Governmentality and Policy Making: the Analytics of Government

Abstract

This panel takes focuses on governmentality or the analytics of government as a window upon the policymaking process and policy analysis. In conventional political science usage, government is associated with the activities of political authorities (such as the cabinet or a ministry). Traditionally, policy analysis focuses on the activities of the state and its surrounding institutions. In the governmentality or analytics of government approach government is, instead, understood as a regime of practices. The focus is on the heterogeneity of authorities which seek to govern conduct, the heterogeneity of the strategies, devices and technologies used for governing, the conflicts between them and the ways in which the social and political order is characterized by such struggles Thus, the analytics of government approach goes even beyond the relatively broadly focused governance concept. From a Foucauldian perspective, the focus of government is on practices: on those mechanisms and techniques which, in the name of truth and the public good, aspire to inform and adjust social and economic activities. Regimes of practices are objects of the analytics of government insofar as they concern the direction of conduct. Government, then, refers to the activities that are undertaken by a multiplicity of authorities and agencies that see to shape our conduct by working through our desires, interests, aspirations and beliefs The perspective of the analytics of government has deep-going implications for our understanding of policy-making. We can say that policy-making is situated at the intersection between the different sites of a regime of government. Regimes of government are systems of practices in which people, individuals, nature and artefacts interact and are transformed into objects of interventions and become "governable." The “objects” of government (such as genes, the economy, global warming, poverty, etc.) co-emerge at a number of different locations that are not necessarily considered to be "political," (such as in hospitals, research institutes, or city neighbourhoods) but nevertheless are sites, where significant influence on the logic and the rationales of a policy field can be taken. Participants are invited to submit papers that exemplify the governmentality approach. We encourage contributions from different policy domains.

Title	Details
Discourse and Practices in analytics of government	View Paper Details
Governmentalities of Union: The European Union in the Perpective of an Analytics of Government	View Paper Details
The Analytics of Policy Implementation: legalizing the prostitution sector in the Netherlands	View Paper Details
The Biopolitics of Human Cloning in Israel	View Paper Details