; Network Governance and the Differentiated Polity

The differentiated polity thesis holds that British government is no longer accurately described by the Westminster model's emphasis on parliamentary sovereignty, cabinet hierarchy, and unified central control. Instead, Rhodes argues that power is dispersed across self-organizing, interorganizational networks characterized by institutional complexity, power-dependence, and game-playing. The Westminster model persists as a guiding narrative for practitioners, but it misdescribes how governance actually operates. Rhodes presents this as a more accurate vocabulary for description, not merely a normative preference for networks over hierarchy.

Rhodes contends that New Public Management and its marketization agenda are no longer the primary challenge facing government. Since governance now occurs through pervasive networks that resist hierarchical steering, governments must cultivate indirect management skills—negotiation, persuasion, and mutual adjustment—rather than market competition or command. Diplomacy captures this relational work: governments must choose strategically among markets, networks, and bureaucracy, recognizing that the mix of governing structures matters more than any single mechanism. The metaphor shift reflects an empirical claim about what governance actually requires, not a rhetorical preference.

Rhodes uses 'sour laws' to describe the inescapable dilemmas and unintended consequences that structure network governance. These include tensions between cooperation and competition, accountability and competence, control and mutual regulation, and strategic direction versus flexibility. Multi-actor complexity produces persistent problems that cannot be resolved through technical fixes. The term conveys that these constraints are not moral failures but structural features of governing through networks—they are 'laws' in the sense of recurrent patterns, and 'sour' because they frustrate aspirations for clean, hierarchical control.

Rhodes's earlier work on policy networks relied on structural typologies—policy communities, issue networks, and their variants—classified by membership, integration, and resource distribution. His later decentred approach shifts attention from structures to the beliefs, practices, traditions, and narratives through which actors construct and navigate networks. Objective position in a network matters less than the meanings actors bring to their interactions. This interpretive turn, developed with Mark Bevir, argues that explaining governance requires understanding how actors' situated agency shapes the dilemmas they face and the responses they craft.

Unlike a standard anthology, this volume includes afterwords for many chapters that set out the original context of writing and identify what has changed empirically since publication. The concluding chapter directly addresses critics of the policy network approach, the core executive framework, and the governance thesis, while restating the case for the differentiated polity. Rhodes uses this apparatus to trace his intellectual trajectory from structural analysis toward the interpretive turn, making the collection a retrospective as well as a reference work—he shows how his thinking evolved rather than presenting the essays as static artifacts.

Rhodes himself concluded in the 2017 afterwords that the trend toward networked governance intensified rather than reversed. The 'franchise state'—where large corporations deliver public services under government contract—extended hollowing out into new domains. However, he acknowledges that his original account understated how differing party beliefs shape outcomes. New Labour accepted parts of the neoliberal agenda while retaining a more active central state; subsequent Conservative governments accelerated outsourcing and austerity-driven retrenchment. The differentiated polity remains descriptively useful, but the specific configuration of networks and the balance of power within them have shifted.