Capacity Beyond the Boundary: New Regulatory State, Fragmentation and Relational Capacity

Abstract

Globalization — the intensification and stretching of social relations beyond national boundaries — has moved sites of governance above, below and beyond the state. It has been suggested that these processes have transformed the internal architecture of the state, leading to the emergence of a new form of regulatory state. One of the distinctive features of this new regulatory state is the way in which it disperses and fragments the exercise of public power. This theme has been picked up by a number of scholars in different disciplines, ranging from Giddens’ (1994) reflexive modernization, Teubner’s (1983, 1987) notion of reflexive regulation and Luhmann’s (1998) autopoietic systems to the broad policy-related governance literature. These conceptualizations point to the manner in which the functions of public governance are being increasingly dispersed across and beyond the state. At the same time the prevailing conceptions of policy capacity — which we call ‘attribute models’ — remain trapped within a statecentric framework that permits only a limited analysis of this ‘decentred’ state. This chapter seeks to place this fragmentation in the context of a broader discussion of two competing models of policy capacity: the attribute and relational models. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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