On Concepts of Governance: A Survey and Interpretation

2004

Abstract We begin with William Walters' interrogation of the concept of governance. Walters notes that this concept has replaced that of" government" in many political arenas: we speak of" global governance" when discussing international organizations and relations;" multilevel governance" regarding the EU, and" urban governance" to describe political relations at the local level.

International Social Science Journal, 1998

Journey for Sustainable Development and Peace Journal

Globally, governance studies have been an emerging paradigm of research and scholarly debate in social sciences. This paper takes this debate as an entry point and aims to analyze its metaphysical construction in terms of ontology, epistemology, and methodology. Data and materials used in the paper are based on the sources of secondary literature. The findings reveal that the political construction of governance is now becoming complex in contemporary societies and it has then adjoined with social, economic, and regional issues in particular. The paper concludes that governance is a contested notion that is moving around different concepts, theories, methodologies, and paradigms. The paper, therefore, is expected to contribute to the governance study in particular along with different disciplines of social science research in general.

The concept of "governance" has become omnipresent in the lexicon of politics and political science. It has very quickly acquired many different meanings, but its most important property seems to be its capacity to serve as a substitute for "government." The former is (allegedly) good and the latter is (allegedly) bad. In this essay, I explore the definition, the presumptions and the utility of governance. I conclude that it can make an important contribution of our understanding of the increasingly complex process of making and implementing public policies, but not as a substitute for government.

SSRN Electronic Journal

Production governance is not detached from the effects it produces. This paper suggests a framework to assess coordination structures and mechanisms in terms of their ability to include the publics and their interests, and to generate socioeconomic value consistently with those interests. To this end, the framework considers a combination of resource integration mechanisms (contract, authority, cooperation) and structures (markets, exclusive organisational structures, and inclusive organisational structures). These combinations are analysed along key features: information, knowledge sharing ad cocreation, involvement and empowerment, as well as alongside some specific functions of governance (legitimacy, cognition, interdependence). The value added is in identifying criteria for appreciating diverse ways of integrating and coordinating resources, and the associated effects, thus providing both scholars and practitioners with a tool to discriminate amongst alternatives.

Annual Review of Political Science, 2016

The term governance does not have a settled definition today, and it has at least three main meanings. The first is international cooperation through nonsovereign bodies outside the state system. This concept grew out of the literature on globalization and argued that territorial sovereignty was giving way to more informal types of horizontal cooperation, as well as to supranational bodies such as the European Union. The second meaning treated governance as a synonym for public administration, that is, effective implementation of state policy. Interest in this topic was driven by awareness that global poverty was rooted in corruption and weak state capacity. The third meaning of governance was the regulation of social behavior through networks and other nonhierarchical mechanisms. The first and third of these strands of thought downplay traditional state authority and favor new transnational or civil society actors. These trends, however, raise troubling questions about transparency...

Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, 2019

This book offers a theoretical and analytical account of governance that enables us to investigate how societies are governed, and with what consequences for power and inequality. This approach enables us to treat governance as at once fully political and fully social, and to rescue its relevance for the analysis of politics, policy and society. How we are governed is vital in the reproduction and transformation of societies. The ideas, decisions and actions that govern our collective life have material and discursive effects that structure social relations. And because such effects can be contested or erased over time, we need a theoretical account of governing that enables us to make visible the politics of these structuring effects in different settings. Our account of governance is therefore concerned both with the material and discursive manifestations of power and their contestation (the political), and also with how social formations are structured, (self-) organised and managed over time (the social). In this book, we conceptualise governance as regime(s) of governing practices that produce socio-political orders, of varying durability and contingency. We treat governance as produced by the material actions, interpretive understandings and structured social positions of socially constituted political actors. We move beyond poststructuralist accounts of government and discourse, and beyond accounts of state-centred policymaking. As such, our account is self-consciously 'post'-poststructuralist. We use this term as a shorthand to acknowledge the influence of original writings on governmentality, semiosis and state theories that we combine with a resolutely historicist and actor-centred approach. The actor-centredness of our conceptualisation gives due emphasis to meaning, action and structure in shaping governance in different settings. Any theoretical account is of course always developed in dialogue

Policy Studies Journal, 2011

The popularity of governance can be seen across academic genres. In some ways, the tremendous amount of theorizing on the subject has created contentious areas of debate. However, the approach that I argue will move the discussion forward is a focus on areas of agreement, where studying governance as a form of statecraft is considered. In order to advance the governance conversation, this essay speculates on the intersections of future governance research areas and maintains that making governance studies meaningful involves more empirical testing and inductive explorations by scholars.

ECPR Press, 2015

Globalization and the development of new modes of governance have deeply transformed the institutions of the welfare state built in the post second war period and set the ground for a distinct body politic and style of government. According to the narratives developed in governance studies, the post-war welfare state is in the process of being superseded by a polity where authority is progressively devolved to task-specific institutions with unlimited jurisdictions and intersecting memberships operating at sub- and sovra-national levels. For this polity, the goal of government is not that of homogenizing the political and social space enclosed within clear-cut and permanent national boundaries, but that of enabling individuals and local communities to operate autonomously in an increasing open world, thus promoting sustainable forms of development. The aim of the book is twofold. First, it aims at supplying better analytical tools for conceptualising and understanding recent social and political change. Second, it aims at explicating the relevance that the change analysed by governance theorists has for traditional themes in political theory related to state authority, democratic legitimacy and political accountability. The book is divided in three main parts composed of three chapters each having as their main aim the clarification of respectively: (i) the context in which change has taken place; (ii) the nature of the policy innovations brought about by this change; (iii) the side-effects produced by the dynamic of change. An introductory chapter setting the arguments of the book, and a concluding chapter summarising its findings and suggesting some alternative courses of action complete the volume.