Academies in context: Politics, business and philanthropy and heterarchical governance

The English Academies programme has become one of the most controversial aspects of the New Labour strategy for education and public sector reform. And in many ways, given the significance of the programme, that controversy is understandable and appropriate. This is particularly so because, as the author argues here, Academies are indicative of and contribute to a set of more general and highly significant experimental and evolutionary policy "moves" which involve the reinvention of public sector institutions and a reformation of the overall institutional architecture of the state and its scales of operation. That is to say, Academies are one small part of a more general shift from government to governance Rhodes, 1997), a shift from the "hierarchy of command" to a new form of "polycentric" and "strategic" governance that is based upon network relations within and across new policy communities designed to generate new governing capacity and enhance legitimacy. These new policy communities bring new kinds of actors into the policy process, validate new policy discourses--discourses flow through them--and enable new forms of policy influence and enactment and in some respects disable or disenfranchise or circumvent some of the established policy actors and agencies. These new forces are able to colonise the spaces opened up by the critique of existing state organisations, actions and actors. All of this involves an increased reliance on subsidiarity and "regulated self-regulation", and it drastically blurs the already fuzzy divide between the public and the private sector "reallocating tasks, and rearticulating the relationship between organisations and tasks across this divide" (Jessop, 2002: 199). All in all it replaces hierarchy with "heterarchy." That is, it replaces bureaucracy and administrative structures and relationships with a system of organisation replete with overlap, multiplicity, mixed ascendancy and/or divergent-but-coexistent patterns of relation. (Contains 1 note.)