Governance of the future

In my presentation I will explore the concept, ‘technology of the future’, in public governance. Public governance within social services aims at changing the existing conditions for the marginalized citizens including children with special needs. I pose the question: what happens if public governance seek to chance the possible future conditions and targets the marginalized child’s relatives?
Parent Management Training (PMTO) is studied as a technology of the future that expands and transforms governance. PMTO targets parents with aggressive and asocial children and aims to “create the parent as the child’s best teacher”. The program involves parents as facilitators modifying the child’s behavior instead of working directly on the child, thereby widening the target of intervention. PMTO exemplifies an arrangement that engages the private sphere in the conduct of public governance aiming at creating a different future for both parents and children. Thus, the approach to PMTO as a technology of the future indicates its expected prevalence in the future and its attempt to reach in to the future becoming of the child. The technology’s involvement of the relatives and its orientation towards shaping the future implies an expansion of public governance in to dimensions: in both time and space.
Based on an ethnographic interpretation of Foucault’s notion of power, I wish to unfold how the technology of the future is practiced within PMTO-group sessions.