The Change of Governance and the Governance of Change

One standard critique of governance theory, and of other functionalist approaches in the social sciences, is that they find it difficult to cope with change. The logic of this critique has been that functionalist approaches depend upon a stable set of structures that will fulfill the functions posited to be essential for governance or for society more generally. Further, to the extent that they do include change in their analysis, functionalist approaches tend to be teleological, with an assumption that all systems will evolve in a certain direction. This social and political evolution often involves some notion of modernity or development, as was the case of the structural-functional models popular in comparative politics in the 1960s and 1970s. The same, and perhaps even more severe, argument concerning change has been applied to systems approaches to politics that share some characteristics with functional models. The homeostatic nature of systems theory means that there is a tendency to resist change (Finkle and Gable, 1973) and to return to equilibrium if the stability of the system is upset. Despite the apparent resistance to change implied in these theoretical approaches, we are arguing that change is possible, and that with appropriate political action can be made to happen. But saying that change occurs is not sufficient, and we need to understand the nature of those changes. We will be arguing that governance as we have conceptualized it contains a much stronger dynamic element than is usually assumed, and it can indeed cope with change and even drive change within the public sector itself and within the society. This dynamism of our model is in part a function of the responsiveness of the governance system to external demands. This democratic premise about change is important, but there are also options for change from within governance institutions itself. In comparative terms, the more étatiste governance systems may be more capable of producing change because they have, or are willing to exercise, greater control over social and economic processes. This chapter will look at two aspects of change as related to governance. The first is how governance systems respond to their external environments, or to their own internal calculations, and change.