As noted in previous chapters, new philanthropies provided New Labour with opportunities for policy ‘experiments’ – new policy ideas, new ways of doing policy, introducing new policy actors. These new methods and several of the new actors are being taken up and taken further by the Coalition government – for example in legislation to allow for the creation of parent-led and so-called ‘Free Schools’.

This chapter will address some of the sorts of ‘new’ actors, both organisations and people, involved in the processes of new governance and the relationships these have to the state and its project of self-transformation and the reform of the overall institutional architecture of the state and its scales of operation – what Castells (2000b, p 372) calls ‘reprogramming’. It will focus specifically on three new policy organisations that have all been endorsed and/or funded by the Coalition government to grow and develop and take on public sector responsibilities and that are all involved in the new Coalition policy developments. It will look at the ‘vision’, ‘interests’ and relationships of these organisations and will discuss the hybridities, blurrings and crossings that are involved both in their roles and relationships with government and in the participation(s) of key actors. In doing so, the chapter will also give greater substance and specificity to the notion of network governance, conveying a sense of some of the relays, discourses, values, interests and commitments involved in governance activities and of how joined up, mutually dependent and reinforcing these new policy communities are. Some specific ‘mobile’ and ‘hybrid’ actors will also be profiled and discussed.

ARK: an ambitious philanthropy

ARK is a charity founded in 2002 by a group of hedge fund managers ‘pooling their skills and resources to improve the life chances of children’ (ARK website). ARK's activities are in the areas of health (in sub-Saharan Africa), child protection (Eastern Europe) and education (India, US and UK). In the UK, ARK is one of a number of organisations (charitable trusts, faith groups and social enterprises and businesses, for example E-Act, United Learning Trust, Harris Federation, Oasis Trust, Ormiston Trust and so on) that are running ‘chains’ of state schools as Academies and providing other services to education.