Landscapes of antagonism: Local governance,neoliberalism and austerity

Introduction

The current climate of cuts, austerity and state retrenchment has intensified a focus on neoliberalism as a meta narrative that seemingly both describes and explains local governance transformations, especially in the global North. Yet such a narrative, this paper suggests, offers little scope for critical engagements with those same transformations: that is, it leaves little space for politics, for agency. Nor does it help us to engage with contradictory trends and tendencies: for example, the simultaneous concentration and dispersal of governmental power. This paper, then, attempts to look beyond the neoliberal narrative in three ways. First, it offers an engagement with what the Guest Editors suggest might be theoretical deficits in some uses of neoliberalism as an explanatory concept. Second, it addresses a political deficit, drawing on different strands of theory to illuminate the ambiguous and contradictory role of local governments in processes of neoliberalisation. Third, it addresses what I want to suggest is a critical deficit by suggesting ways of conceptualising local government as a strategic actor in the ‘landscapes of antagonism’ generated by current cycles of economic, political and governance change.

Neoliberalism in Question

Neoliberalism is a highly contested concept (Brown, 2005; Ward and England 2007) and has become what Clarke (2008) calls a ‘promiscuous’ term that is widely overused and notoriously difficult to pin down. Within political economy, which tends to dominate the field of critical scholarship, Harvey (2005) views neoliberalism as a class-based political project of creating new means of capital accumulation, while Jessop (2002) and Peck (2004) place more emphasis on the role of the state in securing the conditions that enable the expansion of the scope and reach of capital. Analyses of the neoliberalisation of local government point to both the neoliberalisation of urban space (Brenner and Theodore, 2002) and the re-creation of the local state in ways that diminish the power of the local political leadership (Geddes, 2006; Jessop, 2002; see also discussion in Geddes and Sullivan, 2011). Such accounts offer fruitful analytical frameworks for situating the transformations of local governments in the context of global economic and political forces. Yet in their crude form, the political economy approach on which they draw offers a form of ‘epochal analysis’ that reads all particularities as instances of a general phenomenon. In contrast, others have pointed to the spatial variability of processes of neoliberalisation, whether globally (Brenner et al., 2010; Geddes, 2006) or within the UK (Griggs and Sullivan, forthcoming). What is at stake is not simply spatial variation (mediated in path-dependent fashion, through institutional and cultural logics), but the co-existence of diverse governmental, economic and political projects. Brenner et al. (2010) use the idea of ‘variegated neoliberalism’ to capture something of its diverse forms and uneven enactments, while Ong (2007) treats neoliberalism as a ‘mobile assemblage’ comprising technologies, techniques and practices that are mobile and connective rather than a ‘tidal wave’ that rolls out from dominant centres of power. As Larner comments

New political configurations are more multi-vocal than we might previously have understood. Most immediately, we are alerted to the possibility that there are different configurations of neoliberalism, and that close inspection of particular neoliberal political projects is more likely to reveal a complex and hybrid political imaginary, rather than the straightforward implementation of a unified and coherent political philosophy (Larner, 2000, p. 12)

I cannot do justice to the richness and subtlety of the analyses offered by such work, but want to develop Larner’s challenge to the dominance of the political economy approach by exploring the neoliberalisation of local government through perspectives offered by theories of ideology, of governmentality and of assemblage.

Recent writing on neoliberalism as ideology (Hall, 2011; Massey, 2011) draws attention to shifting political conjunctures and to neoliberalism as a cluster of temporally and spatially specific ideologies. Such ideologies are characterised by a discursive framing of the market as ‘outside’ and beyond the reach of politics and the constitution of the state as a burden preventing entrepreneurship and civic renewal. Neither of these is new (see Newman and Clarke, 2009), but each has been hugely amplified following responses to the banking crisis of 2010 and the austerity governance that followed. The depiction of the market as an invisible but potent and demanding force serves to justify attempts to appease it through programmes of debt reduction, austerity and cuts. It also legitimates attempts to subject populations to economic logics—we must all change the ways we live and work according to an economic calculus of debt reduction and financial stringency. Poverty, cuts, austerity and hardship are depicted within a masculine discourse of toughness and rugged resilience, displacing—in part—more feminine and feminist discourses of interdependence and ethical concerns (for intimate others, for future generations, for the environment and for distant populations, as well as members of ‘local’ communities).

However, ideologies are never complete; they form crucial components of hegemonic projects, but such projects are always in the making rather than ‘won’. For example Leitner et al. highlight the reciprocal interdependence of neoliberalism and contestation

The relationship is more than a power struggle for hegemony among mutual opposites. Through their interactions with one another, both neoliberalism and its contestations are potentially reshaped. Cooptation is possible—by absorbing and redefining the imaginaries, practices and spatialities of the other (Leitner et al., 2007).

I will return to this point in discussing the implications for local governance in the next section, but first want to turn to undertandings of neoliberalism inspired by Foucauldian-inspired theories of governmentality. Brown (2005), Rose (1999) and others view neoliberalism in terms of technologies for governing populations by installing ‘economic’ logics of calculation (constituted through discourses of markets, efficiency, managerialism, consumer choice and individual autonomy) and strategies for promoting self governing subjects, including local political elites (Geddes and Sullivan, 2011). Such governmentalities tend, in much of the literature, to be conceptualised as global in scale and reach. However, some versions of governmentality also offer more nuanced accounts. While the liberal economic actor is the favoured subject, other citizen-subjects are also summoned: the responsible citizen, the active citizen, the democratic citizen, the citizen worker and so on. These do not all carry the same identifications, or conduct the ‘work’ of neoliberalisation in the same way. And each may draw on older subject positions, attempting to configure them within neoliberal projects. This is not however necessarily successful and is vulnerable to appropriations ‘from below’: for example, the ‘rights talk’ of the citizen consumer may slide into the rights talk of the social justice claimant. Such slips and slides may, in time, become appropriated in new phases of neoliberalisation, but the outcome may be more ambiguous. Such ambiguities suggest the value of a conceptualisation of governmentalities as strategies or projects rather than outcomes—not least since subjects may well not respond to the subject positions offered or may retain alternative identifications (Barnett et al., 2008, 2011).

None of this denies the significance of the hegemonic project of neoliberalisation and the resulting intensification of poverty and new global patterns of exploitation and inequality. Yet viewing neoliberalism as a singular and all-encompassing force squeezes the capacity both for analysis and critique. It is possible to trace multiple projects of neoliberalisation and to suggest some of the different problematics that neoliberal governance might seek to address—from creating more flexible, educated workers to constituting community as a governmental terrain; from generating innovation to fostering new policy logics; from opening borders to secure the free flow of capital to pursuing security agendas to defend particular territorial interests. These require different kinds of agent, draw on different temporal and spatial repertoires, and may not always be coherent. Here, notions of assemblage offer a productive way of framing neoliberal governance, drawing attention not only to networks of people or flows of ideas, but also to associations between things—objects as well as people. Actants (humans, goods and services, skills, ideas, money, practices, technologies, institutions and other entities) are assembled in new ways. These new associations change the meanings or other properties of individual components drawn into interactive practices. Indeed Li (2007a, 2007b) argues that most of the political work of neoliberalism involves practices of de- and re-articulation of existing elements into new configurations, assemblages or constellations. It is this ‘incompleteness’ of the neoliberal subject that opens space for alternative repertoires: rather than general questions (Is this neoliberal or not? What kind or phase of neoliberalism is this?) the focus of analysis shifts to how multiple projects co-exist and how contradictions between them are resolved in particular sites at specific moments, and what form of labour are at stake. Such questions are, I want to suggest, empirical as well as theoretical.

Local Governance in Neoliberal Times

Each of these three perspectives (neoliberalism as ideology, as governmentality, as mobile and connective assemblage) offers a helpful framework for analysing the ambiguous place of local governments in processes of neoliberalisation. In this section, I focus on the capacity of each to illuminate particular, spatially and politically specific, configurations of local governance. My focus is on local governance in the UK (specifically England and Wales). This focus is significant for three reasons. First, as Peck and Tickell (2007) argue, it is important to distinguish between neoliberalism as an abstraction and the particular forms that emerge in particular contexts. It follows that a focus on a specific nation—and particular places within it—will serve to ground the analysis. Second, the UK has tended to be typified as a symbolic marker of neoliberalisation. This can be attributed in part to its close allegiance with the US, but also because of its particular political characteristics: the dominance of a two-party political system has enabled policies to be pursued with greater clarity and vigour in the UK than in nations characterised by a politics of coalition and consensus. Yet the ‘fast track’ neoliberalism of the UK is also associated with the legacies of Thatcherism and the early move towards the rolling back of the state, legacies whose influence can be traced through the modernising logics of the Blair governments in the 1990s (Newman, 2001) and the austerity politics of the Conservative-dominated coalition government elected in 2010 (Clarke and Newman, 2012). Third, the UK offers a particularly interesting site for examining something of the politics of local governance. This politics is marked by a history of adversarial relationships between the local and central states (Duncan and Goodwin, 1988), with successive governments attempting to curb the powers of local authorities both directly (through stringent financial and legislative measures) and indirectly (through a politics of localism and neighbourhood governing).

Accounts of local governance in the UK frequently offer a limited structural analysis that views local governments as the victims of new global political-economic forces. In contrast, conceptualising neoliberalism as ideology has the potential to open up a productive seam of theoretical and critical analysis, generating questions about how ‘the local’ may form a component of neoliberal ideology, but also how it may be traversed by, and indeed generate, multiple ideological projects. Local authorities can be viewed as both subjected to and as the promulgators of ideologies of the unassailability of the market and its capacity to determine local political economies. Yet they are also implicated in strategies associated with other ideological forms, including the valorisation of ‘the local’ within an overarching anti-state ideology. For example, the New Local Government Network in the UK was, in its conception, a radical project promoted by some local authorities contesting the dominant centralist politics of the UK. However, this became appropriated by both New Labour and subsequently coalition governments promoting strategies of localism. The ethos of localism became deeply entangled with an ideology of citizen-driven government. In particular, the ‘Big Society’ framing of localism promoted by Prime Minister Cameron, however short-lived, appropriated ideas and values (care, relationships, mutuality, morality) that had been marginalised and suppressed in the technocratic governments of Blair (Jordan, 2010). It also re-animated older forms of ‘compassionate conservatism’, all reconfigured within an anti-statist ideology. ‘The local’ was constituted as a self-governing entity charged with maximising its own ‘assets’ and mobilising its own population as problem-solvers, volunteers and resource mobilisers (DCLG, 2011). This can be viewed as an attempt to ‘refresh’ Conservative party ideology in ways that distanced the party from the legacies of Thatcherism and sought to win the consent of those who might not otherwise support the neoliberalising thrust of conservative government. Yet the ideology of localism served to legitimate the dispersal of power and responsibility away from the state (central and local), diminishing its public role in governance and redistribution. This example suggests some of the problems of viewing ideologies as overly coherent. They seek consent precisely by drawing on emergent and residual strands and trying to configure these with the dominant (Williams, 1977). However, the outcome may be ambiguous.

A focus on local governance also serves to highlight the problematic relationship between global governmentalities and fractured and uneven local enactments. Theories of neoliberalism as governmentality (Brown, 2005; Ong, 2007; Rose, 1999) offer productive ways of conceptualising how local government is not simply subject to dominant, top–down forces (or perhaps mobilises in resistance), but is itself implicated in strategies of ‘governing at a distance’. Local governments have been constituted as self-governing economic actors, as responsible political and managerial subjects, as good partners, as reflexive and flexible business leaders, as competitive entities constituted through performance discourse and as ‘delivery agents’ within a centralised system of governing in which there is little room for discretion. Peck and Tickell highlight the impossibility of a progressive local politics because of the way in which neoliberalism constitutes localities as in competition with each other on a global, as well as national, stage. By adapting to this competitive regime, they argue, local authorities are complicit in their own undoing. However, they also suggest that local governments have roles beyond simply the ameliorisaton of the effects of neoliberalism. I want to extend this point by arguing that local governments are deeply implicated in the knowledge–power nexus, promulgating a succession of new governmentalities of citizenship and community. Local governments play an active role in strategies for governing populations by installing ‘economic’ logics of calculation (constituted through discourses of markets, efficiency, responsibility, consumer choice and individual autonomy) and strategies for promoting ‘self-governing’ subjects. The temptation is to see local authorities as the passive victims of global and national forces. Yet local authorities may, through their own policy agendas, be crucial actors in producing, reproducing, reworking and reconstituting neoliberalism: for example, as they seek to promote economic regeneration ‘from below’ (Brenner and Theodore, 2002), as they inculcate new governmentalities of citizenship, or as they mediate and translate neoliberal projects in line with ‘local’ needs, goals and values.

Yet as is the case with ideology, governmentalities can be viewed as over-coherent entities. Much of the literature adopts a rather conspiratorial view of discourse, equating it with governmental projects of reform and modernisation and the subjection of citizens to new strategies of governing (Barnett, 2009). That is, it is assumed that discourses come from ‘above’ and are effective in producing new forms of identity and subjectivity in those ‘below’ that they address. Where they are not effective, this is assumed to be a result of strategies of resistance or subversion on the part of citizens. In contrast a number of studies show how local government actors and their partners engage in resignifying the meaning of what might be viewed as neoliberal discourses (such as those of responsibility, consumerism, participation). That is, they insert them into professional or democratic repertoires in ways that subtly change their meaning and they engage in the work of articulating multiple—and often competing—discourses in ways that reframe the subjectivities at stake (see, for example, Clarke et al., 2007, and Newman and Vidler, 2006, on the role of professionals in mediating the impact of policies on consumerism and choice; Newman and Tonkens, 2011, on the appropriation of social movement citizenship claims; Newman, 2012, on activist engagements with ‘modernising’ logics of local government).

Nevertheless concepts of resignification and re-articulation, drawn from Foucauldian perspectives, suggest important research agendas for the present and future. How, and in what ways, might the discourses of local empowerment be aligned—or not—with the new discourses of austerity, hardship and sacrifice? How will local political and governing bodies re-align existing policies on inculcating citizens into new forms of democratic participation with their induction into new forms of self-governance? And what governmentalities of localism might emerge as a result of the greater penetration of market-based provision into areas previously under local democratic control? These are empirical, as well as theoretical, questions. They are likely to show at least two forms of variation—first, between the strategies directed to different population groups; and, second, between the responses of local authorities in different places: north and south, urban and rural, and so on.

The problem is how to conceptualise the dimensions of difference, and how a focus on theorising difference might enable more nuanced accounts of neoliberalism itself. Brenner and Theodore (2002, p. 356) turn to theories of path dependency to explain what they describe as “geographically uneven, socially regressive, and politically volatile trajectories of institutional/spatial change”. These trajectories are, they argue, shaped through the legacies of earlier institutional arrangements, such that

the evolution of any politico-institutional configuration following the imposition of neo-liberal policy reforms is likely to demonstrate strong properties of path dependency, in which established institutional arrangements significantly constrain the scope and trajectory of reforms (Brenner and Theodore, 2002, p. 361).

My problem here is the emphasis on the legacies of the past rather than on the way in which actors seek out solutions to contemporary problems in cycles of “creative destruction” (Brenner and Theodore, 2002, p. 363). As Brenner and Theodore suggest, this requires future-oriented innovations as well as the break-up of existing pathways. Local authorities, then, are also incubators of new possibilities that may bend or adapt neoliberal logics or may establish alternative pathways.

A conception of neoliberalism as assemblage, in contrast, emphasises the active role of states—and by extension local states—in ‘pulling down’ elements of neoliberal rationalities and articulating these with ‘local’ programmes and projects (Ong, 2007). This provides more purchase on theorising neoliberalism as a contingent and unevenly realised process. It does not mean that it is infinitely flexible, but that its rationalities are constantly ‘flexed’ as elements are re-articulated and re-assembled, potentially ‘cohabiting’ with other projects (Clarke, 2008). Notions of neoliberalism as assemblage also offer theoretically suggestive ways of conceptualising local governments in shifting spatial configurations of power (Allen, 2011; Allen and Cochrane, 2010). MacLeod and Jones, reviewing two decades of the New Urban Politics, note that “urban governance arrangements are increasingly orchestrated around an assemblage of topologically networked and hierarchical struggles” rather than being contained within a territorially bounded space, however fuzzy (MacLeod and Jones, 2011, p. 2448). This offers a new dimension to the traditional governance literature on networks and partnership by asking how the interplay of multi-scalar actants around a specific project in a specific locality will configure local engagements with neoliberal ideologies or governmentalities.

Painter’s analysis of responses to ‘antisocial behaviour’ as assemblages offers a helpful empirical example. He shows how

fighting antisocial behaviour … depends not only on myriad mundane and prosaic practices but also on those practices successfully combining in the particular space–time configuration that will enable the magistrate to make the order, that will allow the anti-ASB machine to work. And of course sometimes it doesn’t (Painter, 2006, p. 768).

Notions of assemblage have also been used to trace the ambiguous role of local government in the processes and practices of forming responses to the Big Society and other localism projects. As Brownill (2011) argues, the Big Society can be viewed not just as ideology or discourse, but as an assemblage comprising funding and bidding regimes, the infrastructure of mediating agencies, the geographical unevenness of available local assets and resources, the pattern of political control, the effectiveness of local networks, patterns of existing and past experiments that can be repackaged, local traditions of volunteering and so on.

This has implications for the conceptualisation of politics. Here, the literature offers widely divergent perspectives. One highlights the vibrancy of local democracy and local leadership as a potential challenge to hegemonic projects (Geddes and Sullivan, 2011); another draws attention to the processes of depoliticisation that may arise as a result of governance innovation (Swyngedouw, 2009). His analysis helps capture the sense that politics (and ways of engaging in redefining the meanings and practices of politics) is constituted through both topological networks and hierarchical institutions. Thus politics is at the same time diffuse and institutionalised, spatially unfixed and hierarchically contained. Such an approach emphasises the diversity of local institutions and the enactment of different responses to neoliberalisation, while holding on to the significance of topological networks (of ideologies, discourses, actants, projects, institutions) that both stretch and contain their constitutive capacity.

Landscapes of Antagonism

The analysis so far has implications for how and where a critical engagement with neoliberalism might be conducted. Some recent literatures have drawn attention to, and sought to categorise, different ways of responding to or enacting neoliberalism (Geddes, 2006; Geddes and Sullivan, 2011). I do not seek here to contribute to this body of work by offering alternative typologies or configurations. Rather, I want to suggest that different enactments of neoliberalising projects take place in a contradictory field of political forces (‘landscapes of antagonism’) that cannot be reduced to systems of party political representation and party-specific ideologies.

As noted earlier, the history of central–local relations in the UK is marked by often highly antagonistic relationships, and these continue. (See, for example, the intervention by the leaders of three Northern cities within England pointing to the unfair distribution financial resources by central government and warning of the possible increases in crime and civic unrest resuting from austerity policies). ¹ Yet here I want to consider ways in which local authorities are not simply agents of resistance, but are themselves traversed by multiple lines of antagonism. These refract wider antagonisms: between capital and labour, between the imperative for economic development and for social and environmental concerns, between social democratic and neoliberal projects, between anti-racist, feminist and LGBT politics and parochial conceptions of ‘the local’, and so on. They are thus subject to dominant ideologies and governmentalities, but are themselves political and governmental actors who play crucial roles in shaping wider regional, national and global landscapes of antagonism.

Hence, the landscapes of local governing are constructed through scalar and temporal dynamics that cannot be compressed into the duality of central or global power and local resistance. Three points are important here. First, local governments cannot be viewed as unitary actors with a single purpose, however much mission statements or party manifestos suggest that they might be. Their work is that of aligning disparate projects into a seemingly cohesive entity. Second, such projects are associated with different scalar logics So, rather than viewing local government as a particular ‘level’ in neatly nested levels of governing authority, their work is that of reconciling multiple scalar projects and regimes—regimes of funding, of governance and inspection, of participation, of policy-making, of devolved authority and so on. Third, they have to align projects associated with different temporalities: in ideological terms, for example, there may be residual elements of municipal socialism or compassionate conservatism, alongside dominant neoliberal rationalities, together with emerging repertoires associated with transition towns, co-operative ventures or democratic experimentation. Dominant, residual and emergent formations (Newman and Clarke, 2009; Williams, 1977) are articulated in ways that do not necessarily resolve contradictions between them; indeed, such contradictions have, historically, been the source of innovation and renewal. Many of the developments that are now associated with neoliberalism—from public–private partnerships to outsourcing, to notions of ‘responsible’ and self-reliant communities—were incubated within local governments as they sought to reposition themselves to take advantage of opportunities and/or to stave off threats in previous cycles of change. Central government policy on localism and active citizenship frequently draws on existing local government innovations and appropriates these for a different purpose. Ideologies that valorise locality are thus ambiguous; they draw on, appropriate and resignify radical projects of democratic innovation and, in the UK, rework central–local antagonisms that, in previous decades, generated a New Local Government network that sought to reclaim local powers lost to central government in the Thatcher and Blair years.

Processes of resignification and appropriation can be illustrated through the current struggles around ideas of localism and citizen-driven government. Both offer attractive images and possible ways of renewing political engagement: for example, Featherstone et al. (2012) debate the possibilites of the emergence of a ‘progressive’ localism in the UK. Localism policies may support the elaboration of new rights and resources—rights to challenge, the possibility of takeover of formerly publicly owned assets, and so on. Yet they also short-circuit democratic bodies and the political parties that sustained them. They raise questions about which citizens are to drive change and about the spatial patterns of inequality that inform the distribution of human, financial and political resources for self- and co-governance. Finally, they raise questions about governance: where does accountability lie, who will hold the ring to ensure some measure of equality in access and voice, and who will pick up the pieces where citizen-driven governance initiatives fail, become recuperated by the political Right or religious extremists, or get taken over by corporate enterprises that seek to exploit the resources of citizens rather than—or perhaps as well as—to serve their interests.

Such ambiguities suggest that a view of ideology or governmentality as ‘just neoliberal’ fails to engage with the multiple strands that comprise hegemonic projects, and the incompleteness of processes of assimilation and co-option. Local authorities are sites in which neoliberalism is evolving as governmental and non-governmental actors privilege the local in order to promote alternative political rationalities or to foster economic regeneration ‘from below’ (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). Yet local governments are themselves local states, promulgating their own ideologies, traversed by competing ideologies of parties and stakeholders, and orchestrators of local development projects.

This opens up questions of politics: how far the vibrancy of local democracy can serve as a challenge to hegemonic projects. However, I want to avoid an overly actor-centric conception of antagonism, in which specific groups of actors are characterised by established interests (whether class-based, place-based or authority-based) and in which such interests form the basis of antagonistic relationships. Landscapes of antagonism are formed (and reformed) through the discursive constitution of new subjects and the orchestration of new lines of antagonism, resistance and alignment. These include what Wills (2012) terms the ‘islands of social capital’ (youth groups, faith groups, church congregations, community organisations) that were mobilised to form London Citizens and other citizen assemblies. They include the ‘ordinary people’ beloved of national politicians: people constituted as the non-interest-bearing, non-politicised citizens to whom policies of localisation, ‘empowerment’, asset transfer and social renewal are directed (Clarke, 2010). They include actors and institutions attached to older formations of politics and power: local politicians, voluntary organisations, partnership workers, advocacy groups, youth and community workers, state professionals, all holding on to ‘residual’ ideologies but seeking new forms of legitimacy within and beyond the local state but with diminished sources of economic and political power. They include neighbourhood projects fostered in earlier cycles of development and regeneration: in the UK, New Deal for Communities, Better Government for Older People, Sure Start Centres and many others, all of which constituted and ‘empowered’ particular groups of actors and which privileged rationalities that, although compatible with neoliberalism, were more ambiguous in their outcomes. They include entrepreneurial projects and corporate bodies that are ambiguously situated in local governance networks and cannot be contained by the boundaries of local economies. And they include identity- and interest-based groups that look beyond the local for their belongings and attachments.

Local governments are both actors in such landscapes of antagonism, with their own interests and political projects, and the mediators of wider struggles, in which they seek to privilege some forces and mitigate others. This is the work of what Tania Li (2007b) terms forging alignments: the work of ‘assembling’ disparate elements into a seemingly coherent whole. It includes the work of reconciling dominant ideologies and political projects with residual forms (echoes of municipal socialism, a progressive form of New Localism, or Blairite conceptions of social investment) and emerging rationalities (from ‘green’ economic projects to new co-operative ventures). Here notions of assemblage offer a productive form of analysis. They direct attention not just to the antagonisms between different ideologies and projects, but to the specificities of practices and processes. They show how policy technologies, budgets, partnerships, professional discourses, contracts, auditing techniques and citizenship regimes are aligned (or not), and the ambiguity of the outcomes.

Such an approach draws attention to the work of assembling and mediating disparate projects. This can be viewed as forms of emotion work that may be painful and stressful. The management of the contradictions of capitalism is no easy task and requires considerable amounts of ‘self-work’ on the part of those attempting to reconcile personal commitments with the organisational rationalities associated with neoliberal projects. However, it also draws attention to the significance of local actors who, in seeking to mediate or mitigate the impact of neoliberal policies, generate innovations that may in turn be appropriated by neoliberal projects seeking to configure alternatives within the dominant (Newman, 2012).

Critical Repertoires

The different perspectives offered in this paper offer alternative ways of understanding what might be happening to local government in particular places at particular moments. I do not want to advocate any single approach; each is suggestive of particular lines of analysis. However, I do want to propose that the theoretical resources we choose help to shape the critical stances we might adopt: that is, they have implications for politics. In what follows, then, I draw on the analysis so far and explore ways in which different critical repertoires might be generated. These each have implications for critical scholars/researchers seeking to grasp something of what is happening in the current moment; and also open up questions of how and where politics is—or could be—enacted.

Working with a concept of neoliberalism as ideology draws attention to the possibility of contradictions and antagonisms that can be inhabited—and perhaps exploited—by local actors. Rather than a from-to conception of change, it suggests something of the significance of multiple temporalities: for example the interplay between residual forms (municipal socialism in the UK, civil society in Latin America), hegemonic projects (neoliberal governance) and emergent ideologies generated by anti-austerity social justice campaigns and global social movements. The work of Hall (2011), Massey (2011), Clarke (2008), Larner (2000), Larner et al. (2007) and Leitner et al. (2007) shows that neoliberalism is constantly seeking ‘other’ projects and resources in its endless search for innovation. A succession of social movements, from feminism to environmentalism, from gay and lesbian politics to disability rights activism, have seen their claims for equality and justice resignified to fit within expanding consumerist logics or incorporated into notions of the ‘worker-citizen‘ (Newman, 2012; Newman and Tonkens, 2011). Yet their incorporation is never complete.

One question, then, is how far local authorities can be the source of counter-hegemonic projects and how they might sustain such projects in the face of dominant forces. Those with long memories might recall the role of the GLC and other Labour-controlled authorities within the UK in countering the ideological projects of Thatcherism (see also Cockburn, 1977, and the work of the London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group, 1979, on working ‘In and Against the State’). The space for such projects is now more limited; in contrast to their defeat through the draconian measures of abolition and marketisation in the 1980s, the UK local governments of the early 21st century have been subject to the curtailment of their power and autonomy by a thousand small strokes. Nevertheless, many local authorities are engaged in distinctive ideological projects that seek to counter the dominant tendencies. ‘Critique’ here, however, is not simply a matter of opposition: it is vested in practices, relationships and the promotion of economic, social and political alternatives, including those fostered through transnational networks.

Notions of neoliberalism as governmentality offer a rather different critical standpoint which centres on how actors respond to the summonings of neoliberal discourses: how far they refuse, resist or simply fail to hear the summonings to neoliberal subject positions; or enact them in performative repertoires that subvert, rather than support, the status quo. For example, the disturbances in English cities in the summer of 2011, where shop windows were smashed and goods looted, can be viewed as the enactment of consumer identities in conditions of poverty and disaffection. And later that year we saw, in the Occupy movement, overt refusals of actors to become the compliant subjects of austerity politics. Resistance elsewhere was less overt and more grudging, taking the form of what Gilbert (2010) and Hall (2011) have termed ‘disaffected consent’. Local authorities themselves can embrace, fail to hear or become more or less grudging subjects of neoliberal discourses. They might of course simply appropriate discourses in a tactical way in order to secure benefits or resources: for example, they might volunteer to be ‘vanguard’ sites for the enactment of new neoliberal logics. In doing so, they may bring benefit to the populations they serve, but in the process may themselves reproduce or amplify such discourses and serve to constitute others in their image.

Critique also involves questioning how far the discursive work of local authorities may serve to reproduce and even strengthen neoliberal appropriations of ‘common sense’ ideas and concepts, and how far it might offer alternatives. For example, ‘fairness’, one of the founding discourses of social democratic notions of redistribution, has been seized by the conservative right and made to work in ways that promote the interests of the middle class and justify the withdrawal of benefits and services to the ‘undeserving’ poor, students, the long-term sick and other groups. Common-sense notions of ‘responsibility’, too, have been appropriated to strengthen discursive framings of a ‘post-welfare’ state. A governmentality approach to critique may, then, include refusing to deploy repertoires that have become thoroughly ‘neoliberalised’, or attempting to re-appropriate them to support local projects and possibilities that do not abrogate the idea of the responsible local state.

A focus on neoliberalism as assemblage opens up rather different critical positions. Rather than a focus on what the leaders and staff of local governments say and do, it draws attention to the importance of the ‘prosaic practices’ of neoliberal governance: how these are realised and enacted in training programmes, institutional routines, action plans, communication media, restructuring programmes, outsourcing and partnerhip strategies, decision-making practices and so on. Yet it also suggests the ambiguity of the outcomes. For example, participative budgeting, associated with counter-neoliberal forces in Latin America (Geddes, 2011) has often been institutionalised in the UK in forms that serve to depoliticise local decision-making; agendas and options may be severely prescribed, the opportunity to voice alternatives limited and the alignment with local budgeting systems weak. Furthermore, the technologies used—often spectacular, visual and with highly professional facilitation—may be orchestrated in ways that minimise conflict and promote consent (Mahony, 2008). In Tania Li’s terms, participative budgeting can be viewed as depoliticising by ‘rendering technical’ what were intended to be radical projects of political renewal. The critical agenda, then, is to show how technologies, systems and routines may inscribe neoliberal rationalities even in sites that seek to promote counter-hegemonic projects.

Unpacking these different engagements with neoliberalism (as ideology, as governmentality, as assemblage) offers a means of trying to understand the dynamic relationship between processes of neoliberalisation and alternative political projects. Theory matters: the arguments of the paper derive from an epistemological position that views theory, critique and politics as mutually constitutive. As Larner suggests

The delineation of different interpretations of neoliberalism is not simply an academic exercise: our understanding of this phenomenon shapes our readings of the scope and content of possible political interventions (Larner, 2000, p. 5).

This underscores the constitutive power of theory itself (Gibson-Graham, 2008): its capacity to make more solid that which is the object of critique and to displace attention from experiments and examples that do not neatly ‘fit’.

Conclusion

This paper has argued that local governments are not simply either agents of or resisters to neoliberalism; they are ambiguously positioned in landscapes of antagonism traversed by multiple political projects. It has not offered a set of prescriptions about how local practices might support, resist or negate neoliberal strategies. Such a perspective would assume that neoliberalism is, first, a coherent entity that can be supported or resisted; and, second, that it exists somewhere outside, and prior to, local practices. Allan Cochrane, responding to a recent exchange on neoliberalism and local governance, asked

To what extent is it [neoliberalism] descriptive and to what extent an analytical tool? To what extent is it an outcome that we can observe, and to what extent is it a driver? Is neoliberalism something that exists in the world, or is it a theoretical abstraction? (Cochrane, 2011, p. 442).

Responses to such questions open up different spaces for politics. If neoliberalism is descriptive, then how useful is it as a descriptor that has the capacity to mobilise resistance? As a descriptor, it may have a tactical utility even though as an analytical concept it is flawed: a theoretical abstraction that removes it from the messiness of what actually exists in the world, and conceals questions of ambiguity and contradiction. If it is viewed as a driver, as an unassailable logic to which ‘there is no alterative’, then there is little space for politics, other than that which Ferguson describes as “a politics largely defined by negation and disdain” (Ferguson, 2010, p. 166).

The paper’s use of the concept of ‘landscapes of antagonism’ is intended to offer a challenge the view that politics comes ‘afterwards’, as a space of resistance to an already completed ideological formation or political project. It seeks to put politics back in, not simply in the actions of local political elites, but in the political work of managing contradictions and aligning the politics of austerity with the possibility of alternative political, social and economic rationalities. It might be argued that the notions of articulation, assemblage and ambiguity on which I have drawn offer theoretical sophistication but little concrete grounding for envisioning or analysing the politics of local governance. Nevertheless, they suggest some caveats for how such a politics might be understood. For example, they suggest that an image of the all-encompassing power of neoliberalism on the one hand and heroic local governments on the other may be flawed. They also challenge a conception of local authorities as intermediaries ‘between’ global forces and local populations: the topological critique suggests that they are not bodies ‘between’ but actors who are constituted by and constitutive of the spaces of neoliberalisation. Rather than a focus on political leadership shaping or determining local strategies, or on local authorities as coherent actors, the focus shifts to the ways in which a plurality of actors are involved in processes of mediation and translation (Lendvai and Stubbs, 2007, p. 189). This includes but stretches beyond notions of interpretation of discourses generated from ‘above’: local actors are viewed as actively seeking out new projects, ideas and resources ‘from below’ and ‘from elsewhere’ (see for example, Salskov-Iverson et al., 2000, on local governance in Mexico). It is in this sense of translation, of seeking out and generating as well as mitigating, that I use the term mediation.

Questions of mediation have to take account, I suggest, of topological processes that decentre local governments as a specific and contained spatial entity. Landscapes of antagonism are both topologically stretched but administratively restricted. They are characterised by the twin processes of extending the reach of neoliberalising processes beyond simple conceptions of the marketisation of local government services, changing the meanings of local citizenship and possibilities of local politics, while at the same time displacing political tensions and contradictions away from dominant centres of power. Local authorities mirror these dynamics, seeking to extend their own reach through new governmentalities and forms of expertise while seeking to displace the contradictions they face—including those of austerity politics—onto their ‘partners’ as well as onto local citizens. It is in this sense that local governments can be seen as ‘mediating’ processes of neoliberalisation.