montfort University Leicester LE1 9BH Email:
[email protected].
Abstract
Theories heralding new ways of governing through networks became
prominent in the 1990s and 2000, but have since declined in influence. This study of austerity governance in Leicester explores the influence of post-‐traditional network and modernist theories. In it finds multiple modernist influences in Leicester, articulated through the idea of “austerian realism”, but no evidence of the normative enthusiasm for networks during the New Labour period. The dominant note of austerian realism is that of “agency denial”, reflecting the combination of constraints imposed by Westminster and the self-‐discipline of local actors under the threat of state coercion. The paper concludes that in Leicester, austerian realism signifies a denuded form of modernism: modernism without commitment.
1
Introduction
This chapter explores affinities between modernist social science and
strategies for collaborative governance in Leicester, in the context of austerity. During the New Labour years, the conceptual grammar of network governance resonated far beyond the academe with ministers and officials, was taught to public sector leaders and enacted (often dysfunctionally) through collaborative institutions, mobilising a range of governmental and non-‐governmental actors (e.g. Benington and Hartley, 2009; Bolden, Petrov and Golding, 2009). The network-‐centric vocabularies of ‘complexity’, ‘whole systems thinking’, ‘adaptivity’, ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’” were pervasive (Davies, 2011: 113), Marsh (2011) arguing that they constituted a new “orthodoxy”. Abundant criticism of the new orthodoxy quickly followed. Moran (2010) branded the widespread celebration of networks as “epochalism” – the tendency to exaggerate change in the present by misrepresenting and denigrating the past (also Lynn, 2001). Bevir’s post-‐Foundationalist theory of governance (2013) pointed to powerful continuities in the traditions of governance. Whereas some thinkers represented networks as the signature of an emerging postmodern condition (Bogason, 2000), Bevir indicted New Labour with reproducing the very modernist practices that network enthusiasts thought they were escaping. He argued that it had promoted network governance through modernist command and expertise. New Labour had believed that “efficiency and effectiveness derive from stable relationships characterized by trust, social participation, and voluntary associations” (2013: 140). Its error was to think it could design these relations from the top-‐down.
2
At the close of the New Labour period, proponents of network governance
theory began distancing themselves from it (Rhodes, 2011; Stoker, 2011). Enthusiasm for networks was dimmed by the disappointment of experience, the realpolitik of economic crisis and the rollout of austerity (Davies and Pill, 2012). The politics of austerity therefore pose important questions about the durability of network governance, as an idea, a tradition and a practice. To what extent are local actors influenced by network theories, and with what impact on their collaborative strategies? To what extent is collaborative governance rooted in modernist social science, or alternatively in post-‐foundational theory (Bevir, 2013)?
The chapter explores these issues through an ongoing study of austerity
governance in the City of Leicester (UK). It argues that modernist influences endure but that enthusiasm for network governance does not. Councillors and officials in Leicester espouse austerian realism, through which they invoke a mix of modernist themes including disciplinary state power, strategic or expert rationality and system governance – the functional utility of collaboration. Whereas the ideal of network governance was imbued with post-‐traditional optimism, and bureaucratic impartiality with legitimacy, the politics of austerian realism are pessimistic, articulating the experience of agency denial – relative political impotence in the face of state power. Leicester City Council (LCC) claims that it is denied agency by the centre, while local activists claim they are denied agency by both the centre and by LCC. For LCC, crucially, this account of agency denial warrants austerian realism. The challenge for de-‐centred analysis is to synthesize insights about the relationship between pressure from a contingently effectual austerian state and the beliefs, traditions and dilemmas of local actors seeking to comply, cope or resist.
3
The Decentred Approach The chapter reports research undertaken in Leicester in Autumn 2013 and Spring 2014. The study is part of the TRANSGOB project funded by the Spanish government, exploring seven cases: Cardiff and Leicester (UK) and Bilbao, Barcelona, Lleida, Madrid and San Sebastian (Spain) (see Blanco and Davies, 2014).1 Phase 1 gathered data about changing attitudes and practices of collaboration at the city level. Leicester’s phase 2 explored the governance of homelessness, because it provided an opportunity to look at dynamics of collaboration and resistance in a policy area coping with austerity and related service reconfigurations.
We conducted 20 interviews, 10 in the first phase and 10 in the
homelessness governance. In phase 1, we interviewed local councillors and senior officials, front-‐line officials in neighbourhood governance and community activists. In Phase 2, we interviewed another councillor, officers responsible for homelessness, voluntary organisations and homelessness advocates and activists, including people with experience of homelessness. In total, we interviewed four Labour councillors (including the City Mayor) coded P1-‐4, four senior local government officers at assistant director level or above (SO 1-‐4), seven other council officers (O1-‐7), three voluntary sector homelessness service providers (VS1-‐3) and four activists involved in local protests and with experience of working in LCC-‐organized homelessness partnerships (A1-‐4).2 The following discussion reflects on the beliefs and meanings articulated by respondents. It reveals elective affinities (resemblances and correspondences rather than direct influences) between modernist theories and the strategies, actions and
4
perspectives of the interviewees. The study also reflects on continuity and change, diversity and uniformity, agency and control and their implications for state theory. Bevir’s post-‐Foundational theory of governance emphasises variety and contingency, but leaves ample space for embedded and enduring patterns in social life, conceived as the “sedimented products of contingent beliefs and preferences” (2013: 150). The longue durée of modernist social science itself casts a shadow over the world of radical contingencies in the interpretivist imaginary, and Bevir’s conclusion chimes with the view of many modernist thinkers: “Decentered theory provides no great optimism about the prospects for this democratic alternative. On the contrary, much of the narrative in Part III of this book suggests a bleak vision of a misguided modernist expertise colonizing more and more of life” (2013: 211-‐12). Bevir and Rhodes also argued that that entrenched practices operating on a large scale may produce macro-‐pathologies: … dilemmas often reflect material circumstances … beliefs often arise because of pressures in the world. For example, the dilemma of inflation was an agreed, accurate perception of a real economic pressure, even if it was variously constructed and the responses to that pressure were equally varied. There is a real world “out there”, and while we do not have unmediated access to it, it is a source of pressures (2003: 149). Inflation might be construed as positive or negative, a pathology or as a useful policy tool. However construed, it is a real phenomenon generated by myriad economic transactions, altering the capacity of participants (who may be unaware of such effects) to engage in future transactions (e.g. McAnulla, 2006). Bevir (2013: 175) discusses two further conflicting pressures, deliberation and violence.
5
Deliberation occurs when agents accord recognition to one another and seek to persuade rather than dominate. Violence arises, in this contrast, whenever an individual or group denies the agency of another. The powerful issue laws and commands. Failure to comply with these laws and commands can result in punishment. The subject of the law or command is treated as an object to be compelled to act in a certain way by the threat of force (Bevir, 2013: 175). This passage invokes another material pressure: the ability of actors to deny agency to one another (the first dimension of power). Although a participatory democracy would not dispense with violence, “it should attempt to strengthen deliberation in place of the violence that currently lurks in the coercive power of the state and the financial power of the market” (ibid). Conceiving the state as a repository of the means of coercion further chimes with modernist theorising. For example, Du Gay (2012: 405) argued that it is the capacity to act as a “free-‐standing coercive structure” which endows the “artificial moral persona”, or “persona ficta” of Leviathan with material substance.3 To the extent that a contingently assembled collectivity inspired by modernist beliefs and traditions is capable of sustaining territorial functions of “pacification and security” (2012: 403), it constitutes a force with a centre. Yet however durable it may be, the centre remains contingent on the ability of actors to whom it is meaningful to reproduce it. To the extent that they can, it is meaningful and true to describe the centre as “the state”. A state which, for historical reasons, possesses these capabilities (beliefs, desires and resources) may choose to prevent people with other
6
beliefs and desires from realising their preferences, or force them to work for the goals of the centre against their will. This kind of state theory is resolutely modernist in inspiration, but makes no appeal to inexorability except insofar as Leviathan demands that we conspire with the persona ficta of statehood for our own and the public good. In a historical account, states emerge contingently as actors imbued with modernist values cooperate and accumulate means of conferring and denying agency to others through the mix of contingently assembled but apparently durable non-‐coercive and coercive resources (Davies, 2014). The remainder of this chapter explores how local actors accord the state power to deny them agency with respect to austerity. It suggests that pressures exerted by the national austerity regime provide credible (if not good) reasons for holding certain beliefs and acting in particular ways. Austerity Governance in Leicester Leicester is located in the East Midlands region of England. With a population of some 330,000 it is the 10th largest city in the UK. However, it lacks the prominence, influence and – some say – confidence of other cities of similar size, like the Welsh capitol of Cardiff. For P3, Leicester has a “collective inferiority complex”. Apart from brief periods of minority administration (2003-‐2007), the Labour Party has dominated Leicester City Council (LCC) since it gained unitary authority status in 1997. It currently holds 51 of 54 seats (two of the other three are defectors from Labour to an anti-‐austerity group, the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition). In 2010, the Council established the directly elected office of City Mayor. The inaugural officeholder is Sir Peter Soulsby. The Mayoralty is invested with considerable
7
executive power further endowed with Soulsby’s gravitas as a local leader of renown. Many respondents saw the Mayor (for good or ill) as the principal source of governing authority in the city. The Austerian Challenge Austerity is here defined as the policy of the UK Coalition government to cut public spending as a proportion of GDP through the rollback of public services, outsourcing, privatisation and wage reductions. It poses a serious medium to long-‐ term challenge for LCC, which faces major on-‐going reductions in service budgets and estimated cuts in the region of £110-‐120,000,000 by 2015, interpreting these figures as a real-‐terms reduction of 38% compared with 2010-‐11, or a 29% fall in comparable funding.4 LCC expects the situation to get worse, some predicting a crunch point SO3 called “the horrors of 2015-‐2016 and the greater horrors beyond there”. According to P4, people are “perhaps a little blinkered” if they think the cuts are over, because “the next two years are when the really dramatic cuts are going to be made”. Moreover, “if the Labour Party got elected … whether that would change I don’t know”. “… The next few years are going to be incredibly difficult”. O6 concurred of Labour that “they would have had to do the same”. According to LCC, its small budget for homelessness services had been cut by some 30% (LCC, 2013a: 3, O4), with aggregate savings of some 50% since 2008 (SO1). VS1 said that his organization (one of several commissioned by LCC to deliver homelessness services) had lost half its council funded bed places and 30% of the funding on each remaining bed. The council closed a number of hostels, a source of disagreement and trigger for small-‐scale protests (see further below). The strictures of austerity were an important justification for the reconfiguration of homelessness
8
services and collaborative mechanisms. Said one official, they had only just got over this “big hump in the road”, and “are already having to think about another spending review on homelessness” (O6). Austerian Realism Public sector respondents argued that they are compelled by the austerian government in Westminster to make these cuts. We call this disposition “austerian realism”, influenced by the notion of “capitalist realism”: that “the end of capitalism is less conceivable than the literal end of the world” (Balakrishnan, 2010: 53). By austerian realism, we mean the disposition of regretful austerity compliance, nonetheless pursued with diligence for the perceived lack of a viable alternative. No LCC politician or official argued that the city should defy austerity, or advocated an alternative non-‐austerian strategy for Leicester, either now or under a future Labour government. According to SO2, LCC chose not to adopt an overtly confrontational stance towards Westminster, because “you can open yourself up to more scrutiny from central government”; there are “various things that they can do to make things more difficult”. A councillor captured the zeitgeist of austerian realism in the Leicester Mercury (http://po.st/IL8u4p): “We are not happy making cuts but we cannot set an illegal deficit budget. If we do Eric Pickles will simply come in and take over the running of the council”. These responses echo Lyons’ (2007: 1) notion of a dependency culture, where local authorities try to anticipate the demands of the centre before it makes them. Lyons questioned the capacity of central government to break from its age-‐old control culture, or local government from its post-‐Thatcher culture of dependency. SO2 continued: “I think that people don’t necessarily understand what’s imposed by
9
central government, and what our response as a council to that is to be honest. That is obviously frustrating from where I’m sitting”. P2 elaborated. “An example of that would be the bedroom tax”. LCC thought it was “dreadful”, “but as a council you are bound by the law of what the bedroom tax is.” “You have to implement it”, but try to mitigate the impact through advice and support (P2, also P4). According to SO4, “people were protesting against Leicester City Council, but in some senses their hands are tied”. Money can be moved around, but “ultimately they can’t bring more money into the city”. O5 commented on protests directed at the Council: “Sometimes we might agree with them, but the budget is the envelope that we are given to spend”. The logics of austerian realism meant that LCC respondents resented protests directed at them. Re-‐iterating the theme of agency denial in the local politics of austerity, some were frustrated there had not been more national protests against the Coalition (see further below). However, projecting themselves as lacking the power to operate beyond the austerian envelope did not mean respondents thought LCC has no agency at all. Councillors and officials, many influenced by social democratic ideas, considered that they and other public institutions do well for citizens in very difficult circumstances. A sub-‐text to austerian realism was that the council is doing what it can to protect groups deemed vulnerable, in circumstances not of its own making. Respondents did not explicitly articulate theories of the state, but austerian realism invoked distinctly modernist assumptions about the inviolability of state power and the capacity of government to enforce its will. It infers a local authority situated in top-‐down relations of control where the centre holds a monopoly of legislative, administrative and judicial power and ample capacity to compel localities
10
into (regretful) compliance, thus denying them agency. It was notable, however, that the state described by LCC was not a Leviathan with positive normative connotations, but a vehicle for discipline and control. VS1 stood out in expressing sympathy with the dilemmas of representative government: that to be too “responsive” to organisations LCC supports, would be to risk interest group capture, or the perception thereof. VS1 was alone in articulating and defending the principle of impartiality, highlighting that despite the dominance of statist practices, justificatory discourses for statism deriving from modernism were lacking in discussions of austerity. Compliance was perceived as a rational response to the threat of coercion. The research revealed no explicit remnants of the “dented shield” justifications deployed by some Labour councils after the defeat of “municipal socialism” (Boddy and Fudge, 1984); the claim that it is better to have Labour authorities making lawful cuts to protect public services as far as possible, than Tory councils seeking to destroy them. This could be because some respondents saw little prospect of change under Labour (e.g. P4, O6). But whatever the reasons, the lack of normative justification for a Labour authority managing austerity underscored the perception that LCC depicts itself as unable to do much about austerity -‐ particularly with further budget reductions expected. The threat of punitive measures and agency denial from London is no fiction and should not be understated. Following local scandals, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government has recently appointed technocrats to run two English authorities, Rotherham and Tower Hamlets -‐ with barely a hint of dissent. Warranted or not, these measures highlight the administrative of the central state,
11
the enduring dependency culture in local government and the correlate lack of any sense that such issues should be resolved solely through local democratic -‐ or judicial -‐ processes. Nevertheless, in anticipating what a future government might do respondents from LCC were arguably co-‐authors of their disciplinary regime as well (governmentality), internalising the dispotif of compliance forged in the legacies of municipal socialism (grievous political defeat) and the lack of a perceived alternative. The perceived and real threats of punishment legitimised austerian realism in Leicester and framed the Council’s approach to collaboration, discussed below. Contesting Austerity Protests against austerity in Leicester have been small-‐scale and episodic. A number of respondents contrasted an active civil society in the past with relative quiescence now. P3 commented: “a lot of things we’re having to do have been painful for those on whom they have impacted … but actually some of them would a decade or more ago would have been generally publically controversial… A lot of them are happening almost without a squeak” (also P1, SO2, SO3). The most prominent of the small and episodic anti-‐austerity protests in Leicester have been organised by homelessness and welfare reform activists, triggered by government welfare reforms and the Council’s homelessness strategy review. Council respondents thought they had been supportive of local protests, while attempting to direct them towards central government. According to P1: “We will facilitate people’s sort of legitimate right to protest, and oppose national government decisions, and indeed decisions that we’re taking locally that they may object to.” They pointed out that LCC could have “turfed them off”, but chose not to.
12
Other respondents pointed out that LCC had responded to protests by reallocating cuts (P4, O4, O6, A3, A4). However, P1 was frustrated that protestors had turned fire on the Council, discussing two demonstrations against the bedroom tax: I spoke at the first one. The mood shifted at the second one quite dramatically. The first one there were a lot of Labour councillors there, a lot of left-‐wing organizations, trade unions, members of the public with no particular affiliation, it was a very united feeling. The second one, the mood had shifted somewhat; the argument was put at the demonstration that it was the Labour Party’s fault.
While sympathising to a degree with the Council’s predicament, activists
were sceptical that it was doing all it could to resist austerity. A1 called for a more directly confrontational approach to the centre: “Why does the local council have to obey government laws and in what way can we circumvent that”? A2 said that despite government policy, the council is “95%” responsible and “very culpable”. “They have implemented government cuts absolutely without any consideration of using the vast amount of reserves that they have”. Nor were anti-‐austerity activists convinced that LCC’s attitude to protests was particularly supportive. Asked whether citizens have a real say, A4 commented: “No. No, and I have been told this by council workers myself. Someone told her: “don’t bother, it doesn’t matter what you do, even protesting”. A2 thought that protest groups “have become less influential, full stop”, drawing attention to increased repression as part of the explanation. A2 saw participating in protest as risky and potentially threatening, particularly in London where “if anything happens they are threatening water cannons or rubber bullets” (also A3, A4). But they argued that
13
LCC contributes to this climate through its own (far more limited) security paraphernalia: “the manner and the way that you’re treated, it’s automatically presumed that you are lesser …”. VS2 commented: I did go to a meeting at the town hall and I was quite frankly appalled. We were sat in the gallery with quite a few homeless people and when we were at the back door to be let in, a security official in full uniform was stood there. I was first in the queue in my cassock and he gave ground. I wonder if I hadn’t been there, if he would have shut the door on them. We interpret these contrasting outlooks as a contest about political feasibility. Whereas LCC’s austerian realists thought they were pragmatic and maximally responsive, critics saw them as unresponsive and unnecessarily compliant. The common ground in this contested terrain is the modernist conception of statehood. LCC thinks anti-‐austerity protestors should focus their ire on central government because it has the power and bears the responsibility. Activists tended to see LCC as the state writ small, perceiving it as having power and responsibility and thus of being complicit in austerity. They perceived austerian realism as expedient and believe LCC has greater political agency than it admits. Governance Networks in Leicester New Labour did not formally adopt austerity while in office, but by 2008 Davies and Pill (2012) detected signs that the local partnership bureaucracies it fostered were beginning to wither amid disillusionment, cuts, institutional up-‐scaling and network closure in pursuit of joined-‐up government and its imputed efficiency. Similar processes were found in Leicester. Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) generated an enormous volume of research throughout the 2000s and were seen by
14
some enthusiasts as potentially the new leading organ of local governance. The City Mayor abolished Leicester’s strategic partnership soon after he took office in 2011. Apart from those asked, interviewees did not mention this partnership. When asked about LSPs, P3 and SO3 were scathing. For P3: “even when they were very fashionable in the Blair years … I was intensely sceptical of them”. They were pleased that by the time the Mayoralty was established, “the fashion had changed”. It was “very easy to ditch the whole damn lot”. For SO3, “I have to say, I have never met a single person who would speak generously about LSPs. Most people would say they turned out pretty quickly to be little more than talking shops”. Then and now, they said, the dominant public attitude is “we don’t want to decide, we want you to provide”. Whether winding-‐up the LSP matters for the governance of Leicester depends in part on whether it was ever seen as important -‐ not so according to P3 and SO3 (see Apostolakis, 2004 for an alternative view from the halcyon days). It also depends on whether changing forms of collaboration signify a change in the modernist influences on Leicester. Some respondents commented that the establishment of the Mayoralty, with the political and executive authority invested in the role (Copus and Dadd, 2014), allows the City Mayor to pursue a more informal approach. P3 thought that the “ability to get people together, to convene is very significantly different” for the Mayor. They recalled a meeting involving the Mayor, the Bishop of Leicester, the Vice Chancellor, the Chief Constable and the Lord Lieutenant about the discovery of Richard III’s body and its potential for simulating a cultural renaissance in Leicester, commenting “we do not need to set up structures to get people around the table”.
15
More research is needed into this apparent shift towards informality, but the attitudes discussed above reflect trends highlighted by Davies and Pill (2012): an increasingly pragmatic approach to collaboration, eschewing normative enthusiasm for “network governance” or “talking shops”. The preoccupation with fitness for purpose was also found in the governance of homelessness, where multiple situated logics of austerian realism, institutionalism and strategic management were prominent in respondent discourses. Preventing Homelessness through Strategic Management In 2012-‐13, LCC undertook the statutory quinquennial review of its homelessness strategy and services (LCC, 2013a), which coincided with budget cuts described earlier. The review generated high levels of public engagement through protests, consultations, a Mayoral Summit, petitioning, formal scrutiny and surveys. It introduced a controversial change in policy, the reconfiguration of collaborative processes and a new relationship with voluntary sector service providers. The homelessness strategy states: “Homelessness services are in need of transformation. We need to tackle the problem of homelessness downstream – moving from a culture of crisis and rescue to one of prevention and support” (LCC, 2013a: 10). This statement captures the change in policy, and was a significant bone of contention among participants, including voluntary sector service providers who otherwise accepted the need to work within the confines of the austerian envelope (LCC, 2013b: 57). The goal was to move away from the previous emphasis on funding hostels and beds, towards projects aimed at homelessness prevention. Council respondents saw austerity as an important source of pressure for this change of direction, but thought it was the right way forward anyway (a rare
16
example of austerity conferring agency). According to O6: “So the new philosophy in the strategy is that we have to invest less in hostels and more in prevention” because many clients are repeat users meaning “we have plastered over the underlying problem rather than solving it”. Consequently, they were “taking money out of hostels, closing council hostels and putting more into floating support – those services that go in and find out what is really wrong in people’s lives”. O6 added, “there is a certain convenience in using austerity as a means for stopping doing something that doesn’t really work”. O5 summarised the rationale: “The strategy should lead the spend, not the other way around”.
However, responses to consultation – including a report by thirteen voluntary
sector homelessness service providers (Appendix 2 in LCC, 2013b) -‐ challenged the meaning and efficacy of “prevention”, suggesting that day centres and hostels are themselves important preventative facilities (LCC, 2013b: 66). Other voluntary sector and activist respondents thought the change in approach was misguided, because the meaning of “prevention” is contestable and homelessness cannot in any case be prevented. Two reasons were given: first, the deep social and psychological problems that lead people into conditions of extreme marginality and vulnerability to homelessness; and second looming homelessness crises associated with welfare reform, the bedroom tax, benefit capping and – soon -‐ Universal Credit, thought likely to trigger a major increase in rent arrears and evictions. VS2, a particularly vehement critic said: “You don’t even understand what you are preventing, so how are you going to prevent it”? VS3 thought “prevention” is used to define homelessness out of existence. “It’s being sugar coated and given a veneer of prevention, when it is actually being driven by having to save money”. Activist
17
respondents were adamant on this point. A3 drew attention to research showing that hostel-‐dwelling is not optional. A4 went further, arguing that more hostel provision is, in fact, part of the solution to homelessness. Respondents suggested that rehabilitation takes years and that trying to move people out of hostels quickly (within a few months) is damaging and self-‐defeating. VS2 summarised the critical viewpoint, arguing that the purpose of the hostel facility is to “create an environment in which each fellow can slowly find himself, recover from at least some of the trauma, begin to come to terms with what has happened to him, which is often terrible beyond belief, and then make his contribution to the general body”.5
Three points follow from this discussion. First, the Council’s perspective was
formed in the shadow of austerian realism, although in this instance the constraints of austerity were seen as a helpful stimulus for change to a preventative strategy. Second, LCC’s conception of strategic management underscores its modernist credentials: the notion that a properly implemented prevention strategy will deliver better control over the problem of homelessness (whether this is true will become clear over the next few years). However, the most striking aspect for current purposes was the implied critique of modernism in critical commentaries about the Council’s approach to “prevention”. The idea that the mission of government is to prevent social ills forms a powerful common-‐sense discourse in public policy and management, and fits neatly with the efficiency imperatives of austerian realism.6 Marcuse (2014) observed that alternative viewpoints are not so much repressed by such “one-‐ dimensional language”, “they are simply not generated anywhere near the arena of policy discourse or power”. The interviewees provided salutary (if tacit) critique of
18
strategic management, and a reminder to critical scholars of the potential contrasts between prevention strategies and the empowerment of service users (Stoneman, 2011). In this case, the ideology of prevention imputed expertise and control to LCC and clashed with the goals of advocates, contributing to the sense of agency denial. Reforming Collaboration Another outcome of the homelessness review was the reform of collaboration. The homelessness strategy (LCC, 2013a: 11) explains that the former Housing Advice and Programme Support Board (HASP) was perceived by the voluntary sector more as a means for LCC to make policy announcements than as a partnership. It has been reconfigured and renamed the Leicester Homelessness Partnership (LHP). This body, through which homelessness resources are presently channelled, is responsible for managing delivery of the 2013 strategy. According to the terms of reference, seven voluntary sector providers sit on the LHP together with a larger number of council and public sector officials.7 Voluntary sector representatives on the LHP are those commissioned by LCC to deliver the homelessness strategy. VS1 commented, “we have a much more formal relationship with the local authority”. Their organization has gone from “being out in the cold … a little bit on the outside. They have “been brought in” from the cold, but without a “blanket”. O6 said of voluntary sector commissioning, “working with them more effectively is part of the antidote to having to cut the services that we provide” (also O4). SO4 explained the stringency of the council’s commissioning process under austerity. To allocate resources, LCC needs to know: “What are you about, what’s your vision, what are you trying to achieve? Funders won’t provide that unless they know they’re going to get a rate of return on their investment”.
19
Voluntary organisations and homelessness activists outside the commissioning framework do not sit on the LHP, but participate in an alternative partnership body, the Homelessness Reference Group. Where the LHP is concerned with delivering the strategy, the HRG has no executive role but gives interest groups a voice – the opportunity to “vent” as A3 put it. Views about the HRG were mixed. Some thought it a good idea, but other activists and some council respondents criticized it for high-‐handedness, particularly during the early part of the review period. Council respondents thought they had learned important lessons from teething problems with the HRG. Whereas LCC saw these changes as the pragmatic response to austerity dilemmas, critical respondents thought that multiple processes of austerity budgeting, commissioning and the performance management of strategy implementation through the LHP were combining in a disciplinary pincer, eroding the voice and policy influence of voluntary sector and activists. According to A2, the tendering process is onerous. “Now you have to apply it seems every 12 months for a tender every 12 months, from what I can gather it’s like applying for ESF money … the form is ludicrous” [ESF is the European Social Fund]. They continued: “It’s become much harder for them to get the money, they’re less effective because of that, they can’t see as many people because of that: They’re another lot who are going to go and die because they are just going to give up” (also A2).
In addition, the perceived threat of capture contributed to a sense that LCC
is, like Westminster, guilty of agency denial. Said VS1 of his organisation’s role as a commissioned service provider; “we try not to be overtly critical” because “we are paid by the local authority for a number of our services”. Whatever the source of this
20
“threat” (perceived, real or both), several respondents thought competitive tendering and commissioning undermines the ability of the voluntary sector to speak truth to power. Said VS2: “So, when you scratch the surface with a lot of people involved with homelessness, they would love to be free to say the things that I have said. … But they daren’t because it would put their funding at risk. We can’t risk our funding because we don’t get any from them”. For VS3: The control of services by local government becoming single access referral points, and the commissioning of services from charities that might have had in the past (and other agencies) more of a questioning and campaigning voice against some of those changes but are in effect a little bit more mute now because they would be biting the hand that feeds them … It’s a real issue I think, this kind of gagging of potential dissent by commissioning them. Interestingly, VS1 said that supporting an advocacy group had enabled his organisation to retain a critical voice by proxy. “That has been quite useful for us, because first, as an organization that stops some of that conflict of interest that we might have, because we might be organizationally compromised in criticising a key funder, but even more importantly it allows the customer to have a voice”. Without it, the organisation “would have trouble finding that critical voice”. Reflecting the activist perspective, A4 thought that commissioning had created an environment where “nobody is brave enough to say anything” with funded organisations feeling “gagged” (similar comments were made by A2, A3 and VS3). In summary, the LCC-‐led process of tendering, commissioning and delivery through the LHP was perceived by others as a form of control, de-‐politicizing the governance of homelessness under the discipline of strategic management and
21
official expertise, warranted by austerian realism. The sense of a threatening, remote and powerful state/local state elite appears throughout the study, where central government is perceived as denying agency to LCC and LCC to critical voices in the city – in this instance through the disciplines of tendering, commissioning and strategic management through partnership. We interpret agency denial at each level as the combination of real constraints and self-‐discipline in the context of resource dependency: voluntary sector organisations on LCC, LCC on the centre. Discussion Perhaps the most striking theme emerging from the study is the trope of agency denial, valorising both the Council’s discourse of austerian realism and the sense of disempowerment among non-‐governmental activists in the governance of homelessness and anti-‐austerity protests. The discourses reflect long-‐established themes about the inauthenticity of collaborative mechanisms: exclusion, distrust and conflict (e.g. Davies, 2011, 2012), without much confidence in resistance either. As was suggested earlier, most respondents drew from modernist ideas about a remote, powerful state/local state, shorn of normative legitimacy (though recall the observation by VS1 quoted above). If the celebration of networks, or indeed of Weberian impartiality, were once invoked to legitimize governing strategies in Leicester, there is little trace of them here – or of the unusually close relationship between theory and policy witnessed under New Labour through the ideology of the Third Way. The commitment to working in partnership with non-‐state actors persists, but for pragmatic reasons associated with institutionalist logics Bevir (2005) attributed to network governance and the functional imperatives of austerian realism. The remainder of the discussion considers two further themes: the
22
prevalence of austerian realism in British governance and its implications for decentring and re-‐centring analyses of the state. If the views of the Local Government Association are representative, England’s local authorities are beset by grim determinism, fearing that the combination of austerity cuts and pressures on social service expenditure will overwhelm the sector by 2020 – the so-‐called Graph of Doom scenario, which lends the push for joined up services a sense of profound urgency.8 Emerging research finds these sentiments reflected in many localities. According to a University of Birmingham commission on the future of public services in the city, for example, the sense of “perma-‐austerity” fuels a “narrative of doom” among officials: some talked about a sense of loss and grief for the past; with organisations paralyzed by the impact of the cuts, and unable to provide a new vision to work towards. As one put it, “No message of hope – leadership is putting council into survival mode by the language they”re using. Nobody is planning for post austerity”. One interviewee spoke about the effect of losing large numbers of staff: “You hear the language of loss everywhere. I get affected by it” (http://21stcenturypublicservant.wordpress.com, posted 9.7.14). Dawning austerian realism was also apparent in the Cardiff TRANSGOB study. The city had been somewhat insulated from austerity until recently but now faces problems familiar to LCC (Guarneros Meza and Pill, 2014). The 2014/15 Welsh Government budget represents “by far the worst settlement since devolution” with cuts of over 5% required in 2014/15, rising to 9% by 2015/16. One interviewee suggested, “it’s time to put away the manicure scissors and reach for the scythe”. Guarneros Meza and Pill reported that Welsh ministers blame Westminster for the
23
cuts. If this stance is expedient, it also reflects the common theme of agency denial, arising from continued resource dependency on Westminster.9 Variants of austerian realism may be widespread in British local governance, particularly but not only among Labour authorities. It could be tempered by boosterism in fast-‐growing and bullish cities like Manchester, where property, land and financial reserves are utilized to plug the gap or delay cuts (as some said should happen in Leicester), or spending on welfare is lower. Tory authorities reportedly have mixed views about austerity, with some also blaming the UK government for their unpopularity.10 Nor are authorities prevented from finding reasons for optimism in their own longstanding political traditions (Lowndes, this volume). With these qualifications, we construe austerian realism as a powerful justificatory narrative, imbued with multiple tropes of modernism and reflecting real constraints imposed by the center -‐ always constructed, mediated and implemented through local beliefs, traditions and dilemmas. The wager of this paper – seemingly that of modernist officials and activists in Leicester -‐ is that the state is “real” in the sense suggested earlier; it is possessed of contingent but durable beliefs, traditions and resources enabling it to deny (and sometimes confer) agency. Austerian realism in Leicester is a response to local resource dependency, coercive state power, threat, and the self-‐discipline of local actors – of government plus governmentality: “cut ourselves or be cut from above”. In a more dystopian vein, Wacquant’s studies of the penal state provide a stark insight into the way austerian regimes use force to reconfigure and intensify urban marginality. Stripped of the normativity he imputes to “bureaucratic rationality”, Wacquant found that in banlieus and favelas, we find the “practical
24
reductio ad absurdum of the state to its repressive apparatus” (2008: 70). Understanding how the beliefs, desires, traditions and resources of state actors allow them to confer or deny agency– and why for many, authoritarianism (like modernism itself) is “colonizing more and more of life” (Bevir, 2013: 211-‐12) – is a crucial challenge for de-‐centred studies of British governance -‐ the literature is populated with myriad stories of coercion and threat under neoliberal restructuring (e.g. Tyler, 2013). Researching the beliefs, desires and traditions of citizens denied agency – and trying to reclaim it -‐ is equally important: how do they cope, respond to and contest austerity conditions in which they are compelled to live, with what prospects of overcoming violence and reviving democracy? Conclusion The chapter explored how local actors constructed governance arrangements in Leicester, in response to dilemmas imposed by austerity. The main conclusion is that there are strong elective affinities between modernist theories and the strategies, actions and justifications of local leaders, enacted through LCC’s conception of austerian realism, and voluntary sector and activist perceptions of local state authoritarianism. However, the modernism of austerity governance in Leicester is hollowed out: it is modernism without commitment. This is a story of necessity without teleology, of actions without normative warrants or felicitous outcomes associated with the traditions of bureaucratic impartiality, managerialist expertise, institutionalism – or indeed heterotopian network theories aspiring to postmodern governance. Agency denial is the central problematic of modernist theorising about austerity in Leicester. For LCC, the story of austerian realism reflects real fiscal and disciplinary pressure from the UK government and the self-‐
25
discipline of actors who think it better to do what is expected than resist and face the consequences – evidence of the enduring dependency culture described by Lyons (2007: 1), or of responsible government depending on perspective. The discourse of austerian realism in Leicester is thoroughly “politicist”. Respondents did not talk about the need to attract business investment or threats from currency and bond market speculators to justify austerian realism. One conjecture is that under a Labour government, the locus of “blame” for continuing austerity in Labour authorities could shift from government to the markets. Labour authorities might prefer an expansionary policy context, but its absence in our respondent discourses suggests that it is considered beyond the bounds of possibility in the foreseeable future. The study of Leicester poses important questions for governance theorists and practitioners. To the extent “exogenous” pressures (like inflation, recessions and coercion) are real, how mutable and transient or sticky and sedimented are they? What makes some practices and pathologies more durable and ubiquitous than others? How do local activists formulate real and imagined constraints as dilemmas and opportunities, spanning what choice-‐horizons? And, what kinds of resources (belief, desire, tradition, resources, threat, coercion), can actors mobilise in attempting to overcome dilemmas? Research on these issues might help address Bevir’s challenge (2013: 63) to modernist theory (critical realism in particular), to show how structures work through local practices; in this case, how the politics of agency denial contributes to the sedimentation of state power and the subordination of alternative beliefs, desires and traditions. At stake is not reification, but the enduring predicaments to which history gives rise through
26
repetition, diffusion, habituation and routine – patterns of conduct that are difficult to break even when beliefs change. The repressive apparatus must remain at the heart of contemporary state theory, a place it has been denied by many contemporary theories of governance. In de-‐centred studies of how state coercion and discipline confers and denies agency, fertile grounds might be discovered for dialogue and debate among post-‐Foundationalists and modernists sharing a common commitment to realism and the critique of reification. _____________________ References Apostolakis, C. (2004) Citywide and Local Strategic Partnerships in Urban Regeneration: Can Collaboration Take Things Forward? Politics 24(4): 103-‐112. Balakrishnan, G. (2010) The Coming Contradiction, New Left Review, 2/66: 31-‐53. Benington, J and Hartley, J. (2009) ”Whole Systems Go”! Improving Leadership Across the Whole Public Service System. Sunningdale: National School of Government. Bevir, M. (2005) New Labour: A Critique. London: Routledge.
27
Bevir, M (2013. A Theory of Governance, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bevir, M and Rhodes R A W. (2003) Interpreting British Governance. London: Routledge. Bevir, M and Rhodes R A W. (2006) Governance Stories. London: Routledge. Blanco, I and Davies J S. (2014) Collaborative Urban Governance Under Austerity: A Comparative Study of Trends and Prospects in Spain and the UK. Paper presented at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Urban Affairs Association, San Antonio, Texas, 19-‐ 22nd March 2014. Boddy, M., and Fudge, C, (eds). (1984) Local Socialism. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Bogason, P. (2000) Public Policy and Local Governance: Institutions in Postmodern Society. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar. Bolden, R., Petrov, G., and Gosling, J. (2009) Distributed Leadership in Higher Education, Educational Management, Administration & Leadership, 37(2): 257-‐277.
28
Copus, C. and Dadd, M. (2014) ‘It’s a Proper Job’: Process, People and Power in an English City. Public Money & Management, Published online before print, June 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09540962.2014.945797. Davies J S. (2011) Challenging Governance Theory: From Networks to Hegemony, Bristol, The Policy Press. Davies J S. (2012) Network Governance Theory: A Gramscian Critique, Environment and Planning A, 44(11): 2687 – 2704. Davies J S. (2014) Coercive Cities: Reflections on the Dark Side of Urban Power in the 21st Century, Journal of Urban Affairs, 36(S2): 590-‐599. Davies J S and Pill M. (2012) Hollowing Out Neighbourhood Governance? Re-‐scaling Revitalization in Baltimore and Bristol, Urban Studies 49(10): 2199-‐2217 Du Gay, P. (2012) ‘Leviathan Calling: Some notes on sociological anti-‐statism and its Consequences’. Journal of Sociology, 48(4): 397-‐410.
29
Guarneros Meza, V., and Pill, M. (2014) Collaborative Governance under Austerity: The Case of Cardiff. Unpublished draft. LCC. (2013a) Leicester’s Homelessness Strategy 2013-‐2018. http://www.leicester.gov.uk/your-‐council-‐ services/housing/homelessness/homelessness-‐strategy-‐2013-‐2018/. LCC. (2013b) Homelessness Review Strategy and Delivery Proposals Consultation Feedback. http://consultations.leicester.gov.uk/adult-‐social-‐care-‐health-‐and-‐ housing/homelessness/supporting_documents/Final%20consultation%20report.pdf. Lynn, L.E. (2001) The myth of the Bureaucratic Paradigm: What Traditional Public Administration Really Stood For’, Public Administration Review, 61(2): 144-‐160. Lyons, M. (2007) Place-‐shaping: A Shared Ambition for the Future of Local Government. Executive Summary. London: The Stationary Office. Marcuse, P. (2015) De-‐politicizing Political Discourse: How “We” Write. Cities, forthcoming.
30
Marsh, D. (2011) The New Orthodoxy: The Differentiated Polity Model, Public Administration, 89(1): 32-‐48. McAnulla, S. (2006) ‘Challenging the New Interpretivist Approach: Towards a Critical Realist Alternative’, British Politics, 1(1): 113-‐138. Moran, M. (2010) ‘Policy-‐making in an Interdependent World, In C. Hay, Ed, New Directions in Political Science. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 25-‐42. Rhodes R A W. (2011) Thinking On: A Career in Public Administration” Public Administration, 89(1): 196-‐212. Stoker, G. (2011) Was Local Governance Such a Good Idea? A Global Comparative Perspective, Public Administration 89(1) 15-‐31. Stoneman, L. (2011) Is Prevention Inherently Good? A Deconstructionist Approach to Prevention Literature, Policy and Practice. Western Criminology Review, 12(2): 21-‐34. Tyler, I. (2013) Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. London, Zed Books.
31
Wacquant, L. (2008) The Militarization of Urban Marginality: Lessons from the Brazilian Metropolis. International Political Sociology, 2(1): 56–74.
1
TRANSGOB is the abbreviation for “transformations of urban governance in the context of the crisis”. The research will continue through an ESRC-‐funded eight country comparative study of austerity from 2015-‐17. Ref: ES/L012898/1. 2 The research in Leicester continues and for this reason, we have not yet shared the chapter with respondents. However, we sought the comments of a recent former official of LCC, who found that the argument largely made sense to him. 3 Leviathan is legitimate because it is the source of rights and freedoms. For Marxists, the capitalist state is illegitimate because it is an impediment to the greater rights and freedoms of communism. 4 See http://citymayor.leicester.gov.uk/budget-‐proposals-‐2013-‐15/overview-‐of-‐our-‐budget-‐and-‐ plans. 5 Virtually all respondents thought that the ideal solution to homelessness is to build cheap public and social housing and reverse austerian welfare reforms. 6 Questioning the ideology of “prevention” hadn’t occurred to me before – I was grateful to be exposed to this critique. 7 http://www.leicester.gov.uk/your-‐council-‐services/housing/homelessness/homelessness-‐ partnerships/ 8 See Sergeant (2013) at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-‐politics-‐18610169. 9 I recently met the leader of another Labour authority, a traditionalist in despair at having to make 2,000 people redundant. It did not occur to him that he has a choice – such as to refuse or resign his position to lead a fight against the cuts. 10 E.g. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a42da73c-‐d81f-‐11e2-‐b4a4-‐00144feab7de.html#axzz37orEkepB.
32
