Recent strategies for ‘governing the social’ have placed a premium on recruiting ordinary people to their processes. This commitment to the value of ordinary people links UK initiatives in public services and citizenship to innovations in development strategies in the global south. This paper asks what it is that makes ordinary people such a desired object of governmental strategies and suggests that it is their assumed a-political character and their capacity to bring values, knowledge and other resources that are beyond the state. This article suggests that keeping politics out of governing may be a governmental ambition, but ordinary people cannot be relied on to perform in such ways.
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