In contemporary Britain, begging in public places is governed by a complex of official and informal techniques that are linked within a framework of vagrancy, charity, welfare and local ‘good government’ legislation. These techniques are implemented by agents who work both ‘within the scene’ and from a distance, and are located not just in traditional offices of social control such as the police, but also in related regimes of public space administration, such as tourism and economic development, town centre and estates management, and environmental health and highway engineering.

Within this field of begging governance, some charitable appeals for pedestrian pocket change are configured as illegitimate and criminal, such as the case with visibly indigent begging, while other begging behaviour, such as charity collections, busking and Big Issue selling are tolerated, legitimised and even encouraged. By including this spectrum of behaviour under the rubric of ‘begging’, I acknowledge how the criminal character of vagrancy has historically encompassed a wide array of indigent, itinerant and peripatetic street characters – such as pedlars, hawkers, vendors, roundsmen, image sellers and various types of street entertainers, including ballad singers.

In my examination of the interregulated character of begging encounters, I am particularly interested in how begging is governed by discourses of urban order that evoke the tropes of ‘civic renewal’ and ‘urban regeneration’. The writing of Michel Foucault, especially his later work on ‘governmentality’ (1991), provides a rich theoretical stance from which to understand such programmes. The Foucauldian notion of governance recognises that political power is exercised “through a multitude of agencies and techniques, some of which are only loosely associated with the executives and bureaucracies of the formal organs of state” (Miller and Rose, 1990, p 1; my emphasis). To speak of ‘government’ in this wider sense is to describe an array of mentalities and practices that work to direct social actors and configure individual subjectivity, often in highly peculiar ways, that are centred in moralising programmes of self-regulation.

This conceptualisation of government liberates us from a narrow, instrumentalist view of law which posits a compliant ‘subject’ that can be commanded, repressed, restricted and prohibited.