Researching the Depoliticisation Crisis

Each of the lenses provides a portrait of the political, focusing on specific activities, moments or places (and not others). Hence, these lenses on the political might be seen as providing partial glimpses of the contemporary depoliticisation crisis. They also suggest the deployment of particular analytical strategies and research methods.

Politics lens 1 (statecraft and the institutions of government). Being the most conventional understanding of politics, research here might entail an emphasis on following or reconstructing institutional processes of political decision-making to understand how, for example, city-wide climate plans have become bound up with arena-shifting (the delegation of some decision-making responsibility to climate scientists and urban policy entrepreneurs). The most appropriate approach here might include (a) expert interviews with politicians, public servants, representatives of environmental nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), businesses, and so on, and (b) analysis of media and official documents from the international, national and urban levels to capture the multi-level nature of climate governance, the broader political context in which city governments act.

Politics lens 2 (choice and contingency). Being both spatially broader (potentially across governmental, public and private realms) and a very specific personal perception of a situation (how can a situation be changed?), this lens necessitates a flexible analytical approach. Analysis needs to focus on both macro and micro processes, for example, capturing through discourse analysis how political debate narrows over time in the governmental realm, while also perhaps observing through ethnographic research (e.g. participant observation) how the capacity for agency (dis)appears in specific fora of the public realm (e.g. local stakeholder meetings on plans for fracking). Interviews with selected actors will also probe their perceptions of issues or processes, seeking their subjective views on their own decision-making capacities.

Politics lens 3 (politics as the apparatus of order and consensus-building vs ‘political’ moments of antagonism). Here, the challenge is to observe and, where possible, draw links between everyday politics and the extra-ordinary political. In part, this may involve similar methods to politics lens 1, through following/reconstructing institutional processes to achieve consensus and order in a particular place and time as well as analysing the discursive strategies used in the media over longer periods of time to see how order is maintained. To grasp moments of political antagonism (and their negation), ethnographic methods may be used to trace how particular contestatory representations of and claims about, for example, the effects of austerity are silenced or simply never become part of formal political discourse. There is also a strong temporal dimension to this view of the political – so research needs to observe or reconstruct political moments and how they recede. To find these silenced antagonistic voices, a first step may include analysis of alternative media and online sources, as well as becoming embedded in particular contexts of actions where conflict might be expected to take place (e.g. in urban areas where rents are increasing and social benefits are being squeezed).

Outlook: Towards a Multi-Lens Approach?

 While other lenses on the political could be considered (e.g. a Marxian, materialist understanding of depoliticisation would provide a fresh view on the current depoliticisation debate), the three lenses outlined above can be considered key definitions within the existing depoliticisation literature and provide a basis for developing diverse and innovative analytical strategies. A plural, multi-lens approach could help to capture more of the actualities of contemporary politics and, hence, tell us more about (de)politicisation. Such a perspective would share Matthew Wood and Matthew Flinders’ (2014) concern to promote a multi-layered understanding of the ‘political’ in depoliticisation research, and there are some parallels between the three lenses on politics discussed here and their ‘three faces of depoliticisation’: governmental, societal and discursive. However, the starting point here (definitions of politics rather than depoliticisation) is different, as is the overall intent: to provide greater precision in terms of how these processes work and how they might best be researched. While Wood and Flinders delineate the general types of depoliticisation found in the literature (for a critique, see Hay, 2014), a multiple lens approach would be more clearly about conducting research around the analytical and methodological implications of different definitions of politics for our understanding of how (de)politicisation shapes the political.

The proposal of a plural, multi-lens approach should preferably be seen as a first step, one aimed at promoting reflexivity in research and more open political debate. It is by no means a coherent standpoint because, ultimately, adopting multiple ontologies may be equated with adopting multiple, and often incompatible, commitments. For instance, the multi-lens approach to politics and (de)politicisation does, in itself, rest on a simple but important assumption about the depoliticisation crisis: that depoliticisation remakes rather than annihilates the political (Beveridge and Koch, 2016). From such a standpoint, the boundaries of the political cannot be wholly fixed in essential terms and become a matter of empirical work rather than an a priori definition. This is a quite different understanding to that of politics lens 3, with writers like Rancière (1998) tending to present the truly political as a largely unsullied and distinct realm. There are, then, uneasy and inherent tensions apparent in pursuing a plural approach to politics and (de) politicisation.

Hence, in order to work, at least in an exploratory fashion, a multi-lens approach does not assume one ontology of the political but tries to accommodate multiple ontologies of the political. It might develop research strategies from them, even if this may not be entirely consistent with the commitments and purposes of the original works. Thus, such a step should be seen as promoting a sense of the ontological politics of depoliticisation research and, ultimately, encouraging reflexivity and debate. Our ontological stances shape epistemological and methodological commitments and do themselvespoliticise and depoliticise through including or excluding particular approaches, objects and methods (Hay, 2013: 2). Political research will always be partial in both its scope and normative persuasion. This is inevitable and should be recognised as such in our evaluations of the decline of the political.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

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AuthorBiography

Ross Beveridge is an Urban Studies Foundation Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow. His recent research has addressed the following: the depoliticisation ‘crisis’ and urban politics, the democratic potential of reorganising public goods in German cities, ‘right to the city’ and urban infrastructural politics and globalisation, privatisation/remunicipalisation and urban development in Berlin in the 1990s.