Rethinking decentralization and state/civil society distinctions: the state as a problematic of governing1

Abstract

In a variety of national contexts, there have been discussions about the changing relations of the state to the educational arena. Often, these discussions talk about centralization and decentralization of the state or of the devolution of power, the latter referring to shifts in the loci of power to geographically local contexts, for example through community governance of education. These discussions, it is argued in this essay, tend to position state power as dualistic, pitting one set of actors against another without inquiring into the patterns that locate different actors. The structuring of oppositions between state and civil society, public and private, government and economy does not adequately characterize the diverse ways that rule is exercised. The purpose in this essay is to relocate the problem of the state in the problematic of governing; to consider the state as networks of relations among various actors and discursive strategies that regulate and discipline the citizen. Pedagogy is explored as a particular site of governing patterns of the state through its systems of distinctions and differentiation. Pedagogy provides a site to explore how the governing patterns produce inclusions/exclusions through the inscriptions of subjectivities. The distinctions are not overt but occur through the production of reason and the ‘reasonable’ person. Changes in Russia, South Africa, Sweden and the USA are examined as different state traditions in the regulation of school practices. 1. This paper was originally given as a lecture at the University of Granada, Spain. I wish to thank the following people for the comments as I wrote and rewrote drafts: Lynn Fendler, Dory Lightfoot, Fran Varvus, Miguel Pereyra, Lizbeth Lundahl‐Kallós, Daniel Kallós, Michael Shapiro, Ingrid Carlgren, Eva Aström, Ulla Johannson, Christina Segerholm, Bob Tabachnick, Geoff Whitty and the seminar group at Pedagogik Instititionen, Umeå University, Sweden and the Wednesday Seminar at Madison. I also appreciate the comments of the two anonymous reviewers for this journal

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