The paper focuses on a set of key policy documents and governance manuals from the 1990s and 2000s, produced by the EU and OECD as well as various nation states in Europe and North America. While advocating the use of the notion of biopolitics in this framework, the paper maintains that to understand what is at stake, we need to detach ourselves from the original Foucaultian typology of biopolitical rationality, comprising: (1) paternalistic raison d’État and ‘police administration’; (2) liberal; and finally (3) neoliberal forms. As it stands, this typology cannot sufficiently account for what is salient in the recent developments in biopolitical governance : the promotion and instrumental co-option of participatory and especially deliberative forms of opinion- and will-formation. Furthermore, the paper suggests that the key notions and lines of reasoning, which constitute the form of thinking or rationality underpinning the 1990s and 2000s participatory biopolitics, cannot be traced back to just one source. Instead, the participatory governmentality is compounded of heterogeneous discursive ingredients, stemming from divergent and in some respects incompatible traditions of thought, scientific disciplines, forms of knowledge, vocabularies and conceptual systems. Besides neoliberalism and New Public Management (NPM), we should acknowledge, how certain key notions stemming from democratic theory, especially from the theory of deliberative democracy, are adopted and appropriated in the strategic, instrumental rationality of biopolitics. As the result, grey areas are born, where it is increasingly difficult, if not altogether impossible, to distinguish between governmental institutions and NGOs, between state and civil society, and between political activity and administration.
