Blurring The State-Private Divide: Flex Organisations and The Decline of Accountability

Abstract

Spurred by two decades of deregulation, public-private partnerships and a worldwide movement towards privatisation, non-state actors now fulfil functions once reserved for government. Moreover, the inclination to blur the “state” and “private” spheres now enjoys global acceptance. An international vernacular of “privatisation”, “civil society”, “non-governmental organisations” and other catch terms de-emphasising the state is parroted from Washington to Warsaw to Wellington. The blurring of the traditional boundaries of state and private encompasses longpractices of governance “reorganisation” such as the outsourcing and subcontracting of government work. It includes state-private hybrids such as the well-entrenched quasi-non-governmental organisations (often called “QUANGOs”) of the United Kingdom and the “parastatals” of Third World countries. Such reorganisation is being intensified inmany places (witness the increased outsourcing in the United States). But the acceleration of this familiar practice fails to convey the processes under way in governments, which are increasingly labyrinths of interconnected state and private structures. Indeed, in some settings, governance is reordering itself in ways that standard vocabularies are ill-equipped to characterise. For example, the “flex organisations” I observed in Eastern Europe can switch their status – from state to private – according to the situation, strategically manoeuvring to best access state, private and international resources. These organisations play multiple, sometimes conflicting, and ambiguous roles that overlap with both government and business, enabling them to bypass the constraints governing either type of activity.