Dilemmas of engagement: the experience of non-governmental actors in new governance spaces
Marilyn Taylor, Joanna Howard, Vicki Harris, John Lever, Antaoneeta Mateeva, Christopher Miller, Rumen Petrov and Luis Serra
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The research reported in this paper sought to explore how non-governmental actors in these spaces perceive the tensions and opportunities they find in new governance spaces and to understand theoretically and empirically how and whether they become 'active subjects'. However, although NGO experience of governance is shaped by common global trends, we can expect the experience and significance of these trends to be shaped in turn by the historical socio-political and cultural context in which they emerge (Deacon, 2007). Indeed, the extent to which a concept of 'governance' that has been developed by Western academics translates meaningfully across different regions and political cultures is also open to question (Heinelt and Stewart, 2005). Our research therefore explored these questions across four countries - Bulgaria, Nicaragua, England and Wales1 - in order to establish how far Western debates about governance had resonance in other regions of the world and what we could learn from a cross-cultural comparison.
The paper begins by exploring the governance discourse in the West. It then introduces the research and reports on some of the difficulties of translating concepts across eh different country research teams. The following section provides a framework for comparison across the different sites and discusses the way in which different contexts have shaped both trends towards governance and the way that non-governmental actors navigate these spaces. The paper ends by reflecting briefly on the implications for further research.