of top-down government. They have done so in the expectation and/or hope that policy-making and implementation will thereby be improved in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and transparency and also made more accountable to relevant stakeholders and/or moral standards, thereby leading to ‘good governance’. This is reflected in growing concern with the role of various forms of political coordination that not only span the conventional public–private divide but also involve ‘tangled hierarchies’, parallel power networks or other forms of complex interdependence across different tiers of government and/or different functional domains. More generally, new forms of partnership, negotiation and networking have been introduced or extended by state managers as they seek to cope with the declining legitimacy and/or effectiveness of other approaches to policy-making and implementation. Such innovations also redraw the public–private divide, engender new forms of interpenetration between the political system and other functional systems and modify relations between these systems and the lifeworld as the latter impacts on the nature and exercise of state power. Where solidarity is involved, we also find arguments that the broader networks, especially coordinated through the state, can provide a means of community empowerment, prevent the isolation of local initiatives and generalize feelings of solidarity to a wider (imagined) community.
Etymology, genealogy and discourse
It is important to distinguish words from concepts. This applies especially to governance. It has a long and chequered past, dating back to medieval Latin and earlier. Its recent revival suggestively highlights a major paradigm shift in political (and economic) analysis as it provides a narrative and/or analytical framework in the contemporary world. The anglophone term ‘governance’ can be traced to the classical Latin and ancient Greek words for the ‘steering’ of boats. It originally referred mainly to the action or manner of governing, guiding or steering conduct, and as such, it overlapped with ‘government’. The first recorded uses of ‘governance’ occur in the 14th century and refer mainly to the action or manner of governing, guiding or steering conduct. It is only in the last 40 to 50 years that there has been a sustained revival in explicit theoretical and practical concern with governance as opposed to government. In short, as far as the anglophone world is concerned, the recently renewed interest in regulation and governance can be dated to the mid-1970s. For a long time, usage was mainly limited to constitutional and legal issues concerning ‘affairs of state’ and/or to the direction of specific institutions or professions with multiple stakeholders.
The key factor in its revival has probably been the need to distinguish between ‘governance’ and ‘government’ in response to crucial changes in the external demarcation and internal organization of the state apparatus and the nature of state powers (plural). Thus, governance came to refer to the modes and manner of governing, government to the institutions and agents charged with governing, and governing to the act of governing itself. The analogous German concept of Steuerung (steering, guiding) proved popular in the 1970s and 1980s for much the same reasons.
There are also significant historical precursors to the idea of metagovernance as well as some close contemporary equivalents. Its antecedents include Greek and Roman notions of a balanced constitution; the medieval and Renaissance ‘mirror of princes’ literature on the art of government (such as Machiavelli’s The Prince, 1988); various notions of ‘police’ (policey or Polizei concerned with the structures and practices that would help to promote a sound political economy, good governance and state security; see Heidenheimer, 1986); and political principles of statecraft and diplomacy such as the mixed constitution at home and the wisdom and necessity of maintaining an international balance of power.
These traditional interests in governance and metagovernance have survived in different forms. But governance has also been discussed without explicit use of this term, and this provides a rich repertoire for illuminating the analysis of governance, whether explicitly in these terms or not. For example, theories of governance have obvious precursors in institutional economics, work on statecraft and diplomacy, research on corporatist networks and policy communities and interest in ‘police’4 or welfare. And although the idea of ‘governance’ has now gained widespread currency in mainstream social sciences, it has by no means displaced other research on economic, political or social coordination. In addition, newer theoretical paradigms have turned their attention from governance (or its equivalents) to metagovernance for their own reasons, at different times, and in their own ways. An influential contemporary analogy is Foucault’s approach to governmentality as ‘the conduct of conduct’ (1991; 2003: 138), especially as developed by the Anglo-Foucauldian school of governmentality studies (see, for example, Miller and Rose, 2008). It is also evident in the increasing interest in resilience (see, for example, Joseph, 2016, 2018).
It is nonetheless worth noting one major source of ambiguity in the mobility of ‘governance’ between theoretical inquiries and practical politics. This is the fact that governance offers both a theoretical and a policy paradigm. Wallis and Dollery (1999) distinguish between them as follows:
… policy paradigms derive from theoretical paradigms but possess much less sophisticated and rigorous evaluations of the intellectual underpinnings of their conceptual frameworks. In essence, policy advisers differentiate policy paradigms from theoretical paradigms by screening out the ambiguities and blurring the fine distinctions characteristic of theoretical paradigms. In a Lakatosian sense, policy paradigms can be likened to the positive heuristics surrounding theoretical paradigms. Accordingly, shifts between policy paradigms will be discontinuous, follow theoretical paradigm shifts, but occur more frequently than theoretical paradigms since they do not require fundamental changes in a negative heuristic. (Wallis and Dollery, 1999: 5)
Drawing on this distinction helps us to understand that the explosion of interest in governance has policy as well as theoretical roots, and that the transfer of ideas and arguments across these two types of paradigm may be both limited and subject to serious misunderstandings. Conversely, failure to make this distinction is likely to contribute to two complementary fallacies. The first is that governance, when viewed largely from the ideas that inform the policy paradigm, is seen as an essentially incoherent concept. This is especially problematic in the case of ‘good governance’ as a discursively mediated policy paradigm. This is reinforced when it is shown that the discourse of ‘good governance’ often serves to legitimate neoliberalism, serving as a flanking and supporting mechanism for an essentially inegalitarian and unjust economic and political project (see Chapter 8). The second fallacy is that, when measured against the demands for analytical rigour of governance as a scientific concept and practice, it is claimed that governance practices are bound to produce no more than ‘muddling through’ at best and failure at worst. This poses at least three problems in exploring theoretical and policy paradigms. What is the best way to link theoretical and policy paradigms without committing errors? The first error is to reduce one to the other. The second is to subject policy paradigms to a purely theoretical critique or seek to derive immediate policy lessons from the theoretical paradigm. The third is to adopt the normative assumption that the practical necessity of governance justifies any and all attempts at governance,5 or to make the fatalistic claim that the practical impossibility of fully effective governance practices nullifies all such attempts.
Theoretical background to governance
These general etymological and conceptual accounts do not explain why a relatively dormant concept with limited scope and restricted usage came to be revitalized at a particular time and has been applied by so many individuals, agencies and organizations to so many different topics. An important general answer (with varied instantiations) to the ‘why this concept, why now’ question is a convergent reaction to perceived inadequacies in earlier theoretical paradigms. It is particularly tempting in the political and social sciences to suggest that the ‘other’ of governance is government (considered as state or organizational hierarchy).6 Thus theories of governance are primarily concerned with a wide range of ‘social’ modes of social coordination rather than with narrowly political (sovereign, juridico-political, bureaucratic or at least
