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- Convenors:
-
Cris Shore
(Goldsmiths)
Susan Wright (Århus University)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- Horsal 4 (B4)
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 14 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the idea of policy mobility and its effects. We invite reflection on how ideas and practices associated with governance and management travel, how policies are taken up or get embedded in new contexts, & the new kinds of relations, subjectivities & practices this process creates.
Long Abstract:
It is over 25 years since the project for an Anthropology of Policy was initiated at the EASA conferences in Prague and Oslo. At that time neoliberal experiments in the reinvention of government through structural adjustment programmes, New Public Management reforms and the 'governance' turn were at their height in countries such as Britain, the US, Chile, Mexico and New Zealand. In the decades since, the rationalities that drove those process have mutated, diversified and spread rapidly across the globe bringing major changes to the global economy and local societies. This EASA conference explores the mobility and settlement of people in an increasingly globalised world. However, we might equally ask about the mobility of ideas and concepts and how particular programmes, practices and policies travel, get taken up, or become embedded in new environments.
We invite papers to reflect on:
1. How do policies travel?
2. Who are the actors that drive the mobility and settlement of policies?
3. In what ways do policies reshape the domains into which they are introduced, and how are those policies themselves changed as a result of their entry into new contexts?
4. What new systems of governance, social relations and organisational forms do they generate?
5. How do governments, companies and other organisations use policies to try and engender new kinds of subjects and subjectivities?
6. How do individuals and groups engage with and contest policy processes?
7. What new methodological tools and theoretical approaches can we use to analyse policy mobility?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 14 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
This paper articulates a theory of policy mobility and policy residues. Ecological and actor-network assemblage concepts help to explore Indigenous policy laminations in settler colonial Australia, but if everything is entangled, what then are the possibilities for political agency?
Paper long abstract:
This paper describes policy travel both in terms of policy as a modality of settler colonial governance, and as something which operates spectrally, as policies past form a haunting presence, shaping bodies and life possibilities as an invisible force in the contemporary moment. Using examples drawn from long term fieldwork conducted in regional and remote Australia, movement here is imagined both as the freighting in of new policy regimes - of the conventionally understood 'do this, constrain that' variety - and as a dynamic interaction with prior policy imports, organically conceived. To understand how policy travels and its manifold effects, we need to arrest the temptation of thinking of policy movement as a uni-directional flow from one static point to another, and consider movement using more ecological frames, tracing the circulations between policy pronouncements, laws, political structures, global capital, ideologies, conditions within offices, conditions within households, so on and so forth; to explore how these circulations create sticky inheritances which are also part of their here-and-now material manifestations. While such a conceptualisation of policy mobility owes a clear allegiance to actor network theory, this paper also seeks a different destination: one which describes the possibilities for politicised human agency within the thickets of various policy ecologies; or put differently, one which articulates an answer to the perennial question animating much policy critique, 'what else can we do?'.
Paper short abstract:
This paper tracks the expansion of indicators and the spread of enumeration and ranking as populist projects and as instrument for new forms of authoritarian management. We focus on PFI schemes and UK Academy Schools to show how indicators colonise new domains and promote new regimes of control.
Paper long abstract:
A key feature of our times is the extraordinary degree to which performance indicators and ranking systems are being used as instruments in the management and governance of the workplace and a vast array of other areas of life. The proliferation of benchmarking systems, scorecards and league tables that purport to measure and rate the qualities and merits of particular phenomena (from hotels, restaurants, automobiles and consumer products to trust, happiness, physical attractiveness and spirituality) has become a populist project of global proportions. However, this index mania also creates the conditions for a new form of governance to flourish, one that uses numbers, ratings and data as calculative technologies for extending managerial control and reshaping human subjectivity to suit neoliberal policy agendas. Taking as our case study policies for promoting Public Private Partnerships and the spread of Academy Schools in the UK, this paper examines these processes and their wider societal and ethical implications. We ask, how do these seemingly technical and mundane instruments of audit travel and resettle in new environments, and how are these measurements instrumental in the colonization of new domains?
Paper short abstract:
My paper will discuss the disrupted process of planning, deferring and realising a new tramway in Lviv (Ukraine). I will examine this tram as an urban socio-materiality brought into being by overlapping policies - some of them translocally mobile, others with the aim at regulating urban mobility.
Paper long abstract:
Tramway number 8 was projected originally by Soviet planning authorities in the 1980s as the major connection between the city centre and Sykhiv, the biggest socialist housing district intended to become a home for 120.000 people. The end of state socialism disrupted investments in public infrastructures and brought about the privatisation of the already built apartment blocks. The projected tramway became one of the many unfulfilled promises of an arrested future.
Journeys to the old city remained troublesome until the idea of the tram was reactivated about 25 years later and finally realised as a conjunction of different policies: i) an urban development scheme that aims at relocating Lviv as an European tourism and IT centre; ii) the subsidies strategies of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development granting credits to "build a new post-Cold War era in Central and Eastern Europe"; and iii) the International Climate Initiative of the German government that finances projects to mitigate green house gas emissions in developing or transforming countries.
In my paper I will trace these policies to their institutional settings of origin as well as to the urban socio-materiality they co-create. I will examine the political rationalities behind them and combine this analysis with observations about the everyday (connective, interactive, frictional) policies enabled by this new socio-materiality. I will discuss conceptually/methodologically how right the conjunction of different policies might open or close conditions of possibilities for infrastructure projects connecting hereby the project of an Anthropology of Policy with infrastructure studies.
Paper short abstract:
This paper provides a critical analysis of polices issued by China's Ministry Of Education in governing Sino-Foreign partnerships. Through analyzing the discursive strategies of MOE and comparing different cases, I show how polices travel to different levels of Chinese higher education sectors.
Paper long abstract:
Upon joining the WTO in 2001, China stated its commitment to GATS and opened its educational market to the world. Meanwhile, the government imposed the fundamental restriction that foreign institutions could only enter China through forming partnerships with Chinese institutions and establishing joint-venture institutions or joint programmes. Though China has enacted a corpus of policies to stipulate the basic structure and developmental direction for these partnerships, the distinctive ways of interpreting and implementing these polices by different educational institutions as well as other actors such as foreign governments or industries have generated vastly varied organisational forms, social relations and subjects in the Sino-Foreign educational partnerships.
This paper provides a critical analysis of polices issued by China's Ministry Of Education in governing these partnerships, which are addressed in the policy documents as CFCRS. Through analyzing the discursive strategies of MOE and comparing the two cases of CFCRS institutions, I show how polices travel to different levels of Chinese higher education sectors and install a hegemonic discourse of global knowledge hierarchy featuring 'the lagging behind' Chinese education and 'the advanced' foreign education.
My inquiry draws on the work of Jason Glynos and David Howarth and their development of Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories into a framework of explanatory 'logics.' I point out how the Social Logics of competition, atomization and instrumentailization, the Political Logics of equivalence/differences and the Fantasmatic Logics of 'a rising China' naturalize the knowledge hierarchy and preinstall the conflicts within the CFCRS
Paper short abstract:
How do human rights policies travel? Building on ethnography from the UN Human Rights Committee, NGOS and Finnish ministries this paper asks this question by focussing on the notion of 'universality' as a decisive dynamic contributing to the 'emancipated dependency' of governance and subjectivities.
Paper long abstract:
How do human rights policies travel; who are the actors that push for their mobility and how are human rights policies adopted in diverse local contexts? This paper discusses these themes by anchoring its inquiry on the NGO reports that accompany the work of the UN Human Rights Committee, the 'most authoritative' UN human rights expert body that oversees how states comply with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Via ethnographic glimpses from the 'centre' of international human rights work - NGO headquarters in Geneva, NGO briefings at UN offices - and scenes from the 'periphery' - namely the offices of local ministries and NGOs in Finland - this paper examines what kind of social relations this mobility both encompasses and generates. It discusses unexpected relationships forged between government representatives and NGO delegates, as well as the role of distinct influential insiders in the process.
Building on the past decade of pioneering work on translation, 'vernacularization' and indicators (Merry), audit (Strathern, Cowan, Billaud) as well as broader debates on expertise, accountability and governance, this paper anchors itself around the notion of universality, but with a twist: whereas in much human rights scholarship universality is approached as an intrinsic quality of human rights ideology, this paper casts it both as an empirical outcome of, and a decisive dynamic contributing toward the travel of human rights policies. This paper discusses the kind of governance structures and subjectivities formed by 'universalizing', paraphrasing it as 'emancipated dependency'.
Paper short abstract:
What happens when mobile policies meet national moorings? In this paper, we look at how European territorial cohesion policies have travelled into Wales. We argue that cohesion with Europe has offered a way for devolved Welsh policy to become more, not less, distinct.
Paper long abstract:
What happens when policies made for mobility meet national moorings? After a majority in Wales voted to leave the European Union, more than one media commentator declared that the turkeys had voted for Christmas. The reasoning behind comments of this kind was simple: unlike most of the UK, Wales has been a net beneficiary of European funding. Since 2000, Wales has received funds particularly through 'territorial cohesion' policies, which aim to smooth out Europe's socio-economic map. Following the money trail is (relatively) easy, but in this paper we look instead at how idea(l)s of cohesion have themselves migrated into Welsh policy space - settling, skimming, or side-stepping. As we show, tracing policy mobilities into Welsh governance is made all the more intriguing by Wales' status as a country, yet not quite a state. Just as Wales caught European attention as an object for cohesion, it became a subject for devolution within the UK. The story of Welsh political self-determination is still unfolding, making policy a crucially contested space. We argue that cohesion with Europe has, paradoxically, offered a way for a devolved Wales to become more, not less, distinct. Travelling the policy landscape and drawing on current fieldwork from Cardiff to Ceredigion, we show mobilities in the re-making of moorings - and we wonder some more about turkeys.
Paper short abstract:
Policy mobility presents a series of theoretical and methodological challenges for anthropology. What does it mean when we say that policy is an assemblage, and what do we obscure? This presentation aims to clarify the value and limitations of assemblage theory for the anthropology of policy.
Paper long abstract:
Policy mobility, a process that takes place on various scales at the same time, offers the opportunity for a profound reconceptualization of 'the field' beyond the bounded site. At the same time, it presents a series of theoretical and methodological challenges as policy mobility is not a singular process but an 'assemblage' of various processes taking place in different places, scales, and policy networks. But how exactly do we use the concept of 'assemblage'? What does it mean when we say that policy is an assemblage, and what do we obscure? Clarification is needed regarding assemblage theory, the use of the concept of 'assemblage', its methodological value and limitations. In the first part, I will present how the concept of 'assemblage' is understood and used in research, and argue there is a disjunction between its ontological meanings and its use primarily as a methodological tool in empirical research. The second part of the presentation will focus on the advantages and limits of assemblage theories for the anthropology of policy. I argue that the notion of 'assemblage' allows us to conceptualize policy mobility as an inherently relational process, and to focus on processuality, relationality, and 'the labor of mobilizing' policies across places. Assemblage thinking can reveal the labor practices and the relations (in)between actors, instruments, infrastructures that make possible policy mobility. Yet, the concept of assemblage obscures how policies are immobilized, partially im/mobilized and contested - due to its very focus on policy presence and the labor of coherence-making.
Paper short abstract:
This paper develops an assemblage approach to governance in the context of the environmental regulation around agricultural production. It explores how policy and governance instruments interact and assemble and raises discussion around multiplicity, agency and possibilities in governance
Paper long abstract:
This paper wants to follow the new vistas that an assemblage approach exposes for the understanding and analysis of governance. Here, I understand governance as a shortcut to encompass a great diversity of practices led by a wide diversity of actors, including for instance a regulatory scheme resulting from a national policy, a certification process led by a big retailer and a participatory initiative developed by an NGO. Consequently, governance is framed as the result of multiple, changing and complex interactions of heterogeneous and highly diverse social and material elements, such as public policies, audit practices, or social movements, developing around related goals and objectives. In this paper, I will draw on the preliminary results of an international research on environmental governance in the specific context of agriculture and food (with case studies in Switzerland, New Zealand, The UK, and at the EU level). More specifically, I will develop an ethnography of a farmer led food label in Switzerland, and explore how specific policy and governance instruments and logics are introduced, displaced and reinterpreted along this agri-environmental governance assemblage. This perspective will emphasize: the fact that governance is made of a multitude of moving relations; the collective and distributed nature of agency, as produced by the assemblage, and not being the proprietary realm of specific agents (human or non-human); and finally, the open and always evolving nature of any governance assemblage, which helps to focus on potentialities and possible (and more desirable?) futures.
Paper short abstract:
The geoparks model is formed around a policy for sustainable territorial development. From grassroots initiative to formal UNESCO programme, this paper maps how taken for granted terms & mobilizing metaphors of a central charter,are balanced alongside syncretic enactments as seen in case study sites
Paper long abstract:
Moving from a group of four European territories that coalesced around EU funding, to a global network and programme acknowledged by UNESCO, the geoparks model was borne out of a frustration at the lack of political commitment to recognise and support the valorising, sharing and popularising of geological heritage. This paper follows the flow of geoparks policy which at its core is shaped around a centralising charter and guidelines. Most prominently when expressed in public forums and through descriptive and promotional material, an unproblematic and unpackaged response is given to features of the model such as its 'bottom up' approach.
However, no sooner had the expansion and transmission of that policy been shaped into a common network of locations, then it started to migrate into new situations. With the addition of new geoparks each year, the conditions and assembled partnerships stretched the founding policy documents beyond the contexts within which they were originally framed.
As traced through 3 case study geopark sites the paper presents how the geopark model is transformed through processes that bring together a plethora of alternative assemblages of actors and materials. These place into view a multiplicity of heterogeneous and shifting individual enactments which simultaneously seek to remain consistent to the 'pure' centrally unifying and essentialising geopark charter - echoing what Law et al. (2014) have described as modes of syncretism. The paper considers the variety of strategies that are applied to endure a mixture of pure and messy practices of the geoparks policy.