From government to governance: still the same old song?

The tension between the ‘democratic ethos’, understood in terms of meaningful self-government, and the maintenance of privileged political and economic power has long characterised modern politics. This paper explores this tension in the context of the terminological shift from ‘government’ to ‘governance’. The central argument is that this apparently simple discursive shift signifies a reconfiguration of the institutions of political rule, leading to what might be best described as the ‘governance state’. This is a form of state that retains the shell of familiar democratic forms while minimising the possibilities of the democratic ethos to constrain the excesses of the prevailing relations of power. In the substitution of ‘governance’ for ‘government’, both conceptually and in practice, there is a danger that the familiar democratic practices of the past may no longer be capable of retaining their hold on our political imagination.