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The Narrative Hegemony of Smart Governance: Social Change Through a Critical Theoretical Perspective

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The Palgrave Handbook of Global Social Change

Abstract

This chapter discusses the impact of social change on how society views governance quality in the era of complex and interconnected policy problems. This era presents a valuable opportunity to revisit tensions between the deepening technocratic logic of formal policymaking and the social change implied by and reflected in the rise of alternative policy epistemics. The chapter focuses on the technocratic exercise of smart governance, as embodied by the smart cities concept, in considering the confrontation between late-stage technocracy and an emerging antitechnocratic agitation that manifests itself in the “local knowledge” movement, on the one hand, and in “anti-science” populism, on the other. Recognizing a mature literature critical of the hegemonic narrative posture of governance ideas, we explore the epistemic foundations of governance reform movements to more deeply understand a mechanism of narrative power that deserves renewed attention in the “smart” era: instrumental rationalism. Smart governance, from an epistemic perspective, marks a progression in a sequence of ideas serving the long-running project to validate and normalize instrumental rationalism in policymaking. To connect this argument to social change, our approach combines the critical perspective of poststructuralism with the political economy perspective of world-systems theory. We postulate that “good” governance is a vessel into which momentarily salient global norms are loaded, and that each successive iteration (e.g., smart) is considered politically viable only if emerging from existing institutional architecture and bearing the ideational legacy of instrumental rationalism. This process of narrative auto-replication yields seemingly novel ideas that are mere variations on a failed theme. The type of social change that can unseat this epistemic lock-in emerges from a more robust valorization of alternative perspectives, which we conclude this chapter by describing as an epistemic awakening.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Asian and International Studies, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Kris Hartley

  2. Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea

    Tobin Im

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  1. Kris Hartley
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  2. Tobin Im
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Correspondence to Kris Hartley .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social Work and Social Welfare, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Rajendra Baikady

  2. Department of Social Work, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India

    S.M. Sajid

  3. Department of Social Work, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, South Africa

    Varoshini Nadesan

  4. Centre for Family Research, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun, Poland

    Jaroslaw Przeperski

  5. Inst of Social Welfare & Res, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh

    M. Rezaul Islam

  6. Department of Social Work, Shandong University, Jinan, China

    Jianguo Gao

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Hartley, K., Im, T. (2022). The Narrative Hegemony of Smart Governance: Social Change Through a Critical Theoretical Perspective. In: Baikady, R., Sajid, S., Nadesan, V., Przeperski, J., Islam, M.R., Gao, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Global Social Change . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87624-1_255-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87624-1_255-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-87624-1

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