Interdependence

Backgrounds of Interdependency: The Network Society

Between government and society, but also between the different actors within society, the public and private sector, many forms of interdependence exist, and the widespread consensus is that these interdependencies have grown in number, variety, magnitude, and intensity.

Several authors have argued that these growing interdependencies are related to the dramatic changes in our society during the last decades. These changes can be summarized as a development toward a network society in which horizontal relations and networks have grown in importance partly as a result of information technologies but also because of specialization. According to some authors, other societal trends, such as individualization, have reinforced these developments. Individualization, considered as one of the major societal developments in Western society, results in a larger variety of values and seems to go hand in hand with a diminishing of the importance of traditional societal relations. The change toward a network society (and the growing variety of values) makes our society less governable from one point because resources are divided and there are no undisputed values for judging policy proposals and outcomes.

Manuel Castells has argued that our societies are increasingly formed in the bipolar tension between the net and the self. If we look at Castells's analysis, this development toward a network society is a gradual progression that started sometime in the 1970s but accelerated during the final decade of the twentieth century. The implicit assumption is that there is a growing need for interorganizational structures between organizations (in the private as well as the public sphere) to deal with this growing complexity of interactions in the public and private sphere (and the interfaces between those spheres) because of interdependencies. The growing number of strategic alliances between firms, the attention to chain management and networks of firms, and the growing attention to forms of co-governance and public-private partnerships gives ground for this assumption.

The consequence is that to solve the complex policy problems that government faces, government needs to involve various actors in policy-making and implementation processes. Private actors, social alignments, and citizens do have important resources or the [Page 459]power to obstruct policy interventions, and only through joint efforts and collaborative action can policy problems in a modern society be solved. Thus, interdependency is much at the heart of the recent interest in governance as a new steering form.

...