Anti-Politics, Depoliticization, and Governance

Paul Fawcett is Associate Professor of Governance and Director of the Centre for Change Governance at the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, University of Canberra. He has published in numerous scholarly journals such as Politics, Policy and Politics, Critical Policy Studies, and Political Studies Review.Matthew Flinders is Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield. His publications include Defending Politics (OUP, 2012), Democratic Drift (OUP, 2009), and The Oxford Handbook of British Politics (co-edited wtih A. Gamble, M. Kenny, and C. Hay, OUP, 2009).Colin Hay is Professor of Political Sciences at Sciences Po, Paris. His publications include Civic Capitalism (with Anthony Payne, Polity, 2015), The Failure of Anglo-Liberal Capitalism (Palgrave, 2012), and The Political Economy of European Welfare Capitalism (with Daniel Wincott, Palgrave, 2012).Matthew Wood is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sheffield and Deputy Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre. He has published in numerous scholarly journals such as Public Administration, Political Studies, and Government and Opposition.

There is a mounting body of evidence pointing towards rising levels of public dissatisfaction with the formal political process. Depoliticization refers to a more discrete range of contemporary strategies that add to this growing trend towards anti-politics by either removing or displacing the potential for choice, collective agency, and deliberation.This book examines the relationship between these two trends as understood within the broader shift towards governance. It brings together a number of contributions from scholars who have a varied range of concerns but who nevertheless share a common interest in developing the concept of depoliticization through their engagement with a set of theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical questions. This volume explores these questions from a variety of different perspectives and uses anumber of different empirical examples and case studies from both within the nation state as well as from other regional, global, and multi-level arenas.In this context, this volume examines the potential and limits of depoliticization as a concept and its position and contribution in the nexus between the larger and more established literatures on governance and anti-politics.

This volume redefines the research agenda for studying anti-politics and contemporary governance, and presents and examines new case-study material from a range of countries and policy areas.