in various disciplines. One could interpret this in four ways. First, regardless of the changing importance or otherwise of heterarchy (neither anarchy nor hierarchy) and solidarity, the significance of governance in lay discourses has changed, and this is reflected in social science scholarship. Second, a stable but recently subterranean stream of heterarchic practices has resurfaced and begun to attract renewed attention. Third, after becoming less significant compared with other modes of coordination, heterarchy has once again become important. And fourth, an upward trend has continued, is becoming dominant, and is likely to continue to do so. There is a kernel of truth in each interpretation.
The first possibility is suggested by the expansion of governance discourses. These range from ‘global governance’ through ‘multilevel governance’ (MLG) and the shift from ‘government to governance’ to the issues of ‘the stakeholding society’ and ‘corporate governance’. Given the close, mutually constitutive relationship between the social sciences and lay discourses, this suggestion would be worth exploring further.
The second possibility is the persistence of underlying realities beneath the vagaries of intellectual fashion. So-called ‘governance’ mechanisms (as contrasted to markets or hierarchy) have long been widely used in coordinating complex organizations and systems. There have always been issues and problems for which heterarchic governance is, so to speak, the ‘natural’ mode of coordination.10 Certain forms of interdependence are inappropriate for (or at least resistant to) market and/or imperative coordination. For example, public–private partnership is theoretically well-suited in cases of organized complexity characterized by a loose coupling of agents, complex forms of reciprocal interdependence and complex spatio-temporal horizons. In addition, different state traditions have given scope for market forces and/or self-regulation to operate in their economies and civil societies. There are also normative preferences for self-organization in certain contexts. This socially necessary minimum of heterarchic practices makes it even more curious that they have only recently attracted focused scientific interest. This is almost certainly related to the blind spots associated with specific disciplinary paradigms or prevailing forms of ‘common sense’. Thus, during the postwar period of growth based on a virtuous circle of mass production and mass consumption in North America and Western Europe, when the ‘mixed economy’ was a dominant paradigm, institutions and practices intermediate between market and state were often neglected. They had not actually disappeared; they were simply marginalized theoretically and politically. Subsequent disenchantment with the state in the 1970s, and with markets in the 1990s, has renewed interest in something that never really disappeared.
A third factor contributing to the rise of governance is the cycle of modes of coordination. All modes are prone to dilemmas, contradictions, paradoxes and failures, but the problems differ with the mode in question. Markets, states, networks and solidarity fail in different ways. One practical response to this situation is to combine modes of policy-making and vary their weight over time – thereby shifting the forms in which tendencies to ‘failure’ manifest themselves and creating room for manoeuvre (Offe, 1975a, b). This suggests that the current expansion of networks at the expense of markets and hierarchies and of governance at the expense of government may involve little more than a specific stage in a regular succession of dominant modes of policy-making. In this sense, what we are witnessing today is really discontinuity in continuity: oscillation within a repeated policy cycle. In other words, the rediscovery of governance could mark a fresh revolution in this process – a simple cyclical response to past state failures (especially those linked to attempts to manage the emerging crisis of Atlantic Fordism from the mid-1970s) and more recently, market failure (and its associated crisis in corporate governance).
An alternative explanation would be that, for various reasons, there has been a shift in the institutional centre of gravity (or ‘institutional attractor’) around which policy cycles operate due to some qualitative shift in the basic problems that regularizing or governmentalizing policies must address. Here we would be dealing with continuity in discontinuity: the revival of familiar governance mechanisms for qualitatively new purposes. If there is a major transition from Fordism to post-Fordism (linked additionally to new technologies, internationalization and regionalization), then such a long-term shift may be at work. Similar possibilities are indicated by the crisis of the national state – with a proliferation of cross-border and multitier problems that can no longer be coordinated within national state hierarchy or through neorealist anarchy of market (see Jessop, 1995). Here, too, we could anticipate that the expansion of networks and/or governance is a sign of a qualitative shift rather than a simple pendular swing within a policy cycle. Rather than prejudge this issue, however, one should recognize that there could be various path-dependent possibilities.
The fourth possibility is that a fundamental secular shift in social relations has occurred. Important new economic and social conditions and attendant problems have emerged that cannot be managed or resolved readily, if at all, through market-mediated anarchy or top-down state planning. This secular shift reflects the dramatic intensification of societal complexity that flows from growing functional differentiation of institutional orders in an increasingly global society – which leads, in turn, to greater systemic interdependencies across various social, spatial and temporal horizons of action. As Scharpf (1994: 37) notes:
… the advantages of hierarchical coordination are lost in a world that is characterized by increasingly dense, extended, and rapidly changing patterns of reciprocal interdependence, and by increasingly frequent, but ephemeral, interactions across all types of pre-established boundaries, intra-and interorganizational, intra-and intersectoral, intra-and international.
A similar argument could be made about the declining advantages of market coordination. In this sense, the recent expansion of networks and solidarities at the expense of markets and hierarchies and of governance at the expense of government is not just a pendular swing in some regular succession of dominant modes of policy-making. It reflects a shift in the fundamental structures of the real world and a corresponding shift in the centre of gravity around which policy cycles move.
Introducing some conceptual clarity
Faced with the wide range of factors that have prompted interest in governance and metagovernance and the wide range of usages and parallel vocabularies, it is useful to distinguish words from concepts. This holds especially where the terminology is not only unclear but also essentially contested. The latter is particularly common in periods of rapid social change and/or when new fields of academic inquiry are emerging. Both sets of circumstances apply in the present case. This illustrates the close, mutually constitutive, links among academic discourse, political practice and changing realities.11 This reflects the fact that the question of governance is more often and more directly related to problem-solving and crisis management in a wide range of fields than the regulation approach in heterodox economics. While this can have salutary effects in diverse fields, it also risks falling into a ‘floating eclecticism’12 by working both within and against old paradigms in a wide range of terrains. The risk of eclecticism is reinforced in some cases by the interest of governance theorists in issues of institutional design, which has led some governance theorists to focus more on specific collective decision-making or goal-attainment issues in relation to specific (socially and discursively constituted) problems. In this sense, governance theorists have sometimes inclined towards instrumentalist analyses that are less concerned to speak truth to power than to become its advisers. This is a temptation in the WISERD Civil Society programme.
More disinterested governance scholars are also interested in the diversity of policy regimes that emerge in response to crises, emergencies and other social problems and the political dynamic behind regime shifts. This often leads to an innovation process oriented to solving the purported governance problems and doing so in a more or less turbulent environment; new forms of governance will emerge on condition that collective action problems are resolved through one (or more) of the attempted solutions and become part of new patterns of conduct. Thus, one might examine how failure in established forms of governance and/or an emerging ‘crisis’ of governance
