Introduction

The study of governance has become almost a growth industry, particularly in public policy discussion and research (Chhotray and Stoker, 2009; Levi-Faur, 2012). There has also been an increase, which is clearly not unrelated, in work on political participation, looking particularly at the way in which traditional forms have declined, while new forms have emerged (Dalton, 2008; Bang, 2009a, 2009b, 2010, 2011; Norris, 2011). Both these sets of literature are clearly linked to the growing interest in the putative process of depoliticisation, which is reflected in this volume and elsewhere. For example, governance is often presented as a depoliticised and managerial process in which policy decisions can be reached through networked and collaborative interactions between rational and consensus-seeking policy experts (Torfing et al, 2012). Similarly, declining levels of individual political participation are often taken as evidence of a depoliticised citizenry which presents a major governance problem, reflecting a decline in the legitimacy of government and, thus, problems in developing and implementing policy. Given these three literatures are clearly related, it's surprising that there had been little attempt to link them. This chapter addresses this omission, arguing that, by juxtaposing these literatures, we can both illuminate important issues in each literature and, crucially, suggest how we can repoliticise processes of governance and political participation.

We develop this argument over three substantive sections. The first section reviews the depoliticisation literature, referring particularly to the Flinders and Wood chapter that introduces this volume. Subsequently, the second section focuses on the links between forms of depoliticisation and modes of governance, in essence arguing that a metagovernance approach can make most sense of the ‘evidence’ for depoliticisation and provide a way of understanding both why there has been an increase in depoliticisation and, at the same time, a process of repoliticisation. The final section then addresses the changing nature of political participation, arguing that we are witnessing both depoliticisation and repoliticisation, and that both political scientists and governments need to recognise and respond to both of these processes.

Depoliticisation: deconstructing Flinders and Wood

We agree with Flinders and Wood that: ‘empirical interest in the topic of depoliticisation has not been matched by conceptual precision’. They respond by identifying three faces of depoliticisation, although they place more emphasis on what they call the societal and discursive faces, because, they argue, the governmental face is: ‘the dominant lens’.