Spatial uncertainties of contemporary governance

The geography of governance has never been as stable as we have pretended, with the coloured blocs of territory on our maps telling us everything we need to know about the realities on the ground. In Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), Mark Twain alerted us to the fact that the colours on the map – in this case designating the US states of Illinois and Indiana – were not much of a guide to the location of the protagonists in their hot-air balloon over the American Midwest. This is not simply to recognize that the map is not the territory but also to question the adequacy of the claimed functions associated with the particular territories for understanding their governance. It has long been established that the official version of US federalism – with a strict division of powers between the tiers of government – is in fact a poor guide to the reality of shared and parallel jurisdictions exercised in relation to functions from criminal investigations to immigration management and public education. The pattern is even more variegated in that the governments of some states, Mississippi, for example, do much less in terms of even exercising their own powers never mind challenging federal authority compared with states such as California and Massachusetts (Agnew, 2011).

Spatial uncertainty – the unpredictability of finding exactly the same disposition of governmental powers across a given territory – in this case about the relative powers of governments under a federal system, is not new. In the United States, events have produced a host of legislative and regulatory measures that have made governance infinitely more dynamic and uncertain than a simple recitation of constitutional niceties about the role of state and federal tiers might lead you to expect. These events include the Civil War, Supreme Court decisions in the late 19th century that encouraged a national market, two World Wars, the New Deal of the 1930s, the War on Poverty of the late 1960s, and the attack on the federal government from the far right since the 1980s and 1990s. The problem repeats at other geographical scales of governance, from the interstate to the supranational and the international, with various institutions having and deploying powers in complex and overlapping ways that defy the straightforward correlation of discrete powers with specific scales of governance (Agnew, 2018; Jessop, 2016). If anything, the trend has increased exponentially in recent years, even if there are now signs of ‘push back’ from nationalists and separatists who wish to return to a status quo ante of singular territories without overlapping powers that is often more imagined than real.

That said, however, recent years have seen a proliferation of new challenges to what might once have appeared to be fairly stable geographies of governance that are likely to defy a simple ‘back to the future’ impulse. The papers in this issue raise a number of these from a wide range of different geographical settings. Schou and Hjelholt (2019, in this issue) engage with the literature on the political economy of state rescaling to show how citizen-service centres in Denmark have been fundamentally changed in their spatial reach and operations by the adoption of data-driven technologies in the administration of public services. New citizen and manager subjectivities are created as a result of a retreat from the public spaces in which much administrative work was once done. The new digital platforms introduce new types of social inequality into state administration, as access to the technologies becomes a sine qua non for working within the new digital state spaces. At the same time, policies for various local development goals can spread from one country to others.

At the same time Noble (2019, in this issue) uses the case of a rural development policy transferred from Japan to Thailand in 2001 to illustrate the ways such policies evolve as they diffuse to match local conditions in adopter communities. The course of such ‘policy mobilities’ has become an important way of assessing how some local government units change their modus operandi and functions, while others do not. Rather than coercion or rational choice, Noble emphasizes how much what he terms ‘para-diplomacy’ on both sides affected the overall direction and relative success of the empowerment of local government in Thailand in this case relative to the ‘original’ Japanese model.

Of course, the spatial dynamics of governance cannot be separated from the character of local politics. In the case of Ghana, Bob-Milliar (2019, in this issue) shows how different models of political party–society relations tend to prevail across the country’s regions. As a result, the workings of the national government and the regions are affected by the extent to which politics is personalized and depends on the mediation of local activists operating out of informal sites and buildings the author terms ‘sheds’. These ever-shifting venues for political affiliation and mobilization motivate the ways in which issues are articulated and aggregated for movement up the governmental hierarchy.

In turn, Turok and Scheba (2019, in this issue) draw primarily from South African experience to explore how much the discourse of the ‘right to the city’ and the various political pressures and court cases this has entailed have come to animate struggles over access to housing in rapidly urbanizing areas. The authors point out that from an initial emphasis on the right to housing in isolation from other rights, the trend has been towards seeing that right in the overall context of the right to a settlement. In other words, increasingly it is terms of access to a bundle of public goods and services rather than just a place of residence that is at stake. Thus, the spatiality of all rights has been redefined in a profound manner.

In a different register, the last two papers address a set of activities that involve relatively novel spatial networks operating at a range of geographical scales and that our vocabularies of governance have not yet managed to address adequately. The first, by Fetzer and Gilgrist (2019, in this issue), addresses the difficulties faced in characterizing the European Union as a type of economy and how it should be governed given its novel status as a hitherto somewhat ambiguous political–economic entity. The authors suggest that the lack of an adequate imagination about the spatial structure of the European Union as an economic enterprise with a specific set of goals relating to social protection and economic competition has affected its functioning. Finally, Sum (2019, in this issue) shows convincingly how much the Chinese government’s ‘One Belt One Road’ geopolitical imaginary connects back to economic dilemmas congenital to China’s recent model of economic development. It is thus a geographical displacement of the contradictions of Chinese development into the Eurasian realm and beyond. Whether this strategy of economic development can be adequately governed and thus deliver its promise remains open to considerable doubt.

These studies in their various and different ways show that remaining locked into fixed territories of state-dominated governance is a poor starting place for examining governance in the 21st century. Drawing from experience around the world, rather than just the usual suspects, gives an extra boost to the claims on offer in this issue.

When we started this journal nine years ago, one of the goals was to engage in the critical examination of the spatialities of governance at the same time as expanding the geographical scope of such examination beyond the shores of North America and Western Europe. This issue of the journal contributes powerfully to achieving that objective and is a fitting conclusion to my tenure as editor-in-chief. From the next issue onwards, Klaus Dodds will be taking over as the new editor-in-chief and will enjoy the support of a largely new and diverse group of co-editors.

Finally, allow me to express my sincere appreciation to Sally Hardy and colleagues at the Regional Studies Association and Taylor & Francis publishers, the journal manager Madeleine Hatfield, and all the authors and referees who have helped Territory, Politics, Governance approach its 10th birthday in rude health. From 2020 onwards, the journal will be available in five issues per year!