Jacqueline Best and Alexandra Gheciu, eds, The Return of the Public in Global Governance. Cambridge University Press, 2014, £72.
|
RATING: 55
|
Buy this book?
|
No
|
This book is conceived as an empirical and theoretical contribution to the literature on the public and the private in global governance, with particular reference to the constitutive character of practice, the relationship between the material and the ideal, and the exercise of power in international relations. Its basic thesis is that there has been a ‘return to the public’ in recent years, but that it must be understood not in terms of the expansion, following decline, of an ontologically separate realm or bounded sphere, but rather in terms of practices – knowledge-constituted meaningful patterns of activity that enable agents (individuals and communities) to reproduce or transform their world (5, 27), and involve ‘goods, actors, or processes that are recognized by the community in which they are carried out as being of common concern’ (32). It addresses the subfields of finance, development, international security, and the environment, and in particular the challenges posed by the ‘global financial crisis’, 9/11, and climate change.
It claims to build on and go beyond existing literatures on the rise of private authority, the global public sphere, and the role of global public goods: the editors suggest that each ‘tends to treat the public as a coherent space or site, thereby reproducing the liberal tendency to think about public/private as ontologically separate domains of social life, marked by their distinct (pre-given) logics and associated with specific institutional locations, and that therefore ‘they fail to understand that its characteristics are socially constructed, and thus potentially subject to contestation, particularly during times of socio-cultural disruption’ (25). A ‘turn to practice’ identifies the processes by which ‘common understandings regarding the nature and boundaries of the public are defined, and subjects, objects, and “rules of the game” for public action are constituted in specific political contexts’ (25-6); and carries with it a particular focus on those that ‘seek to claim particular problems, actors, or processes as public’ – performative ‘public-making practices’ that ‘seek to create the things that they describe’ (33).
This theoretical premise needs taking with a very hefty pinch of salt. Even making allowances for the need to stake out a new perspective as a selling point, it takes some nerve to challenge standard conceptions of the public sphere (citing Habermas, of all people) on the grounds ‘that far from being pre-given and fixed, these boundaries [between public and private] – and the communities of practice that they contain – are constantly constructed, reconstructed, and sometimes challenged through the transformative practices of particular networks of actors, networks that often defy the conventional divides between public and private’ (22). The title alone of the Habermas book they reference, The Transformation of the Public Sphere, should have offered a clue. If it’s about anything, its about the contested transformative practices (discursive and otherwise) of particular networks of actors. Equally, his “The public sphere: an encyclopedia article”, which Best and Gheciu cite, states that ‘the liberal model of the public sphere .. cannot be applied to the actual conditions of an industrially advanced mass democracy organized in the form of a welfare state’: with the rise of the organized working class the public sphere ‘becomes a field for the competition of interests, competitions which assume the form of violent conflict’ (54). Power and its contestation are hallmarks of Habermas’s public sphere, which furthermore ‘must first be arduously constructed case by case’ (55, emphasis mine). As for global public goods, Kaul, also cited, regards as axiomatic that ‘publicness and privateness often are not innate properties. Goods can be – and in the course of history repeatedly have been – shifted from one side of the public-private continuum to the other’. Hardly a rigid conception of separate spheres – and in the same volume, Kaul and Mendoza insist that goods ‘often become private or public as a result of deliberate policy choices’, and devote an extensive section to ‘public and private as social constructs’ (Inge Kaul et al, eds, Providing Global Public Goods: Managing Globalization (UNDP/OUP, 2003: 6); and Inge Kaul and Ronald Mendoza, ‘Advancing the Concept of Public Goods’, pp. 80, 81-87 therein). Most surprisingly, the recurrent criticism of portrayals of private or public spheres as an ontologically separate and bounded entities overlooks that these too reflect discursive strategies, rather than simplistic ways of looking at the world.
In fact, after Avant and Haufler’s historical review of private security agencies, chapter after chapter depicts a pattern in which the response to specific crises, even when brought about by the insufficiently regulated activity of private interests, is to endow private or non-state institutions with public legitimacy and authority. Helleiner documents recourse to private-sector institutions and reporting standards in the post-2008 governance of OTC (over-the-counter) derivatives; Best details the World Bank’s efforts to foster new kinds of publics capable of pressuring the state, and other actors, to reform their practices (in terms, incidentally, that are much more compatible with Habermas’s conception of the public sphere than she herself allows); Bernstein profiles the role of ISEAL (International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling) Alliance, in which market actors and NGOs work together in the virtual absence of states; Paterson touches on a wider range of environmental organisations, while shifting the focus away from the public-private distinction towards complexity and learning by doing; Gheciu describes the granting of authority and legitimacy to private security agencies in post-Communist Bulgaria and Romania; and Leander describes the entangling of public and private in the post 9/11 ‘Top Secret National Security Enterprise’ in the US (a process, incidentally, that recalls the Military-Industrial Enterprise that preceded it, so is not so new).
Concluding essays, the first by Porter and the second by Abrahamsen and Williams, relate at best tangentially to the theme of the ‘return of the public’, confirming the accumulating impression that however construed the notion provides too limited a focus for the collection itself, let alone for a better understanding of contemporary global governance. In sum, the case study chapters are interesting, but the pattern they reflect is a familiar one, and the grander theoretical claims that are made are unconvincing.
The standard of presentation is generally good, but the practice of giving each chapter a separate bibliography (37 pages in all) not only produces duplication and unnecessary length, but allows the contributors to reference themselves or each other 84 times in total – a rapidly spreading and regrettable practice which unambiguously puts private interests above the public good.
It claims to build on and go beyond existing literatures on the rise of private authority, the global public sphere, and the role of global public goods: the editors suggest that each ‘tends to treat the public as a coherent space or site, thereby reproducing the liberal tendency to think about public/private as ontologically separate domains of social life, marked by their distinct (pre-given) logics and associated with specific institutional locations, and that therefore ‘they fail to understand that its characteristics are socially constructed, and thus potentially subject to contestation, particularly during times of socio-cultural disruption’ (25). A ‘turn to practice’ identifies the processes by which ‘common understandings regarding the nature and boundaries of the public are defined, and subjects, objects, and “rules of the game” for public action are constituted in specific political contexts’ (25-6); and carries with it a particular focus on those that ‘seek to claim particular problems, actors, or processes as public’ – performative ‘public-making practices’ that ‘seek to create the things that they describe’ (33).
This theoretical premise needs taking with a very hefty pinch of salt. Even making allowances for the need to stake out a new perspective as a selling point, it takes some nerve to challenge standard conceptions of the public sphere (citing Habermas, of all people) on the grounds ‘that far from being pre-given and fixed, these boundaries [between public and private] – and the communities of practice that they contain – are constantly constructed, reconstructed, and sometimes challenged through the transformative practices of particular networks of actors, networks that often defy the conventional divides between public and private’ (22). The title alone of the Habermas book they reference, The Transformation of the Public Sphere, should have offered a clue. If it’s about anything, its about the contested transformative practices (discursive and otherwise) of particular networks of actors. Equally, his “The public sphere: an encyclopedia article”, which Best and Gheciu cite, states that ‘the liberal model of the public sphere .. cannot be applied to the actual conditions of an industrially advanced mass democracy organized in the form of a welfare state’: with the rise of the organized working class the public sphere ‘becomes a field for the competition of interests, competitions which assume the form of violent conflict’ (54). Power and its contestation are hallmarks of Habermas’s public sphere, which furthermore ‘must first be arduously constructed case by case’ (55, emphasis mine). As for global public goods, Kaul, also cited, regards as axiomatic that ‘publicness and privateness often are not innate properties. Goods can be – and in the course of history repeatedly have been – shifted from one side of the public-private continuum to the other’. Hardly a rigid conception of separate spheres – and in the same volume, Kaul and Mendoza insist that goods ‘often become private or public as a result of deliberate policy choices’, and devote an extensive section to ‘public and private as social constructs’ (Inge Kaul et al, eds, Providing Global Public Goods: Managing Globalization (UNDP/OUP, 2003: 6); and Inge Kaul and Ronald Mendoza, ‘Advancing the Concept of Public Goods’, pp. 80, 81-87 therein). Most surprisingly, the recurrent criticism of portrayals of private or public spheres as an ontologically separate and bounded entities overlooks that these too reflect discursive strategies, rather than simplistic ways of looking at the world.
In fact, after Avant and Haufler’s historical review of private security agencies, chapter after chapter depicts a pattern in which the response to specific crises, even when brought about by the insufficiently regulated activity of private interests, is to endow private or non-state institutions with public legitimacy and authority. Helleiner documents recourse to private-sector institutions and reporting standards in the post-2008 governance of OTC (over-the-counter) derivatives; Best details the World Bank’s efforts to foster new kinds of publics capable of pressuring the state, and other actors, to reform their practices (in terms, incidentally, that are much more compatible with Habermas’s conception of the public sphere than she herself allows); Bernstein profiles the role of ISEAL (International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling) Alliance, in which market actors and NGOs work together in the virtual absence of states; Paterson touches on a wider range of environmental organisations, while shifting the focus away from the public-private distinction towards complexity and learning by doing; Gheciu describes the granting of authority and legitimacy to private security agencies in post-Communist Bulgaria and Romania; and Leander describes the entangling of public and private in the post 9/11 ‘Top Secret National Security Enterprise’ in the US (a process, incidentally, that recalls the Military-Industrial Enterprise that preceded it, so is not so new).
Concluding essays, the first by Porter and the second by Abrahamsen and Williams, relate at best tangentially to the theme of the ‘return of the public’, confirming the accumulating impression that however construed the notion provides too limited a focus for the collection itself, let alone for a better understanding of contemporary global governance. In sum, the case study chapters are interesting, but the pattern they reflect is a familiar one, and the grander theoretical claims that are made are unconvincing.
The standard of presentation is generally good, but the practice of giving each chapter a separate bibliography (37 pages in all) not only produces duplication and unnecessary length, but allows the contributors to reference themselves or each other 84 times in total – a rapidly spreading and regrettable practice which unambiguously puts private interests above the public good.