Governing the Experts: reforming expert governance of rural public housing

Abstract

Drawing on policy texts and a series of interviews conducted with rural public housing officers in 2005, this paper extends understandings of rural governance by shifting the focus on experts from one of being statically understood as the arbiters of rural government-at-a-distance processes to viewing them as more complex actors in these governmental processes. In particular, as governmentalities change at the centre, rural experts need also to be understood as being vulnerable to becoming targets of governmental problematisations and reforms. The paper does this through analysing how policy discourses during the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries problematised the delivery of public housing services by housing officers in Australia and New South Wales (NSW). It then provides insight into how resulting reform processes impacted on rural housing officers from four areas in rural NSW. The paper shows that rural governance understandings can be usefully extended to include how governmental change is not only directed towards and affects rural citizenry but also rural experts who perform multiple roles including being administrators, targets, and opponents of rural reform processes.

Keywords:

• New South Wales
• government-at-a-distance
• rural public housing
• housing professionals
• reforms

Acknowledgements

This research was funded in part through an Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute PhD ‘top up’ scholarship.

Notes

1. The terms ‘housing officials’, ‘housing managers’ and ‘housing experts’ will be used interchangeably in this paper.

2. Latour developed the concept of ‘action at a distance’ in response to the question ‘how was it possible to act on events, places and people that are unfamiliar and a long way away?’ (Miller 1992, p. 65).

3. Franklin (2000, p. 907) defines housing management to be: ‘the activity of managing government subsidised properties owned by local authorities or housing associations, and occupied by rent-paying tenants’.

4. As part of the wider research on rural public housing, interviews were conducted with both housing officials and public housing tenants. The interviews are numbered in the order in which they were conducted.