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Introduction: The Meanings of Governance

In the mid-fourteenth century, an Italian artist named Lorenzetti painted his famous frescos illustrating the stark contrasts between good and bad governance. One part of the frescos pictures a beautiful city where justice reigns, where young women are dancing, children playing, and men working. Some are ploughing, others cultivating vine. In contrast, the part of the frescos illustrating bad governance shows a satanic tyrant on a throne and justice lying tied up on the ground. There are no cultivated fields, no one is working, and the only activity is the killing of men and raping of women.1

Like Lorenzetti, political scientists have long considered governance to be important for the well-being of a country's citizens. However, governance was traditionally associated with government, with the exercise of power by political leaders. The concept was not widely used in the post-Second World War years, but during the 1980s it re-emerged with a new meaning, now referring to something broader than government. Reference to processes and actors outside the narrow realm of government was now included; yet no common definition of governance seemed to emerge. Governance is used in various fields, such as economics, cultural geography and politics. A simple search on 'governance' in the Social Sciences Index results in 1,774 articles in the twelve years from 1986 to 1998. In the three years from 1999 to the present, the Index comes up with 1,855 articles. In other words, more articles on governance have been written in the past three years than in the preceding twelve. Moreover, the articles appear in a wide range of journals, from, just to mention a few, Far Eastern Economic Review, to Urban Studies and Environment and Planning, to Public Administration Review, American Political Science Review and Foreign Affairs. The usage of the concept of governance, then, is applied in many different contexts and with as many different meanings. There is not one coherent body of governance theory, and it is difficult to get a clear picture of what governance theory is about.

The purpose of this book is to give sense to the concept of governance by introducing the many ways in which it is used and by sketching the many different theoretical debates lying behind these ways. This is, of course, a big task, considering the amount of material already in existence. The book makes no claim to cover the whole range of usages. It deliberately excludes, for example, works on corporate governance (which belong in the field of economics) and concentrates on governance as it is used in political science. But placing this literature out of the scope of the book still leaves us with a concept that has multiple meanings.

This introductory chapter has three sections. The first section asks what governance is about: it outlines different definitions of governance in political science, and categorizes them within three political science sub-fields of public administration and public policy, international relations, and comparative politics. The second section finds that identifying a common ground for the three sub-fields is indeed possible if the concept is grounded more explicitly than is presently the case in the new institutionalism. The new institutionalism has become central in all corners of the political science discipline and can be used to identify a broad core that is basic to most governance theory. The final section discusses some key concepts in the governance literature that are important in all usages of governance, and it thereafter outlines the plan of the book.

What is governance?

Etymologically, governance can be traced back to the Greek verb kubernân (to pilot or steer) and was used by Plato with regard to how to design a system of rule. The Greek term gave rise to the medieval Latin gubernare, which has the same connotation of piloting, rule-making or steering. The term has been used as synonymous with government, as the definition in the Concise Oxford Dictionary implies. Here, governance is 'the act or manner of governing; the office or function of governing'. To govern is 'to rule or control with authority; to be in government'. During the 1980s, however, political scientists referred to the term as distinct from government and as including civil-society actors. The definitions below are illustrative:

Governance refers to self-organizing, interorganizational networks characterized by interdependence, resource-exchange, rules of the game, and significant autonomy from the state. (Rhodes, 1997a: 15)

Global governance is conceived to include systems of rule at all levels of human activity - from the family to the international organization - in which the pursuit of goals through the exercise of control has transnational repercussions. (Rosenau, 1995: 13)

Governance is the stewardship of formal and informal political rules of the game. Governance refers to those measures that involve setting the rules for the exercise of power and settling conflicts over such rules. (Hyden, 1999: 185)

These definitions of governance are a small sample of many that can be encountered when assessing the literature. Is there any core to be identified in these definitions or do they refer to completely different phenomena? As noted above, all of them refer to something broader than government. The new use of governance does not point at state actors and institutions as the only relevant institutions and actors in the authoritative allocation of values (Easton, 1965). They all, to some extent, focus on the role of networks in the pursuit of common goals; these networks could be intergovernmental or inter-organizational (Rhodes); they could be transnational (Rosenau) or they could be networks of trust and reciprocity crossing the state-society divide (Hyden).

Despite the similarities, the definitions are used in different sub-fields of political science, and therefore they refer to different debates. For example, in a seminal article on governance, Rod Rhodes (Rhodes, 1996) refers to governance as a vogue word for reforming the public sector. Yet governance is also used in other contexts. When Rosenau talks about governance, he most certainly does not refer to public sector reform, but rather to the emergence of global political problems requiring global solutions. When Goran Hyden talks about governance, he relates it to theories of development and democratization in the Third World. Hence, the three definitions can be placed within the fields of public administration and policy, international relations, and comparative politics.

Rod Rhodes's definition of governance can be placed in the field of public administration and public policy. Scholars in this field study the tasks, organization, management and accountability structure of the public sector. Traditionally, this involved assuming that the public sector functioned best when it was apolitical, structured as a hierarchy, and based on a system of merit-recruitment and promotion. However, this traditional notion was increasingly challenged by scholars, who emphasized the essentially political nature of public bureaucracy (Peters and Wright, 1996: 628-9). They pointed at 'pathologies' of the public sector and found that it often did not work in an effective manner.

During the 1980s, a wave of public sector reforms characterized many western countries, entailing privatization, the transfer of private sector management principles to the public sector, and decentralization. Central government functions were decentralized to lower levels and in some regions political authority was increasingly transferred to supranational organizations. Additionally, in many countries, civil-society organizations have become more involved in the delivery of public services. The consequence has been an increasing fragmentation of political systems. Scholars have begun to take notice of the plurality of actors and organizations involved in the pursuit of common goals, and they are rejecting the sharp distinction between public and private that characterizes traditional public administration theory. The question of how to steer these self-organizing inter-organizational networks becomes crucial.

Rosenau's account of global governance belongs in the field of international relations. The study of international relations has long been dominated by the realist paradigm, which maintains that states are the most important units in the international system and that the study of international relations is mainly about the relations between states. Since there is no government reigning over all states, the international system is anarchic, and states are in constant preparation for war. However, the realist paradigm has been challenged by many significant developments. One is the internationalization, or globalization, of the world economy, which has raised the discussion of the extent to which states really are in control of their territories. If they do not have full sovereignty, they are no longer the only important units in international relations. Another development is the growth of non-governmental movements and organizations, and the creation of global organizations such as the WTO to respond to problems that have a global, or transnational, nature. In other words, increasing globalization has raised a need for global governance in many arenas such as trade regulation, the environment and conflict resolution.

Hyden's understanding of...