Practising Governance: Multi-Party Decision Making in a Multi-Scalar Context
The much vaunted shift from ‘government’ to ‘governance’ in recent years involves (among other things) increased attention to the participation of ‘stakeholders’ in policy making, a trend affecting not only the actions of politicians but also the day-to-day practice of public servants. In my field,...
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| Format: | Journal Article |
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University of Hertfordshire
2009
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/48133 |
| _version_ | 1848758026896408576 |
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| author | MacCallum, Diana |
| author_facet | MacCallum, Diana |
| author_sort | MacCallum, Diana |
| building | Curtin Institutional Repository |
| collection | Online Access |
| description | The much vaunted shift from ‘government’ to ‘governance’ in recent years involves (among other things) increased attention to the participation of ‘stakeholders’ in policy making, a trend affecting not only the actions of politicians but also the day-to-day practice of public servants. In my field, urban/regional planning, this attention has led to a ‘communicative turn’ in the academy; planning practice is increasingly seen as discursive rather than technical. This reframing leads to some significant tensions: between interactive processes and traditional forms of rationalist legitimacy; and between local aspirations and strategic concerns at other geo-political scales. In this paper, I examine how these tensions were negotiated in one case of participatory planning, a meeting of a committee charged with recommending strategies to solve a perceived shortage of industrial land in a remote Australian town. Using discourse-analytical methods derived from systemic functional linguistics, I describe the committee’s construction of a ‘common interest’ between the local and state levels, placing the discursive practices underlying this construction in a context of multi-scalar governance and power relations. |
| first_indexed | 2025-11-14T09:37:27Z |
| format | Journal Article |
| id | curtin-20.500.11937-48133 |
| institution | Curtin University Malaysia |
| institution_category | Local University |
| last_indexed | 2025-11-14T09:37:27Z |
| publishDate | 2009 |
| publisher | University of Hertfordshire |
| recordtype | eprints |
| repository_type | Digital Repository |
| spelling | curtin-20.500.11937-481332017-02-28T01:39:59Z Practising Governance: Multi-Party Decision Making in a Multi-Scalar Context MacCallum, Diana The much vaunted shift from ‘government’ to ‘governance’ in recent years involves (among other things) increased attention to the participation of ‘stakeholders’ in policy making, a trend affecting not only the actions of politicians but also the day-to-day practice of public servants. In my field, urban/regional planning, this attention has led to a ‘communicative turn’ in the academy; planning practice is increasingly seen as discursive rather than technical. This reframing leads to some significant tensions: between interactive processes and traditional forms of rationalist legitimacy; and between local aspirations and strategic concerns at other geo-political scales. In this paper, I examine how these tensions were negotiated in one case of participatory planning, a meeting of a committee charged with recommending strategies to solve a perceived shortage of industrial land in a remote Australian town. Using discourse-analytical methods derived from systemic functional linguistics, I describe the committee’s construction of a ‘common interest’ between the local and state levels, placing the discursive practices underlying this construction in a context of multi-scalar governance and power relations. 2009 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/48133 University of Hertfordshire restricted |
| spellingShingle | MacCallum, Diana Practising Governance: Multi-Party Decision Making in a Multi-Scalar Context |
| title | Practising Governance: Multi-Party Decision Making in a Multi-Scalar Context |
| title_full | Practising Governance: Multi-Party Decision Making in a Multi-Scalar Context |
| title_fullStr | Practising Governance: Multi-Party Decision Making in a Multi-Scalar Context |
| title_full_unstemmed | Practising Governance: Multi-Party Decision Making in a Multi-Scalar Context |
| title_short | Practising Governance: Multi-Party Decision Making in a Multi-Scalar Context |
| title_sort | practising governance: multi-party decision making in a multi-scalar context |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/48133 |