Making Government Liquid : Shifts in Governance Using Financialisation as a Political Device

The financialised character of contemporary rationalities of public governance has been the subject of increased attention within a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields. This paper proposes a particular analytical framework, focused on the notion of ‘governance devices', for understanding the processes that underpin financialised governance and, more fundamentally, maintain the connections between markets and politics. Deploying three distinct cases, the paper indicates that these devices transcend divisions between the actor and the device and create a different form of agency – an assemblage. We argue that understanding such assemblages – their emergence, activity, and, frequently, their failures – opens a window on analysing the nature of contemporary forms of financialised governance as a technosocial system. In so doing, we suggest that the governance devices approach can offer a way of challenging contemporary governance orthodoxies, retracing government's lost responsibilities and re-surfacing its ‘core tasks'