Agonistic failures: Following policy conflicts in Berlin’s urban cultural politics

Friederike Landau

Urban Studies, 2021, vol. 58, issue 12, 2531-2548

Abstract: The paper intervenes in critical policy studies to challenge the ‘success bias’ lingering in public policy accounts of collaborative governance. I suggest conflict, rather than consensus, is a productive resource to navigate collaborations between state and civic stakeholders. By developing a conflict-oriented framework that foregrounds political decisions as always-already failing – regardless of whether promoted as success or failure – I argue that the recognition of nuanced conflicts contributes to new understandings on what counts as success or failure to whom. To substantiate the conflict-oriented framework of policy failure, I present empirical insights into Berlin’s urban cultural politics, shedding light on a new funding instrument for artists. Unpacking artists’ and administrators’ understandings about what constitutes a failure, and how to proceed from there, I propose ‘policyfailing’ as ongoing failure. Conceptualising failure along the lines of operational conflicts (i.e. concrete, procedural disagreements) and meta conflicts (i.e. overarching, ideological differences), two scenarios of policy failure emerge: absolute policy failure, pointing to unsolvable conflicts between state and civic stakeholders; and agonistic policy failure, referring to wider-ranging disagreements about the purpose of policy issues, which are however transferred into temporary policy solutions. Following one such agonistic policy failure in Berlin over time, I show how new opportunities for both absolute and agonistic policy failure unfold. Ultimately, I outline the practical, political and analytical potential of an agonistic framework to understand policies as inherently contested and, to some degree, always failing.

Keywords: agonism; culture/arts/creativity; governance; policy; policy failure; politics; theory; 争夺; 文化/艺术/创æ„; æ²»ç †; 政策; 政策失败; 政治; ç †è®º (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098020949080 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:58:y:2021:i:12:p:2531-2548

DOI: 10.1177/0042098020949080

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().