Abstract

Today we are witnessing a gradual shift towards governance decision-making. rsquo; is seen as an answer to the complexities of contemporary politics. Private actors now cooperate with public actors in network-structures with the aim of creating effective outcomes by way of steering and regulating through standard and norm setting. The term governance itself is immensely popular in policy-documents of practitioners and in the academic literature of the social sciences. As rsquo; is a one-size-fits-all notion to describe a large and diverse range of new phenomena and practices, it also indicates indirectly that the introduction of these new phenomena and practices entails a tendency towards a fundamental political modification. In this dissertation I provide a philosophical analysis of this ‘political modification’. Given the remarkable absence of the notion of representation in governance, the central guiding thread throughout this research is the role of representation for political regimes. The first research question, which incited this dissertation, was ‘What is the exact relation between democracy, representation and politics?’ On the basis of my analysis of several key texts on representation in the philosophical literature, I understand representation as constitutive. My adapted interpretation of Michael Saward’s representative claim model is an expression of the view that political practice will always be a matter of actors who speak, act or decide for others and in doing so provide the represented with an image of themselves and of the represented and thereby partly constitute the identity and interests of the represented. To clarify the relation between representation and democracy I have drawn on the work of Claude Lefort, in particular his book on Machiavelli and his writings on democracy. What comes to the fore in Lefort’s work is that in democratic regimes the constitutive logic of representation is institutionalized. Adding to Lefort, I have drawn explicit attention to two primordial dimensions of a democratic system that are presupposed in Lefort’s analysis of democracy. These two preconditions are: an organisational setting with a vertical split between the place of power and the represented and a discourse that ‘represents’ the common good as an indeterminate and thus contestable representation. The first precondition, namely the vertical split between the representatives and the represented, is institutionalized in modern societies by way of the division between a political sphere and a social sphere. This division forms what I have called the theatrical setting of representative democracy. The second precondition is that the discursive representation of society, the Darstellung, is put forward as indeterminate and contestable. The second central question of my research was ‘What are the theoretical implications of the concept of representation for the current debate on governance?’ Precisely the two presupposed dimensions of the democratic system to which I pointed in the analysis of representative democracy, have been put under strain by the rise of governance. Because of the networked character of governance the theatrical setting disappears in governance. As there is no longer a localizable pole of power the exercise of power is rendered invisible and almost non-localizable. From the fact that there is no longer a delimited social sphere it follows that political decisions are no longer made with reference to a concrete people. Hence, the relation of Vertretung between the pole of power and the social sphere disappears in governance. Furthermore the discursive representation of society is rendered invisible in governance. The evident question that follows from this analysis is ‘How can governance be re-politicized again and what role does representation play in this?’ This formed the third central question of my research. On the one hand, I have briefly addressed the question of how governance could be institutionally re-engineered so that it resembles the ‘political’ character of representative democracy more. I make use here of the work of Rosanvallon. On the other hand, I elaborately engage with the work of Rancière describing the specificities of a social process of contestation that can have the impact of re-politicization.