Policy Instruments and Governance (original) (raw)
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DEFINING, EXPLAINING AND, THEN, EXPLOITING THE ELUSIVE CONCEPT OF " GOVERNANCE "
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.
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From the late 1970s onwards there has been a growing interest in the notion of governance both as an object of theoretical inquiry and as a practical solution to co-ordination problems in a wide range of systems. From a theoretical point of view, the spread of governance studies in many disciplines is generally seen as a consequence of the growing complexity of the economic and social-political environment. According to an increasing amount of economic and political theory, due to globalisation, fragmentation and complexity marking modern societies political and economic life has undergone a transition from “government” to “governance”, from “bureaucracy” to “markets and networks”. The debate on the change from government to governance is very inclusive and comprises different strands of research. As a consequence of that, the basic notion of governance is not precisely defined, even if a relevant attempt in the systematisation of distinct meanings of governance has been carried out...
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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.
Some critical notes on "governance"
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.
Conceptual and Methodological Questions on the Changing Paradigms of Governance
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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.
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
Forms of Political Governance: Theoretical Foundations and Ideal Types.
2012
The Working Paper provides the theoretical foundations for an analytically and normatively adequate understanding of “governance” – a term and concept that has been widely used since the turn of the millennium for describing new forms of political steering and integration. It starts with an overview of the governance discourse at the beginning of the 21st century. We can distinguish a normative and an analytical application of the term governance. In its normative usage, governance constitutes a programmatic alternative to other paradigms for organizing and reforming the state and public administration. The competing paradigms can be subsumed under the terms government and management. For analytical purposes, the term governance is used, by contrast, to diagnose a change in forms of political steering, and sometimes even in politics and statehood altogether and to aptly conceptualise this change. After a critique of existing understandings and typologies, we develop the theoretical building blocks for a comprehensive and at the same time differentiated understanding of governance. First, we look at ‘worldviews’ (Weltbilder), basic assumptions on how the world is functioning or on how the world is supposed to function. Hence, worldviews can correspond to ontologies, basic assumptions on the type of entities that exist and on their relationships, but also to ideologies as comprehensive conceptualisations of an ideal world. We distinguish between holistic and elementaristic worldviews. Second, we turn to “images of social order” (Gesellschaftsbilder) as the fundamental assumptions on how societies are differentiated and on what holds societies together and describe two basic forms: segmentary differentiation and mechanical integration on the one hand and functional differentiation and organic integration on the other hand. “Models of human nature” (Menschenbilder) serve as the third differentiation criteria for the formation of a theory-based typology of governance. Each model of human nature comprises a concept of human behaviour/action and the corresponding understanding of institutionalised structures which influence human behav iour but which are shaped by human behaviour at the same time. The two most important models of human nature in modern social sciences are the homo oeconomicus and homo sociologicus. In order to develop a typology of forms of political governance, we will pick up the third dimension and transform the core insight from the micro- to the macro-level. In line with the homo oeconomicus, the term “government(s)” represents an understanding of political institutions as formalized instruments of the political community; in contrast, the term “governance” denotes a constitutional understanding of political institutions as a communicative structure which (re)creates the political community. Based on these three dimensions, we develop an eightfold typology of forms of governance. Whereas “centralised government”, “concerted governments”, “competing governments” and “contracting governments” correspond to the instrumental understanding of institutions in line with the homo oeconomicus, the other four forms –“communitarian governance”, “civic governance”, “creative governance” and “cogent governance” – build on the constitutive conceptualisation of institutions that correspond to the homo sociologicus. For each of the eight ideal types, we scrutinise the core features so that the typology can be applied in empirical studies for tracing differences and transformations of ideas and realities in political governing across time and place.