Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- One Depoliticisation, governance and the state
- Two Rethinking depoliticisation: beyond the governmental
- Three Depoliticisation, governance and political participation
- Four Depoliticisation: economic crisis and political management
- Five Repoliticising depoliticisation: theoretical preliminaries on some responses to the American fiscal and Eurozone debt crises
- Six Rolling back to roll forward: depoliticisation and the extension of government
- Seven (De)politicisation and the Father’s Clause parliamentary debates
- Eight Politicising UK energy: what ‘speaking energy security’ can do
- Nine Global norms, local contestation: privatisation and de/politicisation in Berlin
- Ten Depoliticisation as process, governance as practice: what did the ‘first wave’ get wrong and do we need a ‘second wave’ to put it right?
- Conclusion Thinking big: the political imagination
- Index
Ten - Depoliticisation as process, governance as practice: what did the ‘first wave’ get wrong and do we need a ‘second wave’ to put it right?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- One Depoliticisation, governance and the state
- Two Rethinking depoliticisation: beyond the governmental
- Three Depoliticisation, governance and political participation
- Four Depoliticisation: economic crisis and political management
- Five Repoliticising depoliticisation: theoretical preliminaries on some responses to the American fiscal and Eurozone debt crises
- Six Rolling back to roll forward: depoliticisation and the extension of government
- Seven (De)politicisation and the Father’s Clause parliamentary debates
- Eight Politicising UK energy: what ‘speaking energy security’ can do
- Nine Global norms, local contestation: privatisation and de/politicisation in Berlin
- Ten Depoliticisation as process, governance as practice: what did the ‘first wave’ get wrong and do we need a ‘second wave’ to put it right?
- Conclusion Thinking big: the political imagination
- Index
Summary
Introduction
I am extremely grateful to the editors of Policy & Politics for the opportunity to respond to this important, innovative and challenging collection of chapters on the process of depoliticisation and the analytical strategies required to best understand its sources, dynamics and consequences. There has – alas – never been a better time to write about depoliticisation, judging by the contempt in which so many citizens hold political elites in most advanced liberal democracies today and the extent to which political elites continue to respond by placing at one remove the inherent contestability of decisions concerning the provision of collective public goods. Yet, despite the attention that the process of depoliticisation has received, the editors of this collection argue for the need to rethink and reconceptualise much of our existing understanding of this crucial set of linked concerns. They launch, in effect, a ‘second wave’ literature on depoliticisation.
I typically have great sympathy for second waves. They offer a way of correcting the almost inevitable biases and distortions that creep into and accumulate within a new and often hastily developed body of literature prompted by the urgent need to come to terms with a recently identified problem, pathology or societal condition. That, I suspect, is very much the story of the first wave literature on depoliticisation, the limits of which this collection of chapters seeks first to identify and then transcend. ‘Second waves’ are, then, generally rather good things, providing a necessary corrective to errors made in (perhaps forgivable) haste.
Here, however, I find myself somewhat more equivocal than usual. That is no doubt in part a product of being, perhaps for the first and only time in my career, identified as part of a ‘first wave’ – and proponents of first waves, as we know, have a tendency to make stubborn adversaries. I think, however, that there is more to this than that – though I suppose I would…
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Tracing the PoliticalDepoliticisation, Governance and the State, pp. 203 - 226Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2015