The Politics of Scale in Policy: Scalecraft and Education Governance by Natalie Papanastasiou

Author:Natalie Papanastasiou [Papanastasiou, Natalie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Political Science, Public Affairs & Administration, General
ISBN: 9781447343851
Google: 77qZDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 43067264
Publisher: Policy Press
Published: 2019-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

Statecraft and the local: the case of localism

A highly significant statecraft agenda that has emerged since the late 1990s in Westminster-style democracies has been coined ‘new localism’ (Pratchett, 2004). Localism is a broad term that has been used to describe a range of policies and governing arrangements. Evans et al (2013, 405) have offered a flexible definition of localism which summarises it as ‘the devolution of power and/or functions and/or resources away from central control and towards front-line managers, local democratic structures, local institutions and local communities, within an agreed framework of minimum standards’. For decades, scholars and practitioners of policy have explored the potential that lies in local governance and politics. For example, one of the most enduring questions of local governance scholars has been to explore the ‘small is beautiful’ premise whose narrative suggests that the local scale is associated with greater democracy and participation (for example, Allan, 2003; Avellaneda and Gomes, 2015; Boyne, 1996; Craig and Manthorpe, 1998; Newton, 1982). Indeed, Mark Purcell has argued that there is a tendency for policy scholars themselves to assume that ‘the local is inherently more democratic than other scales’ (2006, 1921), something which he critiques and calls ‘the local trap’. Narratives of localism which locate the solution to policy problems at the scale of the local is thus by no means new in the study and practice of statecraft.

‘New localism’ can be regarded as the recent intensification of a political interest in the local. One of the contexts in which new localism has appeared with particular force is British politics where it ‘emerged as a policy mantra for the Blair/Brown Labour government…, was subsequently embraced by the [2010–2015] Conservative-led coalition’ (Evans et al, 2013, 403) and continues to be a key part of political narratives in the post-2015 Conservative governments. From a political discourse perspective, localism can be understood as a hegemonic regime of statecraft, involving constructing ‘the local’ through the mobilisation of fantasmatic narratives of participation, community and choice. An important part of this hegemonic practice is the antagonism which is constructed between ‘the local’ and ‘bureaucracy’ – in other words, making policies more local is framed as directly decreasing ‘burdensome’ and ‘inefficient’ bureaucracies (Crowe, 2011). The political agendas of localism are well-explored in political science and public administration literature (for example, Hildreth, 2011; Hodgson and Spours, 2012; Parvin, 2009), and some notable geographical work has also discussed the specific meanings localism allocates to ‘the local’ (see Clarke and Cochrane, 2013; Cochrane, 2016). The discussion presented here aims to build on these arguments further by understanding scalecraft to be a key political dimension of localism.

Localism has manifested itself in diverse and changing ways across different policy fields; this discussion focuses specifically on how localism narratives have intersected with the governance of England’s school system (education is a devolved policy area in the UK). The analysis which follows centres on the narratives of localism that have been mobilised in policies relating to the governance of schools during the period 2007–2017.

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