| Chapter 1: | Jamaican Governance and Citizen Politics in Context |
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2003, 2006). Such theorizing, although it is worthy of critical exploration, ignores the equally deleterious impact of such actors on the stability and quality of civil society. In order to fully understand the political significance of this shift in governance in the Jamaican context and the increased focus on its character and quality, the whole notion of governance must be problematized in line with changing political conditions. The conceptual deficit has until now seen the state dominating discussions on governance and an overwhelming disinclination by Jamaican scholars to give equal attention to activities within the nonstate realm inhabited by civil society. For analytical purposes, I therefore appropriate as my philosophical reference point here the Foucauldian notion of “governmentality” (Foucault, 1991).
Governmentality essentially provides an expanded definition of governance. It is an analytic perspective addressing a formation of power, which recognizes that a strong state depends on the proper disposition of human beings and things (wealth, resources, means of subsistence, territory and climate, irrigation, and fertility) as well as the conduct of conduct (habits, customs, and ways of acting and thinking) (Foucault, 1991, p. 93). In other words, it is an attempt to reformulate the governor-governed relationship, one that does not make the relation dependent upon “administrative machines, juridical institutions or other apparatuses that usually get grouped under the rubric of the state” (Bratich, Packer, & McCarthy, 2003, p. 4). It is, instead, a new governmental and political rationality where the process of governance becomes other than the sole preserve of the state but increasingly depends upon a pluralization of forms of governing. Rather than governance occurring through domination and coercion, governmentality allows for self-responsibility and self-discipline—“an ongoing process of governing oneself, properly applying oneself and acting responsibly in every sphere of life” (Hay, 2003, pp. 166–167).
Governmentality rests upon investing power and capacity in a population and generating mechanisms for governing through society. Of course, the success of technologies of management which lie exclusively outside the purview of the state depends on new kinds of citizen-subjects and their