HANDBOOK ON THEORIES OF GOVERNANCE

Handbook on Theories of Governance

SECOND EDITION

Edited by
Christopher Ansell
Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Jacob Torfing
Professor, Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University,
Denmark, and Professor, Nord University, Norway

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Christopher Ansell and Jacob Torfing 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording,
or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

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Political Science and Public Policy subject collection
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Contents

List of contributorsix
Preface to Second Editionxiii
Acknowledgmentsxviii

1 Introduction to the Handbook on Theories of Governance1

Christopher Ansell and Jacob Torfing

PART I THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF GOVERNANCE

2 Collective action theory 18

Robert Holahan and Mark Lubell

3 Organization theory 29
Morten Egeberg, Åse Gornitzka and Jarle Trondal

4 Public management theory 43

Zoe Radnor, Stephen Osborne and Russ Glennon

5 Planning theory 57
Thomas Hartmann and Stan Geertman

6 Policy process frameworks 67

Saba Siddiki

7 State theory  77
Bob Jessop

8 Democratic theory 89
Andreas Klinke

9 Public law and regulatory theory 104

Shauhin Talesh

10 Development theory 118

Jennifer N. Brass

11 International relations theory 129

Kerstin Sahlin

PART II BASIC THEORETICAL CONCEPTS

12 Heterarchy  140
Karen Stephenson

v
vi  Handbook on theories of governance

13 Network 149
Patrick Kenis

14 Public participation 158

Kathryn S. Quick and John M. Bryson

15 Representation 169
Lucy Taylor

16 Deliberation 178
PerOla Öberg

17 Power 187
Mark Haugaard

18 Legitimacy 196
Sylvia I. Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen

19 Trust  205
Bart Nooteboom

20 Accountability 215
Yannis Papadopoulos

21 Transparency 226
Jenny de Fine Licht and Daniel Naurin

22 Evidence 234
Paul Cairney

23 Learning 244
Tanya Heikkila and Andrea K. Gerlak

24 Innovation 254
Jean Hartley and Jacob Torfing

25 Risk 264
Ortwin Renn and Andreas Klinke

26 Steering 278
Renate Mayntz

27 Soft and hard governing tools 285

Paula Blomqvist

PART III THEORETICAL MODES OF ANALYSIS

28 Information-based governance 298

Graham Bullock
 Contents  vii

29 Discourse theory 309

Steven Griggs and David Howarth

30 Institutional theory 323

B. Guy Peters

31 Public choice theory 336

Lina Ericksson

32 The Advocacy Coalition Framework 353

Jonathan J. Pierce and Alex Osei-Kojo

33 Economic theory 365

Klaus Nielsen

34 Governmentality 378
Peter Triantafillou

35 Complexity theory and systems analysis 389

Christopher Koliba, Lasse Gerrits, Mary Lee Rhodes and Jack W. Meek

36 Narrative and interpretative theory 407

Nick Turnbull

37 Pragmatism 419
Christopher Ansell

38 Normative considerations of interactive governance: effectiveness,

efficiency, legitimacy and innovation 429
Jurian Edelenbos and Ingmar van Meerkerk

PART IV FORMS OF GOVERNANCE

39 Co-production: theoretical roots and conceptual frameworks 446

Tony Bovaird and Elke Loeffler

40 Democratic network governance 462

Eva Sørensen

41 Regulatory governance 472

John Yasuda

42 Network governance 485

Robyn Keast

43 Collaborative governance 497

Alison Gash

44 Private governance 510

Marija Isailovic and Philipp Pattberg
viii  Handbook on theories of governance

45 Urban and regional governance 519

Jon Pierre

46 Multi-level governance 528

Ian Bache, Ian Bartle and Matthew Flinders

47 EU and supranational governance 540

Diana Panke and Miguel Haubrich-Seco

48 Transnational economic governance 555

Walter Mattli and Jack Seddon

49 Metagovernance 567
Jacob Torfing

50 Adaptive governance 580

Toddi Steelman

51 Experimentalist governance 592

Bernardo Rangoni

52 Epilogue: the current status and future development of governance theories 604
Christopher Ansell and Jacob Torfing

Index612
Contributors

Christopher Ansell, Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley,

USA.
Ian Bache, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, UK.
Ian Bartle, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, UK.
Paula Blomqvist, Department of Government, Uppsala University, Sweden.
Tony Bovaird, School of Government, University of Birmingham, UK.
Jennifer N. Brass, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, USA.
John M. Bryson, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, USA.
Graham Bullock, Departments of Political Science and Environmental Studies, Davidson
College, USA.
Paul Cairney, Division of History, Heritage and Politics, University of Stirling, UK.
Jenny de Fine Licht, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Jurian Edelenbos, Department of Public Administration, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the
Netherlands.
Morten Egeberg, Department of Political Science and ARENA Centre for European Studies,
University of Oslo, Norway.
Lina Ericksson, Department of Philosophy, Flinders University, Australia.
Matthew Flinders, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, UK.
Alison Gash, Department of Political Science, University of Oregon, USA.
Stan Geertman, Urban and Regional Research Centre, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.
Andrea K. Gerlak, School of Geography, Development and Environment, and Udall Center
for Studies in Public Policy, University of Arizona, USA.
Lasse Gerrits, Faculty of Social Science, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany.
Russ Glennon, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.
Åse Gornitzka, Department of Political Science and ARENA Centre for European Studies,
University of Oslo, Norway.
Steven Griggs, Department of Politics and Public Policy, De Montfort University, UK.

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x  Handbook on theories of governance

Jean Hartley, Department for Public Leadership and Social Enterprise, The Open University,
UK.
Thomas Hartmann, Urban and Regional Research Centre, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.
Miguel Haubrich-Seco, Department of Political Science, University of Freiburg, Germany.
Mark Haugaard, Department of Political Science and Sociology, National University of
Ireland, Galway, Ireland.
Tanya Heikkila, School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado, Denver, USA.
Robert Holahan, Department of Environmental Studies, Binghamton University, New York,
USA.
David Howarth, Department of Government, University of Essex, UK.
Marija Isailovic, Department of Environmental Policy Studies, Vrije University Amsterdam,
the Netherlands.
Bob Jessop, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK.
Sylvia I. Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen, Public Administration and Policy Group, Wageningen
University, the Netherlands.
Robyn Keast, Faculty of Business Law and Arts, Southern Cross University, Australia.
Patrick Kenis, Tilburg School of Economics and Management (TiSEM), Tilburg University,
the Netherlands.
Andreas Klinke, Department of Political Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland,
Canada.
Christopher Koliba, Department of Community Development and Applied Economics,
University of Vermont, USA.
Elke Loeffler, Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde, UK.
Mark Lubell, Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California,
Davis, USA.
Walter Mattli, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, UK.
Renate Mayntz, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Germany.
Jack W. Meek, College of Business and Public Management, University of La Verne, USA.
Ingmar van Meerkerk, Department of Public Administration, Erasmus University Rotterdam,
the Netherlands.
Daniel Naurin, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Klaus Nielsen, Department of Management, Birkbeck University of London, UK.
 Contributors  xi

Bart Nooteboom, Faculty of Management and Organisation, Groningen University, the

Netherlands.
PerOla Öberg, Department of Government, Uppsala University, Sweden.
Stephen Osborne, University of Edinburgh Business School, UK.
Alex Osei-Kojo, Department of Political Science, University of Tennessee Knoxville, USA.
Diana Panke, Department of Political Science, University of Freiburg, Germany.
Yannis Papadopoulos, Institute of Political Studies, University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
Philipp Pattberg, Department of Environmental Policy Studies, Vrije University Amsterdam,
the Netherlands.
B. Guy Peters, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh, USA and Zeppelin
University, Germany.
Jonathan J. Pierce, School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado Denver, USA.
Jon Pierre, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Kathryn S. Quick, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, USA.
Zoe Radnor, The University of Law, UK.
Bernardo Rangoni, Department of Politics, University of York, UK.
Ortwin Renn, Environmental Sociology and Technology Assessment, University of Stuttgart,
Germany.
Mary Lee Rhodes, School of Business, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
Kerstin Sahlin, Department of Business Studies, Uppsala University, Sweden.
Jack Seddon, Department of Politics and International Relation, Oxford University, USA.
Saba Siddiki, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, USA.
Eva Sørensen, Department of Society and Globalization, Roskilde University, Denmark.
Toddi Steelman, School of Environment and Sustainability, University of Saskatchewan,
Canada.
Karen Stephenson, Netform International, USA.
Shauhin Talesh, Irvine School of Law, University of California, Irvine, USA.
Lucy Taylor, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, UK.
Jacob Torfing, Professor, Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University,
Denmark, and Professor, Nord University, Norway.
Peter Triantafillou, Department of Society and Globalization, Roskilde University, Denmark.
xii  Handbook on theories of governance

Jarle Trondal, University of Agder and ARENA Centre for European Studies, University of
Oslo, Norway.
Nick Turnbull, Politics, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, UK.
John Yasuda, Center for the Study of Contemporary China, University of Pennsylvania,
USA.
Preface to Second Edition

Although the body of theory reviewed in this Handbook has not changed dramatically since
our first edition in 2016, the world around it has. These world-shaking changes are familiar to
all of us. A surging authoritarian populism has challenged established norms and institutions
of liberal democracy and of global order. Foreign tampering with democratic elections has
become ever more brazen and the phenomenon of “fake news” has blindsided us. Progressive
movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have shaken our major institutions and
challenged us to rethink our basic concepts of justice, while the rise of artificial intelligence
and big data have presented new moral concerns about privacy and surveillance. And on top
of all the momentous changes, the world has suffered through the COVID-19 pandemic, with
its stunning implications for societal control and mobilization, and its lasting implications for
how we work and live together.
Theories tend to develop on the scale of a decade or more, the result of the cumulative
interaction between many smaller research agendas operating in parallel. They adapt over
time to changing societal conditions and political events. In our opinion, they should avoid
“faddishness” that jumps on the latest and most popular craze, lest they over-adapt to specific
events or temporary conditions and hence miss the forest for the trees. Yet the events of the
last five years are not really fads; they are fundamental in their implications and they require
broad consideration.
What do the changes of the last five years tell us about theories of governance? This is
a large and unruly question and we do not pretend to have a comprehensive answer. But we
take it as opportunity to reflect on the theories presented in this book as a collection, and to
ponder how the development of governance theories might respond in productive ways in the
future.
The rise of authoritarian populism around the world has challenged many of the basic
parameters of contemporary governance. In a very fundamental way, their economic national-
ism challenges the globalization of the economy, which has had such a profound effect on the
evolution of global governance. At least since the mid-1990s, the United States (US)-led multi-
lateralism that characterized post-World War II international relations has partially disengaged
from the task of international governance, while the rise of neoliberalism, the end of the Cold
War, and the strengthening power of the Global South has significantly transformed the global
landscape. International organizations—once the beacons of the multilateral order—have par-
tially relinquished their centrality and transnational corporations and non-governmental organ-
izations have to some degree stepped in to fill an emerging “governance gap” accentuated by
economic globalization. Various strategies of “new governance”—such as corporate social
responsibility and private regulation—were the products of this transformation (see Chapter
11 on “International relations theory,” Chapter 44 on “Private governance,” and Chapter 48 on
“Transnational economic governance”).
The Trump presidency exemplified the heightened tensions around global governance,
expressing outright hostility to the tradition of US-led multilateralism, and denigrating tradi-
tional democratic allies and the United Nations. At the same time, it reintroduced a strong eco-
nomic protectionism, raising questions about the free trade principles of the global economy.
xiii
xiv  Handbook on theories of governance

However, if anything, the result has been less of a thorough-going transformation of the inter-
national political economy and more of patchwork of inconsistent principles and increased
tensions. The Biden administration has signaled a partial return to the status quo ante, but
the governance gap deepened by the decline of US-led multilateralism is likely to continue,
though probably with heightened turbulence, as the global response to COVID-19 suggests. If
anything, the “regime complexity” observed by global governance scholars is likely to deepen.
Walter Mattli and Jack Seddon’s admonition to pay more attention to the distributional conse-
quence of governance arrangements is likely to be even more relevant today (see Chapter 48).
Brexit has raised a related set of issues about global governance. In some respects, the
European Union (EU) has carried on the tradition of multilateralism and fostered regional
trade integration, and many perspectives on “new governance” have arisen from trying to
make sense of its distinctive institutions and politics (see Chapter 27 on “Soft and hard
governing tools,” Chapter 46 on “Multi-level governance,” and Chapter 47 on “EU and
supranational governance”). The withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU represents
an obvious nationalist challenge to multilateralism, though the future is difficult to discern.
Although some scholars have argued that Brexit might actually strengthen the EU by opening
a path toward deeper integration, others suggest that the populism represented by Brexit will
embolden other EU member states to resist integration. However, many of the governance
innovations in the European sphere reflect the limbo of whether the EU is a state or an inter-
national organization, and the current post-Brexit situation hardly settles that issue. Thus, we
foresee more uncertainty about the types and strategies of governance in the EU, but do not
currently envision a fundamental shift in the logic of governing as the attempts to involve rel-
evant and affected actors to enhance both effectiveness and legitimacy are likely to continue.
While democratic forms of populism may serve as a corrective aligning disconnected
elites with the people, the current forms of authoritarian populism have raised fundamental
challenges to liberal democracy. Where populist parties have assumed power (Brazil, India,
Hungary, Brazil and the US), the result has been “democratic backsliding” that has eroded
the rule of law and bedrock principles of liberal politics. Populists have often adopted a more
authoritarian stance toward the control and deployment of governing institutions, a disdain
for minority rights, and a disregard for the public sphere. Perhaps most troubling, they have
accentuated the divisive manipulation of political information. Is this development a funda-
mental challenge to governance, as described in many of theories outlined in this book? Yes,
we would have to conclude that it is. In our view, much of the impetus for governance arises
due to the increasing differentiation of society and politics. We see governance not so much
as the retreat or erosion of the democratic state, but rather as the deepening pluralization of
society and politics that aims to involve a plethora of public and private actors in governing
society and the economy. However, this pluralization requires the state to invent new forms of
engagement that share and organize political power in less hierarchical ways (see Chapter 7
on “State theory”). The authoritarian and anti-pluralist stance of many of the current populist
movements represents a direct challenge to these pluralist modes of governance. Whereas
recent populist movements thrive on division and contestation, and revert easily to author-
itarian tactics, many governance strategies seek to promote cooperation and integration by
devising modes of sharing power. The two approaches cannot easily coexist.
Yet here we are also in a world of limbo. Short of the triumph of populism, the forces that
are pushing toward pluralism are equally strong. This situation suggests a fundamental point
about governance theories. While there has been significant attention in the governance litera-
 Preface to second edition  xv

ture to the concepts of representation (Chapter 15), deliberation (Chapter 16), power (Chapter
17), legitimacy (Chapter 18), accountability (Chapter 20) and transparency (Chapter 21)—and
in this version of the Handbook we have also added an entry on trust by Bart Nooteboom
(Chapter 19)—current events suggest to us that governance theories must engage more
directly with the conditions that support or erode democracy. While governance theory has to
some extent been attentive to conflict (work on collaborative governance—see Chapter 43—is
in part an exploration of how to manage conflict), it has tended to focus more on cooperation
and coordination as functional responses to complexity and interdependence.
The populist challenge to democracy also suggests the need to further deepen the engage-
ment between governance theory and democratic theory (see Chapter 8 on “Democratic
theory” and Chapter 40 on “Democratic network governance”). While governance theory
has long been attentive to how governing arrangements incorporate the input of citizens (see
Chapter 14 on “Public participation”), populism suggests the estrangement of citizens from
the democratic state; and the need to channel citizen engagement in productive directions.
Governance theories have important work to do in expanding our practical understanding of
the range of ways that increasingly competent, critical and assertive citizens encounter and
provide input into governing process.
While right-wing populists have challenged the basic precepts of liberal democracy, popular
movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have fundamentally challenged the status
quo with respect to equity and inclusiveness. Equity has been one of the cornerstones of public
administration theory, but it has been less visible in discussions of governance. The issue of
inclusion, however, has been a prominent issue in the governance literature, both implicitly
and explicitly (see Chapter 38 on “Normative considerations”). Inclusion often arises as an
issue in the study of networks and collaboration, where there is often a tension about whom
to include. While the governance literature is quite aware that different modes of governance
shape whose voice gets expressed and heard, and that minority voices can easily be excluded,
this is perhaps an area where governance theory could sharpen and deepen its analysis.
Populism and popular movements also raise another fundamental challenge for governance
theories: how to incorporate social media into our theories. Social media raises challenges and
opportunities for governing. First, by shaping new patterns and possibilities of communica-
tion, social media engenders new modes of coalition-building and interest expression, funda-
mentally reshaping the expression of politics. Second, it permits new voices to enter the public
sphere and potentially shifts the balance of power between social groups and governing insti-
tutions. Third, social media changes the kind of information that has salience and influences
how public debates unfold; with the exploitation of “fake news” representing the worst side
of this changing info-scape. Fourth, social media fundamentally transforms the temporality of
governance, speeding it up, and creating demands for rapid response.
Governance theories have mostly taken the changing character of digital technologies
as a new and positive opportunity for improving governance, as captured by the term
“e-governance.” Digital technologies have provided the technological infrastructure for a range
of emerging forms of governance (see Chapter 28 on “Information-based governance”). While
this scholarship also discusses negative features of information technology, recent events
suggest that governance theories need to do a more thorough job of incorporating the less
savory aspects of social media and digital technology into our understanding of governance.
Concerns about the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data have accentuated over the
last five years. To some extent, AI and big data raise concerns that are already addressed by
xvi  Handbook on theories of governance

concepts in the governance theory toolkit, such as “transparency” (Chapter 21) and “govern-
mentality” (Chapter 34). However, we suspect that concerns about privacy and surveillance
are likely to become even more salient over the next decade. Moreover, AI and big data funda-
mentally change patterns of communication, interaction, customization and decision-making
and it is likely that they will ultimately transform the tools and processes of governance.
Governance theories will need to take these new modes of aggregating, distributing and
valuing information into account as we try to understand emerging patterns of governance.
And finally, the big one: the COVID-19 pandemic. We will be digesting the lessons of
this event for years. In many respects, however, it folds all the prior issues together. One of
the noted lessons is that populist governments have performed poorly in responding to the
emerging pandemic: denying its existence, rejecting multilateralism, advancing fake news and
denigrating science. The pandemic has accentuated concern about the equitable provision of
government and private sector resources, and elevated issues of legitimacy and trust. And it
raises the practical and ethical salience of AI and big data.
Perhaps one of the major themes of the pandemic has been the relationship between
knowledge and policy. This has been a central issue in governance theory for many years,
particularly in research on risk governance (see Chapter 25 on “Risk”). In this version of the
Handbook, we have added a new chapter by Paul Cairney on “Evidence” (Chapter 22). Having
experienced the pandemic, every citizen will be impressed by the important—and somewhat
tortured—relationship between evidence and policy. Are masks important? When and where
should we wear them? Is the vaccine effective? Does it cause harmful side-effects? The rela-
tionship between science and policy is critical for governance, but rarely so straightforward as
the phrase “evidence-based policy” makes it sound.
The COVID-19 pandemic called for rapid, complex and comprehensive policy responses
by all levels of government, from local to international. The public policy literature has spe-
cialized in understanding the messy politics of policy-making punctuated by major “focusing
events,” though this body of work has tended to focus on understanding policy change over
time frame of a decade or more. Still, policy process models offer a rich source of theory
for understanding policy-making during the pandemic. In this edition of the Handbook, we
include two new chapters relevant to this task: a chapter by Saba Sidikki on “Policy process
frameworks” (Chapter 6) and a chapter by Jonathan Pierce and Alex Osei-Kojo on “The advo-
cacy coalition framework” (Chapter 32).
As many have observed, the COVID-19 pandemic took on the quality of a “total mobiliza-
tion,” which typically occurs only in wars or major disasters. The role of the state in “steering”
and “metagoverning” this total mobilization was at the heart of the pandemic response (see
Chapters 26 and 49 on these concepts, respectively). Governments had to rapidly develop and
implement regulatory strategies—hard and soft—to engage in broad-based societal controls
that were scarcely imaginable outside of wartime situations (for relevant perspectives on reg-
ulation, see Chapter 9 on “Public law and regulatory theory” and Chapter 41 on “Regulatory
governance”).
The pandemic also raised many fundamental issues about modes of coordination and collab-
oration within and between governments and across the public‒private divide; issues that have
been foundational for governance theories. Although the pandemic response relied heavily on
setting and enforcing rules for the conduct of public and private behavior, it also demanded
elaborate forms of coordination and collaboration at all levels of government and society.
Although the stresses and strains of coordination and collaborative were evident, there were
 Preface to second edition  xvii

bright notes as well, such as the successful public‒private collaboration in the development
of vaccines. Chapters on “Collective action theory” (Chapter 2), “Network” (Chapter 13),
“Complexity theory and systems analysis” (Chapter 35), “Democratic network governance”
(Chapter 40), and “Collaborative governance” (Chapter 43) contain relevant perspectives to
help understand the successes and failures of collaboration and coordination.
An important feature of this total mobilization was that government and citizens had to
co-produce the pandemic response. Mask use was a central feature of the pandemic response,
and although it was in many cases authoritatively enforced, it also required a large degree of
citizen cooperation (as evidenced in places where citizens refused to cooperate). Moreover,
many countries saw a surge in volunteering and local collaboration involving citizens and civil
society organizations helping those weak and elderly who were afraid to go out and in need
of daily supplies and human contact. Co-production has been a theme of the public adminis-
tration literature for many years, but it has rarely been envisioned on such a vast scale. In this
version of the Handbook, we have included a new chapter on this topic by Tony Bovaird and
Elke Loeffler (Chapter 39).
While science took on a central role in decision-making during the pandemic, uncertainty
and the need to continually adapt and change were equally significant. All of us experienced
the sense of constantly shifting rules, guidelines and strategies. While some of this might
be attributed to muddled decision-making or political pressures, governance theories would
also call attention to the inevitable need to flexibly adapt to changing circumstances and new
information and exploit new opportunities to do things in new and better ways. Chapters
in the Handbook on “Learning” (Chapter 23), “Innovation” (Chapter 24), “Complexity
theory and systems analysis” (Chapter 35), and “Adaptive governance” (Chapter 50) speak
directly to these issues. In addition, we have also added a chapter by Bernardo Rangoni on
“Experimentalist governance,” which envisions distributed actors engaging in “recursive
learning” in response to uncertainty (Chapter 51).
In summary, this short reflection surfaces several themes for governance theories. The first
and most important is that governance theories are essential for understanding the response to
major societal events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, the COVID pandemic makes
it clear why we need a “tool kit” of different theories to address different aspects of the highly
complex phenomena of “total mobilization.” However, the second theme is that while govern-
ance theories have much to offer, they also need to be sensitive to fundamental political and
economic challenges and shifts. Large-scale macro-changes in politics, economy and society
are sometimes challenging to grasp or incorporate at the meso scale of most governance theo-
ries, but we need to be attentive to how these changes are transforming the basic parameters for
governing. The intense populist and popular mobilization of the last few years suggests to us
that governance theory needs to engage more fully with democratic theory, and to focus more
on how modes of governance interact with societal conflict and equity. Changes in our com-
munication and information environment have created new ways of engaging politics and they
channel new ideas, perspectives and agendas, often at lightning speed. We need to find ways
to account for these dynamics as we develop our next generation of theories of governance.
Acknowledgments

After more than two decades of intense scholarly debate, there can still be considerable confu-
sion about what governance is and how it should be theorized. This Handbook seeks to provide
conceptual clarification and to canvass the ever-expanding theoretical toolbox available to
students of governance. In preparing the manuscript we have received invaluable editorial
assistance from the editorial staff at Edward Elgar Publishing and from Matthew Stenberg
at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). The support and encouragement
from colleagues at UC Berkeley and Roskilde University has also been a constant source of
inspiration. Last but not least, we would like to warmly thank the authors for their valuable
contributions, their patience and their responsiveness.

xviii
1. Introduction to the Handbook on Theories of
Governance
Christopher Ansell and Jacob Torfing

Concepts and approaches come and go in the social sciences. Some of them are more than
passing moments and become steadily growing research areas that attract increasing scholarly
attention. Some of the new research areas are stabilized and consolidated and gradually take
the form of new paradigms that signal a scientific turn and give rise to a significant reorien-
tation of the scholarly activities of researchers and the ideas and actions of practitioners. The
research on governance has recently evolved into such a paradigm. Although the notion of
governance can be traced far back into history, the interest in governance surged in the 1990s
and has grown ever since. Today, governance is one of the most frequently used social science
concepts in the world, as any internet search will readily confirm. A vast array of researchers,
research centers, journals and conferences are devoted to the study of governance, and many
new theories of governance have been promulgated over the last two decades.
Theories of governance are analytical lenses that help us understand our contemporary
world. These theories have different purposes. Some of them bring into focus how different
actors, jurisdictions, levels and institutional arenas interact to exchange knowledge and ideas,
coordinate action and collaborate in making authoritative decisions that produce collective out-
comes. Others help us understand the role played by different public, private and civil society
actors in governing processes at different levels and in different countries or parts of the world.
Some theories help us analyze how governance is designed, organized and orchestrated, or
how it evolves over time and across sectors and domains. Others measure governance, study
its impact and effects or help us to understand how different kinds of governance contribute to
more effective, democratic or innovative ways of solving societal problems, delivering public
services or regulating social and economic life. Still others analyze governance failure or how
to improve governance to secure desirable outcomes. Collected together, these theories of
governance provide an analytical tool kit for reflecting on and participating in the production
of ordered rule in our increasingly complex, fragmented and dynamic society.
This Handbook provides an overview of theories of governance. As the individual chap-
ters in this volume suggest, the reach of governance theory is broad and its empirical terms
of reference are highly varied—from managing local mental health services to addressing
global environmental problems. Governance theory is also a particularly interdisciplinary
endeavor—with roots in political science, public administration, sociology, economics and
law and with branches that extend into many applied fields. What we hope to make clear with
this volume is that governance researchers share—or at least have at their disposal—a rich and
powerful set of theories that enable us to address a wide range of issues. By focusing on “theo-
ries” of governance, this Handbook celebrates the diversity of ideas that have grown up in this
relatively young field of research. There is no single “theory” of governance, but rather many
overlapping theoretical discussions and debates. By collecting these discussions and debates
together in a single volume, we hope to demonstrate the formidable strength of our shared

1
2  Handbook on theories of governance

conceptual tool kit. By assembling these theories in a single place, we also hope to clarify the
baseline for subsequent theoretical development and refinement.
To establish a common framework for the chapters that follow, we first define the concept
of governance and specify the basic understanding of governance that informs the contribu-
tions to this Handbook. We then explore the rise and development of the governance debate
in Western liberal democracies and other parts of the world. Having defined the concept of
governance and explored its origins, we reflect on the content and purpose of theories of
governance and the need for a Handbook dedicated to the exposition of these theories. This
need arises from the rapid expansion of empirical studies of governance that prompts us to
consolidate, assess and further develop the theoretical foundations of this field. At the end
of the Introduction, we briefly explain the purpose and content of the four main parts of the
Handbook and outline the different ways that it can be used.

DEFINING GOVERNANCE

Today, “governance” is one of the most fashionable and frequently used social science terms
in the world. Part of the attraction is that the notion of governance signals a weakening of
the state-centric view of power and societal steering that has been problematized by recent
empirical and ideological developments. Another and related part of the attraction is that
“governance” perceives private and civil society actors as resources and instruments for
co-produced public policy making, instead of reducing them to passive targets and subjects of
public regulation. This view chimes well with the post-liberal call for the development of an
active citizenship and the post-modern decentering of power. Both tend to draw attention to
the idea of “regulated self-regulation,” which encourages individual and collective actors to
interact in relatively autonomous arenas facilitated and regulated by public authorities aiming
to govern at a distance (Sørensen and Triantafillou 2009).
Governance is a popular but notoriously slippery term. This is evidenced by the fact that
governance is often used in conjunction with a particular qualifying prefix. Hence, “good
governance” tends to refer to the endeavor of international organizations such as the United
Nations and the World Bank to assess and measure the quality of governing institutions in
developing countries in terms of their stability, interaction, transparency, responsiveness, pro-
cedural fairness, effectiveness and adherence to the rule of law. “Global governance” refers to
attempts to devise regulatory policies in response to global problems such as AIDS, terrorism,
poverty and global warming in the absence of an overarching political authority. “Corporate
governance” refers to the institutionalized interaction among the many players—including
shareholders, management, boards of directors, employees, customers, financial institutions,
regulators and the community at large—involved in the process of directing and controlling
private firms. “Multi-level governance” refers to a system of continuous negotiation among
nested governments at the local, regional, national and supranational levels. Last but not least,
it should be mentioned that “new governance” has been a buzzword in public sector reforms
inspired by New Public Management (NPM). The governance literature contains many other
conceptual constellations that further expand the application of the notion of governance.
However, adding a particular prefix to the notion of governance does not help us in defining
what governance per se means. Thus we need a generic definition of governance that can
 Introduction  3

subsequently be used in radial categorizations of different kinds of governance (Torfing et al.

2012).
Some contemporary commentators have defined governance in terms of: the formation
of a collective will out of a diversity of interests (politics); a system of rules shaping and
regulating the actions of social and political actors (polity); or the political steering of social
and economic relations based on soft, cooperative policy instruments, such as persuasion,
voluntary coordination and procedures for benchmarking public performance (policy) (for an
overview see Treib et al. 2005). However, these different definitions do not really capture the
distinctiveness of governance, because they fail to show what governance adds to the more
familiar political science notions of politics, polity or policy.
Let us, therefore, briefly consider some of the alternative definitional strategies that have
been advocated by leading scholars in the field of governance studies. First, the World Bank
(2007) defines governance in terms of: the process of selecting those capable of making
authoritative political decisions; the capacity of the government to effectively manage its
resources and implement sound policies; and the respect that citizens and governments have
for the institutions governing their interactions. The problem with this definitional strategy is
not only its prescriptive character but also that it betrays the fundamental idea that governance
implies a problematization of the role and nature of unicentric forms of government. Although
it does make a reference to institutionalized forms of interaction, the World Bank definition
of governance is primarily focused on the institutions and procedures of traditional forms of
government.
Second, Jessop (1998, 2002) defines governance as “the heterarchy of reflexive
self-organisation.” This definition tends to associate governance with self-organized processes
in civil society. The problem with this definitional strategy is that it gives rise to an unwar-
ranted normativism, as it implicitly assumes that governance is more consensual, egalitarian,
trust-based and deliberative than governing produced by State and markets because it repro-
duces the intrinsic values of civil society.
Third, Kooiman (1993), Mayntz (1993a, 1993b), Scharpf (1994) and Klijn (2008) tend
to equate governance with network forms of governance that are defined either as a hybrid
of hierarchy and market or as a distinctive mode of governing that supplements hierarchies
and markets. Although networks are clearly an integral part of governance, the conflation of
governance and networks creates an overly narrow definition of governance that excludes
those forms of steering, control and coordination that are not provided by stable, horizontal
networks.
Finally, Bevir and Rhodes (2003) tend to see governance as a neoliberal language game
that leads to different interpretations and institutionalizations in different political and cultural
contexts. The problem with this post-foundationalist view is that it becomes difficult to put
bounds on governance. It does not refer to specific institutions, processes or modes of govern-
ing, so governance is reduced to a narrative advanced by situated actors addressing particular
dilemmas in ways that are contingent upon specific traditions.
The problem with the available definitional strategies is that they either define governance
too narrowly or leave the definition open for an endless number of contextual interpretations.
To avoid these pitfalls, we shall here define governance generically as the process of steering
society and the economy through collective action and in accordance with common goals
(Torfing et al. 2012). This definition resonates with Meuleman’s definition of governance as
4  Handbook on theories of governance

any pattern of ordered rule (Meuleman 2008) but is more precise, as it tells us what is governed
and how it is governed.
Building on this broad definition, this Handbook will emphasize the interactive dimensions
of public governance and thus more narrowly define governance as the interactive processes
through which society and the economy are steered towards collectively negotiated objectives.
The crucial insight is that no single actor has the knowledge, resources and capacities to
govern alone in our complex and fragmented societies (Kooiman 1993). Interaction is needed
in order to exchange or pool the ideas, resources and competences that are required for the
production of desirable outcomes.

THE RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE GOVERNANCE DEBATE

The new focus on “governance”—a term difficult to translate across different languages—was
triggered by the problematization of traditional forms of government. The idea pervading
liberal democracies that social and economic relations are—and indeed should be—governed
solely through a “chain of government” connecting voters, parliamentary assemblies, execu-
tive political leaders, public bureaucracy and citizens through a series of delegation and control
relations was criticized for being too formalistic, narrow-minded, exclusive, inflexible, unco-
ordinated, “undemocratic” and, most importantly, out of step with reality. The contemporary
focus on governance arose through an inversion of this reigning conception of governing—the
critical acts of governing often occurred outside the formal chain of government in the interac-
tion of a plethora of public and private actors. The normative logic was inverted as well. Only
by acknowledging the centrality of these extra-governmental interactions could we expect
to achieve competent and knowledge-based decision making, creative problem solving, and
flexible and well-coordinated policy implementation. Moreover, it was assumed that govern-
ance would help to realize democratic ideals about inclusion, empowerment and ownership
and provide opportunities for societal actors to influence and perhaps even co-create policy,
regulation and public services at the output side of the political system. Last but not least, gov-
ernance would provide a more realistic account of the actual forms of governing society and
the economy by taking into account the complex patterns of networked interaction that break
with the linearity of the chain of government.
Theoretical inversion is a well-trod path to criticism. Arguably, many of the most impor-
tant developments in the history of the social sciences have emerged in this way. In political
science, pluralist theories inverted the narrow association of politics with formal constitu-
tional and legal processes, focusing it instead on the political demands of interest groups.
Behavioralism relocated the locus of attention from elites and placed it on the attitudes and
behavior of ordinary citizens. Institutionalism then rebelled against behavioralism, arguing
that institutions rather than individual attitudes and behaviors are the most important focus of
politics. Theoretical inversions reveal unrecognized dynamics, raise new analytical questions
and chart new directions for research. However, they also tend to invoke strong criticism. As
path-breaking early statements give way to the work of theoretical elaboration and refinement,
second generation theorists often wrestle with this legacy as they respond to critics. These
elaborations and refinements are themselves often critical contributions to the emerging par-
adigm, sometimes breaking new theoretical ground and opening up further lines of research.
 Introduction  5

The development of governance theory has definitely followed this path. Early statements
invoking the idea of a shift from government to governance suggested that processes of
governing were somehow self-organizing and did not require government. Critics pounced.
As a result, governance scholars refined their bold claims, clarifying that governance did not
replace government, but rather supplemented and transformed it. They noted how governance
often operates in the “shadow” of government or that government participates in governance
in distinct ways (as a “meta-governor”). The first generation of governance scholarship made
a Faustian bargain by focusing on the positive aspects of governance and ignoring its darker
and more problematic aspects, such as the precariousness of interactive forms of governance,
the development of insurmountable conflicts and the lack of democratic accountability (Peters
and Pierre 2004: 76). Subsequent scholarship responded by exploring this “dark side” (Raab
and Milward 2003) and by elaborating new understandings of accountability (Considine
2002).
To say that the concept of governance emerged simply through a creative act of theoretical
inversion would miss the wider political currents and theoretical concerns that contributed to
its development. Different intellectual communities converged on the concept of governance
because a common question arose from the early 1970s onwards across multiple domains: how
can we govern effectively and democratically in a world in which political authority, capacity
and power are fragmented, distributed or constrained? In the fields of public administration,
public law and public policy, this question arose out of the attempt to address challenges
posed by administrative complexity, poor policy implementation and fiscal austerity. In the
field of development studies, it developed in response to the frustration of achieving develop-
ment goals in partnership with weak or corrupt developing states. In the field of international
relations, economics and environmental studies, the question grew out of the need to address
collective action problems and the management of common pool resources. In EU studies,
it arose from the emerging challenge of governing across levels of government. From the
perspectives of empirical democratic theory or planning, it emerged from discussions about
how to accommodate and enhance political input from citizens and private stakeholders.
In organization theory, it arose from the need to understand how interorganizational rela-
tionships could be coordinated. Each domain produced specific theoretical responses, and
terms like network governance, good governance, corporate governance, global governance,
multi-level governance and democratic governance were born. Over time, however, there was
increasingly cross-fertilization between these domains. Governance—and indeed interactive
governance—was the common theme.
The concept of governance arose, in part, through a fundamental problematization of the
role and function of the State. One source of this problematization can be traced back to the
Trilateral Commission (Crozier et al. 1975), which initiated a world-wide discussion about the
“overload of government” supposedly resulting from the mounting expectations of citizens, on
the one hand, and the limited public resources and the low productivity growth in the public
sector, on the other. The overburdening of public welfare systems allegedly coincided with
an increasing “ungovernability of society” caused by the decline of public-spirited values and
a growing individualism that undermined the social and political cohesion of modern societies.
This bleak diagnosis was particularly troublesome for Western European governments that
had strong faith in the ability of public welfare systems to meet the citizens’ rising demands
for more and better welfare and also had high ambitions with regard to the ability of the State
6  Handbook on theories of governance

to govern society and the economy in ways that ensured growth, prosperity and democratic
legitimacy.
The economic crisis that began in the early 1970s and continued well into the 1980s further
contributed to what was generally known as “the legitimacy crisis of the modern welfare state”
(Habermas 1975; Offe 1984). It was increasingly difficult to finance public welfare systems
and to govern the contradictions of capitalist societies, and the result was a gradual erosion of
the legitimacy of government that revealed itself in and through a growing distrust in elected
politicians, who were accused of being unable to govern to the satisfaction of the people.
The economic and political crisis in the 1970s paved the way for neoliberal governments
and policies that aimed to solve the problem of “government overload” by means of privat-
izing public enterprises, contracting out public services and commercializing the remaining
public sector (Jessop 2002). In line with neoliberal ideology, NPM reforms sought to limit
the role of elected government to the formulation of overall policy objectives and to place
the responsibility for the production and delivery of public services in the hands of private
contractors and public special-purpose agencies that were operating on the basis of contracts
and economic agreements with central government authorities. In response to the increasing
“ungovernability of society,” NPM reforms aimed to deregulate the public sector and society
in order to enhance the reliance on the self-regulating capacity of private markets and public
quasi-markets in which private firms compete for public contracts and citizens can choose
freely between different public and private contractors. At the same time, NPM aimed to
strengthen executive leadership and management in the public sector in order to make it
more efficient. The new managerialism was predicated on a distinction between “steering”
and “rowing.” Politicians and executive managers should define the overall goals and budget
frames, while the responsibility for service production should be devolved to special-purpose
agencies. The new managerialism not only wanted to “let the managers manage” but also
sought to “make the managers manage” by subjecting them to intensified performance meas-
urement and high-powered incentives. With the Anglo-Saxon countries as the epicenter, NPM
reforms spread throughout the Western world and beyond in consecutive waves of public
management reforms (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004).
In European public administration, the concept of governance arose in part in response to
the managerial challenges produced by NPM. In the countries where it caught on, the empha-
sis on contracting out, agencification and devolution resulted in an increasingly fragmented
public sector, which in turn stimulated the need for institutional mechanisms that could provide
horizontal coordination in order to avoid duplication of efforts and create synergies (Rhodes
1997). At the same time, an increasing number of traditional policy problems such as physical
planning, regional development and environmental protection were re-described as “wicked
problems,” and a series of new crosscutting policy challenges such as the expansion of preven-
tive health care, the enhancement of public safety and the improvement of the employability
of the unemployed came to the fore (Klijn and Koppenjan 2004). This development further
strengthened the call for horizontal coordination through institutionalized interaction among
relevant public and private actors. New forms of joined-up government, relational contracts
between public purchasers and private providers, public–private partnerships and governance
networks were typical responses to the call for crosscutting coordination and multilateral
action (Rhodes 2000). “Governance” referred to governing in and through distributed net-
works of agencies and contractors.
 Introduction  7

In the field of international development, the concept had a different trajectory. Reflecting
the economic success of “development states” in Asia and new research stressing the impor-
tance of basic legal and political institutions for the development of Western economies, aca-
demics and practitioners in the late 1980s converged on a belief that a well-functioning state
was a critical pre-condition for successful economic development. The challenge, however,
was that many developing states suffered from either weak capacity or extensive corruption.
By calling attention to the institutional prerequisites of economic development, the discourse
of “good governance” gave international development institutions a neutral language in which
to address the vexing problem of corruption (Grindle 2010). While the use of the term “gov-
ernance” in the setting of European public administration was a response to the fragmenting
effects of NPM, international development agencies like the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund were more inclined to adopt managerial techniques under the banner of “good
governance.”
In the European Union (EU), the concept of governance also arose in response to a distinct
set of themes related to the challenges of governing and to debates about the fundamental
nature of the EU itself. “Intergovernmentalists” debated with “supranationalists” about what
the EU was and what it was becoming. While this debate was fruitful, some scholars argued
that it missed the important patterns of “multi-level governance” that were appearing (Marks
1993, 1996). The term “governance” also came to be applied to relatively novel forms of polit-
ical integration—like the Open Method of Coordination—that reflected the desire to advance
integration without upsetting member-state sovereignty. These novel forms of governance did
this by advancing voluntary goals and standards and enforcing them through the “naming and
shaming” of governments that failed to meet the agreed goals and standards. With the rapid
progression of European integration in the 1990s and early 2000s, a concern about a “demo-
cratic deficit” also prompted thinking about governance. In order to remedy this problem, the
European Commission (2001) and influential academic commentators (Scharpf 1999) recom-
mended the creation of governance networks, partnerships and other forms of participatory
governance. The argument was that the involvement of private stakeholders would help to
enhance input and output legitimacy (Skelcher and Torfing 2010).
Both the development of the EU and globalization led scholars to reflect on basic ideas
about states and statehood. Scholars like Bob Jessop (2002) argued we were witnessing
a three-fold development that involved “the denationalization of statehood,” “the destatifi-
cation of politics” and “the internationalization of policy making.” Others explored the way
de-territorialization and re-territorialization were changing the relationship between state and
nation (Ansell and Di Palma 2004). Old and new state powers were being displaced upwards
to international and transnational organizations, downwards to local governments, public
service agencies, user boards and local communities, and outwards to emerging cross-border
regions and global networks. Consequently, state power came to be seen as being exercised
at a variety of different and tangled scales. At the same time, the State was seen as gradually
losing its monopoly on public policy making as an increasing number of private stakeholders
such as interest organizations, NGOs, citizen groups, consultancy firms and private enterprises
became involved in the formulation, implementation and evaluation of public policy. Some
of these trends were surely exaggerated, but they nevertheless encouraged new thinking about
how governing processes operated between or beyond states.
With the accentuation of debates about globalization, international relations scholars began
to call attention to the serious challenges of managing global problems. While this was an old
8  Handbook on theories of governance

issue, scholars began to point to the way that “global governance” might differ from traditional
management via international agencies (Rosenau and Czempiel 1992). Notably, NGOs came
to be seen as playing a much larger role, either independently of or in partnership with UN
agencies. Optimistic scholars began to talk of the international community of NGOs as analo-
gous to a global civil society.
A distinctive characteristic of governance in all these situations was that governing was
a distributed process engaging many stakeholders from different sectors and governing levels.
Public goods economics problematized this distributed process by pointing out the perva-
siveness of collective action problems (Olson 1974). If some stakeholders preferred to free
ride on others, governance solutions would be suboptimal. Ideas about collective action were
applied both to the anarchy of international political order and to much more local situations
of resource management. One of the most important applications of these ideas was to envi-
ronmental governance. In a landmark book, Elinor Ostrom examined the way that collective
action dilemmas in the management of common pool resources could be overcome (Ostrom
1990). In addition to emphasizing the structure of incentives faced in the management of
commons, she stressed the importance of local community and its reliance on mutual trust and
solidarity as an informal mechanism of overcoming collective action problems.
The discipline of economics contributed in other important ways to the emerging discourse
of governance. Building on the tradition of institutional economics, Oliver Williamson opened
up the black box of the firm and conceived of it as a bundle of contracts. His transaction
cost analysis of the decision to produce in-house or to contract out led him to conceive of
the administration of the firm in terms of governance (Williamson 1996). Related work on
principal–agent theory also opened up the black box of the firm, offering an analysis of how
the delegation of authority was governed in hierarchical situations characterized by informa-
tion asymmetries. Principal–agent theory particularly influenced New Public Management,
as discussed above. These theoretical ideas about the governance of the firm interacted with
a movement of shareholders that sought to increase shareholders’ influence on managerial
decisions in firms. It was the confluence of theoretical work opening up the black box of the
firm and these struggles for control over firms that led to the discourse of “corporate govern-
ance.” These ideas quickly spread around the world and became an important topic of research.
The decentering of power and authority that occurred in many of the fields just mentioned
raised the puzzle of how more or less decentralized stakeholders could co-produce public solu-
tions. An important line of inquiry in the governance literature therefore focused on interactive
forms of governing involving continuous negotiation among interdependent actors. Interest in
various forms of interactive governance was strengthened and supported by new developments
in political science (Kenis and Schneider 1991). For example, the research on public steering
and control conducted at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne (Marin and Mayntz 1991;
Mayntz 1993a, 1993b) and at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Bielefeld (Héritier
et al. 1996) emphasized the systemic limitations of both hierarchies and markets. These limi-
tations necessitated the development of new modes of governance based on mutual exchange
between public and private actors. Jan Kooiman (1993) summarized the new insights in his
famous claim that no single actor, public or private, has the knowledge and capacity to solve
complex, dynamic and diversified problems. Kooiman and many of his Dutch colleagues
perceived the formation of complex networks as the solution to this challenge (Kickert et
al. 1997), while other researchers saw the formation of contract-based partnerships between
public and private actors as the way forward (Hodge and Greve 2005).
 Introduction  9

The focus on networks and partnerships resonated well with the work of British scholars
who had been criticizing the classical notions of corporatism and neo-corporatism for their
narrow focus on the tight cooperation among public authorities, trade unions and business
organizations. In response, they developed a more open and flexible notion of policy networks
that both covered relatively tight and exclusive policy communities and relatively loose and
inclusive issue networks (Marsh and Rhodes 1992; Rhodes 1997; Marsh 1998). The new focus
on policy networks as mechanisms of governance also gained a foothold in France (Le Galès
and Thatcher 1995) and in Scandinavia (March and Olsen 1995; Pierre 2000).
In North America, similar developments occurred. One source of theoretical innovation was
work on policy implementation, which tried to understand how administrative and political
complexity could lead to policy failures. Another source of inspiration was political science
studies of subgovernments—relatively stable configurations of congressional committees,
executive agencies and interest groups. Building on this literature, Hugh Heclo (1978)
observed a surge of networked forms of governance. He argued that policy decisions fre-
quently are moved from macro-level policy systems involving the presidency, congressional
leaders, the Supreme Court, mass media and the general public to policy sub-systems where
issue-specific actors from the public and private sectors interact on the basis of interdepend-
ency. Other literature focused on the role of networks in policy implementation and service
delivery (Provan and Milward 1995, 2001) and paid considerable attention to the question of
how to manage collaborative networks (Agranoff and McGuire 1998, 1999, 2001; Meier and
O’Toole 2001; Milward and Provan 2006). The North American research on network govern-
ance developed in splendid isolation from the European debates. At least in the early years
of network governance research, there were few cross-references between the two bodies of
governance research, but a transatlantic dialogue on these issues has recently emerged. This
dialogue has expanded to include important contributions from Australian scholars, who have
focused on the role of networks in providing welfare services (Considine 2002; Considine and
Lewis 2003; Keast et al. 2004).
The focus on interactive governance through networks and partnerships also developed in
the field of planning and organization theory, where the focus was on how stakeholders with
different perspectives or interests could successfully collaborate to find common ground (Gray
1989; Healey 1997; Innes and Booher 2003). This interest in “collaborative governance” also
developed in the field of public law (Freeman 1997) and in fields like natural resource man-
agement, education and public health (Ansell and Gash 2008). The idea of the importance of
collaboration was extended to public management, which focused on interagency coordination
and the involvement of relevant and affected actors (Agranoff and McGuire 2004).
Today, it is commonly accepted that public governing is not congruent with the formal
institutions of government. In some areas and at some levels there is still considerable room
for unilateral action on the part of the State and particular government agencies, and most
public services and transfer payments are still handled by large-scale public bureaucracies,
although increasingly in partnership with private firms and associations. Nevertheless, mul-
tilateral interaction through which a plethora of public and/or private actors collaborate to
solve wicked and unruly problems, regulate economic processes and provide public services
is gaining ground and becoming the norm in some sectors. In particular, in critical areas where
public innovation and flexible service provision are in high demand, governance strategies
that exploit new opportunities for exchanging and pooling resources or building bridges across
10  Handbook on theories of governance

bureaucratic silos have become a more and more prominent response (Klijn and Koppenjan
2004; Sabel and Zeitlin 2008).

THEORIES OF GOVERNANCE

This Handbook focuses on theories of governance rather than on empirical studies of gov-
ernance. As such, it takes one step back from the empirical world of governance in order to
chart, analyze and assess the theoretical landscape of governance research and the different
theoretical concepts, approaches and accounts that it represents. The study of governance
has been approached from different theoretical angles and has led to the development of new
theories. The expanding field of governance studies has invoked a large number of theoretical
concepts and also produced many new ones. There is no comprehensive and all-encompassing
theory of governance, and the future development of such a theory seems neither likely nor
desirable. The competing theoretical approaches and conceptualizations offer different analyt-
ical perspectives and tools that permit students of governance to mix and match them in their
search for an appropriate theoretical framework for addressing a particular research problem
or research question. Hence, a problem-driven study of contemporary forms of governance is
better off choosing between a large array of sharp and distinctive special-purpose theories than
relying on a blunt, unified all-purpose theory.
Theories of governance are analytical constructs that are developed through empirical
observations, deductive reasoning and a good deal of imagination and creativity. As such,
governance theories are abstract, though context-dependent, ways of reasoning that aim to
define, understand and explain how contemporary societies are governed. Theories of govern-
ance will often implicitly or explicitly contain the following set of components: theoretically
justified assumptions about the nature of the world; empirically verifiable presuppositions that
help to define the scope and validity of the theory; concepts and categories aiming to capture
different aspects of the object of analysis; theoretical principles and arguments enabling us
to understand and explain trends, events and joint occurrences; normative judgments based
on particular standards; and empirical generalizations and predictions based on inductive and
deductive methods.
While theories cannot themselves be falsified, they sometimes give rise to hypotheses and
even predictions that can be tested, or at least critically evaluated, through empirical studies.
Although theories are often developed through a dialectical interaction with empirical studies,
theoretically derived hypotheses tend to be under-determined by empirical observation, since
a marginal reformulation of the theoretical framework and the implicit hypotheses will often
be enough to accommodate recalcitrant facts (Quine 1951).
Theories are essential for good empirical work on governance. There is no pure and unmed-
iated access to the world. We always look at social and political phenomena through a particu-
lar lens of analytical pre-understandings that help us see, make sense of and interpret particular
aspects, events and relations rather than others. Thus the different theories of governance
will tend to define different kinds of governance, provide descriptive typologies and advance
interpretative schemes and causal models that direct the gaze of the researcher and facilitate
a systematic analysis of governance processes based on well-defined concepts and theoretical
stipulations about the conditions and drivers of social and political action and the nature and
 Introduction  11

qualities of political institutions and socioeconomic structures. Indeed, it is a truism that there
is nothing as practical as good theory!
While theory helps the researcher to make sense of the world and structure the analysis of
empirical conditions, processes and outcomes, there are two pitfalls that must be avoided. The
first pitfall is theoretical reification, while the second pitfall is impressionistic descriptivism.
Theoretical reification emerges when researchers perceive concepts and other analytical con-
structs as having a real life existence and thus forget that they are merely partial and contingent
attempts to make sense of the world by naming and interpreting it in a certain way. Theoretical
reification can be avoided by insisting on the gulf between social reality and the theoretical
constructs that we use to make sense of it. However, some theoretical concepts and arguments
tend to creep into the language of lay actors who talk about governance networks, multi-level
governance and metagovernance and thus make use of particular theoretical constructs as part
of the object of analysis. This reflects the fundamental condition of the social sciences: we are
interpreting a social world that interprets itself. Nevertheless, whether it is researchers or lay
actors who deploy a particular set of concepts and arguments, we must insist that these are
contingent theoretical constructs that only capture particular aspects of the phenomena that
we aim to grasp.
By contrast, impressionistic descriptivism emerges when researchers aim to describe and
analyze the world as it appears to them through a more or less random collection of observa-
tions and impressions that are neither informed nor structured by a systematic and consistent
set of theoretical concepts and arguments. Impressionistic descriptivism must be avoided by
recognizing that our empirical observations are always based on particular presuppositions
and by making sure that they are based on relevant and theoretically justified categories and
assertions.
The rise of the governance debate and the development of competing theories of govern-
ance have already spurred the publication of several handbooks of governance. However, we
believe that there is an urgent need for a handbook that explores the theoretical underpinnings
of the new research on governance and provides a systematic and accessible overview of the
different approaches, theories and concepts that are used in this new and important research.
The recent attempts to explore and assess the governing of society and the economy from
a governance perspective are for the most part based on empirical case studies aiming to
describe, analyze and explain different forms of governance at multiple levels and in varying
policy areas. The proliferation of empirical case studies has been valuable for expanding the
field of governance research, but tends to fragment our theoretical understanding of govern-
ance. By focusing on theories of governance, as opposed to actual governance practices, this
Handbook aims to counter the field’s fragmentation by highlighting the implicit and explicit
theoretical assumptions that guide the study of public governance.
The Handbook aims to identify the theoretical foundations of governance research across
different social science disciplines in order to demonstrate the broad and interdisciplinary
relevance of governance studies. It will define and discuss the theoretical concepts that are
relevant to and frequently used in the study of governance in order to show how governance
studies draw on central insights from adjacent theoretical fields. It will also provide an
overview of competing analytical lenses for studying public governance in order to reveal
the theoretical pluralism of the field. Last but not least, it will present and discuss theories of
different forms of governance. The theoretical focus of the Handbook will help us to gauge
the breadth of governance theory. It will also draw attention to the similarities and differences
12  Handbook on theories of governance

between different disciplinary approaches and identify theoretical problems and lacunas that
call for further theoretical development.

THE STRENGTHS OF GOVERNANCE THEORY

Pollitt and Hupe (2011) have recently describe “governance” as a magic concept that is
characterized not only by its conceptual broadness and ambiguity but also by its normative
attractiveness, global marketability and tendency to obscure or even deny conflicts between
different logics. While we acknowledge that the term governance has multiple applications
and that governance theories are not always razor sharp and tidy, we also see a particular
strength in governance theory: It encourages us to find imperfect answers to big questions
about the changing conditions for ordered rule rather than perfect answers to small questions
about the precise impact of different policies, services and regulations.
Building on our account of the emergence and nature of the new theories of governance,
we advance four propositions highlighting the strength of the vast field of governance theory.
First, it is interesting to see that ideas about governance arose at roughly the same time in
multiple intellectual disciplines. Although drawing on different perspectives and addressing
different problems, these disciplines gradually converged upon similar ideas about new modes
of governing. The multi-perspectival nature of governance theory is a major strength, as it
allows us to describe the more or less institutionalized processes of decentered governing
through which public value is negotiated, defined and produced using different but overlap-
ping theoretical languages that each capture important aspects of the current transformation of
the provision of ordered rule.
Second, in constructing governance theory, these different disciplines have built upon clas-
sical concepts from the social sciences, such as power, legitimacy or accountability. However,
in order to better understand new situations and problems encountered in the world of gov-
ernance, these classical concepts have been adapted, expanded and refashioned. In this way,
governance theory contributes to developing and enriching classical social science concepts.
Many concepts need to be rethought in order to make sense of the world of today in which
the formal institutions of government at the national level are revealed as one amongst many
co-governing public and private actors. The conceptual rethinking of classical concepts in the
light of new challenges is a major achievement of governance theory.
Third, the convergence of different disciplines and theoretical traditions on the use of the
notion of “governance” provides us with a boundary object that facilitates a fruitful theoret-
ical exchange between theoretical perspectives that hitherto have lived in splendid isolation
from one another. Hence, the overlapping focus on “governance” encourages theoretical
cross-fertilization, as different theoretical perspectives can now begin to communicate with
and learn from each other. The crosscutting theoretical dialogue about issues pertaining
to governance research may lead to a blurring of the boundaries separating the different
sub-disciplines within the social sciences. Thus the enhancement of interdisciplinary research
can be counted as one of the key strengths of governance research.
Fourth, governance theory has been elaborated through a process of radial development as
researchers have begun to add different adjectives or prefixes to the notion of governance. This
trend has enabled governance researchers to apply the notion of governance to a broad range
of empirical domains, for example economic governance, regulatory governance, collabora-
 Introduction  13

tive governance, network governance and so on. The extension of the empirical relevance of
governance theory to ever more areas is facilitated by the conceptual flexibility of the notion
of governance and constitutes a major strength of governance theory.
From these four propositions, we see that the diversity of governance theories is a strength
rather than a weakness. However, praising the broad appeal and relevance of this “magic
concept” does not mean that we should not strive for definitional precision, theoretical coher-
ence and analytical rigor in the future development of the field. Clear definitions and catego-
ries, well-crafted argument and sharp analytical tools are the telos of all scientific endeavors,
but in the new and emerging field of governance research the scientific goals will have to
be achieved through ongoing debate between different theoretical perspectives and different
empirical applications. Such an enterprise represents a formidable intellectual challenge, since
the different theoretical perspectives and sub-disciplines have different concerns and ideas
about conceptual, theoretical and analytical demands.

HOW THE HANDBOOK IS ORGANIZED

One of the central purposes of the Introduction has been to demonstrate that there is both
a degree of convergence in the governance literature and also a healthy theoretical diversity.
Our goal is to provide an accessible point of entry into this rich body of theory. As with all such
endeavors, there is more than one way that the volume could have been organized. In charting
our own course, we built on four distinct goals that we had for the volume. First, we wanted
to provide the intellectual and empirical context for theoretical developments pertaining to
governance. Second, we wanted to represent the diversity of theoretical ideas and debates
in this field. Third, we wanted to make the volume a point of reference for critical analytical
concepts. And finally, we wanted to establish a strong theoretical baseline that might inspire
future theoretical and empirical work in governance.
In order to provide intellectual and empirical context for theoretical developments, it is
important to delineate how theories about governance have emerged in different disciplines.
This is accomplished in Part I of the Handbook. While it would have been impossible (within
the scope of this volume) to cover all relevant disciplines, we identify ten disciplines that
have made very significant contributions to governance theory: collective action theory,
organization theory, public management, planning, policy process frameworks, state theory,
empirical democratic theory, public law, development studies and international relations. To
provide context for the key theoretical ideas in each of these disciplines, the authors provide
some degree of historical overview that illustrates how and why this discipline began to think
in terms of governance. By organizing Part I around the theoretical contribution of different
disciplines, the volume captures the interdisciplinary breadth of the governance field.
Part II of the Handbook identifies 16 core concepts for governance studies. These are
concepts that reappear over and over again in different theoretical discussions. Each chapter
on a core concept provides readers with rapid access to the theoretical debates about the focal
points of concern in the practice of governance. The authors explain why these concerns are
salient and how different theories can be used to understand them. By devoting significant
chapters to this series of core concepts, the Handbook highlights our shared theoretical inher-
itance. These core concepts are basic analytical tools in the tool kit of governance research.
14  Handbook on theories of governance

Part III of the Handbook takes a different approach to governance theory. While Part
I focuses on disciplinary developments, Part III focuses on distinctive approaches to the study
of governance. We have identified 11 different social science approaches or vantage points:
information-based governance, discourse theory, institutionalism, public choice, advocacy
coalition theory, economic theory, governmentality, system analysis and complexity theory,
narrative and interpretive theory, pragmatism and normative theory. Each of these analytical
approaches contributes something important to our understanding of governance, but does so
by bringing different assumptions, perspectives and prescriptions to the analysis. The purpose
of Part III is to identify these assumptions, perspectives and prescriptions. Each chapter will
explain how a particular approach offers a distinctive theoretical lens into our understanding
of governance.
The final part of the Handbook (Part IV) provides an analysis of distinctive forms of gov-
ernance. As with Part II on core concepts, each of the 13 chapters in Part IV provides an over-
view of a key idea in the governance debate. The purpose of this part is to familiarize readers
with theories of particular forms of governance. Each chapter describes key conceptual and
definitional issues associated with the form of governance and also describes its key empirical
variants. This part of the volume will add to the basic conceptual tool kit for analyzing gov-
ernance. By addressing central research questions related to each form of governance, these
chapters offer ideas for future research.
We hope the Handbook will find a broad readership and that it will prove helpful in pro-
viding a solid theoretical basis for studying the multiple forms of governance. In particular
we hope that people with a professional interest in governance issues will be able to use the
Handbook to develop a broader and more comprehensive understanding of the conceptual
and theoretical approaches to governance. We also hope that the Handbook will be used by
established researchers who want to assess the breadth and content of different theories of
governance, or by those looking for relevant theories that can help to frame and guide empir-
ical studies of actual governance processes. Finally, we hope that graduate and postgraduate
students will find the Handbook helpful in providing quick and easy access to core themes in
the theoretical debate on governance and use it as a source for clarifying key concepts and for
understanding the subtle differences between different theoretical concepts and approaches.

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 PART I

THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS
OF GOVERNANCE
2. Collective action theory
Robert Holahan and Mark Lubell

Collective action dilemmas (hereafter collective dilemmas) occur when the joint decisions of
two or more individuals result in socially undesirable outcomes. Collective dilemmas emerge
from interdependence—the payoffs to one individual depend on the decisions of others.
Solving collective dilemmas requires changing individual decisions through governance
arrangements that alter individual payoffs and result in a joint outcome that leaves at least
one individual better off without harming any other individuals. Therefore, there is a norma-
tive aspect to collective dilemmas, because researchers and practitioners try to find ways to
improve social welfare. Some researchers use the term “cooperation” or “coordination” to
describe the situation when individuals make decisions that produce more socially desirable
outcomes. In game theoretic terms, the goal is often to move from inefficient but stable Nash
equilibrium outcomes to mutually beneficial outcomes termed “Pareto-superior.” Collective
dilemmas are at the heart of most real-world governance challenges, including environmental,
health, education, foreign aid, and other policy domains. Hence basic theoretical and empirical
research in collective action has important applied implications for the study of governance,
and seeks to develop policy recommendations that move toward solutions.
The general definition above applies to many specific types of collective dilemmas. Political
economists focus heavily on problems like public goods provision (e.g. Olson [1965] 1971)
and common pool resource management (e.g. Ostrom, E. 1990). A number of canonical game
theoretical models also represent collective dilemmas (e.g. Axelrod and Hamilton 1981). Field
studies and experiments examine attributes of individuals, institutions, and communities that
make collective action more or less likely to occur (e.g. Ostrom, E. et al. 1994; Gibson et al.
2005). Social network analysis investigates how the degree of interpersonal connectedness
among participants to a collective dilemma affects their ability to solve the dilemma (Lubell
et al. 2010).
From the collective action perspective, then, governance attempts to solve these different
types of dilemmas by creating institutional arrangements that redefine the payoffs from
individual behavior and incentivize cooperation through top-down mandates or encourage
bottom-up self-organizing. Governance is a multi-level process that creates monitoring mech-
anisms, punishes defection, rewards cooperation, provides information, fosters trust-based
reciprocity, and otherwise attempts to create the conditions that make collective action likely
to occur (Ostrom, E. 2005). Effective governance requires an institutional framework that both
positively alters the payoffs to individuals from cooperation and facilitates effective monitor-
ing and enforcement of the rules if and when someone chooses to defect.
Of interest for the current chapter are two collective dilemmas that commonly affect public
policy: the efficient production and effective management of public goods and common
pool resources, respectively. Both types of collective goods share a difficulty in excluding
an individual from enjoying their benefits, whether or not the individual contributes to their
production or management (Holahan and Kashwan 2019). Therefore, both types of goods
face significant threats from free-riders who can reap benefits without sharing in costs. The

18
 Collective action theory  19

goods differ, however, in that common pool resources are rivalrous in consumption—that is,
when an individual consumes a common pool resource, it cannot also be consumed by another
individual—while public goods are strictly non-rivalrous in consumption. In the absence
of a coordinating governance arrangement, collective goods will be under-provided when
private individuals cannot fully capture the positive externalities of provision or over-provided
when private individuals cannot fully exclude negative externalities from the exploitation of
a common pool resource.
This chapter proceeds as an intellectual history of the transition from attention to how
government solves collective dilemmas by establishing top-down institutions to more recent
focuses on the provision of collective goods from bottom-up, self- governance processes. We
begin with the collective dilemmas addressed by classical political philosophers and econo-
mists, from Aristotle to Adam Smith. We then discuss early neoclassical economic models,
before turning to the institutional solutions to these dilemmas, and then introduce collective
dilemmas in complex settings. Finally, we describe how experimental and empirical studies
of these collective dilemmas have converged to produce a robust set of findings regarding the
likely success (and failure) of alternative governance arrangements in overcoming collective
dilemmas.

CLASSICAL THEORIES OF COLLECTIVE ACTION AND

GOVERNANCE

Collective dilemmas are a fundamental aspect of human social life; they have been the focus
of a massive literature that spans all social sciences and most biophysical sciences. Though
it is impossible to discuss the entirety of historical thought on collective action in the short
space available here, it is worth highlighting some of this expansive literature. The manner
in which classical philosophers and classical economists envisioned collective dilemmas has
had a large impact on the governance arrangements developed by modern societies to provide
public goods and successfully manage common pool resources.
Aristotle’s (2000) seminal work Politics discusses at length the difficulty in establishing
a state that adequately advances the public good. Aristotle argues that Socrates’ vision of
a democratic state that shares all property in common and holds a unity of purpose is imprac-
tical. Instead, Aristotle famously argued that “What is common to the greatest number gets
the least amount of care.” The collective dilemma envisioned by Aristotle was that of agree-
ing to a constitution that creates a community, which is necessarily common to all citizens,
but in which individuals can still hold private ownership of the household. Though some
public goods, such as defense, must be provided by the central state, Aristotle wrote that the
self-interest of individuals necessitates that the provisioning of public goods should be limited
to those that a central state has a monopoly in providing.
The collective dilemma inherent in the formation of political order was perhaps the single
most important dilemma faced by classical philosophers. Because political order is funda-
mental for mutually beneficial non-violent exchange, the necessity of a strong central state in
providing for political order has been a recurrent theme in political philosophy for centuries.
Most famously, Thomas Hobbes wrote of the need for a strong central authority known as
the Leviathan to prevent a state of nature “which is called Warre; and such a warre as is of
every man, against every man” ([1651] 1968: 185). To Hobbes, humans require a coordinating
20  Handbook on theories of governance

mechanism to achieve collective action, the benefits of which justify the loss of individual
freedoms (even life itself) that are granted to the Leviathan in exchange for political order.
Since political order is available to all within a jurisdiction and is non-rivalrous in its use, the
Leviathan espoused by Hobbes can be viewed from a contemporary perspective as the mani-
festation of a system of coercive public goods provision. All political authority flows from the
Leviathan down to the citizenry.
Classical economists also touched on the role of central governments in overcoming col-
lective dilemmas. In an often-cited passage from The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith ([1776]
1981: 723) addressed the problem of providing public goods:

The third and last duty of the sovereign or commonwealth is that of erecting and maintaining those
publick institutions and those publick works, which, though they may be in the highest degree advan-
tageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature, that the profit could never repay the expence
to any individual.

To Smith, the proper role of collective goods provisioning extends from the natural status of
a state’s role as coercive taxer that can overcome the tendency of individuals to free-ride on
the contributions of others.
The inquiries into governance pursued by classical philosophers and economists inves-
tigated which types of goods are best provided through market mechanisms and which are
best provided through coercive government mechanisms. These mechanisms were generally
viewed as mutually exclusive. However, this slowly began to change in the nineteenth
century as writers began to reflect on the respective roles of central governments and local
governments. In essence, writers began to transition from an understanding of government to
an understanding of governance. Federalist Paper IX (Hamilton [1787] 1961), for example,
discussed at length the need for a central government to coordinate the provision of some
public goods like stable political order but also advocated the role of decentralized governance
to provide other public goods. Alexis de Tocqueville ([1835] 2000) similarly wrote on the
localism of nineteenth-century America as he witnessed grassroots political organizing across
the new nation. In line with the Federalists’ belief in the role of decentralized governance, de
Tocqueville trumpeted the community-based governance he witnessed, composed of volun-
tary cooperation and mutual respect.

NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMIC MODELS OF PUBLIC GOODS AND

COMMON POOL RESOURCES

Among the earliest contemporary models of public goods provision were the economic models
developed in the 1950s. These models generally took as given that overcoming the free-rider
problem endemic in the provision of collective goods requires a central authority to tax
beneficiaries and then directly provide the good. Otherwise, markets could more efficiently
provide the goods. Samuelson (1954) explored the nature of collective goods by grouping
goods into two categories: private goods are those rivalrous in consumption, and public goods
are those non-rivalrous in consumption. While the nature of rivalry implies private goods are
most efficiently provided in markets, the externalities associated with the non-rivalry of public
goods meant that their efficient provisioning requires a coordinating mechanism (Ostrom, E.
2003). Musgrave (1959) undertook a similar analysis and came to similar conclusions, though
 Collective action theory  21

he defined the key characteristic separating goods as their relative degree of excludability in
consumption. For both models of goods, the ability of free-riders to enjoy the positive exter-
nalities in the provision of public goods meant that a government with the ability to coercively
tax citizens in exchange for the top-down provisioning of these goods was a natural solution
to the dilemma.
Perhaps the most important book written on the topic of collective action in the past 60
years is Mancur Olson’s ([1965] 1971) The Logic of Collective Action. Also an economist
interested in the provision of public goods, Olson challenged long-held tenets of sociological
group theory that assumed rational individuals with a common interest will necessarily act
toward that common interest. Instead, Olson asserted that the model of rationality used to
derive the prediction of group cooperation also implies that individual rationality will lead to
cooperative behavior as an unlikely outcome, rather than an expected one: “Unless the number
of individuals in a group is quite small, or unless there is coercion or some other special device
to make individuals act in their common interest, rational, self-interested individuals will not
act to achieve their common or group interests” ([1965] 1971: 2, italics in original). Though
Olson’s study was intended to develop a general theory of public goods, much of his analysis
actually concerned the management of common pool resources (Ostrom, E. 2003), which were
a relatively new area of study at the time of Olson’s book.
The beginning of the contemporary study of common pool resources is generally attributed
to Gordon (1954), who was interested in understanding the economics of an open access
fishery. However, a biologist’s essay on “The Tragedy of the Commons” (Hardin 1968) has
come to dominate modern policy debates over managing common pool resources. Though
the essay primarily concerns implementing coercive measures for population control, Hardin
is best remembered for his allegory of two ranchers sharing a pasture in common and each
independently deciding on how many cows to graze. Because the benefits of each cow accrue
solely to its owner, but the costs of the cow’s grazing are shared between the ranchers, each
is induced to myopically add cows until the pasture collapses. Similar to the insights of those
investigating public goods, Hardin’s later (1978) argument was that the open access nature
of a common pool resource necessitates governance arrangements in which either the owner-
ship of the resource is retained by a central government or the resource is fully privatized by
a single owner. Collective action was simply an impossible outcome in Hardin’s view.
Samuelson, Musgrave, Olson, and Hardin were each influenced by a model of collective
action that assumed the costs of voluntary cooperation are significantly higher than the
transaction costs of centralized coordination. This perspective stems from the fact that much
of this work also assumes the administrative costs associated with bureaucracy and central
organization are negligible, or at least lower than the costs of self-organization (Ostrom, V.
1989). As scholarly understanding of institutions and transaction costs has increased, however,
theoretical and empirical studies of collective action no longer make this broad assumption.

NEW INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS AND THE POLITICAL

ECONOMY OF COLLECTIVE ACTION

The advent of formal game theory in the 1940s (von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944)
marked a transition in economics from a neoclassical view that individually rational action
will aggregate into socially optimal payoffs to the view that individually rational action taken
22  Handbook on theories of governance

within interdependent payoff situations will frequently produce suboptimal social outcomes.
The canonical example of this is the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, in which two actors following
individually rational strategies to defect will earn lower payoffs than if they could be induced
to cooperate (Axelrod and Hamilton 1981). Importantly, as noted by E. Ostrom (1990), the
logic behind the Prisoner’s Dilemma is similar to that of other popular models of interde-
pendent situations, including the Tragedy of the Commons (Hardin 1968) and the Logic of
Collective Action (Olson [1965] 1971). While these models of interdependent settings are
powerful visualizations of core collective dilemmas, they also came to dominate real-world
policy debates over the governance of collective goods before empirical studies had been
conducted to evaluate the accuracy of the models (Ostrom, E. 1990). Much of the scholarship
on collective goods provision since has been an effort to do just that—empirically ascertain
the realism of these early models and, when necessary, to find governance arrangements that
overcome their dilemmas.
Chief among the solutions offered by scholars is the development of institutions. Institutions
are the rules of the game (North 1990) and include both formal written rules and informal
social norms (Ostrom, E. 2005). Actors in interdependent situations operate under a common
set of rules and form shared mental models of the choice situation that determines the payoffs
from interaction (Aoki 2001). Whether formal or informal, institutions constrain the choice set
faced by actors and shift the payoffs such that cooperation can become a dominant strategy.
Getting the “institutions right,” however, is a continual challenge for policymakers and prac-
titioners. Whether institutions are designed by top-down processes or endogenously emerge
through repeated interactions among interdependent actors, the effective governance of collec-
tive goods requires the formation of institutions that alter payoffs and incentivize cooperative
behavior.
A substantial challenge in formulating effective governance is the ubiquity of transaction
costs that actors face (Coase 1960). Transaction costs are the costs associated with designing
institutions, bargaining over the distribution of resources, monitoring their individual behav-
ior, and enforcing penalties for defection (North 1990). Additionally, transaction costs can
take the form of organizational or administrative costs associated with top-down implementa-
tion of policy (Williamson 1999). In any given collective dilemma, the costs to self-organize
an institutional solution are non-trivial, but so too are the costs of top-down solutions that are
imposed onto actors. The extent to which the provision of a collective good is more efficient
via a top-down or bottom-up governance arrangement is a function of the relative transaction
costs associated with each. Though Coase (1960) was not writing directly to the literature on
collective good provisioning contemporaneously being developed, his insights into the nature
of transaction costs are fundamental to the study of institutions-as-solutions. Indeed, in a world
without transaction costs collective action would not be a dilemma, because it would perfectly
and immediately emerge to solve provisioning problems. Because transaction costs are real,
however, scholars must take them seriously.

THE PROVISION OF COLLECTIVE GOODS IN COMPLEX

SYSTEMS

Collective goods are provided in complex political-economic systems. In the federal system
of the United States, for example, governments composed of overlapping political jurisdic-
 Collective action theory  23

tions provide collective goods like policing and sanitation services at multiple levels (i.e.
city, county, state) and across geographic boundaries (i.e. water districts, metropolitan areas,
neighborhoods) (Ostrom, V. et al. 1961). In self-organized systems of collective good pro-
vision, actors create new institutional frameworks within existing higher-level institutional
frameworks (Ostrom, E. 2005). In both situations, cooperation is influenced by existing rela-
tionships that can either enhance feelings of trust and reciprocity or foment feelings of distrust
and apprehension (Lubell et al. 2010). The complexity of the institutional frameworks under
which collective goods are provided has been studied extensively from multiple perspectives.
A core dilemma in the provision of collective goods by governments concerns whether
political incentives will result in efficient or in suboptimal levels of the collective goods
demanded by citizens. In one school of thought, the overlapping nature of political jurisdic-
tions results in the duplication of services and the over-provision of collective goods (Riker
1964). Similarly, collective goods may be under-produced because each government unit can
free-ride on the provision of other government units, producing a collective dilemma within
governments. If this is the case, then it provides a justification for the centralization of collec-
tive goods provision, as a single government can internalize the externalities of provision and
provide at a socially optimal level.
In contrast, proponents of the polycentric theory of governance (McGinnis 1999) argue
that government units compete against one another to efficiently provide collective goods and
earn tax revenues, which is similar to market competition over private goods (Ostrom, V. et
al. 1961). Tiebout (1956) first introduced the concept of competition among multiple gov-
ernments in the provision of collective goods, arguing that citizens will “vote with their feet”
to live in the jurisdiction with the most collective goods provisioning relative to the tax rate.
These competitive pressures will endogenously result in a socially desirable level of collective
goods provision.
Another perspective of governance arrangements that provide collective goods was offered
by Buchanan and Tullock (1962). They argued that private clubs permit a small group of
individuals to efficiently self-provide some public goods by erecting barriers to free-riders.
For example, requiring a toll for use of a road or a membership fee for use of a shared resource
could supplant the need for government provision of goods. In a sense, Buchanan and Tullock
showed that collective dilemmas can be solved by changing the game being played—in this
case from a non-excludable game into one in which partial excludability is possible. Building
on this work, V. Ostrom and Ostrom (1977) later introduced a four-goods typology based on
both excludability and rivalry that classified goods as private, public, club or common pool
resources. By subdividing goods into their component attributes, this work laid the foundation
for investigations of increasingly complex settings of collective goods provisioning.
The social-ecological systems (SES) framework provides an example of these complex
models. Building on E. Ostrom’s (2005) Institutional Analysis and Development framework
for analyzing interdependent choice in multi-level institutional settings, the SES framework
incorporates biophysical and ecological attributes into a model of collective action (Ostrom,
E. 2009). The SES framework incorporates contingent events, like drought or climate change,
with analysis of institutions to measure the resilience of existing (or potential) governance
arrangements to changing environmental conditions (e.g. Folke et al. 2005). Though still
a relatively new area of research, the SES has already developed a large supporting literature
(Cox 2014).
24  Handbook on theories of governance

While institutions are typically assumed to lower transaction costs and facilitate voluntary
cooperation, new insights using the ecology of games (Long 1958) framework have begun to
challenge this in complex settings. Lubell et al. (2010), for example, examined transportation
and land use planning decisions in California to examine whether interactions within one
policy arena influence interactions within another. They demonstrate that, in contrast to con-
ventional wisdom, the experience of actors in one institutional arena can cross over into their
interactions in other arenas. Thus, the likelihood of successful collective action often depends
on factors not directly related to the specific choice setting; externalities can instead pour over
from one setting to another.
Collective action and institutional change also rely on the processing of new information
about the world actors are engaged in (North 2006), the science or technical details of the
setting (Moyson et al. 2017), and the status quo policy environment actors operate in (Arnold
and Holahan 2014). With the advent of modern survey techniques, scholars have increasingly
turned to understanding what individuals in a collective action situation know about the situ-
ation (and its potential solutions) and, importantly, how individuals gain that understanding
(e.g. Arnold et al. 2018). In line with the theories presented above, kinship and social networks
are frequently cited as the most important source of information acquisition.

EMPIRICS OF COLLECTIVE ACTION: EXPERIMENTS AND FIELD

STUDIES

Theoretical models have shown both the challenges actors face and the benefits from coop-
eration in interdependent settings. With advancements in experimental economics and field
studies, however, scholars have empirically tested the implications of theoretical models.
Much of this work has challenged the assumption of a strictly self-interested model of myopic
individuals seeking immediate and unilateral gain in favor of a model of group behavior in
which voluntary cooperation can endogenously produce successful governance arrangements.
As a result, the policy prescriptions arguing that collective goods will only be provided
by top-down processes have been supplemented by a nuanced theory that allows for both
top-down and bottom-up governance arrangements.
While experiments have demonstrated that self-interested individuals exist in most groups,
experiments have also found that there are individuals in every group who play strategies that
deviate from the self-interest prediction (Fehr and Gaechter 2000). Experiments that model
collective dilemmas by giving subjects an endowment and permitting them either to keep
it or to voluntarily contribute some of it to the provision of a public good have found that
individuals contribute at levels above those predicted by a pure self-interest model (Isaac and
Walker 1988). Common pool resource experiments have found the same (Ostrom, E. et al.
1994). Interestingly, these results have held with and without the presence of a sanctioning
mechanism.
The impact of other-regarding preferences like trust, reciprocity and altruism has become
central to research in collective goods provision. Trust among a community that results in
reciprocation for cooperative behavior has been shown to be important for overcoming col-
lective action in field (e.g. Cardenas 2003) and experimental (e.g. Falk and Fischbacher 2006)
settings. Preferences for altruism have also been studied extensively (e.g. Andreoni 1989).
Interestingly, other-regarding preferences have been shown to be a stable equilibrium of an
 Collective action theory  25

evolutionary process when selection occurs at the level of a group (Axelrod and Hamilton
1981). Each of these factors influences the ability of individuals in a community to cooperate
with one another and develop self-organized governance arrangements that lead to the suc-
cessful co-management of collective goods provision (Ostrom, E. 1990; Poteete et al. 2010).
E. Ostrom et al. (1992), for example, tested Hobbes’s ([1651] 1968) assertion that
“Covenants without the sword, are but words,” by designing an experimental environment in
which some treatments allowed subjects to communicate and utilize costly sanctions. They
found that communication, even cheap talk, increases contributions to a collective good
independent of sanctions (swords). Subsequent experiments have further demonstrated the
positive influence of communication in one-shot (Hackett et al. 1994) and dynamic (Janssen et
al. 2010) environments. Field studies have also documented the important role communication
plays in voluntary cooperation and have helped to inform a large body of research into other
factors that increase the likelihood of voluntary provision of collective goods (Ostrom, E.
1990).
Modern field research on collective goods provision consists of much more than partic-
ipant observation. Agrawal and Goyal (2001), for example, demonstrated the complex and
non-linear relationship between group size and the successful management of shared forest
resources. Similarly, the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) project
measures social and ecological variables in forest-based project sites in over a dozen countries
to produce a catalogue of key variables that can be statistically verified as hindering or helping
the success of collective action. Analyzing IFRI data, Coleman (2009) showed that the factors
most likely to be correlated with healthy forest conditions, such as monitoring and sanctioning
institutions, hold regardless of whether the forest is managed by a local community or a central
government. While voluntary cooperation can achieve successful management, so too can
top-down governance.

CONCLUSION

From classical political philosophy to modern experiments and field work, the study of col-
lective action has occupied a central place in scholarly inquiry (Ostrom, E. 1998). Though
influential models like the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons portray
humans as trapped in a dilemma, unable to successfully provide collective goods, theoretical
and empirical developments over the past half century have produced a richer set of conclu-
sions regarding human behavior that allows for the possibility of self-organized and top-down
governance solutions and successful cooperation even in the face of non-trivial organizing
costs. As E. Ostrom (2007) warned, however, there are no panacea governance arrangements
that work at all times in all places. Instead, the challenge remains for policymakers, scholars,
and practitioners to explore the relative costs of alternative pathways for collective goods
provision and tailor governance arrangements to the characteristics specific to the dilemma.
The future study of collective dilemmas is an exciting field of inquiry. Many of the
propositions of earlier theories, such as Olson’s ([1965] 1971) group size and group heter-
ogeneity paradox, are ripe for further empirical testing. Recent experimental work (Cason
and Gangadharan 2016) demonstrates the potential for expanding on the seminal work of
E. Ostrom et al. (1994). The rapid development of the social-ecological systems frame-
work (Poteete et al. 2010; Cox 2014) and its future application to the governance of natural
26  Handbook on theories of governance

resource systems will continue to refine our understanding of the potential for and limits to
self-organized resource management. The application of social network analysis (Lubell et al.
2010) to collective dilemmas will allow scholars to further refine theoretical expectations of
governance through the application of complex case study analysis. Scholars have produced an
impressive body of research into collective dilemmas over the past century, but there remains
a great deal of potential to further our understanding of these situations. For example, much
still needs to be learned about how collective action drives institutional change. Students of
governance will be at the forefront of these future developments.

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Fehr, E. and S. Gaechter (2000), ‘Cooperation and punishment in public goods experiments’, American
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Folke, C., T. Hahn, P. Olsson and J. Norberg (2005), ‘Adaptive governance of social-ecological
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28  Handbook on theories of governance

Williamson, O. (1999), ‘Public and private bureaucracies: A transaction cost economics perspective’,
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 15 (1), 306–342.
3. Organization theory
Morten Egeberg, Åse Gornitzka and Jarle Trondal

WHAT IS AN ORGANIZATIONAL APPROACH TO GOVERNANCE?

Governance normally takes place within organizational settings. It follows that, in order
to understand and explain governance, organizational variables have to be taken into con-
sideration. An organizational approach emphasizes the role of such factors in governance.
Proponents of such an approach do not claim to be able to provide a complete or compre-
hensive explanation of policy processes and policy contents. A multitude of factors might be
relevant: not only actors and their preferences, but also societal factors such as population
characteristics, the degree of urbanization and so on. The argument is that organizational
factors (independent variables) might intervene in governance processes (dependent variables)
and create a systematic bias, thus making some process characteristics and outputs more likely
than others (Gulick 1937; Simon 1965; March and Olsen 1983a, 1989). Organizational factors
include organization structure, demography, culture and location. In this chapter, however,
we have chosen to concentrate on the role of the organization structure. There are at least two
important reasons for this choice. First, some of the most promising research findings have
been revealed on this organizational factor. Second, contemporary scholarship has lacked
a comprehensive analysis of how organizational structures affect governance (however, see
Egeberg and Trondal 2018, 2020).
“Organization structure” can be defined as a codified system of positions and their respec-
tive role expectations concerning who is entitled to do what, how and when. In this sense,
the organization structure is a normative structure that is analytically separated from decision
behavior or process (Scott 1981). A particular organization structure may be expressed in an
organization chart, although it is an empirical question whether people actually behave accord-
ing to the chart. While organization structure is a key component of government, process is
inherently linked to governance.
This chapter suggests a definition of governance that avoids two conventional difficulties.
The first difficulty is that of conceptual stretching, whereby the governance concept has
become a “catch-all” concept claiming universal or near universal application (Frederickson
2005: 282; Pollitt and Hupe 2011). At the opposite end of the spectrum we find literature that
proposes narrow criteria deemed necessary and sufficient for defining governance. This reduc-
tionist approach aims at classifying governance as taking certain forms (e.g. Rhodes 2000).
“Governance” is defined in this volume as steering society through interactive processes
towards collectively negotiated goals (Ansell and Torfing, Introduction to this Handbook). In
our view, it may be fruitful to treat “governance” as a variable that encompasses interactive as
well as more hierarchical processes (Levi-Faur 2012: 9). After all, this has been the historical
meaning of the word “governance.” This said, most governance processes are probably more
interactive than purely hierarchical.
Applying an organizational theory approach to governance may be useful in at least two
respects. First, it may add new knowledge on how different government architectures shape

29
30  Handbook on theories of governance

governance processes. Second, it may also add practical value for administrative policy.
These dual usages of organization theory reflect the old controversy in public administration
between seeing it as a “science” for understanding and seeing it as a “craft” for organizational
design (Raadschelders 2011: 154). If we observe significant associations between elements
of the organization structure on the one hand and characteristics of governance on the other,
this endows us with a potentially important design instrument. This is so because organi-
zation structure, compared to other factors that might affect policy processes, is probably
more amenable to deliberate change (Gulick 1937; Meier 2010; Egeberg and Trondal 2018).
This said, processes of organizational change may also be highly difficult to understand and
control. Arguably, though, the more organization designers are informed about the complexity
of structural change, the more realistic their design proposals will be. Therefore, this chapter
deals with theories of organizational change in which organization structure constitutes
the dependent variable. But first, in the next section, we discuss the structure–governance
relationship in theoretical terms. Then we present some empirical cases illustrating how
organization structure makes a difference in governance processes. One bias is admittedly
built into this discussion: written by students of political science and public administration,
the case selection is biased towards how organizational factors affect public governance. Yet,
being a non-substantive theory, an organizational approach has wider application than public
sector organizations, covering a wide range of organizational forms, such as networks and
non-governmental organizations.

THEORIZING THE STRUCTURE–GOVERNANCE RELATIONSHIP

Why should we expect people to behave in accordance with their respective role expectations?
Several mechanisms contribute to connecting structure and governance. First, “bounded
rationality” means that decision-makers are unable to consider all possible alternatives and
their consequences (March and Simon 1958; Simon 1965). They therefore need to simplify
this cognitive world. Organization structure may provide systematic and predictable selection
of problems, solutions and choice opportunities (March and Olsen 1976). Thus, officials in
a particular department are expected to consider only certain alternatives and their conse-
quences (e.g. transport capacity), while leaving it to another department to consider other
problems and effects (e.g. environmental). In this sense, a perfect match may occur between
the individual’s need for simplification on the one hand, and the bias produced by organization
structure on the other as regards actors’ perceptions of relevant alternatives, solutions and
choice opportunities. Second, organizations are incentive systems in which participants may
find it rational to act in accordance with their respective role expectations in order to achieve
higher salaries and promotion (Scott 1981). Third, and finally, organizations may also be seen
as collectivities in which role compliance is deemed as appropriate behavior on moral grounds
(March and Olsen 1989). In sum, organizational structure shapes governance by creating
a bias in cognition, incentives and norms.
In addition, theorizing the structure–governance relationship means that we have to be able
to identify generic dimensions of structure that might affect decision behavior in systematic
and predictable ways. We have to “unpack” organizations in order to identify such dimen-
sions. If one is interested both in whether structures matter and in how they matter, one argua-
bly has to take a closer look at their structural characteristics. First, capacity should be taken
 Organization theory  31

into account. To what extent do we find departments, units or positions devoted to a particular
policy area? The idea is that in an information-rich world systematic interest articulation,
problem attention and problem-solving are highly dependent upon the degree to which such
activities are underpinned by organizational capacity.
Second, we should look for how an organization structure is specialized. By horizontal spe-
cialization we mean how work is planned to be divided horizontally within or between organi-
zations. The idea is that organizational boundaries help to coordinate activities within units but
tend to hamper such activities across units. According to Gulick (1937), horizontal specializa-
tion may take place by geography (territory), purpose (sector), function (process) or clientele.
For example, the assumption is that territorial specialization tends to focus decision-makers’
attention along territorial lines of cooperation and conflict and to create policy consistency
within geographical units while inducing variation across such units. Sectoral specialization,
on the other hand, is thought to evoke sectoral cleavages among decision-makers and to foster
policy standardization within a particular policy field across territorial units. Moreover, a func-
tionally arranged structure emphasizes the importance of how things are to be dealt with rather
than what the purpose is. Thus, a structure signals what kind sof expertise—for example legal,
economic or technical—is deemed relevant. By vertical specialization we mean how tasks are
thought to be allocated vertically within or between organizations. For example, by hiving off
regulatory tasks from a ministry to a semi-detached agency one may hope for less political
interference into agency decisions and/or more involvement of particularly affected interest
or user groups. Vertical specialization also characterizes a system of government which spans
two or more geographical levels.
Third, the organization structure may be the role incumbent’s primary or secondary struc-
ture (Egeberg and Trondal 2018, 2020). The primary structure is a structure within which
a decision-maker is expected to use most of their time and energy. While a ministry depart-
ment constitutes a ministry official’s primary affiliation, committees or organized networks
represent secondary structures, since participation is expected to be part-time. The assumption
is that, although secondary structures might affect actual decision behavior, the impact is
assumed to be significantly less profound than in primary structures.
Fourth, and finally, an organization structure may be more or less loosely coupled. Loose
coupling may lead to more anarchical decision processes and thus more surprising results
(March and Olsen 1976). By design, “organized anarchy” may represent a route to discovery
or innovation, a way of breaking the bonds of groupthink and making connections across
bureaucratic or policy domain units, but also a counterweight to opportunism and corruption
(Hood 1999: 63, 66). Key characteristics of such governance processes come close to a general
understanding of improvisation: the absence of consistent and shared goals, trial-and-error
learning, shifting attention and fluid participation (Lomi and Harrison 2012: 10). In the follow-
ing section, we present some empirical cases that are meant to shed light on how characteris-
tics of the organization structure intervene in governance processes.

HOW ORGANIZATION STRUCTURE AFFECTS GOVERNANCE

(PROCESSES)

Governance is often portrayed as sequenced in stages. Two stages organize the following
discussion: the policy-making stage and the implementation stage.
32  Handbook on theories of governance

At the Policy-Making Stage

Numerous studies have documented how horizontal specialization affects the actual flow
and availability of information in national government bureaucracies (cf. Egeberg 2012).
Organizational borders, for example between different ministries, constitute semi-permeable
walls that shape the informational basis for “silo-thinking.” Interministerial information
exchange is positively related to officials’ rank and to the existence of interministerial commit-
tees (secondary structures). A study by Kassim et al. (2013: 188–189) illustrates the behavioral
consequences of horizontal specialization within a supranational bureaucracy: while about 80
percent of European Commission officials agreed with the statement that coordination works
effectively within their own unit and about 50 percent had the same impression with regard
to coordination within their own directorate-general (DG), only 30 percent agreed with this
with regard to coordination between DGs. Thus, which tasks and issue areas that are grouped
together within a particular organizational unit becomes crucial. A study of the transfer of the
European Commission’s pharmaceutical unit from DG Enterprise and Industry to DG Health
and Consumers showed that the unit’s policy focus changed from being biased towards busi-
ness interests, to becoming more attentive to patient and public health concerns. Interestingly,
the unit’s external environment also changed from one being dominated by industry organi-
zations to one being more populated by patient and consumer groups (Vestlund 2015). In the
same vein, a study of regional governments in Germany documents how ministries’ combina-
tion of portfolios influences their preference formation and behavior. For example, a ministry
of energy and environment pursues different goals in energy policy than a ministry of energy
and economy (Hegele 2020). Moreover, the relationship between a public bureaucracy and its
client groups may also be transformed through merging or dividing departments or agencies.
Hult (1987) observed that, subsequent to agency mergers in the United States (US), contacts
with interest organizations became more differentiated, since a wider spectrum of interests had
to be taken into account by the merged units. Thus, so-called “iron triangles” can be seriously
challenged and diluted through merging organizational entities.
In order to illustrate how various ways of horizontal specialization might impact on
governance, European Union (EU) institutions provide an exciting laboratory. This is par-
ticularly with respect to whether a body is structured according to territory or according to
a non-territorial principle of specialization, such as sector or function. On the one hand, an
inherited intergovernmental order is clearly reflected in the way the Council of Ministers is
arranged. The Council, mainly a legislative body, neatly mirrors the territorial composition
of the system, each member state being represented by an executive politician who also has
a national ministry as their primary affiliation.
Studies show, accordingly, that decision-makers mainly upload national preferences, and
that patterns of cooperation and conflict tend to follow territorial (national) lines (Naurin and
Wallace 2008). On the other hand, the European Commission, the EU’s main executive body,
is basically structured according to sector and function from the bottom to the top. Thus, exec-
utive politicians at the top (commissioners) are in charge of particular sectoral or functional
departments (DGs), and they have the Commission as their primary organizational affiliation.
Putting (often) former national ministers into the job of commissioner might then be seen
as a critical case of the extent to which organizational structure is indeed able to (re)shape
politico-administrative behavior in a world most commonly perceived as basically intergov-
ernmental. Studies indicate that commissioners behave significantly differently from ministers
 Organization theory  33

in the Council: sectoral and supranational concerns seem to be considerably more empha-
sized, although national concerns are not absent (Egeberg 2012). At the administrative level,
a departmental structure based on sector or function rather than geography tends to evoke
primarily sectoral or functional identities among officials. This seems to hold not only for the
European Commission services but also for other international administrations (Trondal et al.
2010), and indeed for public administration in general (cf. Egeberg 2012).
European commissioners’ supranational, or European, orientation reflects their primary
organizational affiliation at the EU level. The difference in behavior from national ministers
illustrates the significance of vertical specialization across levels of government. Another
example is drawn from the history of railway building. Much of the German rail network in the
nineteenth century was designed and constructed before the German unification in 1871. Thus,
the regionally developed networks reflected the needs of the former German states, but did not
fit together. The issue was raised in the confederal (intergovernmental) council in Frankfurt;
however, they could not even agree on the gauge of the network. It was not until an additional
level of government was installed in 1871 that network coherence and interoperability at the
national level could be addressed in a more effective manner (Clark 2006). Interestingly,
today, the EU strives to improve the European coherence and interoperability of national rail
networks (and other networks as well).

At the Implementation Stage

Our first empirical case related to the implementation stage deals with how vertical special-
ization and capacity affect governance processes. Central government bureaucracies can be
specialized vertically into separate institutions at the national level, for example a ministerial
(cabinet-level) department on the one hand and a central (subordinated) agency on the other.
So-called “agencification”—that is, the creation of independent agencies at arm’s length from
ministerial departments—has been an increasing phenomenon in many countries as a result of,
inter alia, New Public Management reforms (Christensen, T. and Lægreid 2006). Studies also
show that in this case policy choices tend to be shaped by the organizational context in which
they are made: in contrast to their colleagues in cabinet-level departments, officials in national
agencies exercise their discretion in comparative insulation from ongoing political processes
at the cabinet level (Egeberg and Trondal 2009a; Bach 2010; Verhoest et al. 2010). They have
relatively little contact with the political leadership of the ministry, with ministerial depart-
ments other than their “own” and with parliament. When they exercise discretion, they attach
most importance to expert considerations. Agency personnel are also, although not to the
same extent, attentive to the concerns of affected interest and user groups (see also Neshkova
2014). Less weight is assigned to signals from the political leadership of the ministry. In
ministerial departments, on the other hand, top priority is given to signals from the minister
but also to expert concerns. Considerably less attention is paid to the interests of user and
interest groups (Egeberg and Trondal 2009a). In general, then, vertical specialization seems
to diminish the potential for political steering and control. Studies indicate, however, that this
loss of political direction can be partly compensated for by creating organizational capacity
in the form of a unit in the ministerial department that duplicates parts of the work being done
in the agency (Egeberg and Trondal 2009a; Verhoest et al. 2010). Another factor that seems
to strengthen political control over agencies is politicization (Pollitt et al. 2004; Christensen,
J. and Yesilkagit 2006; Verhoest et al. 2010). However, although political salience and min-
34  Handbook on theories of governance

isterial steering over national agencies are positively associated, this does not seem to annul
the original relationship between agencification (vertical specialization) on the one hand and
actual agency autonomy on the other (Egeberg and Trondal 2009a).
Our second example deals mainly with how modes of horizontal specialization impact
policy implementation across levels of governance. However, the additional effect of vertical
specialization, capacity and secondary structures must also be considered. Let us start with
governance across levels in a unitary state. Implementation of central government policies
may take place through sectoral bodies at the regional or local level that are owned by the
central government. Such an arrangement is expected to lead to highly standardized public
services and regulations across territories; but, simultaneously, intersectoral coordination and
the need for local adaptation of policies may suffer. Studies indicate that the latter effects
may be somewhat remedied by establishing territorially integrated government offices at the
regional level (cf. the French “prefects”). By setting up government offices for the regions
(GORs) in the United Kingdom (UK), the reformers aimed at improving coordination between
the regional offices of Whitehall departments and meeting the demand for a single point of
contact, thus counteracting the compartmentalized (sectoral) traditions of the civil service.
Research shows that GORs in fact led to greater coordination in the regions and became
important mechanisms for developing “holistic governance” within regions (Mawson and
Spencer 1997; Rhodes 2000). The existence of regional or local self-government means
strengthening the territorial component further, thus increasing the potential for policy coher-
ence within subnational territories, but at the same time probably increasing policy variation
across such units. Federalization is a step even further in this direction.
Rules adopted by international governmental organizations (IGOs) are expected to be
implemented by the member states themselves. Thus, implementation is at the outset terri-
torially arranged; it happens indirectly through territorially integrated political units, that is,
the member states. The EU inherited this model: EU policies, for example legislation, are,
for the most part, supposed to be implemented by the member states themselves through the
government–ministry–agency chain of command. As might be predicted from theory, this
has entailed considerable variation in implementation practices across member states (e.g.
Knill 2001; Sverdrup 2007; Treib 2008). EU executive bodies, mainly the Commission and
EU agencies, do not possess their own bodies at the national level; however, an interesting
development in such a direction has taken place over time: the EU bodies have established
direct and close partnerships with national regulatory authorities in charge of implementation,
most commonly through networks of agencies working within the same (sectoral) policy area
(e.g. Dehousse 1997; Majone 1997; Eberlein and Grande 2005). In this way, national agencies
become “double-hatted” and parts of two administrations: a national one and a European one.
Although national ministries may still be the strongest institutions with regard to influencing
agencies’ application of EU law, the European Commission and EU agencies also exercise
considerable influence. The latter, arguably, entails more uniform practicing of EU legislation
across member states. However, the ministry may increase its steering capacity if it contains
units that partly duplicate or overlap agency units, or when issues become contested and polit-
icized (Egeberg and Trondal 2009b).
The shift from predominantly indirect, territorially arranged implementation to semi-direct,
sectorally structured implementation rests on two institutional prerequisites. First, extensive
agencification and decoupling (vertical specialization) at the national level have made parts of
national administration more available for recoupling to EU-level bodies. Second, the exist-
 Organization theory  35

ence of the Commission and EU agencies embodies organizational capacity for following up
on the implementation practices at the national level and for constituting hubs of transnational
agency networks. Finally, studies have documented that such networks (secondary structures)
tend to enhance national agencies’ autonomy and power vis-à-vis their parent ministries (Bach
and Ruffing 2013; Danielsen and Yesilkagit 2014; Maggetti 2014), thus paving the way for
more uniform application of EU law. Interestingly, we notice that the so-called “joined-up
governance” or “whole of government approach” at the national level (Christensen, T. and
Lægreid 2007a) is largely incompatible with strong coordination between the EU level and the
national level (cf. the more direct, sectorally arranged multilevel structure discussed above).
This fact has been largely ignored in the literature so far (but see Egeberg and Trondal 2018).

THEORIZING ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

The overall structure of governance systems may be fairly stable and contain institutions
that have lasted for centuries, but within most systems change is ubiquitous. Organizations
are created and added to the governance of societal sectors, and at different governance
levels (Meyer et al. 1997b). New organizational forms arise that, for instance, reshape
public–private boundaries or create new links between existing organizations (Brunsson and
Sahlin-Andersson 2000; Ahrne and Brunsson 2005). Organizational births can be followed by
their “deaths” as established organizations are split into new ones, merged or, less frequently
in the case of public organizations, simply terminated (Boin et al. 2010). Formal structures
are frequently changed along the vertical and horizontal axes as tasks and responsibilities are
(re)distributed between hierarchical levels and between different organizations and organiza-
tional subunits (Rolland and Roness 2011: 400). How can such changes be accounted for in
theoretical terms? In a seminal article, March argues that theories of organizational change are
not very different from theories of action in organizations (March 1981). Consequently, the
scholarship on the processes that produce such changes in organizations reflects the theoretical
diversity of organization studies in general. Here we limit our attention to the main theoretical
positions identified in the literature on organizational change; positions that differ when it
comes to two basic questions: the extent to which organization can be changed by deliberate
design, and the extent to which organizational change is environmentally determined (Olsen
2010).
A functional account assumes that organizations are established and structured as answers
to various collective action problems, and that the choice of organizational forms can be
accounted for by reference to its consequences (Scott 2008: 28–29). In economic organization
theory, for instance, organizational forms are seen as reflecting the need to minimize transac-
tion costs in economic exchanges (Williamson 1981); in the study of international relations,
the structure of international organizations has been accounted for as a functional necessity for
dealing with transnational problems which states cannot solve alone (Mitchell and Keilbach
2001); and in the study of multilevel governance a functional perspective has in particular been
deployed to account for delegation to EU institutions (Tallberg 2002) and for the creation and
governance structure of EU agencies (Majone 1997).
Adding active agency and analytical attention to the process of organizational change,
a rational instrumental perspective on organizational change argues that actors’ consideration
of functional efficiency will determine the design and redesign of organizations. Through
36  Handbook on theories of governance

a process of active analytical problem-solving actors choose among alternative design options
by using some decision rule that compares alternatives in terms of their expected conse-
quences for goals that are already established and known (March 1981). The political and
administrative leaders in governance systems are expected to be the central participants in
organizational change processes, and the theory assumes that these actors have control over
change processes and insight into the link between the organization’s goals and how different
structural alternatives contribute to realization of such goals. With new goals or changing cir-
cumstances, change is required. Reorganization takes place to reduce the distance between the
desired state and the real state, and when the organization no longer serves its purpose it will be
terminated (Boin et al. 2010: 387). Intentionally rational design is thus desirable and in theory
possible, but as demonstrated by empirical research, more relevant to accounting for change in
some circumstances than others (Christensen, T. and Lægreid 2011). Change as rational ana-
lytical problem-solving has been observed in cases of micro- or organizational-level change
(Christensen, T. and Lægreid 1998), but does not capture well the complexity of macro-level
reform that encompasses several organizations and sectors of society (March and Olsen
1983b). It is easier to change formal legal structures by design than to change deep-rooted
organizational values and informal practices (Olsen 2010: 58–68), and change as analytical
problem-solving is more likely when there is a clear hierarchical center, and political and
administrative leaders pay attention to change processes and organize the capacity for imple-
menting administrative reform (March and Olsen 1983b). Analytical problem-solving is also
dependent on the structural conditions under which change takes place: in loosely coupled
organizations where goals are ambiguous, causal understandings are unclear, participation
is fluid and attention is scarce, reorganization is more likely to be event-driven, sensitive to
fluctuations in decision-makers’ attention and hence accounted for by a garbage can model of
organizational decision-making (March and Olsen 1976; Cohen et al. 2012).
A power and conflict-oriented perspective on organizational change also takes as a starting
point that change is the product of intentionally rational actions, where actors have prior
preferences and act on the basis of anticipated consequences, but here actors have conflict-
ing interests attached to organizations and possess different resources to pursue their goals.
Organizations are in themselves a collection of coalitions between groups and individuals,
and a core challenge is designing organizations that are effective and responsive to their
own interests and to those of their constituents in the coalition (Pfeffer and Salancik 1977).
As existing organizations are the results of previous bargains, reorganization processes are
likely to stir up old conflict lines and activate potential veto players among political groups,
institutions, administrations, employees, professions, clients, industry and other stakeholders.
The process of organizational change—that is, “the politics of structural choice”—becomes
a process of bargaining among coalitions of actors in their struggle to control the exercise of
public authority. Organizations represent the extension of the most powerful and resourceful
coalition’s interests and are “the structural means by which political winners pursue their own
interests, often at the great expense of political losers” (Moe 1990: 213). Asymmetrical power
relationships will thus shape design. A main factor accounting for institutional design is the
expected distributional effects of organizations (Tallberg 2010; Kelemen and Tarrant 2011).
Actors following an instrumental logic, with conflicting interests and in a position to block the
preferred organizational design, can be dealt with through bargaining and side-payments, yet
this limits the political-administrative leadership’s control over change processes.
 Organization theory  37

An institutional perspective on organizational change (March and Olsen 1983a, 1983b,

2006) sees rule-following and identity-based action as the primary logic in organizations, and
gives privilege to norms and ideas over actors’ prior preferences and anticipated consequences
when explaining organizational change. The institutionalization of organizations implies that
they develop cultural features, routines and meanings beyond the “technical requirement of the
task at hand” (Selznick 1966: 17). As pointed out by Simon (1965) in the early formulations of
organization theory, the structure and identities of organizations are molded by internal con-
ditions and the interaction the organization has with its environment. In the early (vulnerable)
stage, a new organization is in search of its own mission, form, role and identity. It develops
routines and capacity for handling contingencies and for learning from its own experiences,
setting its own path. Since an organization’s history is in this way encoded into rules and
routines, organizational structures cannot be changed arbitrarily or at will. Change is more
likely to occur incrementally through local adaptation and local experiential learning than
as a consequence of deliberate choice or as dictated by environmental pressure (March and
Olsen 2006). Similarly, an institutional theory of organizational birth takes into consideration
the institutional context, history and legacies of organizations and expects to see established
arrangements being used to create new ones (Stone Sweet et al. 2001: 235). New organizations
cannot be expected to arise automatically as a response to environmental demands or from
choices made on a clean slate, but are likely to be molded by and layered upon the pre-existing
institutional arrangements (Olsen and Peters 1996; Mahoney and Thelen 2010). Abrupt and
radical change by “replacement” is exceptional, and most likely brought about by performance
crises and exogenous shocks delegitimizing existing governance arrangements (Streeck and
Thelen 2005); see for example the case of governance arrangements for food safety in the EU
in the aftermath of the BSE crisis (Kelemen 2002), or the government arrangements for public
health in the EU during the coronavirus crisis (Greer et al. 2020). The potential for “change
by intent” is within this perspective seen as curbed and requiring actors’ attention to the legit-
imacy of organizational forms (Olsen 1997). In institutionalized settings, reformers must be
sensitive to perceptions of what is reasonable and appropriate, or use contingent events that
enable path-changing intervention.
Also building on institutional scholarship, a theory of organizational change as diffusion
and isomorphism shifts the analytical focus to external pressures for change stemming from
institutional environments and organizational fields. The main expectation is that changes
in organizational structures or the establishment of new organizations can be explained by
reference to the imperative of “rationalized myths” and widely held ideas and norms on how
to organize modern governance arrangements that create pressure for similar structural change
(Meyer and Rowan 1977; Tolbert and Zucker 1983). Under conditions of ambiguity and
uncertainty, legitimacy-seeking organizations will adhere to cultural rules and cognitive tem-
plates within the wider institutional environment. Structures and procedures associated with
modernity—such as the independent specialized regulatory agency, autonomous central bank,
public–private partnerships, “joined-up government” (see e.g. McNamara 2001; Christensen,
T. and Lægreid 2007b; Groenleer 2009)—spread from one organization to another, between
different national and sectoral governance systems. Pressures come in waves as short-term
organizational fashions (Abrahamson 1991) or long-term, deep trends with global reach
(Meyer et al. 1997a). Beyond the main idea that organizational change is “solution-driven”
rather than problem-driven, institutional sources of organizational change can be associated
with several types of mechanisms (mimetic, normative or coercive; DiMaggio and Powell
38  Handbook on theories of governance

1983) or types of carrier (states, international organizations, consultants, professions, or trans-

national networks of administrators or academics). Moreover, elaborations of this perspective
have identified a complex dynamic of contagion where cultural rules are not simply spread,
but filtered and translated (Sahlin and Wedlin 2008), questioning the reproductive reliability
of organizational templates and hence also isomorphism as an outcome.

CONCLUSION
Contemporary scholarship lacks a comprehensive analysis of the organizational dimension of
governance (processes). Despite the vast scholarship available on both governance and organ-
ization theory, these strands of research have been in mutual disregard (e.g. Kettl 2002; Olsen
2010). Illustratively, a fairly recent handbook on governance lacks an organizational approach
(Levi-Faur 2012). This chapter has argued that applying organizational theory to governance
may be useful in at least two respects. First, it may add new knowledge on how different gov-
ernance architectures shape governance. Second, it may also add practical value for change. If
organizational variables are shown to affect governance processes in particular ways—as sug-
gested above—these variables may subsequently be “manipulated” to achieve desired goals.
In this way, theoretically informed empirical research may serve as an instrumental device.
This chapter has argued that governance cannot be adequately explained without including
its organizational dimension and different ways of organizing it. By using governance as
dependent variable, the following organizational variables have been suggested as independent
variables: organizational capacity, organizational specialization (horizontal/vertical), organi-
zational affiliation (primary/secondary) and organizational coupling (tight/loose). Further, by
using organizational structure as dependent variable, four complementary approaches have
been introduced to explain organizational change: instrumental problem-solving, conflict and
bargaining, rule-following and -learning, and diffusion.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are grateful for the valuable comments given by the editors, Christopher Ansell and Jacob
Torfing, and by Arild Farsund and Johan P. Olsen.

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42  Handbook on theories of governance

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4. Public management theory
Zoe Radnor, Stephen Osborne and Russ Glennon

INTRODUCTION
This chapter takes a reflective and somewhat critical view on the move from administration via
management to governance related to public reform and delivery systems. It will also present
a set of ideas framed as ‘public service-dominant logic’, which argues that the underlying logic
of public service delivery has been flawed and needs to be re-addressed through engagement
with service theory.
The history of public sector reform in the late twentieth century has been dominated by the
importing of private sector concepts, practices and thinking (Pollitt 1990, 2013; Keenan 2000),
and in particular economic theories and arguments such as rational choice theory (Stoker and
Marsh 2002; Faucher-King and Le Galès 2010), which by definition question the role of the
market and private sector in service delivery. Overall, these practices are commonly referred to
by the label ‘New Public Management’ (NPM), conceived as an alternative to the previously
dominant understanding of how public services have been governed and managed, usually
referred to as public administration (PA) (Dunleavy and Hood 1994).
Previous work has presented two lines of contention (Osborne, S. 2010). The first
was that the increasingly fragmented and inter-organizational context of public services
delivery (Haveri 2006) necessitated asking new questions about public services delivery.
It is now no longer possible to focus solely either upon administrative processes or upon
intra-organizational management – the central preoccupations of public administration and
(new) public management, respectively. Rather these foci must be integrated with a broader
paradigm that emphasizes both the governance of inter-organizational (and cross-sectoral)
relationships and the efficacy of public service delivery systems rather than discrete public
service organizations (PSOs). This broader framework has subsequently been termed ‘New
Public Governance’ (NPG) (Osborne, S. 2010). This framework does not replace the previous
foci, of course, but rather embeds them in a new context; a similar argument has been made
by Thomas (2012). The second contention presented was that much contemporary public
management theory has been derived conceptually from prior product-dominant management
research conducted in the manufacturing rather than the services sector. This has generated a
‘fatal flaw’ in public management theory, which has viewed public services as like manufac-
turing, rather than service, processes that are created by professional design and then delivered
to the user. Our central argument is that the business of government is, by and large, not about
delivering pre-manufactured products. Nor are most relationships between public service users
and public service organizations characterized by a transactional or discrete nature, as they are
for such products (McLaughlin et al. 2009). On the contrary, the majority of ‘public goods’
(whether provided by government, the non-profit and third sector, or the private sector) are
in fact not ‘public products’ but rather ‘public services’. Social work, healthcare, education,
business support services, community development and regeneration, for example, are all ser-
vices rather than concrete products in that they are intangible, process-driven and based upon

43
44  Handbook on theories of governance

a promise of what is to be delivered. Public services can of course include concrete elements
(healthcare or communications technology, for example). But these are not ‘public goods’ in
their own right – rather they are required to support and enable the delivery of intangible and
process-driven public services. We argue for the inclusion of a public management theory that
is ‘fit for purpose’ as a critical component of operationalizing NPG, that is, negotiating the
policy–administration–delivery gap. It must therefore understand public services as services,
with the distinctive public service-dominant logic and managerial challenges that this implies,
and must hence reject the fatal flaw contained within current, product-dominant public man-
agement theory.
This product-dominant fatal flaw, we argue, has persisted despite the growth of a sub-
stantive body of services management and service-dominant theory that challenges many
of its fundamental tenets for the management of services (Normann 1991; Vargo and Lusch
2006; Gronroos 2007). An example of this dominance is the current operational and process
improvement agendas for public services in the UK, where a product-dominant approach
has led to focusing solely on efficiency rather than upon effectiveness and equity (Radnor
and Osborne 2013). It is this body of services and service-dominant theory, we propose, that
should inform our theoretical and conceptual understanding and analysis of the management
and delivery of public services.
This chapter will present the thinking in an extended form. Firstly, it will outline briefly the
development of the prevailing paradigm of public management from public administration
and develop our critique of its fatal flaw (in its product-dominant bias) and its increasing
irrelevance to the contemporary world of public policy and public services delivery. Secondly,
it will present a discussion on the development of NPG from NPM. Thirdly, it will explore the
potential of public service-dominant logic to generate new theoretical insights and frameworks
that are more ‘fit for purpose’ for contemporary public services. Finally the chapter will draw
together the reflections on this new approach to our understanding of public management and
its implications for appreciating and addressing the managerial challenges for public services
that NPG poses.

FROM CLASSICAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION TO NEW PUBLIC

MANAGEMENT

Niskanen (1971) was among the earliest academics to formally (i.e. econometrically) put
forward an economic theory of bureaucratic behaviour. He is commonly held to be one of
the main instigators of the shift away from established notions of public administration and
public service and towards the marketized, consumerist and individualistic view that is firmly
embedded in British policy today, and which is considered a basic plank of NPM (Hood 1991;
Frederickson and Smith 2003). Prior to this philosophy, ‘public administration’ was consid-
ered the dominant hegemony in academic circles, being viewed in the UK as a bureaucratic
and political model (Meier and Hill 2005) and as a Weberian model of bureaucracy in conti-
nental European (Torfing and Triantafillou 2013). Rhodes (1997) argued that the organizing
perspective of the ‘Westminster model’ was a fundamental part of the mainstream political
science understanding of how public services were governed. This focused on electoral and
democratic sovereignty, and political control of the neutral executive (civil service), and less
 Public management theory  45

on the physical delivery of services, which was taken to be a result of the rule-bound discretion
of professionally trained administrators.
This view of public services as bureaucratic and monolithic organizations was common in
the political discourse, and it is not hard to envisage the superficial attractiveness of importing
private sector practices, particularly given the strength of the rhetoric around the perceived
weaknesses of public servants in terms of failing to recognize or address user needs, nurtured
by politicians’ distrust (Aucoin 2010). Writing in the middle of the 1990s, Frederickson (1996)
used D. Osborne and Gaebler’s (1992) concept of ‘reinventing government’ as his label for
NPM, and declared the problem of the ‘bureaucratic paradigm’ to be at the heart of both rein-
venting government and the emergence of New Public Administration, a term originating as
far back as the 1920s (Lynn 2010).
Many academics (Hood 1991; Dunleavy and Hood 1994; Frederickson 1996; Ferlie et al.
2005; Pollitt 2013) accept that the 1980s saw the shift away from the dominance of public
administration, which is generally held to include (Hood 1991):

● the reliance on the ‘rule of law’;

● administration that focuses on set rules;
● a key role for bureaucracy in making policy;
● incremental budgeting;
● the dominance of professions.

To summarize, contemporary public management theory is broadly encapsulated within the

NPM paradigm which arose as a response to three lines of critique of the traditional public
administration premise of the ‘politics–administration dichotomy’ (Svara 2008). The first of
these queried the enactment of this dichotomy in practice (Vroom and Yetton 1973; Pressman
1975), the second presented a critique of public officials as primarily a self-serving elite who
put their own needs above those of citizens (Cole and Caputo 1984), and the third presented
public administration as an inefficient and ineffective means by which to allocate public
resources (Osborne, D. and Gaebler 1992).
In the US, an early attempt to respond to these critiques was contained within the New
Public Administration movement (LaPorte 1971; Frederickson 1976) – though this movement
itself was criticized for unnecessary federal interference in local public services (Cupps 1977)
and for failing to significantly increase citizen engagement in the public policy process (Weber
1998; Walters et al. 2000). Consequently, the NPM movement argued for a more managerial
and market-oriented framework for public services delivery, and for one that did not simply
reform the role of citizens and public administrators, but which sought to recast them entirely.
The classic formulation of NPM was in Hood’s (1991) seminal paper. This drew attention to
the growth of a distinctly managerial, as opposed to administrative or professional, approach
to public services. The key elements of this approach included a conspicuously managerialist
focus on delivery, desegregating services to their basic units and a consequent focus on unit
costs, a preoccupation with performance management and output control, growth in the use of
markets and competition as a means to allocate resources (and a subsequent reformulation of
citizens as public service ‘customers’), and an especial attention to the lessons from private
sector management for the delivery of public services (Hood 1991).
Hood located NPM as one of five ‘megatrends’ that together we could loosely describe as
reforms (Hood 1991: 3). Much has been written about some of these broad shifts in reform
approaches (Ferlie et al. 1996; Boyne et al. 1999; Kingdom 2000; Stoker 2004; Dunleavy et al.
46  Handbook on theories of governance

2006a; Osborne, S. 2010), and these discussions generally consider the transition from CPA to
NPM. D. Osborne and Gaebler’s book Reinventing Government (1992) is also credited with
energizing the debate around the nature of public service management (Dunleavy and Hood
1994; Kingdom 2000) by focusing on the private sector, entrepreneurial aspects of manage-
ment. Kingdom goes on to argue this is a symptom of an economic and political shift: after
the 1980s, ‘the post-war Keynesian orthodoxies were challenged in the rise of neo-liberalism
under the government of Margaret Thatcher’ (Kingdom 2000: 14).
Hood’s (1991) influential paper, and others, led subsequently to important debates both
about the appropriateness of the managerial model for public services delivery and about its
impact (Hood and Jackson 1991; Kickert 1997; O’Toole 1998; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004;
Thomas 2012). Whilst some of these critiques focused upon a comparative evaluation of
managerial as opposed to administrative models for delivering public services, others argued
against the basic premise of the suitability of the market as a mechanism for allocating public
resources (Schachter 1997). This latter argument built upon an earlier and ongoing discussion
about the comparable nature of private and public sector management: are they indeed, to use
the classic formulation of Allison, ‘alike in all unimportant aspects’ (Allison 1983)?
To an extent this debate about the legitimacy or otherwise of the NPM model has been
overtaken by events. Whilst the issues of efficient and effective utilization of public resources
have never gone, and never will, they have become subsumed increasingly within the reality
of a post-modern fragmented society and fragmented state (Haveri 2006). This reality has
meant that the intra-organizational focus of NPM and previous governance paradigms does
not reflect the inter-organizational and interactive nature of contemporary public services
provision (Torfing et al. 2012). Nor have they embraced either the increasingly processual
and systemic, as opposed to discrete and transactional, nature of the public service delivery
process or the way in which they have become knowledge-driven within a digital economy.
Subsequently, therefore, novel approaches have developed that have attempted to respond to
this new reality – including public value (Moore 2002), digital governance (Dunleavy et al.
2006b) and NPG (Bingham et al. 2005; Alford and Hughes 2008; Osborne, S. 2010). What has
been remarkable in this latter consideration of the legitimacy and relevance of NPM has been
the frequently implicit assumption of a unified and integrated body of management theory
derived from private sector experience and upon which public management is grounded. Yet
this is far from the case. We argue here that the concepts and evidence upon which current
public management theory is based have been drawn from a body of private sector theory
derived from the experience of manufacturing and industry – such as Porter’s influential work
on competitive advantage (Porter 1985). This body of theory assumes a range of core elements
of the production process, but four are especially important. These are: first, that production
and consumption are discrete processes, ruled by different logics; second, and consequently,
that the costs of production and consumption are distinguishable and separable; third, that
political engagement and the representative role played by local politicians are at best an irrel-
evance to managing public services; fourth, that consumers are largely passive in this process.
 Public management theory  47

FROM NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT TO NEW PUBLIC

GOVERNANCE

Thus far we have charted the development of NPM as a response to the perceived failings of
public administration, which in turn is challenged by NPG (Osborne, S. et al. 2013). We have
argued that the failure of NPM derives from several directions. First, society has been trans-
formed profoundly since the inception of NPM in the 1980s and the early 1990s. On the one
hand, it has become more fragmented and it has become increasingly difficult, if not impos-
sible, for single PSOs to respond in isolation to social and economic needs (Haveri 2006) – if
indeed this was ever possible. On the other hand the past two decades have seen the evolution
of plural and pluralist systems of delivering public services. Government no longer acts as
a single agent in delivering public services – rather it requires the collaboration of a range
of actors across public service delivery systems, something that has arguably been catalysed
further by the global financial crisis and resultant ‘austerity’ in public spending.
Consequently PSOs can no longer act as if their efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability
are in their own hands alone. All too often, NPM-style reforms have predominantly concen-
trated upon internal efficiency alone, rather than being externally focused upon effectiveness
in meeting the expressed needs of service users and citizens. A good example of such failure
has been in the implementation of ‘lean’ reform initiatives in public services (Radnor et al.
2012), which have led to internally efficient but permanently failing PSOs. In reality PSOs are
now part of complex public service delivery systems where their mission-critical objectives
require the successful negotiation of relationships within these systems – with policy makers,
other PSOs, service users, citizens, the democratic apparatus and indeed a range of service
system elements and stakeholders.
Significantly the NPG perspective goes beyond the network governance approach articu-
lated by Kickert (1997), amongst others. These latter approaches acknowledge that individual
PSOs can no longer act in isolation and that they require a focus upon inter-organizational
policy and implementation networks (comprising a multiplicity of PSOs). However, the thrust
of the NPG is that such an inter-organizational perspective is necessary, but not sufficient.
Drawing upon services theory (Gronroos 2007), it conceptualizes public services not as pro-
duced within inter-organizational networks alone, but rather as enacted within systems that
include PSOs themselves, service users and other key stakeholders (such as families or carers),
local communities, hard and soft technologies, and physical capital and products. It is the
interaction of these complex service systems that is the core of effective public service deliv-
ery. Such a systemic approach positions the service users centrally as an element of the design
and delivery of public services through their role as co-producers (Osborne, S. and Strokosch
2013). The task is thus not simply the governance of networks of PSOs, but the governance of
these interactive and complex systems.
Second, the NPG paradigm argues that PSOs are not delivering products – but rather
intangible services that require attention to the processes of service delivery and relationships
with service users, not simply to service design. Gronroos (1998) identified this search for the
‘missing product’ as a common mistake of failing service firms, and this is equally relevant to
PSOs as they strive to develop sustainable business models for the twenty-first century.
Third, seen from an NPG perspective PSOs also need to recognize that the product-dominant
basis of NPM is counter-productive to their survival. It assumes that their sustainability is
driven by a business equation where production and consumption are treated separately – the
48  Handbook on theories of governance

costs of the former can be reduced without affecting the latter. This might be true for man-
ufactured products, but it is certainly not the case for public services. In this case reducing
production costs directly affects the quality of their use/consumption – and this affects longer
term viability and sustainability (Normann 1991; Gronroos 2007). For many service firms,
staff is one of their most expensive costs. PSOs, in particular, have sought to limit unit costs by
reducing staff costs (such as residential homes for elderly people employing less-well-trained
staff or reducing staffing ratios). Service theory identifies this as counter-productive. Reducing
staff costs invariably reduces the service quality, weakening the market position of a service
firm. Rather, service firms need to invest in staffing to improve the quality of the service
delivered, thus strengthening their market position and sustainability – what Normann (2000)
calls the ‘virtuous circle’ for the profitability and sustainability of such firms.
Fourth, throughout both PA and NPM, the task of public service delivery has been
conceptualized as something to be enacted by public service professionals and where the
service user is largely passive in the process, whether a ‘client’ or ‘customer’. There have, of
course, been movements to bring the service user into a more active role in service delivery
through ‘co-production’ into the service delivery process (see Alford (2014) for an excellent
summary). Important as these approaches are, they frequently mistake the nature of the public
service delivery task. In reality it is impossible to deliver any service without an element
of co-production (Xue and Harker 2003) – this is part of the very definition of a service.
Consequently the task becomes not one of how to bring the user into co-production but rather
how to engage actively with this already existing component of the public service delivery
process in order both to improve the quality of existing services and to plan for future service
delivery and innovation (Osborne, S. and Strokosch 2013). It is important to be clear that this
is different from the ‘consumerist’ movement that has dogged public services over recent
decades, and which has been subject to strong critiques elsewhere (Jung 2010; Powell et al.
2010). What is proposed here is rather to understand the totality of the public service delivery
system and the complex iterative interactions between services users and public service staff
that occur within it.
Finally, NPM has not been able to respond to the challenges of knowledge-driven services
delivery within the digital economy. Not only is this transforming the nature of relationships
between PSOs, politicians and service users, but it is questioning both the achievement of
public value as the indicator of public service effectiveness, rather than internal measures of
public service efficiency (Moore 2002; Bekkers et al. 2011), and the governance processes
required to negotiate agreement about such effectiveness (Brown and Osborne 2013).

EMBEDDING A PUBLIC SERVICE LOGIC WITHIN NEW PUBLIC

GOVERNANCE?

NPG perspectives have thus begun to emerge in response to NPM weaknesses, including the
dominance of efficiency considerations and the lack of focus on user value (Osborne 2010;
Osborne et al. 2021; Torfing and Triantafillou 2013). Over the past three decades, however, an
alternative body of theory and research about the management of services has been developed.
Originating in a discussion about the marketing of services (Gronroos 1998) this has now
evolved into a substantive theory in its own right (Gronroos 2007; Lusch et al. 2007), which
remarkably has been ignored in the debate about managing public services, despite its apparent
 Public management theory  49

relevance. Services management theory addresses the distinctiveness of the service experi-
ence, the often inter-organizational and systemic nature of public services delivery and the role
of the consumer as the shaper, co-producer and evaluator of the service experience. The time is
therefore long overdue, surely, to explore the contribution of a service-dominant approach to
the governance of public service delivery. We denote this approach as the public service logic
(PSL) of public services delivery and management (Osborne 2020). This formulation pays an
explicit debt to the ground-breaking book by Lusch and Vargo (2006).
At its most basic level, manufacturing and product-dominant theory relates to activities that
physically transform raw materials into saleable goods, and include a transfer of ownership
in this sale, whereas service-dominant theory relates to the transaction of intangible benefits,
where ownership of these activities is not transferred (Normann 1991). There are three core
characteristics traditionally referred to. First, whilst a product is invariably concrete (such as
a washing machine), a service is intangible – it is a process (staying at a hotel is not simply
about the quality of the room, but is also about the overall process or experience of your stay).
This is not to say that the content of a service (its purpose) is irrelevant; that is nonsense. Of
course, a service (whether healthcare or lifestyle) must deliver its intended benefits. However,
research also consistently suggests that, whilst users expect a service to be ‘fit for purpose’,
they base their judgement of its performance upon their expectations and experience of the
process of service delivery, rather than upon outcomes alone (Lovelock 1983). This means
that influencing and understanding a user’s expectations of a service are fundamental to their
experience of, and satisfaction with, that service – and that this experience then can affect quite
profoundly the effectiveness and impact of that service. Gronroos has argued persuasively that
a common failing of services management is attempting to provide a ‘missing product’ rather
than concentrating upon the process of service delivery (Gronroos 1998). We would argue this
failing is endemic to public service management.
The second core concept of services theory is that there is a different production logic for
manufactured products and services, respectively. For the former, production, selling and
consumption occur separately (e.g. the washing machine). With services, however, production
and consumption occur simultaneously, for example with residential care. Unlike the case
for a product, a service reducing unit costs by changing staffing levels or experience directly
affects the experience of that service by its users – and its subsequent effectiveness; the two
processes are not separable.
Finally, the role of the user is qualitatively different for manufactured products and services.
In the former they are ‘simply’ purchasers and consumers. However, for services, the user is
also a co-producer of the service. Importantly, this does not imply any active willingness to
co-produce on the part of the user – simply that it is impossible to use a service without, in
some way, contributing to its co-production. At the most extreme, no service is ever produced
identically for two people – a meal in a restaurant is as much a result of the interaction between
the customer and the waiter as it is of the quality of the food, whilst a surgical procedure is
influenced just as much by the individual pathology of a patient as by the doctor’s skills. At
a fundamental level, therefore, co-production is not an ‘add-on’ to services, but a core feature
(Osborne, S. and Strokosch 2013). This is not to suggest, however, that co-production is a nor-
mative panacea for all of public management’s problems. As Hardyman et al. suggest (2015),
in health at least, there are differences in how value accumulates across repeated interactions,
and we should not forget that users do not always respond in an expected or rational way to
a pre-determined service narrative.
50  Handbook on theories of governance

The implications of these three core characteristics for the governance of public service
delivery are myriad, and impossible to do full justice to in this chapter. However, one implica-
tion is especially significant. The performance of a public service is derived from three things:
the design of the service, the outcome achieved, and the subjective perception or expectation
experience of the user; these collide at what Normann (1991) calls ‘the moment of truth’. The
quality of this interaction, argues Normann, affects not only the satisfaction of the service user
but also the user’s service outcomes. This is not simply about user satisfaction, as the con-
sumerist movement would argue (Powell et al. 2010), but rather co-production having a direct
influence upon public service outcomes.
Some caveats are needed. To avoid being overly reductive, it is important to acknowledge
that these characteristics exist on a continuum. There is a world of difference between hospi-
tality and financial services, for example, and how they approach co-production. Additionally,
the heterogeneity of the sector itself must be considered – significant diversity exists within the
different elements of the public sector, and between individual organizations, and in practice
one size rarely fits all (just consider the differences between tax collection, parks maintenance,
education and healthcare delivery, for example). Second, care must be taken when transferring
lessons from the private to the public sector – whether from a manufacturing or a services
context. They share many of the same challenges but are quite distinct, not least in the domi-
nance of the polity as context for the public sector.
Perhaps most importantly, services theory itself has undergone considerable conceptual
development over the last decade. An influential group of writers have argued that the
above three characteristics (intangibility, simultaneous production, and consumption and
co-production) of services are actually second order characteristics. Stephen Vargo and his
colleagues (Vargo and Lusch 2006) have turned the traditional argument on its head. They
argue that ‘service’ is actually a core feature of both services and products; a service-dominant
approach is the only way to add genuine value to either. They thus argue for a focus both upon
value-in-use in service delivery and upon the intertwined roles of consumers and service staff
in co-creating this value. They also situate such value creation with dynamic and interactive
ecosystems. This approach is gaining traction within PSL also (e.g. Petrescu 2019; Strokosch
and Osborne 2020).
Effective service management is thus not concerned with the control of unit costs and
efficiencies of a production process, but rather with ‘the application of specialized skills’ and
where ‘knowledge is the fundamental [resource]’ (Vargo and Lusch 2006). In this, the service
user is always the co-producer of value, as there is no extant value for a service until it is used
– ‘experience and perception are essential to [service] value determination’ (Vargo and Lusch
2006: 4). A service-dominant approach is one that places ‘activities driven by specialized
knowledge and skills, rather than units of output, at the center of exchange processes’ (Vargo
and Lusch 2006: 5).
Combining these three characteristics of traditional services theory, together with
a service-dominant approach that emphasizes the role of knowledge transformation, is, we
argue, the way forward for public management theory in the era of NPG. We articulate this
contribution as a public service logic approach to public services delivery and management,
and we suggest that embedding this approach within NPG allows a relevant and appropriate
theoretical perspective to inform the improvement, design and delivery of public services.
 Public management theory  51

REFLECTIONS AND CONCLUSION

This chapter has argued that current public management theory and practice are flawed in their
over-reliance upon empirical and theoretical insights from product-dominant management
theory derived primarily from the manufacturing sector. This has represented a fatal flaw
within the NPM paradigm and has undermined both our understanding of and the practice of
public governance. Further, it was argued that this body of theory is especially ill suited to
embrace the focus on service systems and relational governance that is at the heart of NPG.
Consequently this chapter has argued instead for an alternative approach. This approach
emphasizes the distinctive characteristics of services and their impact upon their management,
adopts a holistic and systemic attitude to the delivery of (public) services and acknowledges
the central role of service user expectations and experience to the performance of (public)
services.
Engaging with public service-dominant logic, we believe, will allow effective public
management practice and delivery within NPG. PSL recognizes and responds to the external,
inter-organizational reality of this mode of public management, including the democratizing
and representative functions, as well as to the need to embrace the processual and systemic
character of public services delivery. It is only through such an approach, we argue, that genu-
inely sustainable models of public services delivery can be negotiated, understood, developed
and facilitated for the future, rather than through the vain attempts to recreate public services
as manufactured goods produced in isolation from the service delivery process and its distinc-
tive logic.
However, it is also important, in concluding, to delineate some of the limitations and
challenges that must be faced in adapting service-dominant theory to public services. There
are subtle nuances that are required in its application. Six issues, we would argue, are espe-
cially important. First, when considering the application of any body of research and theory
from business experience, the distinctiveness of the polity and of public services needs to
be remembered. Whilst public services have increasingly adopted models and insights from
business practice, rarely has it been a simple or mechanistic task, and not all models or insights
are always appropriate. Developing a business to make a profit is somewhat different from
developing a PSO to meet a social or economic need, even if both do require some form of
economic sustainability. Unlike the case for a business, consumer satisfaction alone is not an
adequate measure of service performance for PSOs. This was the central flaw of the consum-
erist approaches to public services that were early, partial and imperfect attempts to apply
discrete elements of service-dominant theory to public services – but which lacked a coherent
understanding of service-dominant logic in the round (excellent critiques of these approaches
are found in Powell et al. 2010 and Jung 2010).
Second, there are practical obstacles to be overcome in evolving a public service-dominant
approach in public services. These include professional opposition to user-led services
(Bovaird and Loeffler 2012), passive, partial and/or tokenistic applications of service-dominant
approaches (Sinclair 2004) and the danger of the over-customization of public services leading
to inefficiencies in public spending (Peters and Pierre 2000). Whilst not absolute limitations,
these obstacles have to be negotiated in reframing the public service delivery process as
a service-dominant process.
Third, one would not want to replace the surgeon with the patient in the ‘co-production’ of
oncology services – professional expertise is vital and irreplaceable in delivering the desired
52  Handbook on theories of governance

impact. It is important therefore not to have a reductive approach that reduces a PSL approach
to public service governance to mere sophistry. However, in the above case, research has also
indicated the significance that the co-production of an overall treatment plan between health
professionals and patients has for clinical outcomes in oncology (Katz et al. 2005). Despite
this, the introduction into healthcare services of meaningful levels of co-production remains
a contested area (Stickley 2006). A PSL approach to public services delivery, applied sensi-
tively rather than simplistically or mechanistically, could have supported and validated such
co-production from the outset.
Fourth, the development of ICT poses new challenges for services management. Many of
the traditional caveats about the nature of the service encounter have been challenged over the
last decade by the rise of e-services (Surjadjaja et al. 2003). For public services, progress in
‘e-government’ initiatives has been variable. Some have argued that it has been either ‘chaotic’
(Layne and Lee 2001) or an opportunity missed for genuine service transformation (West
2004). Others have argued that ‘digital governance’ has the potential to generate genuine user
and citizen engagement with public service delivery (Margetts 2009) – and indeed sometimes
irrespective of whether public service managers or politicians would want it (Bekkers et al.
2011). In this sense digital governance and a PSL approach that privileges co-production may
well go hand in hand in the early twenty-first century.
Fifth, there are inevitably cases where the user of a public service is unwilling or coerced;
the prison service is a classic example here. The professionals of the prison service have
a custodial function that it would appear is hard on first glance to co-produce or conceptualize
as a service (for prisoners, at least). Even here, though, it has been argued that the electronic
tagging of convicted criminals within the community is a form of co-produced custody
(Corcoran 2011). Margetts (2009) goes further with this argument, too, suggesting that
community-based custodial options may be one area ripe for such technological innovation.
Fagan and Davies (2000) have also inverted this argument. They contend that coercion in the
delivery of law and order services is not a limitation upon co-production, but rather that such
coercion ‘raises concerns about the legitimacy of law [and] threatens to weaken citizen partic-
ipation’ and that co-production is consequently a legitimate response to such service failure,
which can maintain ‘the broader social norms of contemporary policing’ (Fagan and Davies
2000). Public service-dominant logic has thus a real contribution to make here for public
services and their governance.
Finally, a PSL approach to public management is particularly complex where public ser-
vices, as can often be the case, have multiple and/or conflictual users. In the above case of
custodial prison services, for example, it is a moot point who the actual service users are – the
convicted criminals themselves, the court, victims of crime, or society more broadly. This
dilemma is highlighted particularly by Bovaird (2005) – not only are there multiple potential
users of public services in such cases, but their needs can be contradictory and sometimes
diffuse. Co-production is not a normative good – it can have negative as well as positive
outcomes for public service delivery. In contested situations therefore it is essential that the
governance of co-production is actively approached rather than ignored in order to enhance
the balance between the positive and minimize the negative outcomes. A natural corollary of
this is that we might see public services expect or assume co-production from service users,
potentially leading to negative consequences for those users who cannot do so or who choose
not to (Torfing and Triantafillou 2013).
 Public management theory  53

These are significant challenges for the application of PSL to public services delivery and
for the meta-framework of the NPG. These will require genuine theoretical and conceptual
development if they are to make a substantive contribution to the field. Yet such challenges
are not a reason to delimit a public service-dominant approach to the governance of public
services; rather they are a reason to acknowledge its greater complexity in public services than
in the business sector.
It is because of, rather than in spite of, these complex issues that we believe that a PSL
approach to the governance of public services is essential. Such an approach can only enrich
our theoretical and practical understanding of public services delivery by placing these chal-
lenges in a framework based upon the actuality of service delivery rather than a misunder-
standing of them as discrete goods produced in a wholly product-dominant and transactional
fashion.
Clearly such a transformation has implications for the theory and practice of governance
in the context of public services. On the one hand some of these implications are a reality
already. The vertically integrated delivery of public services through unitary public service
organizations that was, and is, typical of public administration has been increasingly replaced
by collaborative network and systemic approaches to the delivery of such services. This devel-
opment has had clear implications for the governance of inter-organizational relationships
between PSOs. On the other hand the recognition, within a public service-dominant logic, that
the governance of public services delivery now needs to move beyond a preoccupation with
PSOs alone and to embrace the reality of the governance of complex and process-based public
service systems is a paradigmatic shift that will require the evolution of more sophisticated
approaches to such governance.
This short chapter has been a contribution to developing such approaches – but it is the start
of the conversation, not its end. Future research should consider exactly how PSL will influ-
ence governance structures and theory, and how it addresses the negotiation of public value
and priorities, particularly in a context of continued public spending restraint.

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5. Planning theory
Thomas Hartmann and Stan Geertman

INTRODUCTION: THEORIES FOR, IN AND OF PLANNING

Spatial planning is rather young. It was introduced in the second half of the nineteenth century
as a response to the appalling conditions in the towns and cities that were growing rapidly to
accommodate the industrial revolution (Hartmann and Needham 2012). Accordingly, planning
theory is a young academic discipline. Despite its youth, however, planning theory must still
provide a solid scientific foundation for planning as a general discipline.
But what is planning theory, and what is it not? Planning theory is of epistemological value:
it helps provide an academic foundation for the discipline (Biddulph 2007). Beyond this epis-
temological value, planning theory should also “help to guide practice” (Sternberg 2000). Over
the years, there have been many attempts to structure, define and operationalize planning theory
and its theoretical approaches1 (Taylor 1998; Allmendinger 2002; Forester 2004; Gunder and
Hillier 2009; Hillier and Healey 2010; Alexander 2011). A major conclusion arising from the
academic debate on the definition of planning theory is that no one comprehensive planning
theory exists, but rather planning is a conglomeration of various theories from many disci-
plines (Needham 1988; Hendriks 1999; Hillier 2010; Hartmann 2012b). Yiftachel and Huxley
noted that the “theoretical approaches being employed … display a remarkably healthy state
of (postmodern) heterogeneity” (Yiftachel and Huxley 2000). Planning theory has developed
and changed dramatically during the short history of its existence. Thus, the historical roots
of planning and planning theory are fairly shallow. On top of that, planning theory is not well
rooted in planning practice, and vice versa. In fact, spatial planning practice often appears to
be an atheoretical or even theory-hostile activity – its focus is on moving forward and getting
things done rather than consulting theoretical insights (Cuthbert 2011: 6). Planning is often
based on “eclectic reading, common sense, on-the-job experience, and personal predilection”
(Talen and Ellis 2002: 44). What, then, is the role of theory in planning? It can be said that
planning and theory share a kind of love–hate relationship. Neither can exist without the other,
but their roles are not clear and seem to change constantly. In this contribution we will seek
to understand how the role of theory develops and changes in order to uncover how planning
theory can contribute to a general theory of governance.
To simplify, we explore the relation between planning and (planning) theories by using
three perspectives. These perspectives link to phases in the history of spatial planning:

● Prior to the 1970s, planners searched for a comprehensive and general planning theory.
From this perspective, theory is a servant for spatial planners, who make informed
decisions on the basis of theoretical insights. In this view, theories are analytical and
conceptual tools used to understand the object of planning (Needham 1988). Theories
from disciplines such as transport planning, urban design or economics are all applied in
this type of planning. These theories are very much focused on the planning object itself;
therefore, we call these theories in planning.

57
58  Handbook on theories of governance

● In the 1970s, a big paradigm shift took place in planning theory: planners acknowledged
that planning problems are complex, normative and inherently uncertain (Hartmann
2012b). Rittel and Webber even used the term “wicked problems” to describe these plan-
ning intricacies (Rittel and Webber 1973). This paradigm shift marks a strong reorientation
towards the process of planning, accompanied by a tendency to disregard the planning
object. Communicative, collaborative or participatory planning was born in this phase.
New theories from outside of the planning field entered the scene to support the process
of planning, including “mixed scanning,” management-oriented theories and so on. This is
what we call theories for planning, because this kind of theory does not discuss the content
or object of planning itself (that is, theories in planning), but rather describes how we
should perform the planning activity itself.
● More recently, there has been a trend toward questioning this strong process-oriented
approach to planning theory (Fainstein 2005). As other aspects gain more importance,
theorists seem to search for a more general theory of planning (Gunder and Hillier 2009).
Such a theory not only should help to make better plans (Forester 2004), but should also
contextualize planning within the tensions between administrations and politics. This
perspective can be called theories of planning.

We will address these three perspectives on planning theory and then identify what can be
derived from each to create a general theory of governance.

THEORIES IN PLANNING: OBJECT-FOCUSED

Why do we need planning? One answer to this question is that planning increases the general
public welfare (Moore 1978: 388). In the early days of spatial planning, during the industrial
and post-war periods, planning achieved this task by tackling problems that appeared to be rel-
atively “definable, understandable and consensual” (Rittel and Webber 1973: 156): infrastruc-
ture needed to be improved, wastewater treated, houses built or rebuilt, areas for industrial and
commercial activity provided and so on.
Particularly in the post-war period, after 1945, spatial planning was “essentially an exercise
in physical planning and design” (Taylor 1998: 5). Accordingly, many rationalistic theories
are concerned about the built structures (urban design) and economic and quantitatively
measurable effects. These theories and models have been borrowed from other disciplines
(Needham 1977), such as classic location theory or land rent models from economics (e.g.
Alonso 1964; von Thünen [1921] 2013). One important theory is Christaller’s central place
theory. Christaller ([1968] 1980) sought to calculate the urban structure of space to allocate
infrastructure and public facilities in a more efficient way. Spatial planners considered
themselves to be engineers of space (Albers 1969; Rittel and Webber 1973; Taylor 1998) or
“technical experts” (Allmendinger 2002: 88). As such, they provided blueprints for spatial
developments (Hajer et al. 2010). The focus of these planning approaches was clearly on the
object – space, built structures, economic effects – while it fully disregarded the associated
social or political components of planning. This is also called “substantive” planning theory
(as opposed to the subsequent procedural theory) (Taylor 1998: 153).
This object-focused spatial planning has implications for the prevailing mode of govern-
ance. Ever since the foundation of planning, planners have had the notion that the use of land
 Planning theory  59

and buildings needs supervision and superordinate control. They also believe that coordination
of sectoral planning is needed, also known as facet planning. Inevitably, planning has become
multidisciplinary (Parker and Doak 2012), and it needs to integrate different sector activities
(Moss 2009; Spit and Zoete 2009; Stüer 2009). In terms of governance, the idea that planners
were the experts led to a top-down planning approach with a strong sense of coordination.
This coordination of established sectoral planning, such as water management, transportation
planning, infrastructure planning, economic development or urban design, required a strong
justification. The prevailing notion was that extensive quantification of data and “a reduction
of the world to numbers” would provide “an air of legitimacy” to planning (Cuthbert 2011:
12). Based on the positivistic assumption that gathering and analyzing data would produce
a superior outcome (Moore 1978: 388), planners used analytical and efficiency biases to legiti-
mize their plans (Baum 1977). This approach has been called rational, rational-comprehensive
or synoptic planning (Hudson et al. 1979). Hudson identified four classical elements of this
type of planning: goal-setting, identification of policy alternatives, evaluation of means against
ends and implementation (Hudson et al. 1979: 388).
This focus on the object of planning was criticized by many academics in the 1970s.
Baum complained in 1977 that this rationalistic planning approach led to bureaucracy and
technocracy and did not necessarily serve the public interest (Baum 1977). Previously, in
1965, Davidoff had stated that a planning process is inherently political and “requires that the
planning function be located in either or both the executive and legislative branches and the
scope of planning be broadened to include all areas of interest to the public” (Davidoff 1965:
331). He coined the term “advocacy planning” to express the idea of paying attention to the
needs of different societal groups instead of focusing on technocratic planning. These claims
and ideas have been adopted and developed further in the succeeding years and decades by
various theorists, such as Forester (1982).

THEORIES FOR PLANNING: PROCESS-FOCUSED

Planning, particularly its rationalistic approach (Hudson et al. 1979), was under attack in the
1970s. Wildavsky stated that planning is elusive, and it is not possible to explain substantial
planning decisions with facts (Wildavsky 1973: 127). The notion that planning is not solely
about facts but is also about perceptions persisted until the advent of contemporary planning
theory (Gunder and Hillier 2009: 4–5; Kokx and van Kempen 2010). Planning theorists
ascertain that around the 1970s a paradigm shift took place in society and also in spatial
planning. Rittel and Webber explained in 1973 that the period of tame problems was over
and that “planning problems are inherently wicked” (Rittel and Webber 1973: 160). Their
analysis, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” was very influential in the develop-
ment of a new planning theory. “Wicked problems” cannot be proven right or wrong (Rittel
and Webber 1973), because different stakeholders perceive the world through different lenses
(Davy 1997; Schönwandt and Voigt 2005). In planning, “one cannot use the term ‘truth’
without the required quotation marks” (van Eeten 1999: 3). In this period, planning theo-
rists started to reject the pure object-oriented approach from the early days of planning and
acknowledged that planning problems are no longer “definable, understandable and consen-
sual” (Rittel and Webber 1973), but rather are characterized by uncertainty, complexity and
normativity (Allmendinger and Tewdwr-Jones 2002; Forester 2004; Gunder and Hillier 2009;
60  Handbook on theories of governance

Boelens 2010; Hartmann 2012b). The object of planning is recognized as being “situated ‘in
between’ conflicting or at least disputing parties” (Forester 2004: 246), where facts and values
are inseparably mixed up in planning processes (Forester 1982; Bertolini 2010). According
to this perspective, planning balances power relations (Lambregts et al. 2008), which turns
planning into a political process (Stein 1995).
As a consequence of this perspective, planners lost confidence in the rational-comprehen-
sive method of top-down planning. The paradigm shift caused a re-orientation from “theory
in planning” towards “theory for planning.” This new theory is also called procedural plan-
ning theory (Neumann 1998: 208; Taylor 1998). In planning theory, the role of planners has
evolved from that of managers of space (Albers 1969; Wagner 1970) towards that of actors
“inter alia” (Stein 1995; Parker and Doak 2012) or “advisors who operate like everybody
else” (Allmendinger 2002: 88) with an emphasis on communication and deliberation (Taylor
1998). Planners are not central in the process anymore. Accordingly, plans are no longer
instruments to achieve a certain spatial outcome, but rather a tool that governs the process of
decision-making (Geertman 1996: 28).
After the paradigm shift, planning theory became increasingly concerned with addressing
the issue of how planners can better cope with the inherent uncertainty of planning problems
(Faludi 1973; Roo 2010). In this respect, perhaps the most important and influential concept
was introduced by Lindblom in 1959: the concept of “muddling through” (Lindblom 1959).
Lindblom noted a gap between policy practice and literature at the time: whereas practice
addressed complex problems with iterative pragmatic choices, literature recommended
a comprehensive, rationalistic and holistic approach to policy problems (Lindblom 1959). He
recommended a heuristic concept of policy-making (namely muddling through). It follows the
notion that comprehensive planning needs to be rejected in the face of the sheer complexity
of urban realities; instead, planners need to take small steps and depend on intermediate
outcomes to govern future directions. One prominent application in this respect is perspec-
tivistic incrementalism, which builds on muddling through (Schmals 1999). Etzioni was very
influential in this debate. His article on mixed scanning synthesizes rationalistic planning with
incrementalistic planning (Etzioni 1967; Geertman 1996: 28). According to Etzioni, “As the
actor ‘scans’, he ‘takes in’ information and explores alternative steps. Moreover, what infor-
mation to collect, e.g. the extent to which to process it, are also choices that need to be made
in the decision-making process” (Etzioni [1968] 1971).
Depending on the particular perspective, the new paradigm is often called “post- positivist,”
“post-industrial,” “post-Fordist” or “post-modern” (Healey 1996; Hendriks 1999; Alexander
2000; Allmendinger 2002). The common notion behind all these post-isms is that they mark
a rejection (Baum 1977; Allmendinger 2002), or at least a fundamental redevelopment
(Allmendinger and Tewdwr-Jones 2002), of the conventional object-oriented concepts of
earlier periods of planning. Planning theorists recognized that identifying the causes of and
solutions to a situation in a complex network goes beyond rationalist reasoning (Gunder and
Hillier 2009; Roo and Silva 2010). However, planning theory did not develop homogeneously.
Among others (Taylor 1998; Hillier and Healey 2010), Allmendinger tried to capture the evo-
lution of planning ideas and developed a typology of planning theories (Allmendinger 2002).
His work reveals two key facts: First, planning theory developed from theories in planning
to theories for planning. This shows how planning has grown as an independent discipline
(Needham 1988) and also how planning theory has become more self-confident. Second, the
paradigm shift led to an explosion of theories for planning. The procedural planning theories
 Planning theory  61

helped planners to cope with uncertainties to some extent (Roo 2010), but they also revealed
that certainty in spatial planning is almost impossible, as the planning context is so complex.
This gave rise to another perspective on planning theory: theories of planning. These theories
are less concerned with the planning object and the process; they focus instead on the context
in which planners plan.

THEORIES OF PLANNING: TOWARDS CONTEXT-FOCUSED

Recent debates in planning theory follow the idea that planners need to cope not only with
cognitive uncertainties but also with a complex and normative planning context. Typical
approaches incorporate other stakeholders or citizens into the planning process. Important dis-
cussions are centered on participative planning (Innes and Booher 2000), the communicative
turn in planning (Healey 1996; Huxley 2000) and, most importantly, collaborative planning
(Innes and Booher 2010). These approaches regard a changing planning context, which has
developed from government to governance (Wegener 2012). According to this view, govern-
ance processes are “shaped by wider economic, social, and environmental forces that structure,
but do not determine specific, interactions” (Healey 2003: 104). Planners are not central in the
planning process; planners are actors in highly complex decision structures where a variety of
other public and private stakeholders are involved in these processes (Fürst 2010; Wegener
2012).
Theoretical discussions on participative planning often refer to the study by Arnstein
wherein she presents a ladder of citizen participation (Arnstein 1969). Some propose that
citizen participation increases the legitimacy or democratic quality of planning, while others
suggest that it increases the quality of the plan by collaboration; often the result is a com-
bination of these arguments (Hartmann 2012a). Participation and citizen empowerment are
often celebrated as the Holy Grail in planning theory (Fagence 1977; Brownill and Carpenter
2007; Dreijerink et al. 2008) without questioning the normative implications or the “mental
shortcuts” (van Eeten 1999; Billé 2008). One issue is that participation does not necessarily
lead to more consensual planning results; it might even nurture conflicts (Silver et al. 2010).
Another issue is that the motives for participation remain unclear (i.e. whether it is to increase
the quality of the plans or the processes, raise support, acquire legitimacy). So the role and the
power of citizens in participatory processes are often vague (Donders et al. 2014).
“Collaborative planning,” a term coined by Healey (1997), is certainly the most common
and influential term in the planning theories that address planning processes. The label “collab-
orative planning” has been used for various inclusive and participative governance processes
in spatial planning over the last few years. Healey complained in 2003 that “the metaphor
‘collaborative planning’ became used and misused” (Healey 2003: 108). Groups, politicians
and policy-makers used the term in order to promote certain participative policy-designs.
According to Healey, collaborative planning regards planning as an interactive governance
process, which can occur in many different modes.
Collaborative planning is often treated as a desirable mode of governance because it
provides the necessary flexibility that was lacking in the rationalistic planning approaches.
Few question the trend of transforming from government to collaborative forms of govern-
ance (Wegener 2012). Often, the collaboration of planners is celebrated in planning theory
(Hajer et al. 2010; Klemme and Selle 2010). However, it is criticized as well: “Ironically the
62  Handbook on theories of governance

progressive credentials of spatial planning in terms of consensus building, policy integration,

and the search for ‘win–win–win’ solutions may have helped script out oppositional voices”
(Allmendinger and Haughton 2010: 803). Such an exclusionary effect will reduce the dem-
ocratic legitimacy of the planning process. Democratic legitimacy may also be undermined
by the incorporation of strong private interest groups into the collaborative planning process,
as this may threaten to cause the selling out of the public interest (Hartmann and Needham
2012). Another challenge is identified by Rydin, who acknowledges that communication
and collaboration are critical characteristics of planning, but who is also concerned about the
validity of different knowledge claims posed by different stakeholders in the planning process
(Rydin 2007). Another constraint not only of collaborative planning but also of participative
planning, or the communicative turn in planning, comes from the Habermasian assumption
that communication inherently contains the possibility of consensus (Huxley 2000). Conflicts
are not automatically solved simply by bringing all stakeholders to a roundtable and expect-
ing them to discuss the problem until it is resolved (Davy 1997; Billé 2008). In addition, the
consensus that emerges from an open discourse can easily be disturbed by the discourse itself,
especially if the discussion opens up again or a new stakeholder with a new opinion joins the
discussion (Hartmann and Needham 2012). Collaborative planning needs institutions to make
its planning results robust and enforceable (Huxley 2000: 371).
Thus, even a planning theory focused on the context of planning has its faults and pitfalls.
Lively debates about collaborative planning (Healey 2003), participation (Innes and Booher
2000; Brownill and Carpenter 2007), communication (Huxley 2000) or governance processes
in planning (Forester 2004; Moss 2004; Hillier 2010) are still very strong in planning theory.
However, these debates cannot resolve the fundamental dilemmas of planning that stem from
the fact that it is a discipline that, on the one side, deals with practical problems for which it
must find solutions while, on the other side, it departs from “wicked” planning problems that
are inherently uncertain, complex and normative. Where does this leave planning theory?

DISCUSSION: TOWARDS BALANCED THEORIZATION

In the early days of planning as an academic discipline, the planning object stood in the center
of theoretical debates (rational comprehensive or substantive planning theory); after the para-
digm shift in the 1970s, the process became the focus (procedural planning theory); thereafter,
the theoretical focus turned to the context of planning (i.e. collaborative planning theory).
These three phases in planning theory describe fundamental and important perspectives on
spatial planning. The above description also shows that planning theory has developed over
the past decades into a strong, self-confident discipline.
Two issues become obvious when regarding the short history of planning theory. First, the
Holy Grail of planning theory has yet to be found. Each theoretical perspective has blind spots
and gaps, falling short of the ideal. Second, there is a common concern regarding governing
practices. The analysis of different modes of governance, given the diversity of planning con-
texts, is an important issue for contemporary planning theory.
Such modes differ depending on the way different stakeholders interact. The dimensions of
object, process and context are important determinants for such modes of governance (Spit and
Zoete 2009; Driessen et al. 2012). “A narrow definition of planning theory results in theoreti-
cal weakness arising from the isolation of process from context and outcome” (Fainstein 2005:
 Planning theory  63

121). In other words, theory on spatial planning governance needs to address three dimensions:
first, a look at the specific role of spatiality (namely the planning object); second, a reflection
on the political dimension of the planning processes (Stein 1995); third, a theorization on the
specific planning context, that is, the public sphere and civil society as domains of social strug-
gles (Gualini 2010). In recent debates on planning theory, this threefold perspective has been
increasingly addressed. In the future, the interrelations between object, process and context in
theory need further elaboration and discussion. Finally, such debates on theories of (modes of)
governance are of huge importance for spatial planning and planning theory.

NOTE
1. It is debatable that all that is called planning theory even matches the definition of what a theory
should be (Cuthbert 2011).

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 Planning theory  65

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66  Handbook on theories of governance

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6. Policy process frameworks
Saba Siddiki

INTRODUCTION
This chapter discusses governance in connection with policy theory. In particular, it focuses
on how governance, and critical dimensions thereof, are addressed in leading frameworks
that policy scholars have developed to study the public policy process. The discussion builds
on a general conception of governance as the formal and informal processes through which
society and the economy are steered in accordance with common goals, assuming that these
processes are interactive and engage multiple types of actors within them toward identifica-
tion and pursuit of common objectives (Ansell and Torfing, Chapter 1 in this Handbook).
Further, it builds on a conception of the policy process as the process by which public policies
are developed, adopted, implemented and evaluated. Relatedly, policy process research is
conceived of as the study of interactions among different types of actors within this process
toward the development of public policy over time (deLeon and Weible 2010: 23).
A discussion of governance through the lens of policy process research is considered
appropriate given that both focus on interactions among actors, and contexts in which these
actors interact toward the pursuit of common policy goals (Howlett et al. 2017). Policy process
research can contribute to the understanding of governance by highlighting the many political
and contextual dynamics associated with the engagement of diverse stakeholders in the policy
process as they vie to advance options that align with their varying policy beliefs, and to
relay their distinctive preferences about how scarce public resources should be allocated to
respond to perceived public problems (Anyebe 2018). Relatedly, policy process frameworks
offer guidance on analyzing the individual, collective and contextual dynamics of multi-actor
cooperation in policy formulation, implementation, and other parts of the policy process.
Many policy process frameworks cast multi-actor interaction in policy activities under the
conceptual heading of “collective action,” treating collective action not just as cooperation in
the pursuit of policy goals, but rather as strategic interaction among individuals with different
beliefs and preferences at different scales to influence policy outcomes. Policy process frame-
works support investigation of the following types of questions relating to collective action:
What are individual and contextual determinants of collective action? What are common types
of dilemmas associated with collective action? What individual, procedural and structural
(i.e., venue-related) factors support and/or challenge collective action? What are the kinds
and designs of institutions (i.e., formal and informal rules, norms and strategies) that guide
collective action? And, of critical import: What are the outputs of collective action?
A key premise of the discussion presented in this chapter is that governance fundamentally
shares the collective action perspective advanced in policy process research; that is, it stresses
interactions among actors from within and outside of government who have a common inter-
est in shaping what occurs within the policy process. These goal-directed interactions occur
within particular processes and venues and are constrained by formal and informal institutions.

67
68  Handbook on theories of governance

Following from this premise, the key questions motivating the study of governance have ana-
logues in policy process research, specifically those that relate to collective action.
This chapter begins with an overview of key questions that guide research on governance
and on collective action within policy process research, drawing parallels in terms of their
overlapping foci. It then reviews leading policy process frameworks that specifically focus
on collective action and summarizes these frameworks along foci identified as being of
overlapping interest to governance and policy process scholars. The chapter concludes with
a discussion of what is to be gained from thinking about how governance theory can leverage
policy process frameworks.

KEY QUESTIONS MOTIVATING GOVERNANCE AND POLICY

PROCESS RESEARCH

Brief Overview of Governance Research

Along with the increasing prevalence of governance in practice over the last several decades,
a rich body of scholarship has developed on the topic. Scholars of public administration,
public policy, political science, and related fields, have sought to investigate when and why
governments engage non-state actors in policy formulation and implementation, the various
forms that partnerships among state and non-state actors take, the processes and institutional
constraints within which governance takes shape, and the effectiveness of decentralization in
policy activity (Borzel and Panke 2007; Howlett et al. 2017; Peters and Pierre 1998; Rhodes
1997). The major foci of governance research can be captured with attention to key questions
that guide it, including: What does governance look like? Why governance? What enables
effective governance? What hinders effective governance? And, what are the outputs of
governance?
Brief responses to these questions are offered here. In characterizing governance, scholar-
ship relays an appreciation for the variegated ways through which state actors engage non-state
actors in policy activities within similar and different forms of partnerships (Peters and Pierre
1998). More formalized kinds of engagement are reflected in public‒private partnerships and
contractual arrangements. Less formal kinds of engagement are reflected in the convening
of non-state actors with state actors in ad hoc or occasional collaborative processes. The
engagement of non-state actors in policy formulation and implementation is tied principally
to augmentation of government capacity, broadly conceived. Capacity refers to informational,
economic, social and other resources, the leveraging of which can help government to more
effectively design policy solutions and provide public resources. Furthermore, governance
scholars posit that policy-making regarding “wicked problems,” in particular, can elicit the
need for diverse stakeholder expertise and perspectives, given that these types of problems
are often associated with scientific and technical uncertainty, lack of clarity regarding the link
between problems and solutions, polarizing disagreement on policy goals and views about
how to achieve them, and contextual sensitivity. The engagement of non-state actors in some
cases is also argued on normative grounds, insofar as broadening participation by non-state
actors is consistent with the principles of democracy (Kim and Siddiki 2018).
Factors enabling and hindering governance are to some extent tied to the particular forms
it takes, but generally the factors that seem to support cross-sector collaborations include
 Policy process frameworks  69

agreement in goals among collaborating partners, powerful sponsors, effective leadership,

perceived legitimacy and trust, effective planning, responsiveness to partners, resilience and
accountability systems (Bryson et al. 2006). Logically, when these factors are weak or absent,
effective cooperation may be challenged. Lack of funding can also be challenging (Leach and
Sabatier 2005). Just as the factors that enable and hinder governance depend in part on its par-
ticular manifestation, so too do the metrics by which governance can be evaluated. Relevant
outputs, outcomes and impacts depend on the nature of partnerships and their broader goals;
they can come in the form of services delivered, policy outputs or systemic consequences, or
even social learning (cognitive and relational learning) among coordinating partners (Siddiki
et al. 2017; Koontz and Thomas 2006; Koontz 2014).
This brief overview of governance scholarship emphasizes that governance hinges on
collective action; that is, on cooperation among state and non-state actors in policy activities.
Focusing on different aspects of collective action, governance research has contributed valua-
ble insights on the when, why, how and what of it.

Brief Overview of Policy Process Research

Reflecting its roots in political science, policy process research focuses on the study of state
and non-state actors in policy decision-making. As the policy process field started to develop,
policy scholars began identifying actors prominently featured in policy processes, then char-
acterizing prototypical relationships among particular types of actors that notably influence
what happens in different stages of the policy process. The term “iron triangle” was coined
to reference mutually beneficial relationships among bureaucrats, members of congress, and
policy lobbyists that essentially reflected a form of regulatory capture; that is, instances in
which policy-makers and administrators become beholden to regulated interests (Stigler
1971). Heclo (1978) posited that the iron triangle insufficiently captured the array of actors
and relationships that influence the unfolding policy process and he introduced the concept
of “issue networks” to capture the diverse sets of actors that possess expertise on policy
issues, who organize loosely, participate in the policy process fluidly, and whose intellectual
and ideological commitments to particular policy issues are paramount to material gain. In
the years that followed, numerous other concepts were developed or used to characterize
conglomerations of state and non-state actors that organize with varying degrees of cohesive-
ness and procedural or institutional embeddings, but typically due to shared policy beliefs or
goals, to shape the policy process. Among these concepts are policy coalitions (Sabatier and
Jenkins-Smith 1993), policy networks (Rhodes 2007) and policy regimes.
As policy process research has developed these and other concepts, scholars have sought to
identify dynamics of diverse stakeholder interactions that generalize across policy domains,
geographies, and political systems. Among the questions that guide the assessment of this
collective action in the policy process are the following: What are the dominant forms of col-
lective action observed in the policy process? What motivates collective action in the policy
process? What enables effective collective action? And, what are the outputs of collective
action?
Because governance research and policy process research are commonly focused on collec-
tive action, there are opportunities for investigating how the concept is similarly and distinctly
addressed across bodies of scholarship. The following section links governance and policy
process research with respect to the key questions presented earlier in this chapter.
70  Handbook on theories of governance

Table 6.1 Key questions motivating governance and policy process research

Governance Policy process research Core overlapping foci

What does governance look like? What are dominant forms of collective Form
action in the policy process?
Why governance? What motivates collective action in the Motivation
policy process?
What enables effective governance? What enables effective collective action? Enabling factors
What are the outputs of governance? What are the outputs of collective action? Outputs

Synthesizing Insights: Key Questions and Overlapping Foci of Governance and Policy
Process Research

Table 6.1 lists key questions motivating governance and policy process research focused
on collective action identified. Questions across the two bodies of scholarship are coupled
in terms of four overlapping collective action foci: form, motivation, enabling factors and
outputs.
The following section provides an overview of three prominent policy process frameworks
that focus on collection action to highlight how policy process frameworks can be used to
understand governance.

UNDERSTANDING GOVERNANCE THROUGH POLICY PROCESS

FRAMEWORKS

The three frameworks reviewed in this section are the advocacy coalition framework, ecology
of games framework, and institutional analysis and development framework.

Advocacy Coalition Framework

The advocacy coalition framework (ACF) addresses collective action in the policy process,
focusing specifically on groupings of policy stakeholders that engage, and compete, in policy
subsystems (geographically and territorially bound policy-making domains). Policy stakehold-
ers are government and non-governmental actors that have a vested interest in policy outcomes
within a particular policy subsystem. According to Jenkins-Smith et al. (2018: 139‒140),
the ACF borrows Heclo’s conception of issue networks in construing policy stakeholders as
officials from any level of government, representatives from the private sector, members of
non-profit organizations, members of the news media, academic scientists and researchers,
private consultants, lobbyists, think tanks, and even members of the courts. Within policy
subsystems, the ACF draws attention to advocacy coalitions and the role that they play in
shaping policy and, in particular, driving policy change. Coalitions are comprised of groupings
of policy stakeholders that engage in a non-trivial degree of coordination and strategizing to
influence policy within a particular subsystem. Under the ACF, it is assumed that stakehold-
ers within subsystems coalesce around shared policy beliefs, and one is likely to find more
than one coalition in a subsystem, given the typical variation in beliefs among stakeholders.
Coalitions compete to shape policies in ways that align with the dominant policy beliefs of
their respective stakeholders. One focal policy outcome under the ACF is policy change. Thus,
 Policy process frameworks  71

a central question motivating ACF research is: How do coalitions influence policy change?
Another focal outcome of interest under the ACF that is presumed to precede policy change is
policy learning, or “enduring alternations of thought or behavioral intentions that result from
experience and which are concerned with the attainment or revision of the precepts of the
belief system of individuals or of collectives” (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993: 42).
The description of the ACF in the preceding paragraph highlights two kinds of collective
action relevant under the framework. The first type of collective action is that exhibited among
policy stakeholders (government and non-government actors) that interact with others with
shared beliefs in the context of coalitions within policy subsystems. The second relevant type
of collective action is that exhibited among coalitions that vie to advance their preferred policy
options within policy subsystems. In either case, a coalition is one form of collective action
of analytical interest. However, depending on whether one is evaluating interaction within
or among coalitions, expectations and assumptions regarding collective action motivations,
enabling and hindering factors, and outputs may differ. Each of these are addressed in turn.
Policy stakeholders ally themselves in coalitions based on shared beliefs because coordinating
with other stakeholders who have shared policy beliefs is deemed to be an effective strategy
for pursuing policy goals. Coalitions are motivated to interact with other coalitions in policy
subsystems to ensure that their respective policy goals are advanced over those of others. An
inherent competition for space on the policy agenda thus motivates inter-coalition interaction.
Just as belief homophily can motivate interactions among policy stakeholders within coali-
tions (i.e., drive initial participation in coalitions), so too can it enable sustained participation.
Indeed, ACF scholars posit that shared beliefs are one reason that coalition formation and
participation are not subject to typical threats to collective action, such as free ridership and
disinclination to invest in cooperative behaviors where benefits are diffuse. Jenkins-Smith et
al. (2018: 150) write:

Actors from coalitions can overcome threats to collective action on the basis of three rationales …
First, similar beliefs among allies reduce the transaction costs for coordination. Second, actors are
involved in policy subsystems at different levels of intensity and, thus, some engage in weak forms of
coordination (sharing information) and others in strong forms of coordination (jointly developing and
executing shared plans). Third, actors often experience the devil shift [tendency to view opponents as
untrustworthy], and therefore, exaggerate the costs of inaction and the need for action.

A different set of factors are posited to influence intra-coalition interactions under the ACF.
Among these factors are broader contextual attributes that support collective action of this
kind, referred to as coalition opportunity structures. Coalition opportunity structures refer to
features of political systems that have implications for whether and how policy stakeholders
can mobilize to influence the policy process. The ACF also posits that inter-coalition inter-
action, and indeed negotiation, may be facilitated by the existence of “hurting stalemates,”
instances in which competing coalitions recognize that no policy gains can be made by any
single coalition unless coalitions engage with one another. Table 6.2 summarizes features of
the ACF around foci represented in Table 6.1.

Ecology of Games Framework

In 1958, Norton Long used the term “ecology of games” to describe activities within local
communities (Long, 1958). Long cast the array of activities observed in societies in terms
72  Handbook on theories of governance

Table 6.2 ACF framework treatment of governance and policy process research
overlapping foci

Form Advocacy coalitions

Motivation Belief homophily, coordinating with other stakeholders who have shared policy beliefs deemed
effective strategy for pursuing policy goals, advancement of policy goals
Enabling factors Policy beliefs, coalition opportunity structures, hurting stalemate
Outputs Policy learning, policy change

of games, in which individuals (i.e., “players”) participate. As reflected in games of others

sorts, individuals engaged in societal activities were presented as operating within particular
structural contexts, occupying different positions and roles, pursuing goals while employing
various tactics and strategies, and engaging with others in shared and distinctive activities to
further their goals. Over the last decade, Lubell (2013) has used Long’s conceptualization of
community affairs as an “ecology of games” to develop an analytical framework for under-
standing collective action within and across policy venues and processes. This analytical
framework bears the same name as the concept on which it is based: the ecology of games
framework. Whereas Long conceived of games as activities in which community members
engage, Lubell, under the ecology of games framework, conceives of games as rule-structured
venues or processes in which actors from within and outside of governance engage in sus-
tained collection action to address a specific array of public problems relevant within a par-
ticular geographically defined policy system. It is assumed under the framework that multiple
such games exist in any geographically defined policy system. A key premise of the ecology of
games framework is that to understand how public problems are addressed within a particular
policy system, one must not only consider the participants, focal issues and governance of
individual collective action venues and processes, but also interdependencies among these
various venues and processes.
The ecology of games framework emphasizes individual agency and motivations in col-
lective action; both toward generating understanding of why individuals engage in collective
action in the policy process, as well as how they engage. Fundamentally, individuals are
assumed to engage in collective action to deal with observed inefficiencies or inequities that
result from individualistic pursuit of preferences without attention to broader social ramifica-
tions of such. They also engage in collective action within games to pursue policy goals, gain
resources (e.g., information) or gain political influence. Motivating an interest in understand-
ing interdependencies among collective action venues and processes is the observation that
public dilemmas that give rise to collective action are often linked physically and/or socially.
According to Lubell (2013: 541):

The EG [ecology of games] framework adds the complication that [public issues] may be intercon-
nected through biophysical, economic, or social processes, so that policy decisions regarding one
issue may directly influence payoffs in other issues. Policy outcomes depend on how individuals
make decisions regarding the use of resources involved with each issue, for example the amount of
nonpoint source pollution that flows into a watershed, fish harvested from a fishery, effort invested in
maintaining a levee system, etc.

The ecology of games framework highlights multiple factors that enable collective action
within policy games. Among the factors that enable effective sustained collective action are
the same factors that prompt it in the first place: the potential of accruing personal and political
 Policy process frameworks  73

Table 6.3 Ecology of games framework treatment of governance and policy process
research overlapping foci

Form Games (rule-structured and issue-focused venues or processes in which multiple actors from within and
outside of government interact)
Motivation Overcome inefficiencies in public goods and service production and provision, pursue policy goals,
gain political resources and influence
Enabling factors Rules, personal motivations, policy learning
Outputs Policy decisions

gains through cooperation. The framework specifically acknowledges the negative implica-
tions that the personal motivations of actors may have on the efficacy, or even survival, of par-
ticular games. That is, the possibility that certain actors may seek to frustrate or destroy games
if this ultimately yields the most personal gain. The framework also identifies policy learning
as an important factor enabling cooperation. Policy learning encompasses learning about: new
technologies (presumably relevant for policy problems of interest), the underlying biophysical
or social processes driving policy problems, the preferences of other actors, and different
policy options that could be implemented to structure resource-related behavior (Lubell
2013: 544). Finally, rules that structure games can be designed to support cooperation within
games. The key outputs of collective action under the framework are policy decisions that
emerge within and across venues. As noted above, of central import are interdependencies and
spillover effects of outputs that emerge from different venues. Two types of spillovers are of
particular interest under the framework: payoff externalities and strategic externalities. Payoff
externalities occur when a decision made in one game effects a collective action problem that
is in the jurisdiction of another game (Lubell 2013: 546). Strategic externalities occur when
actors who participate in multiple games carry strategies deemed appropriate for one game to
others; however, because games often beg different strategies for interacting relating to their
rules and actors, this leads to suboptimal decision-making in some games. Table 6.3 summa-
rizes features of the ecology of games framework around foci represented in Table 6.1.

Institutional Analysis and Development Framework

The institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework has been applied extensively
in studies of governance, particularly relating to the production, provision and consumption
of public goods and services (Ostrom 1990). The IAD framework is principally focused on
institutions that govern collective action: how these institutions emerge, how they guide
collective action, how they evolve based on collective action, and systemic outcomes that
result from their application by actors engaged in cooperative activities (Ostrom 2005). Under
the IAD framework, institutions are conceived of as rules, norms and strategies that regulate
behavior or constitute features of governed systems (Frantz and Siddiki 2020). Institutions can
be formal or informal. Formal institutions are those which have been formally codified by an
appropriate policy-making entity, often in writing; for example, in laws, regulations, organiza-
tional bylaws, or other forms of policy. Informal institutions are those that are learned through
socialization or are tacitly understood and are reflected in widely accepted social practices
or culturally tied habits. Collective action under the IAD framework is conceived of as any
instance in which two or more actors are engaged in repeated interaction and decision-making.
The IAD framework labels these instances in which two or more actors interact with the term
74  Handbook on theories of governance

“action situation” (Ostrom 2005). Given the foci of the IAD framework, this interaction and
decision-making is typically linked to the management or use of commonly shared resources.
While the IAD framework is widely accepted as one of the leading frameworks for under-
standing governance within the policy process (Weible and Sabatier 2018), it is unlike the
other policy process frameworks reviewed in this chapter in one important respect. Whereas
both the ACF and ecology of games framework focus on particular kinds of collective action
within the policy process (i.e., within coalitions and policy games, respectively), the IAD
presents a more generalizable conceptualization of collective action that is meant to transcend
policy domains. Action situations, the concept under the IAD framework in relation to which
collective action in governance is assessed, are assumed features of systems governed by both
formal and informal institutions. Scholars employing the IAD framework have used it to study
action situations within policy systems (borrowing language from previous sections) that are
governed by system-specific laws and regulations (Carter et al. 2016), as well as to study
action situations governed by socially communicated and understood institutions (Basurto
2005). Furthermore, the framework offers a general characterization of types of actors that par-
ticipate in action situations, typifying them in terms of producers, providers and users of public
goods and services in relation to which collective action is occurring. These actor categories
are not mutually exclusive and, depending on whether one is dealing with formally or infor-
mally governed systems, one will observe variable arrays of government and non-government
actors in action situations.
Taking the various points offered above together, it can be posited that the IAD framework
offers a more generalizable understanding of collective action in governance than the other
policy process frameworks reviewed in this chapter. Indeed, rather than scoping the study
of collective action within the context of particular kinds of systems, the IAD framework
guides scholars to consider qualities of collective action dilemmas observed in these systems,
qualities of the goods and services being shared and jointly acted upon within these systems
that give rise to particular kinds of dilemmas and related forms of collective action. IAD schol-
arship highlights, both empirically and conceptually, the various allocative inefficiencies that
stem from the joint consumption and non-excludability of public goods and services.
Collective action in and of itself does not imply cooperation toward resolution of dilemmas,
but it can. One question of interest to many IAD scholars is: What enables more cooperative
forms of collective action toward more efficient and sustainable production, provision and use
of public goods and services? The IAD framework posits that characteristics of the biophys-
ical or material world, attributes of actors, and institutions all influence what happens within
action situations, and particular factors associated with each can enable cooperation in action
situations to prevent or solve collective action dilemmas. Examples of biophysical, actor and
institutional factors include predictability in biophysical conditions, the number of actors
engaged in production, provision or consumption of a public good or service, and ability for
actors within an institutionally governed system to participate in the design of institutions
(Ostrom 2009). Outputs of collective action under the IAD framework are of variable sorts
and are fundamentally tied to the focus of collective action. Examples of outputs are resource
use decisions, policy outputs, or even the generation of new institutions. Table 6.4 summarizes
features of the IAD framework around foci represented in Table 6.1.
 Policy process frameworks  75

Table 6.4 IAD framework treatment of governance and policy process research
overlapping foci

Form Interaction among two or more individuals in situations called “action situations”
Motivation Overcome inefficiencies in public goods and service production and provision
Enabling factors Biophysical and material conditions, attributes of individuals within institutionally governed
communities, institutions
Outputs Dependent upon focus of collective action

CONCLUSION

This chapter is premised on the position that collective action is central to governance. The
study of governance engages various questions that fundamentally orient on understanding
how actors from within and outside of government interact to shape policy formulation and
implementation, what motivates decentralization in policy activities, what facilitates it, and
what outputs of governance look like. Policy process scholars have engaged similar types of
questions in the development and application of frameworks to facilitate examinations of col-
lective action in shaping policy agendas, influencing policy design, instructing policy imple-
mentation, and devising policy responses to policy evaluations, outputs and policy learning.
The overlap in foci of questions explored by governance and policy process scholars relating
to the concept of collective action accommodates the ability to explore what the different,
albeit complementary, bodies of scholarship can contribute to one another. Based on the brief
overviews of policy process frameworks addressing collective action provided in this chapter,
it appears that policy process frameworks can aid governance scholarship to understand: the
biophysical and structural contexts in which collective action occurs; the strategic dimen-
sions of collective action in public sector decision-making; and how politics manifests and
influences collective action in the policy process. Policy process frameworks also highlight
the importance of institutions (formal and informal rules, norms and strategies) in enabling
effective collective action. Future research that explores the intersections among governance
and policy process scholarship can move beyond identifying complementary conceptualiza-
tions and questions to consider the overlaps in specific hypotheses posed and tested in the two
bodies of theory and research. Such efforts could yield further insights into the factors that
enable, and hinder, collective action in policy activities in order to meet the goal of improving
the theory and practice of governance.

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Carter, David P., Christopher M. Weible, Saba N. Siddiki, and Xavier Basurto. 2016. “Integrating Core
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of Public Administration 48 (2): 159‒174.
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Leach, William D. and Paul A. Sabatier. 2005. “Are Trust and Social Capital the Keys to Success:
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CO: Westview Press.
7. State theory
Bob Jessop

This chapter reviews some scholarly approaches to governance that draw on different accounts
of the state and state power with different implications for its potential roles in collective
problem-solving, social transformation and social domination. First, however, I note some
difficulties in defining the state and governance and, hence, in productively exploring their
relations. Second, I offer a definition of the state that can support analyses of its variable
forms and functions, its crisis-tendencies and forms of failure and, above all, how it is related
to governance. Third, I define governance in broad terms that enable conceptual clarification,
theoretical engagement, and empirical research regarding its links to state power. This also
avoids the ontologically misguided and methodologically sterile debate between state- and
society-centred analyses and the associated temptation to study the state in state-centric terms
and governance from a society-centric perspective. The fourth step is to consider whether
a governance-centric analysis might displace this problematic and, if so, what this might entail.
Step five is a state-theoretical (but not state-centric) account of third-order governing that links
it to Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of state power. The chapter ends with five remarks on the
scope for mutual dialogue and enrichment between a state-theoretical agenda on governance
and a governance-theoretical agenda on the state.

THE STATE

It is hard – some claim, impossible – to give a clear definition of the state when it has such
a long history, assumes so many forms, and changes continually. Some critics suggest that the
concept of state is too vapid or vacuous to be useful and opt instead to study political behaviour
and institutions and/or the microphysics of power to avoid macro-structural questions. Such
responses are one justification for the governance turn. Neither solution is wholly satisfactory.
A consistent interest in politics requires attention, explicitly or implicitly, to the polity, politics
and policy (Heidenheimer 1986; and for global politics, Lipschutz 2005). The polity (from
the Greek, politeia) is the institutional matrix that constitutes a distinctive terrain, realm,
domain, field or region of specifically political actions (Weber 1978; Palonen 2006). This is
equivalent to statehood in its inclusive sense as I will define it later based on insights from
Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault. Equally important for governance research, whereas
the polity provides a rather static, spatial referent, politics is inherently dynamic, open-ended
and heterogeneous. It refers to the forms, aims and objects of political practices. It includes
contention over the architecture of the state and political sphere as well as struggles occurring
outside the state that modify political calculation and/or views on the purposes of state power.
Politics in turn constrains the set of feasible policies, that is, policy-making as an art of the
possible. Thus, if politics concerns the overall strategic direction of the state and its division
of ‘policy labour’, policy denotes in turn specific fields of state intervention and abstention,
decisions and non-decisions, and so on. This said, some policies transform politics (witness

77
78  Handbook on theories of governance

the depoliticizing role of neoliberal policies based on ‘there is no alternative’ rhetoric, new
public management, downsizing and outsourcing, or the repoliticizing effects of the feminist
claim that the personal is political) and reshape the polity (transforming the constitutional and
institutional rules, norms and procedures regulating interaction between social and political
actors). This general framework provides several interesting ways to connect the state (or
government) and governance. Later arguments will add weight to this claim.
Let me now define the state. The classical approach of European constitutional, legal and
state theory identifies three core elements of the state: (1) a politically organized coercive,
administrative and symbolic apparatus endowed with general and specific powers; (2)
a clearly demarcated core territory under the more or less uncontested and continuous control
of the state apparatus; and (3) a stable population on which the state’s political authority and
decisions are binding. These elements have varying spatio-temporal extension and horizons
of action and mobilize a range of state capacities and other resources in pursuit of diverse
state objectives. Reference to state objectives suggests a fourth element: the idea of the state.
This denotes the political imaginary that defines the nature and purposes of the state, invok-
ing higher goal(s) than self-preservation and self-interest and thereby distinguishing it from
mafia-like bodies. It serves to legitimate the state and its power and also provides more general
criteria for legitimacy crises and state failure.
Each element has been studied in terms of its historical constitution, reproduction and
transformation through various practices of governance and/or governmentality. First, there
is significant work on how the demarcation lines are drawn between the state and its consti-
tutive outside(s) (for different views, see Keane 1988; Mitchell 1991; Nickel 2007; Foucault
2007; Luhmann 2012). The same holds for work on the governance and governmental prac-
tices involved in shaping and steering political representation, recalibrating the institutional
architecture of the state and the division of political and policy labour within (and beyond)
the state, modulating modes of intervention, and articulating the idea of the state as a basis
for state projects, political programmes and policies oriented to specific issues and problems
(Jessop 2015). If we reject the idea of the state as a fictive sovereign, or ‘behead the King’
as Foucault suggested, then the state and governance can be studied in complementary ways.
Especially relevant here are Foucauldian work on discourse and dispositive analysis (Bussolini
2010) and the production of the ‘state effect’ (Foucault 2007, 2008). Second, there is a large
literature on the practices that enable the territorialization of political power and create new
territorial matrices that frame the polity, politics and policies (Brenner et al. 2003; Delaney
2005; Elden 2013). This extends to the claims made to extra-territorial authority as well as
practices adopted to overcome frictions rooted in territorial borders. Examples of the latter
include multi-level and/or cross-border governance. Third, as to population, state-building
is historically oriented to populating state territory, its density or ‘populousness’, qualities of
the population, people’s rights and obligations, loyalty and disloyalty, and so on (Biller 2000;
Curtis 2002; Petit 2013). In short, as this paragraph indicates, an interest in the state and an
interest in governance are not mutually exclusive. The state is an object of governance and
governmentality as well as a potential real or fictive agent of these practices.
This said, let me face the challenge and offer an umbrella definition of governance. For
present purposes, it refers to the diverse mechanisms and strategies of coordination that are
adopted by autonomous actors, organizations and functional systems in the face of complex
reciprocal interdependence among their actions, activities and operations. I will consider four
main kinds of governance but, as other contributions to this Handbook show, many other types
 State theory  79

and various hybrids are possible. The four are anarchy, hierarchy, heterarchy and solidarity
(for details, see Jessop 1997, 2010, 2020). Some governance theorists have correlated these
to different sets of social relations, respectively: exchange and markets, states and inter-state
relations, networks and society, and real or imagined communities. But this exercise is more
typological or speculative than empirically grounded. For some theorists, only heterarchy
counts as governance (thereby counterposing it to other modes) and, indeed, it was this mode
that allegedly gained in practical significance and attracted theoretical attention from the
1970s. In this context, governance involves reflexive self-organization based on continuing
dialogue and resource-sharing among independent actors and oriented to developing mutually
beneficial joint projects and managing the contradictions and dilemmas inevitably involved
in such situations. Such practices are not new: they have long been used to supplement or
counteract market anarchy or bureaucratic hierarchy and to coordinate complex organizations
and systems. More generally, this fourfold typology suggests that governance occurs at the
intersection of different kinds of social relations and this, in turn, creates the possibility of
adopting different approaches to their interactions.
On this basis one might distinguish society-centred approaches to governance (embracing
economic, societal and community-based approaches) from state-centred approaches (which
consider governance as part of a state strategy and/or as a response to government failure).
I consider these and other positions below but will first clarify the meaning of state- and
society-centred approaches and put them in their place within a broader, strategic-relational
concern with governance.

STATE- VERSUS SOCIETY-CENTRED THEORIES

Mainstream work in the last 50 years or so has distinguished state- from society-centred the-
ories in at least two ways. First, an ontological or comparative-historical approach examines
the genesis and dynamics of actually existing government and governance arrangements.
For example, Philippe Schmitter, a leading theorist of corporatism, distinguished statist
and societal corporatism, which can be interpreted here as actually existing hybrid forms of
governance based on different mixes of exchange, hierarchy, network and solidarity. The
former is imposed by the state in centralized, bureaucratic systems and is usually linked to
neo-mercantilist strategies in a context of delayed capitalist development. It may be used to
suppress class, ethnic, linguistic and/or regional differences and limit popular access to the
polity and politics. Conversely, societal corporatism emerges from below in liberal democra-
cies through processes of economic and social bargaining between organized labour, business
associations and the political authorities. It is relatively pluralistic, ideologically varied,
linked to democratic welfare states and mobilized in support of economic crisis-management
(Schmitter 1974).
A second approach deals with research strategies and is more methodological in orientation.
For this approach, whereas state-centred analyses regard the state, government or governance
as independent variables in studying social phenomena, society-centred analyses treat them
as dependent variables to be explained by actors, factors and mechanisms beyond the state.
This contrast depends on an often superficially drawn distinction between state and society,
especially when the latter is treated as the undifferentiated social environment (or ‘unmarked
other’) of the state. A more differentiated model would give more choices of independent and
80  Handbook on theories of governance

dependent variables: technological, economic, financial, legal, political, pedagogic, scientific,

religious, aesthetic, and so on. An additional analytical problem in this regard is that govern-
ance often functions as a boundary-crossing mechanism between the state and other spheres
of social relations.
To illustrate what is at stake here methodologically, I refer to Theda Skocpol, a prominent
historical sociologist who advocated a state-centred approach to state formation, revolu-
tions, welfare state restructuring and gender politics. She contrasts her approach with three
‘society-centred’ perspectives prevalent in the 1950s‒1970s: (1) the neo-Marxist notion that
class relations determine state action; (2) the structural-functionalist formula that society’s
functional needs determine the forms and functions of political institutions; and (3) the plural-
ist position that state policies and power mainly reflect the changing balance of social forces
beyond the state (Skocpol 1985: 4-5). In contrast, state-centred theorists, like Skocpol, claim
that the state, the inter-state system and/or state managers have a more or less unique location,
strategic reach, autonomous logic (raison d’état, Staatsräson, Realpolitik, etc.), specific and
non-substitutable powers and resources, particular sets of material and ideational interests,
or even distinctive pathologies. Severally and together, these are important causal forces that
shape the state, its tasks and its societal impact and, as such, cannot be explained through
societal factors and forces (Skocpol 1985: 9‒10; for a wide-ranging survey of state-centred
theorizing in political science, see Amenta 2005).
One could criticize Skocpol’s account of these approaches, despite her recognition of their
internal heterogeneity, because it is premised on the state‒society binary. More significant for
this chapter, however, is that this binary reflects prevailing theoretical and methodological
concerns in mainstream work on the state, and has become less relevant since the 1980s now
that governance has moved up the research agenda.
This new priority prompts six remarks. First, as noted, the boundary between state and
society is socially constructed, internal to the political system and liable to change. Indeed,
showing this empirically is a key contribution of work on governance and governmentality.
Second, state-centred analyses also presuppose coherent state projects and relatively unified
states, but neither assumption is self-evidently true. Third, building on this point, to talk of
state managers, let alone the state, exercising power is at best to perpetuate a convenient
fiction that masks a far more complex set of social relations that extend far beyond the state
apparatus and its distinctive capacities. Research on government as well as governance should
trace the circulation of power through wider and more complex sets of social relations within
and beyond the state. Fourth, the state‒society distinction has less purchase in relation to gov-
ernance, especially where it concerns ‘wicked’ or complex problems that are not located on
just one side of the binary. Fifth, practically, many governance institutions and practices seek
to manage substantive interdependences among several apparently operationally autonomous
social spheres. Finally, sixth, methodologically, it makes little sense to distinguish so sharply
between independent and dependent variables in the governance context because there is no
strong bias towards ‘society-centred’ or ‘state-centred’ analyses that would justify ‘bending
the stick in the other direction’ (which was a major justification for the statist turn in the
1980s).
Given these remarks, it is hardly surprising that excellent and insightful analyses of gov-
ernance have been produced using both state- and society-centred approaches; often because
they conclude that, regardless of starting point, each has elements of truth. However, insofar as
they are inverted or mirror-images of each other and rest on the same misleading state‒society
 State theory  81

binary, to suggest that combining them is more productive actually serves to reproduce the
problem. Two wrongs do not make a right. It would be more fruitful to identify a substantive
research problem without regard to this distinction, and then deploy whatever concepts and
methods seem most suited to exploring, describing, interpreting and explaining the problem.
This seems to be the case in most research on governance.
This said, there is one context in which the state‒society couplet is implicitly deployed
in research on governance: the claimed shift from government to governance. This treats
the modern state as a sovereign power with a legitimate monopoly of coercion that relies on
imperative coordination to gain compliance with its authoritatively determined goals. The sov-
ereign state is seen here as the quintessential expression of hierarchy (imperative coordination)
because it is, by definition, the political unit that governs but is not itself governed. Growing
societal complexity, especially as this gains global dimensions, undermines the effectiveness
of top-down command by the sovereign national territorial state and requires other forms of
state intervention or, alternatively, the retreat of the state (Jessop 2002; Willke 1997). Both
solutions are reflected in the correspondingly ambiguous claim that there has been a shift from
government to governance. I return to this issue below.

TOWARDS GOVERNANCE-CENTRIC APPROACHES?

This section addresses two linked questions. First, are there parallels in governance research
to the society- versus state-centred distinction that was invoked in the case for ‘bringing
the state back in’ to guide research on the state? And, second, does it make sense to talk of
a governance-centric approach, which would, paradoxically, be de-centred, as an alternative to
this misleading dualistic problematic?
Regarding question one, it is certainly possible to speculate on possible parallels. Two
obvious society-centred examples are: (1) studies that emphasize the growing complexity of
societies, which reduces the efficacy of ex post coordination through the anarchy of market
forces as well as that of ex ante imperative coordination based on hierarchical command; and
(2) studies that explain the expansion of governance in terms of demands emanating from
diverse social forces outside the state for a share in decision-making. A state-centred parallel
could be efforts to explain the growth of governance as the state’s (or state managers’) own
response to overload, state failure or state crisis in order to retain a central role for the state in
governing its territory and what occurs within it (see below). While there are good examples
of work along all three lines, it would be wrong to isolate society or the state as a better the-
oretical or methodological entry-point into the study of governance. For, besides the reasons
given above, governance arrangements are often justified by theoretical paradigms or social
imaginaries that question the (continued) validity of this distinction.
Regarding the second question, five main accounts of the shift from government to govern-
ance have developed since the mid-1970s, the period when the failure of the post-war state
became increasingly evident in advanced capitalist societies. In some cases, these are alterna-
tive descriptions of the same broad set of changes; in other cases, they involve a more radical
shift in theoretical perspective.
First, there is a tendential de-hierarchization of the state. In this process, states or state man-
agers seek to retain or restore their control over society by turning to other forms of governing
their territory and population (defined here to include collective agents as well as individuals
82  Handbook on theories of governance

and households), especially through public‒private partnerships of various kinds that cooper-
ate in the definition and delivery of state projects and policies. An analogous process might
be called the heterarchization of the international political arena as political anarchy rooted
in the absence of a world state is replaced by the pooling or sharing of sovereignty through
intergovernmental cooperation and/or a self-organizing world society.
Second, as an alternative description that highlights other aspects of this process, it is
possible to identify a recalibration of state power as government makes more extensive use
of networks and other modes of governance as a way of maintaining its political efficacy in
the face of growing societal complexity. Here the focus is on the complex, de-centred, and
pluralistic governance arrangements at stake rather than the apparently simple fact that the
state relies less on imperative coordination based on coercion, law, planning and hierarchical
bureaucratic arrangements.
A third way to describe such changes, which is more common, displaces the focus from
the state in its narrow juridico-political sense to the more general organization of the polity.
In other words, the state is de-centred analytically, highlighting instead the de-statization of
politics. This is reflected in the claim that there has been a shift from a hierarchical state to
a networked polity (cf. Ansell 2000). This shift involves hybrid governance arrangements
marked by horizontal and vertical patterns of coordination, multiple public and private sector
agents, and the use of resources supplied by different stakeholders according to their respec-
tive capacities, competences, and ideal and material interests.
Fourth, going somewhat further, there has been a de-politization of power. This term
depends on the distinction between polity, politics and policy. Thus, the process refers not just
to the retreat of the state from the political field as it invites or allows other political forces to
play a bigger role, but also to efforts to define some problems as better suited to nominally
apolitical forms of decision-making. Different forms of marketization are one example of
this, but for governance theorists the more interesting form is the growth of network govern-
ance beyond the polity (as opposed to the expansion of the networked polity discussed in the
preceding paragraph). These arrangements combine resources that are distinctive to the state
(for example, its monopolies of coercion, taxation and the right to make collectively binding
decisions) with resources that are distinctive to other societal subsystems, institutional orders,
organizations or collective actors (such as social movements). This response is more likely
where governance practices are concerned in the first instance with managing functional
interdependencies, whatever their scope (and perhaps with variable geometries), rather than
with activities occurring in a defined and delimited territory. It is even more likely where
governance problems cross-cut territorial boundaries.
Fifth, Foucauldians suggest that there has been a shift to advanced (neo)liberal forms of
governmentality, which use various governmental techniques both to mobilize and discipline
the energies of civil society and, in so doing, govern social relations at a distance rather than
through direct command and control by a sovereign authority. This approach is particularly
associated with interest in the development of new kinds of apparatus (dispositif) organized
around various discursively constituted problems (or urgences) (Bussolini 2010, summarizing
the Foucauldian problématique in this regard). For Anglo-Foucauldian scholars, this approach
de-emphasizes the role of the state (e.g., Miller and Rose 2008), but for others, especially
those influenced by Foucault’s later lectures on governmentality, territorialization and ‘state
effects’, the discourse-dispositif approach provides an alternative account of the modalities of
state power and the role of the state in the strategic codification of power relations.
 State theory  83

A STRATEGIC-RELATIONAL APPROACH

An alternative to society-centric, state-centric and governance-centric interpretations of the

alleged shift from government to governance is offered by the strategic-relational approach
(hereafter SRA). This originated in an attempt to transcend another binary in social analysis:
the false binary posited in explanations of the form and functions of the state between the
primacies of the structural logic of capital and class struggle. It was then developed to address
structure‒agency dialectics more generally. As such it is well suited for exploring the opera-
tional autonomy of government and governance as well as the limits on strategic choice and
conduct imposed by their broader social context. SRA theorists reject one-sided society- or
state-centred approaches to government and governance on the grounds that the society‒state
distinction is not a real social a priori construct but a fetishized social construct (see above).
The SRA examines state and society in terms of the structural coupling and co-evolution
of government and/or governance arrangements with a wider set of institutions and social
practices.
The SRA’s basic claim is that the general configuration of the four elements of the state
and the more specific articulation of its modes of representation, institutional architecture and
modes of intervention affect the tangled interactions among the polity, politics and policy.
The resulting political ensemble privileges some strategies over others, the access of some
forces over others, some interests over others, some spatio-temporal horizons over others,
some coalition possibilities over others. A given type of state, a given state form, a given
form of regime, will be more accessible to some forces than others within the wider political
system or, indeed, social formation, according to the strategies they adopt to gain state power.
And it will be better suited to the pursuit of some types of strategy than others because of this
system’s distinctive resources and modes of intervention. In this way, the SRA directs atten-
tion to potential disjunctions, frictions and tensions in the state; to the difficulties that state
managers in different branches, departments, tiers and sites of government have in using their
respective powers (in the plural) to project power; and to the extent to which forces beyond
the state, whether within or beyond the political system, can act as force multipliers or sources
of recalcitrance or resistance regarding broad state projects and particular policies. This raises
questions about the sources of politics and policy, modes of calculation and technologies of
power/knowledge involved in government, the role of governance arrangements in projecting
state power, and so on.
Applying the SRA to trends in government and governance suggests several premises and/
or conclusions relevant to this field of research (explored further in this section). For, even if
we accept the classical three-element account of the state, there is no reason to assume that
state power is confined to imperative coordination, namely, centralized planning or top-down
intervention. The state (or polity) provides an institutional matrix for political contestation
(politics) over policies; and state power can be exercised not only through coercion, command,
planning and bureaucracy, but also through networks, partnerships, appeals to solidarity, and
other forms of governance.
This argument nonetheless retains a key role for the state because governance occurs in the
shadow of hierarchy. This is an allusion to metagovernance, that is, the governance of govern-
ance (Kooiman 2003; Meuleman 2008; Chapter 49 in this volume). This occurs on many sites
and scales and with different orders of ‘meta-ness’. Higher-order metagovernance is a key
84  Handbook on theories of governance

activity of the state and, indeed, can be seen as a countertrend to the shift from government to
governance (Jessop 1997, 2002, 2004, 2020).
The SRA shares the growing interest in metagovernance but also makes three more or less
distinctive claims. First, it identifies the modes of governance failure corresponding to the four
above-noted modes of governance (considered as first-order governance) and distinguishes
four corresponding responses to such failure. These ‘second-order’ responses aim to improve,
respectively, the efficiency of markets, the effectiveness of command, the responsiveness of
networks, and the level of trust and solidarity in communities. This occurs in many arenas and
policy fields and need not involve the state (which is primarily concerned in these terms with
the effectiveness of command). Second, third-order governing alters the weight of individual
modes of governance so that the overall ensemble of governance arrangements at a higher
or more comprehensive level of social organization is better adapted to coordinate complex
social relations. And, third, this level of governing is more likely to involve the state as the
addressee in the last instance of appeals to solve societal problems by taking responsibility for
the overall balance among modes of governance.
Following Andrew Dunsire (1996), we can refer to third-order governing, when it is orches-
trated by the state, as collibration. This has sound etymological roots as a term to describe the
continual rebalancing of several modes of governance; whereas equilibration would serve well
enough for just two modes of governance. It also serves to distinguish what is at stake here
from other kinds of metagovernance. A partial list of relevant collibrating activities undertaken
by the state would include:

● the practices whereby states at different levels provide the ground rules for governance
and the regulatory order in and through which governance partners can pursue their aims;
● ensure the compatibility or coherence of different governance mechanisms and regimes;
● act as the primary organizer of the dialogue among policy communities;
● deploy a relative monopoly of organizational intelligence and information in order to shape
cognitive expectations;
● serve as a ‘court of appeal’ for disputes arising within and over governance;
● seek to re-balance power differentials by strengthening weaker forces or systems in the
interests of social cohesion and/or system integration;
● take material and/or symbolic flanking and supporting measures to stabilize forms of coor-
dination that are deemed valuable but prone to collapse;
● contribute to the meshing of short-, medium- and long-term time horizons and temporal
rhythms across different sites, scales and actors, in part to prevent opportunistic exit and
entry into governance arrangements;
● try to modify the self-understanding of identities, strategic capacities and interests of indi-
vidual and collective actors in different strategic contexts and hence alter their implications
for preferred strategies and tactics;
● organize redundancies and duplication to sustain resilience through requisite variety in
response to unexpected problems;
● assume political responsibility in the event of governance failure in domains beyond the
state (based in part on Jessop 2002: 219; see also Bell and Hindmoor 2009; Meuleman
2008; Jessop 2011, 2020).
 State theory  85

Collibration is not a purely technical or technocratic process but, as with other aspects of state
power, involves efforts to secure and/or rework a wider unstable equilibrium of compromise
organized around specific objects, techniques and subjects of government and/or governance.
One conclusion from these observations is that there is a paradoxical relation between
government and governance. As Foucault, Jessop, Kjaer and Larsson, among others, have
argued in very different theoretical and empirical contexts, the shift from government to
governance is accompanied by a shift from governance to metagovernance. While Foucault
(1981) rejected the centrality of the state in political and social analysis, he was concerned
with its contingent role in the strategic codification of power relations. Or, as Mark Kelly put
it, ‘[h]aving removed the state’s status as the central concern of political thought in his earlier
work, Foucault now moves towards understanding the state in the specific role that it actually
does have in networks of power’ (Kelly 2009: 61‒62). Thus, Foucault (2007: 109) turned
increasingly to the analysis of the statification of government and the governmentalization of
the state. Bob Jessop (2004) argues that the shift to governance requires metagovernance to
secure some coherence among governance regimes and provide an appropriate balance among
different stakeholders and interests for the sake of social cohesion. Likewise, Poul Kjaer
(2010) notes for the European Union that, rather than involving contradictory developments,
governing and governance are mutually constitutive, in that more governing implies more
governance and vice versa. In turn, Bengt Larsson (2013) suggests that, whereas the state
can enhance its power by using networks to govern, networks depend on sovereign power to
maintain the conditions for effective network governance.
Interestingly, this approach fits well with Antonio Gramsci’s approach to the state, which he
defined as ‘the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class
not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those
over whom it rules’ (Gramsci 1971: 244). Overlooking for now the class-reductionist nature
of this definition, which leads Gramsci to dismiss other aspects of state power as relatively
trivial in comparison (ibid.), it does have the salutary effect of shifting attention from the state
as a juridico-political apparatus (conceived perhaps in line with the three-element approach)
towards the modalities of the exercise of state power. Gramsci also famously described ‘the
state in its inclusive sense’ as ‘political society + civil society’, and added that state power (in
stable liberal bourgeois regimes) involves ‘hegemony protected by the armour of coercion’
(Gramsci 1971: 263). From an SRA perspective, this invites further redefinition.
Thus, paraphrasing Gramsci, one could describe state power in strategic-relational terms as
the conduct of ‘government + governance in the shadow of hierarchy’. This acknowledges that
state power: (1) extends beyond coercion, imperative coordination and positive law to include
the mobilization and allocation of money and credit and the strategic use of intelligence, sta-
tistics and other kinds of knowledge (Willke 1997); (2) depends on the capacity to mobilize
active consent or passive compliance from forces situated and/or operating beyond the state in
its narrow juridico-political sense; and (3) includes collibration, that is, the strategic rebalanc-
ing of modes of government and governance to improve the effectiveness of indirect as well as
direct state intervention, including the exercise of power at a distance from the state.
Collibration is where the ‘shadow of hierarchy’ is most evident. This phrase was introduced
(initially by Fritz Scharpf 1993) to denote the indirect influence that states may exercise over
other actors or forces in political and civil society through the real or imagined threat of exec-
utive or legislative action that draws on the state’s unique capacities and powers, including
coercion (see also Héritier and Rhodes 2011). While the Gramscian redefinition above high-
86  Handbook on theories of governance

lights the state’s role in collibration, other scholars have suggested that there are functional
equivalents to the state’s ‘shadow’ role in this regard. These include: (1) the more or less
spontaneous, bottom-up development by networks of rules, values, norms and principles that
they then acknowledge and follow (Kooiman and Jentoft 2009); (2) increased deliberation and
participation by civil society groups through stakeholder democracy, putting external pressure
on the state managers and/or other elites involved in governance (Bevir 2010); and (3) actions
taken by international governmental and non-governmental agencies to compensate the inabil-
ity of failed or weak states to engage in metagovernance (Börzel and Risse 2010) – although
this example seems to involve a rescaling of the shadow of hierarchy insofar as these actions
are typically backed by powerful states, as Börzel and Risse themselves note.
Jonathan Davies (2011) provides a neo-Gramscian approach to governance that comple-
ments my proposed redefinition of the integral state but is more tightly focused on the current
neoliberal globalizing capitalism. Specifically, he interprets the movement from hierarchy
(via, he suggests, markets) to governance as an aspect of the continuing struggle for hegem-
ony under neoliberalism (Davies 2011: 128; cf. Provan and Kenis 2008). In this context he
emphasizes, against claims that network governance is symmetrical (at least in the sense that
it is not hierarchical), that it is strongly asymmetrical and that these asymmetries are rooted in,
and also mediate, the wider, contradictory totality of capitalist social formations with their vast
concentrations of power and wealth, intensifying competition and chronic instabilities. On this
basis he outlines a novel typology of forms of network governance within neoliberalism that
ranges from inclusive governance through sub-hegemonic to counter-hegemonic forms and
examines the conditions for emancipation through networks. He asks why powerful networks
of actors with similar material and cultural endowments have more influence than other types
of networks, and why nodal actors in different networks are more closely related than other
actors (Davies 2011: 131). He also remarks that network coordination tends to degenerate
into hierarchical coordination because networks fail to cultivate governing subjects (he calls
them ‘connectionist citizen-activists’) able to solve policy and management problems in
de-politicized, trust-based networks. He concludes that network governance failure moves
state power along the Gramscian consensus‒coercion continuum from hegemonic leadership
towards domination (Davies 2011: 132). In the terms presented above, this could also be
described as a re-assertion of the shadow of hierarchy; but one tied to a particular class project.
This approach need not be confined to neoliberalism but can be extended to the role of gov-
ernance whenever its objects involve ‘wicked problems’ rooted in part in social relations of
exploitation and/or domination.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

I conclude with five brief remarks. First, the claim that there has been a shift from govern-
ment to governance rests on a narrow view of the state as a juridico-political apparatus that
governs through imperative coordination. This ignores other modalities of state power and
implies that, if the state employs other techniques of rule, it must be ‘in retreat’. Second, a less
sovereignty-focused but still state-centric account of governance would examine how the state
modifies the relative weight of different modes of governance to promote state projects as part
of its continuing efforts to preserve state power, if necessary by sharing it with social agents
and forces from the economy and civil society and/or by pooling sovereignty with other states
 State theory  87

in various kinds of intergovernmental regimes. Third, conversely, a more governance-centric

approach would consider how the state is enrolled in governance practices in various social
fields, not as the prime mover or as primus inter pares, but as one actor-cum-stakeholder
among others with distinctive resources to contribute to governance arrangements and projects
that are initiated beyond the state. Fourth, as the second and third approaches make sense of
certain aspects of governance (cf. Schmitter 1974 on state corporatism and societal corporat-
ism), they could be combined into a more general analysis of how governance arrangements
are articulated into the strategies and tactics of different social forces concerned to maintain,
reform, or overturn patterns of social domination. Fifth, this would lead to a neo-Gramscian
analysis that examines ‘government + governance in the shadow of hierarchy’ whilst provid-
ing adequate space for more focused analyses of particular sites of governance without regard
to their broader ramifications for social domination.

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Skocpol, T. (1985), ‘Bringing the state back in: Strategies of analysis in current research’, in P.B.
Evans, D. Rueschemeyer, and T. Skocpol (eds), Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 3‒38.
Weber, M. (1978), Economy and Society, 3 vols. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Willke, H. (1997), Supervision des Staates. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.
8. Democratic theory
Andreas Klinke

Governance has become a familiar notion that has spread remarkably widely in social sciences,
especially in political science.1 One such account, one of many in social science governance
research that constitutes a discourse of the transformation of statehood and state–society
relationships, is that hierarchical political and social organization in advanced democracies
is being supplanted by new forms of governance involving public and private actors. Many
conventional institutional hierarchies are becoming non-hierarchical, network-based and
self-organizing consociational and associational structures empowered and controlled by the
interaction and collaboration of the state and society. Traditional foundations of political insti-
tutions are being complemented or replaced by new institutional modes; as a result democratic
control, accountability and legitimacy are becoming blurred.
Undeniably, our democratic culture and structures are having an effect on the development,
design and character of governance, but contemporaneously governance is also challenging
traditional democratic practices. Scholars worldwide are grappling with the question of
whether and how new governance can instantiate democratic features and mechanisms. They
are also attempting to elucidate the theoretical sources and ways in which democratic features
shape what is the specific character of distinct forms of new governance, although the debate
on this issue takes different forms depending on national discourses, how the different schools
of thought promote ideas and how scholars interpret the democratic nature of governance.
American and European scholars have been claiming that governance can embody democratic
principles, but have also criticized governance approaches for the risk they pose to democracy
(cf. Bevir 2010; Norris 2012). However, the main implications for democracy related to
how governance steers society and economy are still relatively unclear, and thus governance
remains the source of considerable debate. When inquiring into the relation between modern
democratic thinking and governance approaches, we need to pay attention to distinctive
attributes and aspects of the existence of such forces and dynamics as the de-centralization
of political power and the de-hierarchization of decision-making authority, the growth of
horizontal forms of cooperation and coordination, and the increase of direct involvement of
experts, stakeholders, public interest groups and individuals in the processes that shape col-
lective objectives.
Arguably, democracy has contributed to the brave new world of governance, but the ques-
tions are what has been influenced by democratic thinking and how it has been influenced.
Two epistemological strands of democratic theory – normative and empirical-analytical – have
inspired governance concepts and practices. I utilize both strands to explore some of the ideas
and features of democracy that inform an analysis of governance. Which interpretations of
democratic principles and elements have illuminated which modes of governance, and how?
What are the democratic credentials of governance? Which democratic features are embodied
by governance? However, this chapter is not another attempt to conceptualize democratic gov-
ernance. Rather, it seeks to delineate the distinct contribution that democratic theories make to

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new governance approaches. To this end, I discuss a variety of modern theories of democracy
that have stimulated and infused governance forms, directly and indirectly.
A recent example may illustrate this approach. Although the governing of technical infra-
structures in Europe is dominated by a hierarchical style of regulation (Grande 2011), the
complex processes that have come along with the transformation of energy in Germany have
resulted in new governance approaches being adopted at all territorial levels from local to
national. Although planning and regulation are still largely bureaucratic in style, the with-
drawal of the state from the delivery of some services has led to the emergence of governance
approaches that include more market mechanisms and economic competition, new policy
networks, quasi-autonomous collaborations and organizations and corporatist arrangements
where the state and non-state actors attempt to coordinate and regulate the transition towards
more renewable energy. Indeed, these changes are neither general and comprehensive nor
consistent across the sectors that are involved. Nevertheless, on the whole, the governance of
this energy transformation reflects a more de-centralized and non-hierarchical collaboration
in which state agencies control key functions through more inclusive arrangements that are
self-organized and self-determined to some extent and that represent the plurality of stake-
holders – bureaucrats, private enterprises, non-profit agencies, community organizations and
even citizens themselves.
In this chapter I pay particular attention to what the different strands of democratic theory
imply for the study of governance, although a full overview of the democratic elements and
trends captured by governance scholarship lies beyond its scope. In the remainder of this
chapter I focus on two analytical goals: first, the chapter identifies and distinguishes how nor-
mative and empirical-analytical theories of democracy illuminate contemporary governance;
and second, the chapter delves into the question of how cardinal democratic ideas and values –
inclusion, self-determination and the formation of public opinion and political will – elucidate
both broad and narrow meanings of governance concepts and practices from the perspectives
of various democratic theories.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL STRANDS OF

DEMOCRATIC THINKING
Various epistemological and ontological strands of democratic theory are foundational to
current approaches to governance. Certainly, distinct features of democracy and constitutional
legality have permeated the evolution and guise of new, hybrid governance arrangements
substantiating markets, networks and/or hierarchies. The debate among those who want to
enhance the democratic quality of governance approaches is, however, increasingly influenced
by debates about the desirability and feasibility of fundamental democratic elements and
mechanisms of governance.
It has become common among political philosophers and theorists of democracy to differ-
entiate between normative and empirical-analytical theories.2 While the normative strand of
democratic theories, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, offers a compre-
hensive account of how and why democracy is morally desirable and which principles should
shape democratic institutions, the empirical-analytical strand of democratic theory focuses on
those societies that are known as democratic in order to understand how and why real-world
democratic institutions and processes operate. Following Jürgen Habermas and other leading
 Democratic theory  91

scholars of democratic theory, I delineate three types of normative theories of democracy:

liberal, republican and deliberative (Habermas 1994, 2009; Ottmann 2006). Among the main
debates sparked by the literature on empirical-analytical democratic theories are those about
pluralism, interest intermediation, concordance, negotiation and direct democracy. These are
more closely connected to what is considered important for governance.3 To a certain extent,
both normative and empirical-analytical democratic theories have informed the concepts,
designs and practices of new governance, especially with regard to corporative, collaborative
and network-based governance.
The most influential propositions of democratic theories, when it comes to explaining what
illuminates new governance arrangements, grapple with fundamental ideas and values of dem-
ocratic theories posited by seminal scholars of democracy. Many interpretations in modern
democratic theory bear a resemblance to cardinal democratic principles such as freedom,
equality, publicity, authentic interest mediation, participation, control, effectiveness and so
on, although they have been defined and emphasized in varied ways by different scholars (cf.
Benz 1998; Schmidt 2010). Notwithstanding, these principles of democracy originated out
of broader views of democracy that highlight inclusion, self-determination and the forming
of public opinion and will as key features in the pursuit of social justice, fairness, equity and
accountability within a democratic society (cf. Christiano 1996; Dahl 1998; Young 2000;
Habermas 2009). To a certain extent, these generic democratic ideas and values could be
regarded as reliably providing the essential “life blood” of democratic systems. They can be
seen as normatively and analytically distinctive, yet they are intertwined in practice. Their
occurrences overlap, although the different ways in which democratic principles are put into
operation solidify different governance approaches. I will very briefly, and at a general level,
expound on the relation and distinction between the epistemological and ontological strands
of democratic thinking before unveiling the main democratic elements and features attributed
to governance.
The liberal paradigm advanced by John Locke and John Stuart Mill aspires to a liberal
political, economic and social order grounded on market-based principles, the contestation
of individual private interests and the search for agreement between contrary interests, all the
while preserving civil liberties and rights. These goals are instantiated through the hierarchical
form of a representative democracy and by constitutional legality. According to this view,
governance is seen as a new avenue of protecting private interests as well as transforming them
into political power.
In contrast, the republican model of democracy, which draws its inspiration from Aristotle,
Immanuel Kant and Renaissance humanism, emphasizes a democratic system that divides
society into corporate groups and their interests, where self-determination takes place in the
form of a moral-ethical self-understanding. The democratic formation of political will is more
horizontally organized and based on forms of communication that work to achieve consensus
and social harmony by emphasizing collective interests.
The formation of political opinion and will in the public sphere and in parliament is not held
captive to market mechanisms. Rather, it builds upon public communication whose purpose is
to achieve agreement. For republicanism, democratic sovereignty is accomplished by adhering
to established processes where reasonable persons make decisions through communication
and consultation.
The deliberative model of democracy borrows elements of both republicanism and liberal-
ism to formulate the ideal procedure for deliberation and decision-making. This democratic
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process focuses on a relationship between negotiation, self-understanding and discourse on

justice in order to achieve fair outcomes (Habermas 2009: 79). Many versions of deliberative
democracy – ideal, epistemic and pragmatic – accentuate the role of procedural legitimacy
in the democratic process of forming political will.4 Deliberative democracy draws on fair
chances and equal capacities for members of the public to shape policy. The narrative of delib-
erative democracy partially overlaps with the theory of participatory democracy,5 and both see
self-determination and self-rule as fundamental to the creation of opportunities for members
of the public to directly influence political decision-making through deliberative reasoning.
However, while participatory democracy strives for the maximization of public participation,
deliberative democracy retains a focus on the (ideal and epistemic) quality of processes and
procedures that shape public deliberation.
The democratic theory of pluralism reflects the experiences of real-world democracies that
prospered after World War II. Its democratic system draws on cooperation, conflict resolution
and distribution of power among organized interest groups as well as the prudential steering of
power resources in the state, society and economy. Exponents emphasize the complexity and
variety of intermediary institutions, as well as their importance as communication conduits
and facilitators between the state and society. Of more specific interest is the pluralist notion
of a democratic polyarchy as conceptualized by Robert A. Dahl (1971, 2006a). He advocates
a representative system that is institutionally and procedurally defined by the cornerstones of
participation and contestation. Participation entails the involvement of the people in debates
about public matters and in electing representatives. Contestation means a thorough and com-
petitive articulation and channelization of societal interests into a free formation of political
opinion and will.

INCLUSION

The term inclusion can be associated, at a very general level, with concepts of unity, cohesion,
affiliation, mutual embeddedness and so on. The contemporary mainstream notions of inclu-
sion, as observed in governance in Western democracies, represent a blend of different models
of democracy theory. It may be worthwhile to note that theories of democracy have broadly
defined inclusion as the ability to involve a variety of actors (individual and collective),
processes and interactions, integrate a plurality of modes of coordination and communication
between public and private actors, enable and facilitate political equality, clarify issues of
representation, pay attention to civic organizing and engagement, attend to social and politi-
cal differences, accommodate diversity, and bridge gaps between levels of organization (cf.
Christiano 1996; Young 2000; Dahl 2006b; Held 2006).6 Proponents of democratic inclusion
also stress that each person or group ought to be able to take part in the established functions
of society and democracy. Given this broad understanding, how do different democratic
models elucidate governance?
In its present meaning, inclusion is about adopting governance approaches that secure
more equality in terms of agency, participation and membership and that provide a tolerably
fair distribution of opportunities. To get a better picture of the issue, one needs to look at the
theoretical interpretations of various governance phenomena that reference inclusion. Liberal
democratic theorists who advocate an economy-based society with the state as guardian
argue that modes of economic governance are ways to actively engage all members of the
 Democratic theory  93

society as producers and/or consumers and make them integral to the success of the market
economy. This inclusion practice integrates and welcomes all efforts that enhance the provi-
sion of goods and services and communication between producers and consumers. According
to Mark Bevir (2009: 125), both market-based approaches of governance pursue a kind of
inclusion. On the one hand, liberal market governance strives for perfect competition and
a Pareto-efficient allocation of resources with the intent of making sure no individual is better
off than another. On the other hand, liberal governance models inclusion on the assumption
that the market economy attempts to maximize forms of social coordination and organization.
If democracy was built on a foundation of relative societal egalitarianism, liberal market- and
economy-based governance could create a more inclusive system with equal treatment of the
members of society and fair distribution of resources.
In contrast, deliberative and pluralist democracy theories offer another account of how
inclusion is operationalized by new governance approaches. Contemporary pluralism sees new
forms of governance as political entities that welcome plural interests and actors and promote
inclusion of members of society who are identifiably different in terms of social, cultural and
political identity. From the perspective of democracy as a polyarchy, governance can be seen
as a mechanism that ensures that political power is dispersed to multiple people, agencies,
autonomous groups and even society at large. This pluralist perspective endorses network and
collaborative governance that engages citizens as political equals and representatives of the
people, and responds to the preferences of citizens.
Another interpretation of inclusion arises from deliberative theories of democracy that
assert a relationship claim and a procedural demand. The deliberative school of democratic
thought favors affectedness as a rule of inclusion and the active involvement of those members
of the public affected by the decisions made. On the one hand, those who are affected by
a problem are entitled to be represented or directly engaged in governance.7 On the other
hand, those who are addressees of decisions and regulation are also eligible to be represented
or directly involved.8 A similar line of argument, albeit coming from a more idealistic per-
spective, presented by some scholars of deliberative democracy, calls for the inclusion and
deliberation of all (Manin 1987; Benhabib 1996). Proponents of governance approaches
that privilege deliberative mechanisms and procedures would not in any case agree to such
unrealistic inclusion requirements, because they become implausible and impracticable as
soon as one entertains the idea of putting them into practice (cf. Offe and Preuss 1991).
However, taking up the argument in terms of affectedness, some modes of governance that
are called collaborative governance9 or sometimes deliberative or participatory governance10
might interpret inclusion as providing “equal opportunity of access to political influence”
(Knight and Johnson 1997: 280, italics in original). Practices of collaborative governance that
encompass procedures such as forums of public deliberation, community problem-solving,
notice-and-comment rule-making, citizen juries and panels, voluntary public advisory groups,
roundtable discussions and multi-stakeholder dispute resolutions tend to advance fair chances
of access and the right to political influence for citizens and stakeholders. These collaborative
governance approaches “emerged in response to perceived failings in representative democ-
racy with respect to conflict over public policy” (Blomgren Bingham 2011: 389). Deficiencies
of inclusion and self-determination arise when direct participation is lacking.
The waste disposal policy and strategy of four area municipalities in the Northern Black
Forest in Germany serve as an example of a collaborative governance approach that engaged
citizens and stakeholders through deliberation and participation. In the first phase, a round-
94  Handbook on theories of governance

table of affected stakeholders determined policy goals and developed several options to meet
these goals. In the second phase, randomly selected citizens of all four municipalities who
were concerned about and/or affected by the waste disposal policy were asked to comment
on these options and delineate implications for their own municipality. Finally, the randomly
selected citizens were asked to locate waste facilities that met the goals of waste disposal that
had been developed and explicit fairness criteria. As demonstrated in this example, feasible
deliberation conveyed by collaborative governance underpins relevant dimensions of demo-
cratic inclusion, but “need not depend on making every decision the product of deliberation by
every citizen” (Bohman 1998: 418).

SELF-DETERMINATION AND SELF-RULE

Modern democracies vest their people with the fundamental right of democratic self-determina-
tion and self-rule. According to Robert Dahl (1989: 311), “the democratic process promotes
the capacity for exercising self-determination.” This reflects the democratic principle of
“equality expressed by the presumption that adult persons are entitled to personal autonomy
in determining what is best for themselves” (Dahl 1989: 311). By virtue of this principle,
citizens freely determine their political status, freely pursue their economic, social and cultural
interests, and freely determine the kind of social organization and representation that conveys
these interests (cf. Cassese 1995). Democratic self-determination in governance institutions
means that citizens are “assure[d] of the opportunity to play the role of choosers of the basic
aims” (Christiano 1996: 10) of democracy. According to this view, the self-governing ability
of governance would be strengthened if participants had equal rights and fair opportunities,
without any restrictions or interference by another party, to influence the decision-making
that affects their lives. Governance approaches offer new opportunities for members of
the public to freely and collectively pursue their individual interests and preferences. This
self-determination and self-rule arises from the increase in horizontal, communicative forms
of coordination involving multiple actors, especially by means of governance approaches that
have a network, partnership and collaborative character. Thus, new governance approaches
can foster self-determination by empowering groups and individuals by giving them a voice
in those patterns of rule “through which society and the economy are steered towards collec-
tively negotiated objectives” (Ansell and Torfing, Introduction in this Handbook, italics in
original) and over those collective decisions that affect their lives and the common good. This
encompasses prosperity, full employment, education, health, peace, social, military and civil
security, sustainable use of natural resources, sustainable growth, environmental protection
and so on. In more general terms, some scholars conceive of policy-making and governing
in modern democracies as having become increasingly dependent on a complex system of
networks where self-determination succeeds through modes of horizontal coordination of
interests and actions of public and private actors who are mutually dependent on each other’s
resources and jointly realized objectives (Börzel 1998; Enroth 2011).
Liberal democratic theorists would ascribe self-determination to interaction in market-based
governance approaches, which attempt to improve market mechanisms, efficient competition
and consumer choice and which allow “consumers to express their preferences continuously
across a range of intensities, and for individual items” (Bevir 2009: 27). Citizens act as
 Democratic theory  95

consumers and express their interests and preferences by buying commodities and selecting
services delivered by one agency or organization rather than another.
According to republican and pluralist democracy theories, the emergence of governance
approaches is seen as a new and innovative pillar supporting the distribution of centralized
political authority and the devolvement of centralized decision-making power to pluricentric
steering by self-governing stakeholder and public interest groups. This can be seen in corporat-
ist, associative and network-based governance approaches that represent the plurality of actors
in society and a diversity of societal interests and preferences. Such arrangements enable
participating individuals and groups to exercise the necessary functions of decision-making
without intervention from the central state and freely come to collectively binding political
decisions through either competition or cooperation. Advocates of pluralism argue in favor of
a self-conscious and autonomous contestation about interests and preferences in the form of
arguing, disputing and negotiating, as a means of self-determination, to come to agreements
that are collectively acceptable.
The Ethics Council on Energy Transition in Germany serves as an example of an interme-
diary and moral authority in a larger context of governance arrangements that acts as commu-
nicator and facilitator between the state and society in a pluralistic and corporate manner. The
Council was established by the German federal government in 2012 in the aftermath of the
Fukushima events and comprised representatives from the scientific community, government,
the economic sector and civil society. The Council was associative and self-dependent in
nature. Council members appraised the risks and benefits of phasing out nuclear energy and
achieved a communicative agreement based on one commonly reasoned policy outcome that
recommended a transitioning to more renewable forms of energy. This recommendation has
been unanimously approved by the German parliament.
Governance approaches that retain a focus on corporatism formed in policy networks have
promoted self-determination in a more specific manner as a strategy of interest intermediation
and as a catalyst for social justice and harmony (cf. Crouch 2006; Bevir 2009: 60–64). The
state negotiates with business and labor organizations – which have a legitimate right to form
their own allegiances and represent their group’s interests and preferences – about the pattern
of rule that regulates and controls a specific economic sector, though if such large groups are
at odds with each other about their interests then the state often acts as moderator and mediator
between the competing groups. To some extent, the breadth of corporatist self-determination
has become a means of representing interests, mediating conflicts, distributing wealth, ensur-
ing opportunities and privileges within society and achieving agreement, with the end result of
social peace. In contrast, proponents of deliberative democracy argue that self-determination
needs to be continuously achieved by public deliberation. Adherents emphasize the democratic
potential of civil society and the public sphere and a transformation of power from the state to
citizens. To the extent this is realized, deliberative and participatory governance can claim that
“participants should have equal opportunity to influence the process, have equal resources,
and be protected by basic rights” (Mansbridge et al. 2010: 65) in order to thoroughly incorpo-
rate operational self-determination into its generic understanding of deliberative democracy.
Critics of deliberative democracy argue that the configuration of governance arrangements
with such radical deliberative and participatory processes of self-determination seeks to resist
powers arising from neoliberal, representative and corporatist structures and mechanisms.
One example of putatively enabling more self-determination for affected citizens is a plan
by the German government to establish a new governance arrangement that adapts features
96  Handbook on theories of governance

and mechanisms of deliberative and participatory democracy in the development, planning and
execution of infrastructure policies. In response to broad public mobilization and opposition to
large-scale infrastructure projects (such as the project “Stuttgart 21”), the government suggests
a multistage process of engaging affected citizens comprising dialogue-based procedures,
public forums and public advisory boards in the development, planning and implementation of
infrastructure policies.11 This new strategy is intended to complement the conventional plan-
ning approval procedure and thus indicates a shift towards a more participatory governance
approach.

PROCESSES FORMING PUBLIC OPINION AND POLITICAL WILL

Democratic processes in which public opinion and political will are formed arise from com-
munication and discourse in spaces of the public sphere that are channelized and aggregated.
The public sphere is seen as the mediation authority between society and the political system
of a nation-state. Communication and discourse in the public sphere relate to common con-
textual frames of reference in terms of observation, perception, action and interdependence.
If actors, individual and collective, debate social, economic, political or cultural issues of
common concern, then a public sphere becomes socially constructed. Speakers who comment
or give an opinion on the collective issues or react to other speakers help to shape discursive
arenas with a communicative production of the formation of public opinion and will. The
communicative and discursive formation of public opinion and will can go beyond national
borders; for example, Thomas Risse identified transboundary communicative spaces within
the EU and a transnationalization of public spheres emerging especially in continental Western
and Southern Europe. These transnational public spheres emerge “whenever European issues
are debated as questions of common concern” (Risse 2010: 6), which might be relevant for
transnational and EU governance.
Arguably, new governance approaches provide all kinds of opportunities for communica-
tive and discursive interaction between various actors that are intended to aggregate and form
public opinion and give common reference frames and meaning structures that are deemed to
be socially and publicly acceptable. Various network-based governance approaches connect
communication and discourse in the formation of public opinion and will with decision-making.
Different types of communicative and interactive patterns, ranging from negotiation to seeking
consensus, characterize the formation of public opinion and will in, for example, policy net-
works and corporate and collaborative governance approaches. A more specific issue is cor-
poratist governance that refers to the representation of and negotiation between major interest
groups because it “relies heavily on collective bargaining agreements to economic issues and
especially incomes policy” (Bevir 2009: 62). In most cases, public opinion and will that mirror
the interests represented in corporatist governance approaches are formed by communication
and discourse within the corporate organization and thus beyond the sphere of governance.
Hence, corporatist governance epitomizes a representation-based arrangement where agents
are acting on behalf of the status of economic preferences that are being framed within their
corporate organizations and so represented as self-interest in governance processes. This raises
the critical problem of the principal–agent relationship. Since agents are supposed to pursue
the economic self-interests of their corporate organizations, it often leads more to a conflict
of interest and bargaining for compromise in governance processes and less to a process of
 Democratic theory  97

arguing for a collective preference formation in the pursuit of public interests and the common
good. Among the contested aspects of new governance approaches linked to the formation
of public opinion and will are the debate over the modality and purpose of stakeholder and
citizen participation and deliberation as a mechanism to channel public opinion and will. Most
notably, the liberal school of democratic thought, pluralist thinking and theories of delibera-
tive and participatory democracy have stimulated the discussion about whether and how new
governance forms have promoted participation and deliberation, though in different ways.
Scholars of the liberal perspective argue that “the spread of markets increases choice and so
the opportunities for citizens to participate in public decision-making” (Bevir 2009: 147).
Drawing out the implications of pluralist democratic theory, one could argue that democratic
polyarchy, admittedly modeled on the assumption of a representative democracy system,
would endorse those governance approaches that enable the participation of citizens and
stakeholders and provide opportunities for them to express their aspirations in order to debate
the validity of them and thus influence policy issues. Participatory and deliberative democracy
theories have instigated governance arrangements that increase opportunities for members of
the public to engage in policy-making processes.12 Citizens are entitled to bring to the table
their experiences, have their voices heard and directly influence decision-making. While the
liberal view revolves around the argument that the people are invigorated as consumers, the
pluralist, deliberative and participatory perspectives emphasize the empowerment of citizens
to participate as democratic subjects.
Deliberative democracy and discourse ethics have infused some new governance approaches
with the notion that the formation of public opinion and political will succeeds through reflex-
ive processes of rational discourse and ideal proceduralism. However, ideal democratic dis-
course and deliberation may not occur in a pure form in new governance approaches because
real-world processes of forming public opinion and will are not as coherent and logical as
theories aver. More likely, an expansion of more pragmatic and feasible deliberative ideals,
which rely on basic rules of communication and procedural legitimacy, would enable the
finding of communicative agreements beyond that of consensus. The deliberative formation
of public opinion and will in governance approaches would focus on reason-giving, mutual
justification and acceptance of considerations that are compelling and convincing even for
those who disagree (cf. Mansbridge et al. 2012). To a certain extent, such opinion and will
formation might unveil self-serving and conflicting interests, competing norms and values,
expert dissent and expert–lay divisions. Governance approaches espoused by discursive,
deliberative and participatory democracy theories often make use of mini-publics in the
form of consensus-conferences, citizen juries or panels and deliberative opinion polls in an
effort to involve ordinary citizens (cf. Goodin and Dryzek 2006; Goodin 2008; Fishkin 2009;
MacKenzie and Warren 2012), employ procedures such as roundtable discussions, media-
tion and negotiated rule-making to actively engage collective actor groups or create hybrids
of both. According to these democratic theories, a narrative form of communication and
deliberation “opens the door to storytelling and the non-cognitive evocation of meanings and
symbols that can appeal to actual or imagined shared experiences” (Mansbridge et al. 2012:
67), because the formation of public opinion and will implies moral judgments justified by
cultural values and being reflective of ontological and ethical convictions. Thus, a deliberative
governance approach can establish credibility and mutual respect and create sympathy among
the participants, which allows attention to commonalities and differences.
98  Handbook on theories of governance

In a meta-analysis of 137 empirical cases of collaborative governance, Chris Ansell and

Alison Gash (2008) investigated critical rules for procedural legitimacy. They discovered that
the expansion of deliberative ideals into more pragmatic patterns of rule has been adapted
in a wide range of cases. The outcome of this is that finding agreement is considered highly
important, but that finding a consensus, while desirable, is not likely to become a reality.
Hence, real-world deliberation aggregating public opinion and will formation in new gov-
ernance approaches may end in an incomplete agreement on one outcome based on different
reasons, an integrated solution on one outcome drawing on different valuations for joint gain,
a distributive agreement that all consider fair, a negotiated compromise or even an agreement
to dissent (Parkinson 2006; Mansbridge et al. 2010; Parkinson and Mansbridge 2012).
The transnational and multilevel governance approach of the Great Lakes regime of Canada
and the U.S. illustrates how the forming of public opinion and political will has been produced
by a variety of deliberative and participatory procedures such as public hearings, public
meetings and workshops, roundtable discussions and focus groups with stakeholder groups,
and public advisory groups at the regional and local level (Klinke 2006, 2009). The deliber-
ative and participatory processes are facilitated by expert committees established under the
umbrella of the International Joint Commission (IJC). Inter alia, a series of these mini-publics,
where participants heard from experts and stakeholders and engaged in extensive discussions,
resulted in the revision of the 1972 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA) and
recommendations that led to the enactment of the new 2012 GLWQA.
Indeed, the turn in democratic theory and practice to deliberative democracy in the past two
decades has resulted in changes in new governance approaches in many modern democracies
insofar as the state has increasingly employed different forms of discursive, deliberative and
participatory mechanisms and procedures in public policy-making.

CONCLUSION

In this chapter I have wrestled with basic normative and empirical-analytical democratic
theories and emphasized the strengths and assets that new governance approaches have
acquired from different democratic branches and distinctively adapted and incorporated into
their practices. Indubitably, such new governance approaches are ubiquitous, having spread
to numerous domains of the state, society and economy. The proliferation of deliberation
and participation in governance emerged, in particular, in response to perceived failures of
representative democracy with regard to disagreement and conflicts over public policies.
However, these new governance approaches producing democratic elements and mechanisms
are situated at arm’s length from core democratic processes and institutions.
It might be too early to determine whether democratically inspired governance arrange-
ments are able, and to what extent, to address the problems of modern democracy, and whether
they are able to address the consequences of this brave new world of governance for contem-
porary democracies. To a great extent, governance configurations are largely heterogeneous
and amorphous. I want to use an analogy from pointillism to illustrate this. It seems that we
are not yet able to blend the color spots of the multifaceted new governance phenomena into
the full range of tones and texture that would be necessary to discern the patterns of a complete
image of how governance helps promote democracy.
 Democratic theory  99

A widespread uneasiness, arising from the question of whether and how governance
approaches will enhance or deteriorate our traditional representative democracy, marks the
discussion about the contribution of new governance approaches to contemporary democra-
cies. Some scholars argue that governance approaches promoting democratic elements might
undermine the institutional stability of electoral, representative democracy, blurring who is
entitled to act and govern on behalf of society (Haus 2010). The fragmentation of democratic
governing into different kinds of multi-layered governance has exacerbated the tension about
who has the democratic right to represent the people, elected and appointed political elites or
the people themselves as they seek more opportunities to be involved in governance struc-
tures and decision-making through direct participation (cf. Sørensen 2002: 698). Given the
increasingly complex constellations of actors and the deficiencies of representative democ-
racy, the challenge is to take advantage of the politicization and democratization potential of
governance approaches (Haus 2010). This issue alludes to the scholarly debate that has been
addressed in the literature under key words such as “deepening democracy” (Fung and Wright
2003), “post-democracy” (Crouch 2004; Eberl and Salomon 2013) and “third democratic
transformation” (Dahl 1989).
A part of the debate on post-democracy returns to the older discussion of the crisis of
democracy by harshly criticizing numerous phenomena and developments in contemporary
democracies in conjunction with the neoliberal economic paradigm. Colin Crouch (2004)
delineates a critical and negative perspective of post-democracy. He identifies the problems
of current democratic systems by exploring symptoms such as an increasing passiveness of
citizens in elections, the erosion of classical political parties, the ability of big enterprises to
develop and exert political power, the commercialization of public services and so on. Other
scholars of democratic theory share his diagnosis of post-democracy in terms of a disenchant-
ment with politics but tend to offer more constructive criticism by arguing that a democrati-
zation of governance institutions and processes through adapting and operationalizing key
democratic principles has the potential to revitalize modern democracy, especially with regard
to more direct citizen participation (cf. Jörke 2013; Landwehr 2014). The prefix post suggests
that a new “post”-era is dawning in which new recognizable patterns are formed that leave
behind, at least partially, existing and long-established democratic institutions (cf. von Beyme
2013; Blühdorn 2013). The question needs to be raised, whether we really observe a turna-
round in democracy and thus the dawn of a new era of neo-democracy, or whether the changes
we see are a trajectory of slow progress, gradual change and adaptation in modern democracy.
I rather think that democratically motivated governance does not and cannot exist as a post-
modern and disembodied brave new world detached from historical and traditional democratic
structures and processes. The possibilities of new governance institutions are largely dependent
on existing democratic structures and processes. On the other hand, I believe that democrati-
cally instigated new governance approaches also cannot be seen as just peripheral to the core
of our existing representative democratic institutions. Rather, our whole democratic system
needs to adapt to the new role of governance, and the brave new world of governance needs
to adjust in such a way that it complements core democratic institutions rather than replaces
them. In my opinion, the phenomenological evidence of governance, which creates a positive
democratic framework and meaning structure, points to a further development of democracy
rather than a new era of post-democracy. In line with Robert Dahl’s (1989) argument, I would
say that we can currently discern a development toward a third transformation of democracy.
The brave new world of governance, dynamic and forceful, induces new challenges for tradi-
100  Handbook on theories of governance

tional democratic processes and structures because changes in society and politics are, in part,
shifting from established modes of democratic culture to new norms and values. Arguably, the
inclusion and participation of societal actors in governance arrangements that are enlightened
by pluralist and deliberative democracy theory provide new avenues to producing the legit-
imacy of and accountability in democratic systems, but not in the form of traditional modes
of electoral accountability and constitutional representation. The ways in which democratic
accountability and legitimacy in governance arrangements are operationalized become crucial
in the advancement of a third democratic transformation, although the different approaches
to attaining legitimacy and ensuring accountability in governance arrangements are contested
in the scholarly literature. Given the broad range of norms, values, attitudes and behaviors
unveiled by individuals and groups that result in demands for more inclusion and participa-
tion, network-based organizations and new de-centralized modes of politics which rely on
the conceptual ideas of governance, the question arises: Is the vision of a brave new world of
governance so daring in its promise that we are able to break through and transcend the limits
of traditional democratic processes and surmount some of the difficulties of representative
democracy? If so, how and to what extent? Inspired by James Bohman’s (1998) “The Coming
of Age of Deliberative Democracy” and the apparent growth of deliberative, collaborative and
network-based governance approaches in domestic and international politics, I would posit the
thesis that a third democratic transformation will come along with a deliberative democratiza-
tion of socio-political governance processes increasingly involving members of national and
world society.13
The emergence of new governance arrangements might effectuate a change and/or adapta-
tion in the form and character of our democratic systems in the future. Traditional democratic
structures and processes would not be displaced but supplemented by governance institutions
that resurrect fundamental democratic ideas and values, especially with regard to more inclu-
sion, more opportunities to exercise self-determination and more channelized and aggregated
processes of public opinion and will formation through public deliberation and citizen par-
ticipation. Hence I want to conclude by highlighting two questions for future research. First,
to what democratically inspired level do we need to raise governance approaches in order to
democratically complement our often failing representative democracies? A supplement to
this question is how we can tame the changing nature of the modern state that poses a danger
to democracy. To this end, we need to learn more from internationally comparative empirical
evidence from a broad range of sectors and countries. Second, we ought to elicit discussion
on the fundamental issue of what the epistemologically, ontologically and ethically desirable
model for future democracies should look like, and ask whether transformation bringing about
this new model is within reach, as Robert Dahl (1989) asked more than three decades ago. We
need more theoretical and empirical exploration at the meta-level that explores both demo-
cratic and undemocratic implications, trajectories, convergences and divergences emerging in
the light of governance.

NOTES
1. For the definition of governance used in this chapter, see Ansell and Torfing (Introduction in this
Handbook).
2. Cf., for example, Cunningham (2002), Schmidt (2010) and the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, http://​plato​.stanford​.edu/​entries/​democracy/​ (accessed 4 July 2014).
 Democratic theory  101

3. For overviews on different theories and models of democracy, see, for example, Cunningham
(2002), Dahl (2006a), Held (2006) and Schmidt (2010).
4. Although scholars use their own terminology in models of deliberative democracy, there is
a remarkable convergence in terms of proceduralism. See inter alia Bohman (1996); Habermas
(1996); Bohman and Rehg (1997); Elster (1998); Dryzek (2000); Parkinson (2006); Goodin (2008);
Parkinson and Mansbridge (2012).
5. Widely used German textbooks on democratic theories subsume deliberative and participatory
democracy theories under the term participation-based democratic theory (Schmidt 2010: 236–253).
6. Cf. also the definition of social inclusion and its relevance for governance (Koikkalainen 2011).
7. For this notion of affectedness, cf. Habermas (1996) and Goodin (2007, 2008).
8. For this interpretation, cf. Cohen (1997) and Thompson (2010).
9. For a more detailed discussion on collaborative governance, see Blomgren Bingham (2011), Ansell
(2012) and Gash (Chapter 43 in this Handbook).
10. See Fischer (2012) for the theory and practice behind the concept of participatory governance.
11. See the handbook for good civic participation by the German Ministry of Transport and Mobility,
http://​www​.bmvi​.de/​SharedDocs/​DE/​Anlage/​V​erkehrUndM​obilitaet/​handbuch​-buergerbeteiligung​
.pdf? blob=publicationFile (accessed 15 August 2014).
12. For more elaboration on public participation and deliberation in the context of new governance
approaches, see McLaverty (2011), Quick and Bryson (Chapter 14 in this Handbook), and Öberg
(Chapter 16 in this Handbook).
13. For such a deliberative democratization in risk governance at the national level, see, for example,
Klinke and Renn (2014) and Renn and Klinke (Chapter 25 in this Handbook) and, at the interna-
tional or global level, see, for example, Klinke (2014).

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9. Public law and regulatory theory
Shauhin Talesh

Increased involvement, delegation and deference to non-state actors has probably been the
most important change to the regulatory state in the past three decades (Jordana and Levi-Faur
2004; Shamir 2010). This chapter explains the rise of governance in the context of public law
as a shift from rulemaking by governmental institutions to rulemaking coming from private
organizations and other civil actors. I highlight this evolution along three dimensions: prelude
to governance, from government to governance, and beyond governance. While law remains
necessarily a public function, the private role in the construction and meaning of regulation,
compliance and law itself is more salient and celebrated than ever before.

PRELUDE TO GOVERNANCE: THEORY AND DEBATE OVER

PUBLIC LEGAL INSTITUTIONS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Contemporary studies of governance in public law emerge from an important history. For
much of the twentieth century, public law scholars across a variety of disciplines studied law
as a “top-down” process, a system of rules coming from the command of government or, more
precisely, public legal institutions. Traditional instruments of lawmaking by public legal insti-
tutions such as legislatures, courts and administrative agencies include formal rules and stipula-
tions, adversarial methods, enforceable means of dispute resolution and command-and-control
regulatory mechanisms. Within this top-down framework, research focusing on public law
often examines the relationship between businesses and legal institutions.
Considerable theoretical and empirical focus is devoted to explaining the way interest
groups that directly participate in governmental processes such as legislatures and administra-
tive agencies lobby for laws and regulatory rules that serve their interests (Mills 1956; Dahl
1961, 1967; Polsby 1963; Shapiro 1988). Interest group studies interested in understanding
structural business power examine how business occupies a privileged position in society
(Lindblom 1977). Other scholars interested in instrumental aspects of business power examine
how interest groups form advocacy coalitions that lobby, negotiate for favorable laws, build (or
set) an agenda in their strategic favor or exert direct influence on government decision-makers
through campaign contributions (Kingdon 1984; Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Leech et al.
2002; Kamieniecki 2006).
Taking a more transactional view of the legislative process, public choice theorists apply
economic models to legislative and administrative decision-making. Under this approach, pol-
iticians and the electorate are considered rational utility-maximizers operating in a competitive
electoral and legislative market (Becker 1983). As interest groups participate in a political
market, they demand legislation, which provides benefits to legislators, who in turn supply
them with governmental largesse. While instrumental, structural and public choice approaches
are all different, they each analyze interest groups as rational, strategic actors seeking direct
influence over governmental institutions.

104
 Public law and regulatory theory  105

Faced with command-and-control regulatory mechanisms that include formal rules and
requirements, businesses try a variety of approaches to influence not just legislation but also
regulatory policy (Bernstein, M. 1955; Stigler 1971; Posner 1974; Quirk 1981; Vogel, D.
1989, 1995). Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, United States regulatory agencies became the
subject of debates between economic or capture-cartel theories and their critics (Herring 1936;
Huntington 1952; Bernstein, M. 1955; Kolko 1965). Capture theory suggests that regulation is
“acquired by the industry” and designed and operated primarily for its benefit (Stigler 1971:
3; Posner 1974; Becker 1983). In order to survive, regulators employ a regulatory strategy that
meets industry demands for favorable policy. Although capture takes a variety of forms, typi-
cally capture studies focus on business capture of existing governmental regulatory agencies.
In sum, prior to governance, public law scholars focused on the relationship between
business and government. Interest groups, public choice and capture studies of public legal
institutions explain public law as a top-down process, where legislators and regulators try
to coerce or in some cases encourage organizations to comply, while organizations engage
in rational, strategic choices as to whether to comply and how to influence legal mandates
(Jordana and Levi-Faur 2004; Braithwaite 2008). At all times, public law was produced by
government. In this view law is exogenous to organizations even as it is open to organizational
influence. Thus, studies of government made great strides in explaining how businesses
directly influence government outputs, whether they are laws made by legislatures or legal
rules implemented and enforced by administrative agencies.

FROM GOVERNMENT TO GOVERNANCE: COLLABORATIVE

APPROACHES TOWARD BUSINESSES AND LEGAL
INSTITUTIONS

More recently, business’s relationship with regulatory institutions has undergone a dramatic
change owing to the transformation of the regulatory state over the past 30 years. In particular,
the location of governmental decisions shifted away from traditional public governmental
institutions. The top-down command-and-control regulation of the 1960s and 1970s spawned
heightened capture and interest group pluralist behavior. In response to the backlash and inef-
ficiencies of big government and political change at the executive and congressional levels of
government, the 1980s and 1990s saw a shift toward privatization, liberalization (free market
capitalism) and devolution to the private sector (Majone 1997; Bignami 2004a, 2004b; Streeck
and Thelen 2004; Levi-Faur 2005; Braithwaite 2008).
Despite popular belief that regulation was abandoned when neoliberalism was adopted
around the Western world in the 1980s, empirical evidence suggests that privatization, dereg-
ulation and the nurturing of markets under neoliberal governments expanded and extended
regulation across the world (Vogel, S. 1996; Jordana and Levi-Faur 2004; Levi-Faur 2005;
Braithwaite 2008; Parker and Nielsen 2011). For example, Jordana and Levi-Faur (2003,
2004) analyzed the decision to privatize telecommunications and electricity and the decision
to create regulatory agencies in 171 countries, and showed not only “intimate associations”
between privatization and the creation of independent regulatory agencies but also a signifi-
cant increase in both since the 1980s. Moreover, Jordana and Levi-Faur (2003, 2004) studied
regulation in 16 sectors across 49 different countries from 1920 to 2002 and found that the
number of regulatory agencies rose sharply in the 1990s.
106  Handbook on theories of governance

Thus, the purported deregulation and drive toward free markets has led to a slow re-regulation
of free markets in the form of soft regulation aimed at perfecting market performance (Majone
1997; Levi-Faur 2005). New regulatory models anchored by contractual arrangements,
standards, rankings and monitoring frames are increasingly being used by states (Djelic and
Sahlin-Andersson 2006). As Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson note, “[i]nterestingly, the prolifer-
ation and expansion of those new regulatory patterns is both shaped by market logics and has
a tendency to introduce and diffuse market principles” (Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006:
7). For example, the “new public management” emphasizes efficient results and treating core
government functions with a more market-based, competition-driven philosophy (Peters 1996;
Terry 1998). Performance standards emerge whereby regulators specify the outcomes or the
desired level of performance while leaving organizations the flexibility and discretion to come
up with ways to achieve such ends (Gunningham and Sinclair 2009).
While regulatory capitalism and privatization are the reality (Levi-Faur 2005), soft regula-
tion, rather than the direct provision of public and private services, is the expanding part of
government (Vogel, S. 1996; Levi-Faur 2005; Schneiberg and Bartley 2008). “Hard laws”
and directives coming with the coercive backing of the state decline as states move toward
a broader conception that establishes legally non-binding “soft” rules such as standards and
guidelines (Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006).1 This transformation from hard to soft rules
led constitutional law, administrative law, jurisprudence and political science scholars across
the world to focus less on government and more on “governance.”
Governance signifies “the range of activities, functions, and exercise of control” by both
public and private actors in the promotion of social, political and economic ends (Lobel 2004:
344). Governance scholars view traditional regulation and command-and-control techniques
as too narrow and incomplete a policy framework to accomplish social goals. Governance
models are positioned in between top-down command-and-control regulatory models and
industry self-regulation. Governance models conceptualize a world where boundaries are
largely in flux and are being shaped by public and private actors, including states, international
organizations, professional associations, expert groups, civil society groups and business
organizations (Freeman 1997, 2000; Majone 1997; Sturm 2001; Braithwaite 2002; Lobel
2004; Ansell and Gash 2008). Broadly, governance approaches typically support the replace-
ment of the New Deal’s hierarchy and control with a more participatory and collaborative
model in which government, industry and society share responsibility for achieving policy
goals.
Regulation is still an important component of governance, but governance goes beyond
mere regulation by focusing on the dense organizing, discursive and monitoring activities
that embed, frame, stabilize and reproduce rules and regulations. Under a new era of public–
private partnerships between corporate and state actors, non-governmental actors are taking
a more active role in governing themselves and trying to maintain the public good (Majone
1997; Ansell and Gash 2008). In areas relating to the financial industry, health care, polic-
ing, criminal justice administration (prisons), education, family, transportation, information
technology, privacy, and environmental and consumer protection, public agencies are directly
engaging non-state actors in collective decision-making. These co-regulatory schemes are
consensus-oriented and deliberative and aim to allow private industry more direct involvement
and control in implementing public policies (Braithwaite 1982; Kagan et al. 2003; Lobel 2004;
Ansell and Gash 2008; Freeman and Minow 2009). Whereas governments use traditional
instruments such as formal rules and stipulations, adversarial methods, enforceable means of
 Public law and regulatory theory  107

dispute resolution and command-and-control regulatory mechanisms, governance models use

a series of new tools such as non-adversarial dialogue and organizational learning. Presumably,
these tools lead to the development of principles, guidelines, best-performance standards and
various soft law instruments. It is important to note that governance models vary and should
be thought of as on a continuum, often operating somewhere in between command-and-control
and pure self-regulation (Jordana and Levi-Faur 2004).
Since the 1980s, governance through regulation has been the central reform across the
United States (Talesh 2012), the European Union (Majone 1994, 1997), Latin America
(Manzetti 2000; Jordana and Levi-Faur 2003), East Asia (Jayasuriya 2001) and developing
countries (Cook et al. 2004). Countries increasingly contract out government services, stream-
line government functions, cut the delivery of many services and benefits traditionally run
by public institutions, and devolve power to lower levels of government, which in turn look
to private actors to help execute their new responsibilities (Salaman 1995). The neoliberal
agenda of freer markets and the accompanying “more rules” or “good governance” is inter-
nationalized, and was extended globally to Asia and the developing world via bilateral trade
negotiations, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations Conference on Trade
and Development in the 1980s and 1990s (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000). In Europe, the term
“soft law” is often used to describe the variety of regulatory innovations that move regulation
toward greater reliance on private ordering. This form replaces legally binding rules and
adjudicatory mechanisms with broad guidelines and private sector rulemaking, norm-setting
and harmonization projects in governmental, intergovernmental and transnational arenas
(Abbott and Snidal 2000). Specifically, soft law regulatory forms such as non-state-based
regulation, including voluntary industry and internal corporate systems of self-regulation and
non-governmental organization (NGO) certification and management systems, are growing at
the national and international levels (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000; Bernstein, S. and Cashore
2007).
In an attempt to keep pace with the international growth of governance models, socio-legal
scholars and political scientists focus on establishing the theoretical foundations of govern-
ance. Scholars articulate various theories of governance, including but not limited to: “reflex-
ive law” (Febbrajo and Teubner 1992), “soft law” (Jacobsson 2004; Trubek and Trubek 2004),
“collaborative governance” (Freeman 1997), “democratic experimentalism” (Unger 1998;
Dorf and Sabel 1998, 2000; Dorf 2003), “responsive regulation” (Ayres and Braithwaite 1992;
Braithwaite 2002), “outsourcing regulation” (O’Rourke 2003), “reconstitutive law” (Stewart
1986), “post-regulatory law” (Teubner 1986), “revitalizing regulation” (Farber 1993), “reg-
ulatory pluralism” (Gunningham and Sinclair 1999), “decentering regulation” (Black 2001),
“meta-regulation” (Morgan 1999), “contractarian law” (Dana 2000), “communicative gov-
ernance” (Kooiman 1993), “negotiated governance” (Krawiec 2003), “destabilization rights”
(Sabel and Simon 2004), “cooperative implementation” (Michael 1996), “interactive com-
pliance” (Sigler and Murphy 1988, 1991), “public laboratories” (Liebman and Sabel 2003),
“deepened democracy and empowered participatory governance” (Fung and Wright 2003),
“nonrival partnership” (Minow 2002), “daring legal system” (Minow 2002), “renew deal
governance model” (Lobel 2004), “delegated governance” (Bamberger 2006) and “regulatory
capitalism” (Levi-Faur 2005).
Empirical studies of governance concepts try to highlight the new instruments and tech-
niques of regulation. Empirical studies account for the new types of legality, including negoti-
ated rulemaking, management-based regulation and other regulatory systems that try to follow
108  Handbook on theories of governance

the logic of governance (Coglianese 1997; Coglianese and Nash 2001; Coglianese and Lazer
2003; Howard-Grenville 2005). Ayres and Braithwaite’s (1992) idea of responsive regulation
involves greater participation of non-state entities in the regulatory process and greater empha-
sis on dialogue and persuasion rather than sanctions and adversarial methods as a means to
ensure compliance. Consistent with governance theories, responsive regulation presupposes
and to some extent encourages private and self-regulation, and anticipates state regulatory
structures that rely on multiple participants and actors. Ayres and Braithwaite attempt to go
beyond the politics of deregulation while understanding that command-and-control regulation
also has drawbacks. Studies of responsive regulation reveal the proliferation of private and
public–private regulatory structures (Nielsen 2006; Parker 2006; Braithwaite 2008).
Thus, perhaps the most innovative aspect of governance approaches is not the newness of
the model but the recognition of the model whereby regulation operates concurrently and in
cooperation with the background of markets and social interactions (Lobel 2004).2 Regulatory
governance focuses on explaining what motivates organizations to comply with legal reg-
ulation, go beyond compliance and analyze the conditions most conducive to non-enforced
compliance (Kagan et al. 2003; Gunningham et al. 2004; Fairman and Yapp 2005; Albareda
et al. 2008; Haines 2009; Parker and Nielsen 2009, 2011). Because law was traditionally
thought of as formed and defined outside of organizations and prior to reaching organizational
domains, studies emphasize private organizations’ strategic motivations for complying or not
complying (Simpson 1992, 1998; Vaughan 1998), social and legal license pressures (Kagan et
al. 2003) or moral value-laden concerns (Tyler 1990).
The theoretical and empirical studies of governance suggest that the governance turn in
public law reflects a normative preference for a more effective social and environmental
regulation of markets while also acknowledging the failures of command-and-control regu-
lation (Dorf and Sabel 1998; de Búrca and Scott 2006). In this respect, governance regula-
tory approaches are a form of “meta-risk management” or “meta-regulation” (Parker 2002;
Coglianese and Nash 2006: 14; Parker 2006; Braithwaite 2008; Scott 2008). Although not
always successful, meta-risk management when working properly shifts risk and responsi-
bility onto businesses in a way that encourages and incentivizes firms to develop models of
self-organization that can also achieve “public goods” and may better ensure compliance with
environmental, labor and consumer laws (Ayres and Braithwaite 1992; Sabel et al. 2001;
Parker 2002; Lobel 2004; Gunningham and Sinclair 2009). While not all scholars assume
that co-regulation and self-regulation always work (Parker 2002; Edelman et al. 2011; Talesh
2009, 2012, 2015b), studies that critique novel regulatory arrangements tend to focus on issues
of efficacy, feasibility, functionality and implementation (Parker 2002; Nielsen 2006; Marx
2008).
In sum, whereas government command-and-control regulation attempts to structure civil
society responses, governance allows private organizations and civil society actors greater
involvement and voice in how they will be regulated. In this respect, governance studies place
government on an equal level with non-state civic and commercial authorities and affirm
its retreat from assuming primacy. The regulatory governance framework recognizes how
privatization complements the expansion of new technologies of regulation, meta-regulation
and professional self-regulation, and increases delegation to businesses, civil society, and
intra-national and international networks of regulatory experts. Unlike command-and-control
regulation, governance models decenter regulation away from the state to plural networks of
 Public law and regulatory theory  109

regulation and make businesses responsible to self-regulate in order to achieve not just finan-
cial profits, but also policy goals and values (Black 2001; Shamir 2008: 379–383).

BEYOND GOVERNANCE: ORGANIZATIONAL CONSTRUCTIONS

OF THE MEANING OF LEGAL REGULATION

For the most part, scholarship on regulatory governance has produced far more empiri-
cal research on the rise and character of governance than on its translation into practice
(Schneiberg and Bartley 2008). Schneiberg and Bartley note that:

researchers have amassed evidence for the recent proliferation of regulation and new forms at the
national and transnational levels. However, they have barely begun to analyze systematically how
new forms are translated into practice, leaving scholars with little to say about the extent to which
new forms actually reshape markets and organizational behavior on the ground … [T]heoretical pre-
occupations in some quarters with adoption, diffusion, and legitimacy [of governance models], can
sideline issues of implementation, effectiveness and local impact. (Schneiberg and Bartley 2008: 49)

While the form or design of governance arrangements is well documented, less attention is
directed toward how the content and meaning of legal rules are reshaped during their imple-
mentation under various governance models. Research elucidating clear specification of
mechanisms and processes through which private organizations, state actors and civil society
stakeholders shape law and policy within collaborative governance arrangements has proved
difficult to gather. This gap flows in part from the methodological challenges of studying how
governance forms shape behavior and legal rules. But this line of research is critical, because
regulatory governance prefers to be flexible and vague about what business activity is allowed
and what business conduct will be prohibited or limited. Thus, how “law” is interpreted,
implemented and constructed in governance models remains a challenge for scholars inter-
ested in the relationship between public law and governance. Fortunately, scholars are starting
to overcome these methodological challenges.
Some scholars are moving “beyond governance” to understand and examine governance
as a process that specifies the institutional and political mechanisms through which private
organizations and civil society actors shape the content and meaning of laws (Stryker 1994,
2000, 2002; Parker 2002; Schofer and McEneaney 2003; Zeitlin 2005; Schneiberg and
Clemens 2006; Talesh 2012, 2014). Researchers are exploring what regulatory agencies (state
or non-state), businesses and other stakeholders mean by governance, and how their attitudes
and responses converge, diverge and interact. In particular, these studies highlight how law
and compliance are shaped by socially accepted meanings of governance actors, while also
highlighting what remains contested and why (Edelman et al. 1993, 2001; Lange 1999; Parker
2002; Fairman and Yapp 2005; Talesh 2009, 2012, 2014).
Specifically, “beyond governance” approaches often approach law and compliance as an
endogenous process that is socially constructed by organizations. There have been two phases
to this approach. Deriving largely from empirical work in the civil rights context, first-phase
legal endogeneity studies articulated a theoretical framework for understanding compliance
as a process and specified the institutional mechanisms through which organizations shape
the content and meaning of law. In particular, empirical research highlights how ambiguous
civil rights laws led employers to develop a number of symbolic forms of compliance that
110  Handbook on theories of governance

were more attentive to managerial ideals and preferences than to legal ideals. These symbolic
forms of compliance were eventually incorporated into judicial decisions interpreting civil
rights laws (Edelman 2016). Empirical research identified a series of mechanisms, including
how organizations legalize themselves through the creation of formal policies and proce-
dures, how managerial conception of what constitutes compliance flows into the manner that
organizations understand law and compliance, and how forms of compliance developed and
were institutionalized within organizational fields and ultimately incorporated into judicial
conceptions of compliance. Thus, law and compliance is an endogenous process, that is, the
content and meaning of laws are determined by organizations, the very group such laws are
designed to regulate.
Second-wave studies refined and expanded the endogenous approach into other legal set-
tings beyond the civil rights context. Second-wave studies have not just moved legal endoge-
neity to new areas such as consumer protection, insurance and prisons, to name a few, but have
elaborated the theoretical framework to explain how organizations can shape the content and
meaning of legislation and regulation through institutional and political mechanisms (Talesh
2009, 2014). Empirical research in the second wave also reveals how other logics beyond man-
agerial values, such as consumer, risk and penal logics, can influence the way actors within
organizational fields understand law and compliance.
Talesh (2012) draws from new-institutional ideas of organizational fields and legal endog-
eneity to show how institutionalized and competing logics operating among stakeholders and
organizations play an important role in determining how consumer warranty law is imple-
mented in alternative dispute resolution systems operating outside courts with various levels of
involvement by private organizations, state actors and civil society stakeholders. Despite there
being similar formal laws on the books, the law in action operating in different private and
state-run consumer warranty dispute resolution forums in the United States is different based
on the way business and consumer perspectives are accounted for in each dispute resolution
process. Under the single-arbitrator private dispute resolution system run by private organiza-
tions with soft state oversight in California, business values flow into the rules, the procedures
and the meaning of law operating in the private dispute resolution system mainly through an
extensive training and socialization process for arbitrators. On the other hand, the state-run
dispute resolution system in Vermont consisting of a five-person arbitration board of three
citizens, an automotive dealer and a technical expert anchors the neutrality and legitimacy of
its dispute resolution structure in a collaborative justice model that balances interested stake-
holders reflecting business and consumer logics in a state-funded and -designed structure. To
the extent that business values are introduced into the process by the presence of the automo-
tive dealer and technical expert arbitrators on the consumer warranty dispute resolution board,
they seem to be balanced with competing consumer values by the presence of three citizen
arbitrators and also the state administrators hired to run the program. Thus, Talesh’s analysis
of the mechanisms and processes through which governance structures operate and construct
what law means suggests that the institutional design and form of the governance structure, in
this case the dispute resolution system, have important implications for consumers’ access to
justice and, more broadly, the civil legal system (Talesh 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015a).
Other empirical studies in this vein explore how private organizations shape the meaning
of public legal rights in securities regulation (Reichman 1992; Krawiec 2003, 2005; O’Brien
2007; Holder-Webb and Cohen 2012; Funk and Hirschman 2014), insurance regulation
(Schneiberg 1999; Schneiberg and Bartley 2001; Talesh 2015b) cybersecurity (Talesh 2018),
 Public law and regulatory theory  111

welfare regulation (Covaleski et al. 2013), insider trader laws (Bozanic et al. 2012), prison
rape regulation (Jenness and Smyth 2011), school sexual harassment policies (Short 2006),
restaurant hygiene regulation (Lehman et al. 2014), privacy (Pandy 2013), the medical educa-
tion field (Dunn and Jones 2010), criminal justice (Grattet and Jenness 2005), Australian labor
law (Frazer 2014) and United Kingdom financial services regulation (Gilad 2014). As scholars
continue to study the relationship between business and legal regulation, more research is
needed to investigate the multiple ways in which institutional and political mechanisms are
at play in shaping the meaning of governance arrangements (cf. Stryker 1994, 2000, 2002).
Research on how global governance models are translated into local settings shows that
law rarely goes unaltered from one setting to another, instead getting altered via editing and
retheorization (Djelic 1998; Campbell 2004; Merry 2006). For example, Carruthers and
Halliday (2006) analyze how a model of corporate insolvency law supported by international
organizations was partially resisted, incorporated, altered and indigenized as it was exported
to China, Indonesia and South Korea. They highlight the iterative nature of implementation
and the constitutive cycles of translation and back-translation between the global and the local
actors tasked with interpreting and implementing insolvency law, and how political, cultural
and institutional forces converge. Others have discussed how multiple forms of soft and hard
governance often intersect, and raise questions concerning the extent to which they undermine
or reinforce one another (Sabel and Simon 2006; Trubek and Trubek 2007).
Analyzed collectively, these empirical studies suggest a move toward what I refer to as
“beyond governance.” In other words, public functions are not simply being devolved to
private actors as traditional governance models suggest. Stakeholders are not just more
actively participating in policymaking. Rather, private organizations and civil society actors
are now driving what constitutes the content and meaning of public legal rights originally
created by legislatures, courts and regulatory agencies. Because legislative and regulatory
rules are often ambiguous with respect to their meaning, regulatory governance in the context
of public law is more of a bottom-up process emerging from private organizations and other
stakeholders than a top-down process flowing from public legal institutions. Empirical studies
in this vein begin moving us away from thinking about governance as a reaction to rational,
command-and-control government mandates. Rather, governance models are a framework for
exploring how participating stakeholders actively construct the meaning of law and compli-
ance. In doing so, these studies simultaneously encapsulate the institutional logics and political
power of organizations, stakeholders and civil society actors.
Looking ahead, continued investigation into the subtle processes by which organizations
shape the meaning of compliance is crucial, especially given the rise of regulatory govern-
ance and public–private partnerships sanctioned and approved by legislatures, courts and
administrative agencies in the past 20 years. As this chapter shows, private organizations are
not merely influencing government institutions but instead also performing many traditional
government functions—including lawmaking—with state sanction and approval (Braithwaite
1982; Macaulay 1986; Gunningham 1995; Hacker 2002; Kagan et al. 2003; Lobel 2004;
Ansell and Gash 2008; Freeman and Minow 2009; Talesh 2009, 2012, 2014). In this respect,
future governance studies should continue to move beyond examining the rise and character
of governance forms, to exploring how law itself is constructed, contested and reshaped by
private organizations and other civil society actors.
112  Handbook on theories of governance

NOTES
1. Majone (1997: 143) explains the subtle link between privatization, deregulation and re-regulation:
‘mode of control whereby public utilities and other industries deemed to affect the public interest are left in
private hands, but are subject to rules developed and enforced by specialized agencies. Such bodies are usually
established by statute as independent administrative authorities—independent in the sense that they are allowed
to operate outside the line of hierarchical control by the departments of central government. Thus, the causal
link between privatization and statutory regulation provides an important, if partial, explanation of the growth
of the regulatory state’.
2. Though not the primary focus of public law scholars, concepts of governance have been around for
quite a long time (Jaffe 1937).

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10. Development theory
Jennifer N. Brass

INTRODUCTION
International development theorists seek to understand how socioeconomic standards of living
rise in order to reduce poverty in developing countries of the world.1 The distinct normative
logic of each in a series of development theories over the past 75 years has structured donor
and government policy prescriptions, which have rippled throughout the world. As each has
failed to swiftly eradicate global poverty, criticisms have mounted, and the paradigm has
shifted.
Assessing the role for the state in fostering positive socioeconomic change has been central
to the evolution of theories of development: these theories originated in a time of Keynesian
faith in the state, only to be replaced by a belief, peaking in the 1980s, in the primacy of
the market. By the 1990s, development theorists had shifted back toward the center of the
market–state division, recognizing the role of “good governance” institutions in creating
enabling conditions for markets. Development theories had again morphed towards a focus
on collaborative governance by the 2000s, as the inclusion of multiple “stakeholders,” both
from inside and external to the state, in decision-making and implementation became the gold
standard for successful governance.
This chapter provides an understanding of the evolution of these paradigmatic development
theories from the post-World War II era to the present, highlighting the rise specifically of
“good governance” and of governance more generally. As will become evident below, in
the field of international development the term “governance” shares many of the meanings
described in other chapters of this Handbook, but also takes on particular meaning for those
in the field.

STATE-LED DEVELOPMENT DURING THE KEYNESIAN

HEYDAY

Most scholars of international development theory view its emergence as occurring in the
post-World War II era, a time of decolonization in much of the world. This period was during
the height of the Keynesian revolution, when non-orthodox economics gained prominence and
called for high state involvement in managing economies (Hirschman 1981: 6). Development
economists based in both rich and poor countries called for “dirigiste” states, in which
governments actively managed national economic development, to compensate for market
imperfections like underemployment of resources and late-comer status in industrialization
(Hirschman 1981; Lal 1985: 5).
One version of these ideas, dependency theory, developed in Latin America. Dependenistas
held that poor countries were experiencing deteriorating terms of trade owing to their position
in the world capitalist system, which exacerbated their poverty (Prebisch 1950; Cardoso

118
 Development theory  119

and Faletto 1979). In this theory, developed countries became richer only by exploiting the
resources of poor countries, which experienced “the development of underdevelopment”
(Frank 1967). A strong and protectionist state was needed to remedy this situation (Cardoso
and Faletto 1979).
Interventionist governments became pervasive throughout the developing world, involved
in all elements of the economy, service provision and welfare (Mkandawire 2001). Most
followed policies of protectionism, import-substituting industrialization (ISI), expansionary
spending, wage and price controls and public investment planning. Between 1965 and 1972,
for example, 90 percent of manufacturing agreements in Kenya involved protection from
foreign competition (Bates 1981: 64), and other states nationalized service provision and
enterprises in the name of national unity and development (Azarya and Chazan 1987). In
Nigeria, for instance, the government grew 50 percent in the five years following independ-
ence (van de Walle 2001), and the number of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) grew from 250
to more than 800 in the 1970s (Lewis 1994: 443).
In most developing countries, the state quickly became the largest employer, creating
thousands of new jobs in the civil service, SOEs, schools, clinics and infrastructure projects.
In many poor countries growing numbers of university-educated students automatically saw
the civil service as their future employer (Prewitt 1971; Barkan 1975) and in many states were
actually guaranteed employment (van de Walle 2001). By 1975, public sector employment
constituted 57 percent of total employment in Kenya, 65 percent in India and 40 percent
in Trinidad and Tobago (International Labour Organization 2010), and Egypt, Sri Lanka,
Tanzania and other countries provided educated citizens with a job as the “employer of last
resort,” whether the labor was needed or not (Pradhan 1996). By the early 1980s, public sector
employment in developing countries was averaging 44 percent, compared to an average of 24
percent in developed countries (Heller and Tait 1984: 40).
Unfortunately, protectionism and a dirigiste state were not economically successful policies
in most regions of the world (Lal 1985). For example, where ISI was meant to grow domestic
markets by protecting infant domestic industries, by the 1970s it had become clear that devel-
opment through ISI was not occurring (Hirschman 1981). In Latin America, manufacturers
were so inefficient that the prices they charged proscribed successful exportation (Baer 1972).
Internally, too, real prices rose on manufactured goods in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico (Baer
1972: 99). Similar outcomes occurred throughout Africa and much of Asia.
The state-led development policies also failed to take into account the role of politics in
economic policymaking. Most countries had highly clientelist political-economic systems,
which resulted in decision-makers implementing politically – not economically – rational pol-
icies (Bates 1981). Over time, these translated into low or negative profits for SOEs, perverse
incentives within organizations (Ekeh 1975) and the withdrawal of farmers from commercial
markets, reducing tax revenues (Bates 1981) in many countries. Outright corruption was also
commonplace (Watts 1991), though it was rarely if ever recognized by donor or government
representatives. Thus publicly owned monopsonies and SOEs were used to generate rents not
for government reserves, but for personal ones, with a “wholesale trade in public resources”
developing in some countries (LeVine 1975). Meanwhile, the desire to employ educated
citizens led to “bureaucratic elephantiasis” (Crook 1989) rather than increased productive and
administrative capacity. Overall, the combination of protectionism with the politicization of
economic decisions curtailed efficiency and effectiveness.
120  Handbook on theories of governance

A SHIFT TO MARKET SOLUTIONS

The failure of developmental economics’ highly statist interventions in most developing

countries coincided with a turn toward market fundamentalism in the West, heralding an age
of economic liberalism that peaked in the 1980s. As it became clear that most developing
country governments were not making such economically efficient or rational policy choices,
development theorists began to see the state as the cause of economic problems. The market
became the solution prescribed. Organizations like the World Bank, the IMF and bilateral
donors began to condition loans and grants to poor countries on economic liberalization.
Part of this shift to liberalism was based on a reading of the rise of the “Asian Tigers” –
Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, all of which had developed extremely rapidly
following World War II – as “having gotten the prices right” (Wade 1992; World Bank 1993).
These countries were said to have followed the orthodox economic principles of the market
and focused on growth through trade rather than implementing the “dirigiste dogma” (Lal
1985). Western-based international donor organizations that had supported ISI developed
a new devotion to the market. As world commodity prices fell, the oil crises occurred and
weather patterns produced severe drought in the 1970s, most poor countries had little choice
but to accept donor conditionality from the “lenders of last resort.”
The prescribed standard World Bank and IMF reform package, dubbed the Washington
Consensus, advocated the privatization of state enterprises, decrease in state spending,
deregulation of markets, and liberalization of trade and exchange rate policies (Williamson
1989). The era of import-substituting industrialization, in which states dominated national
economies, drew to a rather abrupt close. Primarily in Latin America and Africa, governments
adopted structural adjustment programs that aimed to “jump start” economic growth through
rapid market transformation. By 1988, 42 of Africa’s 54 countries had signed on to structural
adjustment.
Bureaucratic reforms followed the principles of New Public Management, which had
gained favor in the West at the same time. Downsizing and outsourcing the state were meant
not only to free the market from the oppressive hand of the state but also to reduce the oppor-
tunities for corruption within the government apparatus (Kaufman 1997). Governments there-
fore sold many of their economic assets. In Africa, a number of countries had witnessed the
divestiture of 50 percent or more of their SOEs by the 1990s (Nellis 2008). They also slashed
expenditures on social services, following the idea that private actors could provide them more
effectively. In Tanzania, for example, social services as a percentage of government expendi-
ture halved between 1981 and 1986, decreasing to the lowest point in 20 years, while fees for
public services increased, with school fees up by 25 to 45 percent in 1989 alone (Tripp 1994).
In Kenya, spending on education dropped from 18 percent of the budget in the 1980s to 7.1
percent in 1996, and, in the health sector, government spending decreased from $9.82 million
in 1980–81 to $6.2 million in 1993 (Katumanga 2004: 48).
Rather than seeing the market being freed to allow growth to occur, however, many devel-
oping countries experienced declining standards of living and negative economic growth
following the implementation of the liberalization policies. In Latin America, for example,
devaluation not only lowered real wages but also led to severe inflation in countries like
Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil and to per capita income decline in most countries (Agarwal and
Sengupta 1999). Both Latin American and African countries came to realize that liberaliza-
tion rarely enticed foreign investment. Instead, many SOEs were sold, often at below-market
 Development theory  121

rates, to politically well-connected local businesspeople. Across Africa, export rates fell by 30
percent in the 1980s, and imports by 65 percent, while economic output across the continent
declined by 20 percent between 1980 and 1986 (Watts 1991: 132). African economies shrank
throughout the 1980s at an annual rate of 2.8 percent (World Bank 1989: 221).
When structural adjustment programs were imposed on already-weak administrations,
moreover, the policies of decentralization, downsizing and privatization further eroded state
capacity (Watts 1991). Liberalization policies created a great deal of confusion and ineffi-
ciency in the bureaucracy, resulting in increased misinformation along with an inability to
collect information, greater uncertainty at nearly all levels, and a delegitimization of bureau-
cratic authority (Watts 1991: 133).

RECOGNIZING THE ROLE FOR MARKET-ENABLING

INSTITUTIONS OF GOOD GOVERNANCE

The backlash was strong against the wholesale liberalization of the economy and the shrunken
role for the state. Structural adjustment programs were extremely unpopular in most countries
where they were implemented. By the end of the 1980s, many scholars and development
experts were also questioning how wise it was to attempt to remove the state from the
economy. A wave of research showed that the East Asian Tiger “miracles” had actually
resulted from extremely interventionist governments, rather than the opposite as had been
touted (Johnson 1982; Haggard 1990; Wade 1992; Woo-Cumings 1999). Although Japan,
Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong did have a strong export orientation (rather than
import-substituting) in manufacturing, the governments carefully planned investment and
production in each of the countries, counter to liberal theory.
By the early 1990s, moreover, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War meant
several things for developing countries. The spectacular failure of privatization in Russia,
which left much of the economic engine of the country in the hands of a small group of “oli-
garchs,” for instance, demonstrated that, in some conditions, freeing the market in the absence
of clear regulation can create as many problems as it solves. Changes in ownership are not
sufficient for creating real markets; competition and regulatory reforms are also needed (van
de Walle 1989).
With the threat of communism removed, the “alignment” of poor countries to the capitalist
West also lost much of its significance. As a result, many donor countries lowered their accept-
ance of mere lip service to loan conditionality and began to insist that recipient countries fully
implement the required policies (Doornbos 2001). No longer could countries like then-Zaire
be run as personal fiefdoms making use of aid monies in exchange for loyalty to the West. For
the first time, development agencies began to talk about problems of patronage and corruption
in countries they had funded as allies during the Cold War; the topic was no longer taboo
(Transparency International 2004).
The combination of these factors led international development theorists and policymakers
to swing the market-state pendulum back toward the center. By the end of the 1980s, the World
Bank had already identified a “crisis of governance” in sub-Saharan Africa, marking the first
use of the term “governance” in international development circles (World Bank 1989: 60).
Theorists and practitioners alike did not turn away from the market but did increasingly insist
that strong, functional institutions of the state, such as property rights, an operative legislative
122  Handbook on theories of governance

and judicial system, a competent bureaucracy and a wide variety of regulations, are needed
to undergird the working of markets (North 1990). Scholars pointed out that facilitating free
markets requires more state capacity than did state-led development, not less (Chaudhry 1993).
The Bank itself admitted that aid could slow the emergence of accountability within the state,
making it crucial for donor organizations to focus on state institutions (World Bank 1989:
54). Indeed, by the early 2000s, two of the Bank’s World Development Reports had focused
explicitly on the role of the state (World Bank 1997) and institutions (World Bank 2002) for
development. “Governance” thus entered the core lingo of international development theory
with specific reference to improving the quality and effectiveness of state institutions.
In the 1990s, talk of governance in development circles, whether explicit or implicit, was
nearly always about “good governance” rather than one of the broader uses of the term iden-
tified in the Introduction in this Handbook. Although exact definitions varied both within and
across institutions (Gisselquist 2012), the focus was often on corruption and authoritarianism,
with “governance” and “corruption” sometimes used almost interchangeably (cf. World Bank
2007: 1). Good governance, then, referred to public institutions with low levels of corruption
and high levels of democratic accountability. Governance, in international development
circles, became a normative political term promoting the model of advanced Western democ-
racies to other countries (Doornbos 2001). As Ansell and Torfing describe in the Introduction
in this Handbook, “it was assumed that governance would help to realize democratic ideals
about inclusion, empowerment and ownership” as well as ending frustrations with weak and
corrupt developing states. Conceptualizations like the following became common in interna-
tional development descriptions of governance:

Governance consists of the traditions and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised.
This includes the process by which governments are selected, monitored and replaced; the capacity
of the government to effectively formulate and implement sound policies; and the respect of citizens
and the state for the institutions that govern economic and social interactions among them. (World
Bank 2015)

The first of these two sentences reflects the broad definition of governance used in this
Handbook. The specificity provided in the first and third clauses of the second sentence,
however, demonstrates the normative focus on democratization and transparency, while the
second expands the definition of governance to a normative measure of “sound” state capacity
that broader definitions of governance often lack.
Reflecting this focus on democratic governance, the World Bank began to systematically
and regularly record “governance indicators” – voice and accountability, political stability and
absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of
corruption – beginning in 1996 for more than 200 countries (World Bank 2007). It was not
just donor organizations that drew attention to these issues, however; the nonprofit corruption
watchdog Transparency International, which produces a variety of widely cited corruption
indices, was founded around the same time, in 1993.
 Development theory  123

GOVERNANCE IN DEVELOPMENT IN THE TWENTY-FIRST

CENTURY

Since the turn of the century, many in international development have continued to focus on
“good governance” – the US development agency Millennium Challenge Corporation, for
example, was founded in 2004 with good governance as one of the three pillars a country must
meet in order to qualify for aid (Millennium Challenge Corporation 2015). The World Bank,
the United Nations and many other donors and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) also
continue to use the term “governance” in this way.
Yet there have been both a backlash against the good governance agenda and a turn among
international development theorists to using the term “governance” in a broader, less norma-
tive way, as it is defined in the Introduction in this Handbook. On the former, there has grown
a sizable literature critiquing “good governance,” both as an ill-defined, perhaps intentionally
elastic concept (Doornbos 2001; Gisselquist 2012) and as an ideal (Grindle 2004; Sundaram
and Chowdhury 2012). Perhaps the best-known critiques of good governance come from
Harvard’s Merilee Grindle, who notes that “good governance is a seductive idea – who, after
all, can reasonably defend bad governance?” (2010: 1), while calling for a more realistic “good
enough governance” in developing countries (Grindle 2004, 2007). By this, Grindle notes that
“good governance” provides a “fig leaf” for nominally apolitical donors to dictate political
prescriptions to poor countries (2010: 5), but that such policies should be considered for each
country contextually. Studies, moreover, have questioned the causal relationship between
a country’s scores on the World Bank governance indicators and the rates of economic growth
(Kurtz and Schrank 2007).
Critics have also condemned the hypocrisy of some aid organizations in requiring good
governance, which they do not themselves always practice (Woods 2000). Shining a light
on donor practices in addition to those of developing countries has led in the past decade to
a growing focus on “aid effectiveness” through several global fora and declarations on the
topic (Kaufman 2009). Some have called this the start of a new post-Washington Consensus
development paradigm (Claeye 2014), which recognizes the effectiveness of donor organiza-
tions as being just as important as development country government efficacy.
Also moving beyond the “good governance” agenda, recent scholarship in international
development has employed the term “governance” as it is used in public management and
administration circles in the West – not as shorthand for “good governance.” In these usages,
scholars recognize the current reality that developing country governments and civil service
actors are but one of a variety of actors – public, private and nonprofit – that are involved in
the governing process (Brass 2012; Gore 2013). As Ansell and Torfing note in the Introduction
in this Handbook, “Only by acknowledging the centrality of these extra-governmental interac-
tions could we expect to achieve competent and knowledge-based decision making, creative
problem solving, and flexible and well-coordinated policy implementation.”
In the international development context, this type of collaborative or network governance
arose not only out of a recognition of the place for private and civil society actors to engage in
governing but also owing to the fact of state collapse or extreme weakness in many developing
countries. Much of the scholarship on governance in development in this vein has therefore
examined the role of NGOs in both decision-making and implementation of public services.
Beginning during the period of structural adjustment, government downsizing left large and
growing gaps in service provision, which NGOs worked to fill (Bebbington et al. 1993).
124  Handbook on theories of governance

Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, for example, most non-hospital health facilities and services,
including dispensaries, HIV/AIDS assistance and most clinics in remote rural areas, were
being run by NGOs by the end of the 1980s (Bratton 1989). Instead of a rush of private actors
sweeping into a provisionary role, NGOs undertook many services that were traditionally
implemented by the state, such as education, healthcare and infrastructure.
Indeed, the relations between NGOs and the government today suggest that, counter to some
claims in the governance literature, the state has not retreated from governance to be replaced
by non-state actors. Instead, it has been joined by non-state actors in the governing process,
and has been bolstered by the combined efforts. This has been documented not only in Kenya,
but also elsewhere in Africa, Latin America, South and East Asia, and the former Soviet Union
(cf. van Klinken 1998; Brinkerhoff 2002; Keese and Argudo 2006; Palmer 2006; Rose 2006;
Taylor 2006; Zafar Ullah et al. 2006; Brautigam and Segarra 2007; Pick et al. 2008; Rosenberg
et al. 2008; Batley 2011; Ejaz et al. 2011; Nurul Alam 2011; Jammulamadaka 2012).
As I describe in my own work on Kenya (Brass 2012, 2014, 2016), NGOs have become part
and parcel of governing in many developing states. In both the policy-making and implemen-
tation aspects of governance, NGOs have joined the state in a highly interactive fashion. On
the decision-making side of the equation, NGO leaders sit on national and local policymaking
committees alongside civil servants and politicians, and the government integrates NGO pro-
grams and budgets into local and national plans. In implementation, NGOs and line ministries
pool resources for joint projects, and NGOs pay for activities that allow the government to
fulfill its own mandate. As a result, NGOs help to supplement governing capacity. Others have
made similar arguments about governance in developing countries, bringing the usage of the
term more into line with its use in mainstream governance studies today.
These collaborative arrangements exist not only between NGOs and governments but also
among a range of actors who have become involved in advocacy, decision-making and imple-
mentation in developing countries – private businesses, civic associations, community-based
organizations, individual citizens, multinational organizations, and international donors. The
various actors involved are often referred to as “stakeholders,” and many donors require
widespread stakeholder participation in activities using their monies. To illustrate the gov-
ernance process in a vaccine dissemination program, for example, an international agency
might collaborate with developing country ministry of health headquarters officials and rural
NGO workers to decide which immunizations are most needed in the country. That inter-
national organization might then facilitate the in-kind donation of vaccines from a private
pharmaceutical company to the ministry. Ministry officials might next collaborate with one or
many NGOs working in each region of the country to distribute vaccines to all corners of the
country. When it comes time to administer the vaccines, the NGOs might fund the cost of fuel
for government vehicles to reach outlying villages, where the NGO will have worked with its
local community-based organization counterparts to gather appropriate individuals to receive
the inoculation. The government might send public health personnel to the site visits, with
their daily per diem fee paid by the NGO using funds from a particular donor. In this example,
each actor – public, private, nonprofit and community – is crucial for the collaborative success
of the program.
When the emphasis is on the role that citizens can play in decision-making on policy or
implementation, it is often referred to as participatory governance. Aligning with a gener-
alized push for participatory development in the global south, participatory governance is
often implemented through public fora of all sizes at which citizens are invited to voice their
 Development theory  125

opinions, interests, and concerns. In this, there remains an implied focus on democratic voice
and accountability, but it is subtler than in the “good governance” agenda.

CONCLUSIONS

This chapter has provided a historical view of the evolution of the term “governance” as it
is used in the field of international development. Questions of governance in development
revolve around the state – whether it should be the prime actor, should have an ancillary ena-
bling role or should be one among a number of actors working collaboratively to create and
sustain positive changes in standards of living. The prevailing view on this question has shifted
twice in just the past half-century, as each paradigmatic view has failed to be associated with
rapid development throughout the global south. The reality is that scholars and practitioners of
development do not know which factors are actually necessary for change to occur.
The current focus on “governance” allows us to say that “everything matters.” No longer is it
solely the state or solely the market that is responsible for progress; now we must contend with
interwoven roles for government, business, nonprofit organizations, community groups, civil
society, donors and multinational organizations, all of which are crucial to success. Additional
research is needed, however, to better understand the mechanisms of coordination between
and among these varied groups from the local to the international level of development, such
that we might identify both the necessary and the sufficient conditions. The challenge will
be to pair development programs and donor funding cycles with timelines appropriate for
research to measure medium- to long-term change.

NOTE
1. Most theorists focus on economic growth as a precondition for improved health, human rights,
democracy and happiness (Easterly 2001), while others emphasize a more holistic expansion of
freedoms (Sen 1999). The definition presented in this chapter takes a broad approach.

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11. International relations theory
Kerstin Sahlin

FROM INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS TO TRANSNATIONAL

GOVERNANCE
Theories of governance took shape partly in reaction to a dominant perspective in which social
control was perceived as primarily mobilized by and confined to the nation-state. This per-
ception is particularly striking in the literature of political science and international relations
(Keohane 1982; Baldwin 1993). An objection to this state-centered view was raised with the
catchphrase “governance without government” (Rosenau and Czempiel 1992). Theories of
governance do not imply that states and governments disappear (e.g. Pierre 2000). Rather, they
emphasize that the study of governance should not start from an exclusive focus on the state.
Avant et al. (2010), for example, point to the multitude of actors involved in global governance,
ranging from the great diversity of international organizations, multinational corporations and
professional associations to advocacy groups, and these authors stress the diversity of their
functions. Broadly speaking, these actors “create issues, set agendas, establish and implement
rules or programs, and evaluate and/or adjudicate outcomes” (ibid.: 10). Theories of govern-
ance have turned attention to other important global and regional actors, to world society and,
increasingly, to the interplay of states with other local and global actors, such as international
bodies, corporations, civil society organizations and professional networks (for an overview,
see Ansell and Torfing, Introduction in this Handbook). This has led to the development of
theories and empirical studies of how these many diverse actors interact, network, collaborate
and sometimes compete across sectors and levels.
This chapter presents a perspective on governance in which the interplay of multiple actors
is key but processes, rather than specific sets or groupings of actors, form the primary units of
analysis. This framework has been developed to capture the organizational and institutional
dynamics of transnational governance (see Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006).
The chapter is structured as follows. After a brief presentation of the broad background
to this developed framework, the next section presents the notion of a transnational world.
Then come two sections presenting the principal characteristics of transnational governance:
distributed yet organized governance and the multi-institutional embeddedness of governance
processes. The following section describes how these features tend to result in self-reinforcing
and ambiguous processes. In a final section three important topics for a future research agenda
on transnational governance are presented.
This framework on transnational governance took shape primarily as a result of empirical
studies of “regulatory activism” (Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006, chap.18; on regulatory
activism, see also Levi-Faur 2005; Braithwaite 2008). Coercive rules are common and
expanding around the world. In addition, studies have shown a far-reaching proliferation of
regulatory activities among and across nations—transnationally. Such regulations tend to be
of a “soft law” kind: non-hierarchical rules that are not legally binding (Mörth 2004, 2006).
Furthermore, such rules are largely informal and flexible in the sense that they are open to

129
130  Handbook on theories of governance

interpretation and adjustment by those who are regulated (cf. Kirton and Trebilcock 2004).
The domain and applicability of soft rules and the conditions for compliance are defined in
conjunction with the rules themselves. Authority is not predefined in the relationships between
the regulated and the regulating but must be built into each governing relationship. These
observations have led to an expressed need for a theoretical framework capable of capturing
processes of transnational governance in the making.
Although the regulatory actors may seem diverse, what has emerged is a striking conver-
gence across sectors and across territories. Fields as diverse as the defense industry, labor
markets, higher education, health care, the environment and pollution, public management,
accounting and the social responsibility of corporations have increasingly been governed
in similar ways—transnationally. New regulatory modes, such as contractual arrangements,
standards, rankings and monitoring frames, have increasingly been used across sectors and
nations, and also by the state (Hood et al. 1999). A fair number of such regulatory modes
target administrative processes and are, in fact, derived from popular current management
ideas (Beck and Walgenbach 2002; Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall 2002; Power 2007). Such
soft law is combined with monitoring and agenda-setting activities, which are pursued in
institutional and organized processes.
An institutionally informed theoretical framework was developed that emphasized the
complex, progressive and historical dimension of this re-ordering of the world. This theo-
retical framework takes as a starting point the notion of a transnational world in the making.
Transnational governance is distributed, with multiple actors involved. This does not mean
that complex interplays between regulating and regulated actors are anomic or chaotic,
since transnational governance appears to be highly organized. Furthermore, actors and pro-
cesses are institutionally embedded, but not in the sense of one institution being dominant.
Transnational governance is multi-institutional.

A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD

In our contemporary world, it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate what takes place
within national frontiers from what takes place across and beyond nations. The regulatory
processes described above develop and operate between and across frontiers. The state is an
important body in these processes: it regulates and is regulated. The state has certainly not
withered away, but the regulatory processes described above involve many more kinds of
organizations, and the state does not always appear as a unified actor or body. In describing
this governance as transnational we consider, in line with Hannerz (1996: 6), that “actors may
now be individuals, groups, movements, business enterprises, and in no small part it is this
diversity of organizations that we need to consider.” This approach emphasizes that the state
is only one type of actor amongst others (cf. Katzenstein et al. 1998), but also that the whole
or parts of the state are embedded in complex organizational webs. Organizations overlap
in such networks, and individuals and groups may at times be committed to the network, to
organizational subunits or to the process as such, rather than to their organizations. Networks,
activities and individuals constantly span multiple levels, rendering older lines of demarcation
obsolete. Thus, studies of the re-governing world should neither neglect the state nor treat it
as the only or fundamental mainspring of the re-governing process. In the transnational world,
the territorial basis and reach of a single set of regulations cannot be taken for granted. One
 International relations theory  131

set does not exclude the development of another in the same area. Examples from studies of
accounting regulations (Botzem and Quack 2006), administrative standardization and certifi-
cations (Tamm Hallström and Boström 2010), corporate social responsibility (Jacobsson and
Sahlin-Andersson 2006), competition regulations (Djelic and DeHond 2014), certifications
and quality assurance of higher education (Pallas and Wedlin 2013) and pollution-reducing
schemes (Buhr 2008) show how various regulatory schemes develop in parallel, compete and
are combined and merged.

TRANSNATIONAL GOVERNANCE IS ORGANIZED

Transnational governance is highly organized and has undergone a dramatic worldwide

expansion of formal organizing. Drori et al. (2009: 17) note that: “One of the dominant
features of the age of globalization is the rampant expansion of organization.” Organizations
have become both more numerous and more active worldwide, to the extent that our contem-
porary society has been described as “the organized society” (Perrow 1991, 2002; see also
Meyer and Bromley 2013). Particularly noteworthy is the continuous growth of international
organizations (e.g. Boli and Thomas 1997, 1999; Drori et al. 2009). This is especially true
of international non-governmental organizations, whose members are largely composed of
a mix of governmental units, commercial actors and various non-governmental and voluntary
associations (e.g. Tallberg et al. 2013).
Transnational governance also tends to be organized in the sense that the links and rela-
tions among these many and different organizations are largely organized in the form of
transnational networks (Marcussen and Torfing 2007; Djelic and Quack 2010; Torfing 2012).
Transnational networks are not confined by national boundaries, even if governmental and
intergovernmental bodies constitute important parts of those networks. Rather, a defining
characteristic of transnational networks is, as argued by Djelic and Sahlin (2012), a blurring of
the distinction between the national and international, governmental and non-governmental,
and public and private, and a distributed view of governance that relies on mechanisms not
directly associated with state authority or sanctioning power (see also Risse 2012).
International organizations and networks function, to a large extent, as carriers of a world
culture. Changes happen, since “all sorts of actors learn to define themselves and their interests
from the global cultural and organizational structures in which they are embedded” (Boli and
Thomas 1999: 4). In her studies of the global diffusion of research policies, Finnemore (1993)
showed the importance of international organizations as teachers of norms, and Finnemore and
Sikkink (1998) have pointed to their role as “norm entrepreneurs.” Marcussen (2000, 2004)
has, in similar ways, shown the influence of the OECD through the development and dissem-
ination of ideas and soft law. Brunsson and Jacobsson (2000) focused especially on stand-
ardizing organizations and, basing their work on observations that organizations of this kind
have expanded substantially in the transnational sphere, also showed how those organizations
carried certain scripts, for both the regulating and the regulated. Transnationally operating
organizations therefore largely reflect what is happening in a particular field, but also shape
and disseminate ideas and conceptualizations, establish and strengthen core institutions and
are important meeting places for actors in the fields concerned.
With organizational expansion, organizational dynamics as such comes to permeate and
shape transnational governance. Organizations set their own rules and strategies for member-
132  Handbook on theories of governance

ship and action. By voluntarily joining an organization, members bind themselves to following
the rules it issues or adopts (see for example Ahrne and Brunsson 2008). Typical examples
concern rules for quality assurance, and such systems are often described as voluntary.
However, individual organizations or organized networks can make such a quality assurance
scheme a condition of membership, or an important way of monitoring members of the organ-
ization. In this way, the adoption of a soft regulation becomes a condition of membership.
Organizational dynamics form the basis for proliferation and authorization of such regulations.
One salient observation in organization theory is that organizations tend to develop an inter-
est in their own survival and growth (e.g. Selznick 1949). They also stabilize and formalize
over time. The pursuit and translation of transnational governance are core activities for many
international organizations. Organizations are formed and expand in processes of transnational
governance, and with these processes organizations have also been shown to develop organ-
izational interests in pursuing these activities further, as such activities add to the centrality,
resource base, legitimacy and survival of the organizations as such (e.g. Sahlin 2014).
To summarize, organizations and organizational processes have been shown to form
important dynamics in transnational regulation in at least three ways. First, the expanding
group of international organizations are central in shaping transnational regulatory schemes.
Organizations and organized networks span sectors, nations and regions and form important
venues for circulating and proliferating regulatory schemes. Second, expanding organizations
serve as platforms for the authorization of and compliance with transnational rules. Third,
organizations’ activities and initiatives in processes of governance, and in the pursuit of
certain schemes, have been shown to be partly driven by organizational dynamics and survival
interests.

MULTI-INSTITUTIONAL DYNAMICS

Studies of transnational governance in the making bear witness to deeply institutionally

embedded processes. The similarities among regulatory and governance schemes can be
understood as an expression of the strength and reach of world society. Theories of world
society (Meyer et al. 1997) point to the formation of global blueprints and to cultural pro-
cesses that permeate and shape actions across the world (Drori et al. 2006). The world society
perspective draws attention to the homogenization of the institutional and cultural frames that
structure transnational governance.
While studies of transnational governance in the making show how they are permeated and
shaped by powerful and dominating global institutions, processes have also been shown to
develop incrementally where interests and forces for further expansion arise endogenously
in these processes. This suggests a somewhat less top-down and less centralized institutional
framing.
Studies within the framework of what has sometimes been called “Scandinavian institution-
alism” (Czarniawska 2008) have made sense of “travels of ideas” around the world and shown
how ideas did not flow or homogenize spontaneously, but were transposed and transformed
in active translation processes. Such qualitative, detailed studies of how individual ideas have
been translated drew attention to the many organizations and networks involved in such pro-
cesses. At the same time, these organizations and networks have formed important arenas for
actors and ideas, but also actively edited and circulated ideas (Sahlin and Wedlin 2008). Thus,
 International relations theory  133

ideas change as they flow and can take on new forms and meanings as they move within and
between contexts. Many ideas have been found to form the foundation of, and inspiration for,
new regulations, in the form of standards, guidelines, assessing criteria and templates—soft
law and governance of the kind mentioned above. Widely circulated ideas have also resulted
in, or contributed to, changes in individual organizations’ identities, in field transformations
and in more general institutional changes.
At first glance, translation or editing of circulating ideas may appear creative and
open-ended. However, processes of translation are characterized rather by social control, con-
formism and traditionalism, thus following rule-like patterns. Emerging editing rules restrict
and direct the translation—or editing—in each phase of circulation. The term “rule” does not
imply that there are written or explicit instructions for the telling and retelling of stories and
ideas; neither does it imply that these translations follow clear intentions and established edi-
torial techniques. Although there are no explicit rules to follow, edited stories reveal how these
translations were shaped by the institutional embeddedness in which they were performed
(Sahlin-Andersson 1996).
In combining the emphasis on global blueprints and the cultural frames of world society
with observations of organized society and results from the qualitative studies of Scandinavian
institutionalism, Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson (2006) delineated the main contours of a trans-
national multi-institutional culture or meaning system. This multi-institutional setting forms
the basis for the construction and translation of transnational governance.
Following Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson (2006), institutions are defined as constitutive of
actors, interests, relations and meanings. With institutionalization, certain ways of being and
doing are progressively becoming taken for granted as natural. In Scott’s (2008) terms, they
are regulative as well as normative and cognitive. They form the “rules of the game” and thus
shape actions, as well as the assessments and evaluations of such actions and their outcomes.
This also means that institutions are reinforced as they form the basis for action (see Jepperson
1991).
Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson (2006) compared evolving and proliferating transnational reg-
ulations in several areas: accounting and auditing, standardization of industrial processes and
products, the open method of coordination within the EU, the UN global compact initiative
concerning corporate responsibility, public management standards, evaluation and ranking of
university and management education, competition regulation and certification of environ-
mental standards for forestry products. They found striking similarities among these processes
in terms of their institutional embeddedness. Moreover, the institutions involved were found
to drive regulatory activism and highly organized transnational governance.
Initially, transnational regulatory schemes were clearly based on, and developed with, an
expansive authority of modern scientific rationalization. Scientization has been shown to
frame transnational governance throughout the world (Drori et al. 2003; Drori and Meyer
2006). Guidelines, standards and assessment criteria are widely circulated and supported by
references to science. The proliferation of evidence-based models is another manifestation.
Second, transnational governance expands with marketization (Djelic 2006). In about
a century, market logics have moved from reflecting marginal ideas in a few liberal intellectual
centers to becoming a force that structures the world. Transnational governance was found to
be framed by and based on the idea of a market as the main arrangement for the allocation of
resources and services, even as the “natural” way to organize and structure human interactions
(Djelic 2006).
134  Handbook on theories of governance

Third, transnational governance was based on similar ways of assessing what is good
and bad, excellent or insufficient, expressed in ranking lists and prizes, public naming and
shaming, and the like. Boli (2006) named this moral rationalization as he showed how these
assessments were founded on a rationalized moral order that assumes common cognitive and
normative judgment criteria.
Finally, an emphasis on dialogue and deliberation formed a basis for all evolving transna-
tional governance schemes. Mörth (2006) showed how this development was intertwined with
transnationally evolving views of deliberative democracy that emphasize dialogue, deliber-
ation and the autonomy of participating actors. With this institutional development, we find
a widespread quest for accounts and information on which participants in this deliberation can
act, and thereby be invited to take part in the dialogue. Not only does this institutional devel-
opment help to intensify the quest for information but, in order for the deliberation to actually
form a dialogue, critical scrutiny and multiple perspectives on development are required.
To summarize, as transnational governance has expanded, new soft law schemes have
emerged. These schemes display striking similarities. The expansion and homogenization of
transnational governance schemes can be explained by their institutional embeddedness.

SELF-REINFORCING AND AMBIGUOUS PROCESSES

Transnational governance develops incrementally in multi-institutional and organized pro-

cesses. Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson (2006) identified three reinforcing spirals. A first spiral
is driven by distrust and a quest for trust. Power (1997, 2004) depicted how, in contemporary
risk society, a diffused distrust generates the need to set rules and monitor behavior to ensure
mutual trust. However, in the process of trying to build trust, it could easily become under-
mined because rules and auditing signal distrust, and this will further spur on monitoring and
regulation.
Governance and regulation are partly a matter of allocating responsibilities. As regulatory
and governance activities are organized, responsibilities become diffused and dispersed.
Furthermore, the movement towards soft regulation has a tendency to divert responsibility
away from rule setters and towards rule followers. This double blurring of responsibilities
may drive the need for regulation and governance still further and constitutes the second
self-reinforcing spiral.
A third self-reinforcing spiral revolves around the search for control. The transnational
world is, as described above, characterized by shifting and blurred boundaries, organizations
and processes. In a world where regulation is expanding, avoiding regulation is not the way
to seek control of one’s own domain. Rather, a more promising strategy is to become actively
involved in issuing and supporting a satisfactory regulatory scheme.
The above findings lead to the conclusion that transnational governance is process-driven
rather than interest-driven—not in the sense that interests are lacking, but in that interests
largely form endogenously in the processes. This partly follows from the main features of
transnational governance in the making that have been in focus above: the “soft law” nature of
regulation, the organized, multi-institutional and open-ended processes, and the transnational
structure in which they evolve.
 International relations theory  135

CONCLUSION AND FURTHER RESEARCH

Theories of governance are still largely described in terms of what they are not—what they
have formed in reaction against (exclusively state-centered views). While this reactive mode
of theory development has been extremely powerful, this way of defining theory may lead to
quite imprecise and open-ended definitions. One means of strengthening and clarifying analyt-
ical frameworks of governance is, instead, as emphasized in the Introduction in this Handbook,
to spell out the theoretical under-pinnings of the diverse group of theories that have come to
be assembled under the label “governance” and to describe the processes and mechanisms of
governance that are the primary focus of each such perspective. The research on transnational
governance described in this chapter has pointed to some main drivers behind the expansion
of transnational governance, and pointed to some common features. More empirical work may
serve to further specify the drivers, characteristics and implications of transnational govern-
ance. I will conclude this chapter by suggesting three important topics for a future research
agenda on transnational governance.
An initial pointer for further research would be to continue to build more systematic
descriptive and explanatory models of the expansion of transnational governance. Research
on transnational governance has largely been case-study-based. When such cases have been
compared, as by Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson (2006), common patterns of these processes
have been found that could form the basis for a more comprehensive framework and for
conclusions regarding the transnational landscape. This research framework would preferably
seek to model processes further and with data that allow for well-developed comparisons over
time, sectors and space, as a way to find out more systematically where, and with what conse-
quences, self-reinforcing processes of the various kinds described above play out.
Further research could also seek to develop models on the main characteristics of trans-
national governance. The studies and analyses referred to have repeatedly pointed to the
open-ended and ambiguous nature of transnational governance. Ambiguity was an important
topic of organization research in the 1970s (e.g. March and Olsen 1976). Observations in
studies of transnational governance can be further illuminated through this earlier work. Seen
in the framework of the seminal article by Cohen et al. (1972), the transnational landscape can
be characterized as an organized anarchy, as the landscape is characterized by problematic
preferences, unclear technology and fluid participation. A normative conclusion from the
research on transnational governance reviewed is that this ambiguity is unlikely to be elimi-
nated. Rather, efforts could be directed towards better understanding and management of the
ambiguous but organized processes. A “garbage-can-inspired” model of these processes may
be a first step in this direction, with the same ambition that Cohen et al. (1972) expressed at
the end of their seminal article: “The great advantage of trying to see garbage can phenomena
together as a process is the possibility that that process can be understood, that organizational
design and decision making can take account of its existence and that, to some extent, it can be
managed” (Cohen et al. 1972: 17).
A third line of research suggested by the transnational governance framework concerns
further developments in, and the dynamics of, transnational governance. The studies referred
to above have described transnational governance in the making—processes are open-ended
and may develop differently, depending on how global economic and political conditions
unfold. In a 2012 book chapter, Djelic and Sahlin reflected on the transnational governance
perspective and spelled out scenarios for how transnational governance might develop further
136  Handbook on theories of governance

with the recent economic and financial crisis. In the wake of this crisis, increased calls for
tighter regulations may, they argued, mean that soft transnational regulations turn into tighter
forms of governance and oversight at the national level. Another possibility is that transna-
tional governance will continue to expand along the lines described in this chapter. Further
historical and comparative studies may indicate future developments in, and challenges to,
transnational governance. They may also, on a more theoretical level, develop a framework
to show more clearly how developments of transnational governance intersect with develop-
ments of state-centered forms of governance.

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 PART II

BASIC THEORETICAL
CONCEPTS
12. Heterarchy
Karen Stephenson

PAN-HUMAN IMPERATIVES
Singular hierarchical governance worked moderately well when the world was large and flat
and humans were tethered to machines. That was before the digital domain mobilized infor-
mation and made our world small and über-connected. We have yet to fully embrace how this
relatively new digital landscape will change humanity, but I suspect it will rival anything the
Serengeti plains offered to our hominid ancestors. We need not look back millennia but only
to the last 100 years to read Durkheim’s vision of the world as a vast interconnected network
of institutions (Durkheim 1933). He was correct. Organizations have morphed into vast
networks or conglomerates. Durkheim did not have a name for it, but heterarchy is what it is
called (McCulloch 1945), and it comes with an innovative form of governance. Capitalizing
on this organizational structure may require a rethinking of our governance models and how
we understand institutional change.
Today, we are faced with not two but three competing pan-human imperatives. The first two
imperatives of place and social proximity have been the mainstays of human civilization for
millennia. People convene around hearths, in town halls or in city squares because they cannot
abandon that primordial need for intimacy and belonging. A third digital imperative arises
when we use “space” as a means for communicating or connecting at great distances. From
the dawn of humankind, “virtual” missives traveled via sound (voice, horns or percussive
drum beats) and sight (smoke signals). However, in the twenty-first century, a hybrid human
connection emerges using technology platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and
so on. This has dramatically changed the social landscape. The implications for how human
beings communicate and connect have yet to be fully appreciated or understood. The three
imperatives are detailed below:

● Society and economy give primacy to physical structures and artifacts (monuments,
buildings and city states). This territorial imperative is largely passive and rooted in place.
Ironically, little thought is given to “space” in a place. It’s not surprising, as most of us
don’t see the shape of space, but only the objects that occupy it. Walk into any call center,
computer center and workstation. What do you see? The tools have changed, to be sure,
but the actual layout of an office or a floor plan is not all that different from Bentham’s
late-eighteenth-century panopticon (which refers not only to the built environment but
to its governing philosophy). We delude ourselves into thinking that we work in a post-
modern, sexy-cool virtual world. Despite enabling technologies, we have advanced only
incrementally in our ability to substantially change place and the institutions that occupy it.
● A more reactive social imperative that has evolved for millennia is physical propinquity,
or proximity. People need people, and they need them to be close. Propinquity is a social
imperative that catalyzes our need to belong, and as a result we assemble in tribes, teams
and organizations. How tightly we are coupled in these organizational structures depends

140
 Heterarchy  141

on our social structure, which like the shape of space we typically cannot see. There is one
form of governing structure that is visible—that of hierarchy—but we know from research
that hierarchies are poor proxies for revealing social DNA (Stephenson 2011). Leaders
see head-counts; they cannot see the social landscape but for the Dilbertian cubicles1 in
their line of sight. If they can’t see how people are relationally connected, then they can’t
accurately value the person. This form of social DNA, called social capital, is quantifiable.
It is the missing link in fully valuing, and therefore governing, the human asset.
● More recently, a new digital imperative has emerged—crowd sourcing, where humans
virtually amass and connect in space. We connect with each other in a vast Milky Way of
virtual connections that is visually represented as a network and can be mathematically
measured. But, be warned, virtual chatter in collecting contacts (or, to use the colloquial
phrase, “friending”) is largely transactional noise and does not represent real dialogue or
connecting with true friends. Superficial transactions are akin to driving in traffic where
the rules of engagement are mutually agreed and generally well understood. There is value
that comes from that kind of mass connection. But another kind of treasure is locating
where the connective tissue of trust lies hidden in all that noise. Trust is an ancient and
sturdy form of connection that mitigates risk. If we naively mistake or attempt to substitute
technological connection for trust, then we do so at our peril.

BEYOND HIERARCHY

A growing sense of unease as to how to effectively govern global institutions is no better

demonstrated than in the Arab Spring of 2010. Self-immolation by a Tunisian jump-started
a conversation in the Twitter sphere, as people protested in Tahrir Square. Egyptians tweeted
to meet up. Unquestionably, there is dynamism in the digital domain that contrasts sharply
with a government’s presumption of perpetuity. The Egyptian government did topple, after
all. To truly live long and prosper among nations and tribes, different organizational blueprints
are required. Blueprints of the industrial complex (hierarchical governance) are centuries old
and still needed. But, as we witnessed in Egypt, we should inform and refresh our parochial
hierarchical concepts with the inevitable realities of meta-organizational networks and the
governance that comes with them.
To provide more of a theoretical context, definitions for organizational structures
may prove helpful. Those definitions are summarized in Table 12.1.

● A “market” is an organization consisting of collections of dyadic connections (two parties)

engaged in non-repetitive, disinterested transactions generally characterized as contracts.
● A hierarchy is a “chain” of command based in authoritative control with a well-identified
leadership. The exchanges that populate the hierarchical structure are generally routinized
and repetitive.
● A network is a connection between three or more people engaged in repetitive, interested (i.e.,
familiar) and asymmetric exchanges based in trust. Contracts are generally not necessary.
● A heterarchy is a connection between three or more hierarchies engaged in asymmetric,
repetitive and sustained collaborations. Participating hierarchies intermittently lead and
follow, suppressing a competitive drive in lieu of a collaborative ethos that benefits the
whole network.
142  Handbook on theories of governance

Table 12.1 Elementary structures and exchange rates

Organizational form ABCs of exchange Structure

Market Disinterested, non-repetitive transactions Collection of dyads
Hierarchy Routinization through a governing Chains of nodes
authority
Network Mutually interested, repetitive and The smallest network is three or more
asymmetric exchanges nodes linked in a triad
Heterarchy Mutually interested, collective governance The smallest heterarchy is three or more
characterized by asymmetric and hierarchies linked in a triadic network
asynchronous exchanges

We are compelled to evolve beyond familiar, traditional hierarchical forms of governance,

as attested by the Arab Spring. Most organizational failures result from the inability of gov-
ernments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and private sector firms to effectively
manage crises (natural or human-made). Rather than seamlessly working toward a desired
common outcome, “perverse outcomes” (unintended consequences) are spawned as multiple
organizations compete against each other rather than collaborate to achieve a higher collective
objective. Collaborating at this meta-organizational level requires the specialized structure
of heterarchy. The combinatorial properties that result from linking three or more hierar-
chies together are profound precisely because they reach for a collective good that no single
hierarchy could attain on its own. Implementing this innovative form of governance requires
a rethinking (and perhaps undoing) of traditional hierarchical leadership.

STRUCTURES VERSUS SCALE

Look around at your mammoth organizations. How did we get here? Most of us lament the
existence of “big government,” these great barrier reefs of red tape that famously tout “bigger
is better.” What if there were an iterative, underlying pattern governing the way governments
scale to gargantuan proportions?
What if there was a “structural” DNA at the root of “scale”? That is precisely what the
French anthropologist Levi-Strauss reasoned when investigating kinship structures in South
American tribes in the early twentieth century. He asserted that he was less interested in a 10
percent increase in a population of 300 million than when a two-person household becomes
a three-person household. In short, structure trumps scale. He called this nucleic structure
the “atom of kinship” (Levi-Strauss 1955, 1969), and it didn’t matter if it was based in bio-
logical or fictive lineages, as the cultural calculus was ultimately the same—political. The
scientific search for a verifiable atom of kinship resulted in disappointment, and the theory
was dismissed in the field of anthropology as more provocative than practical. But I think
Levi-Strauss was on to something; he was just looking in the wrong place at a special case.
The triad in physical and natural sciences is one of the strongest structures. What if there was
a genus of organization, and kinship was merely a species or a special case of a species? What
other species might populate this genus?
That’s where the three organizational species of markets, hierarchy and networks provide
us with a more complete answer. Historically, economists have held to the general belief that
hierarchy is an island of planned coordination in a sea of market relationships, a pristine par-
 Heterarchy  143

adise inhabited by vertically integrated tribes of employees (adapted from Richardson 1972).
Hierarchy was the logical high point of the civilized world, book-ended by markets, which
were considered to be the grand genesis of commerce. A network was a theoretical interloper,
often dismissed by economists as a mixed breed, a doomed hybrid. There was no place for
network in the pantheon of social theory. Those were the early days. Decades of theoretical
research coupled with the practical realities of social media have reasserted the importance of
networks and their relevance in cultural genesis. Networks are after all primordial; only later
did clans, lineages and hierarchical nation states develop sufficiently to trade their surpluses in
local, regional and global markets.
Ronald Coase’s (1937) classic paper on the nature of the firm (i.e., hierarchy) suggests
that firms and markets, while different organizational structures, nevertheless share common
transactional practices. The distinction, later amplified by Williamson (1976, 1985, 1993),
was based on the amount of knowledge contained in a transaction (“asset specificity”).
Disinterested, non-repetitive (one-off) exchanges occur as market transactions (simple con-
tracts). The structure of this exchange is a dyad (two people linked together in an exchange).
Dyads ground most of our assumptions about market economies, personal relationships,
contract law and marriage.
Exchanges that entail greater uncertainty (and therefore a proportional amount of asset
specificity) are best sheltered within the firm as a way to mitigate greater risk. Theories of “the
firm” were conceived, and characterizations of its hierarchical infrastructure were developed.2
A chain of command is the overarching structure in hierarchy, as authority holds its linkages
together.
Only much later did other researchers argue (Stephenson and Zelen 1989; Krackhardt 1990;
Powell 1990; Stephenson 1990) for the existence of another organizational structure—a network.
Networks aren’t dyads (as in markets) and they aren’t exclusively chains (as in hierarchies).
They begin as triads, built from adding one more person to a dyad. A profound mathematical
principle is revealed when this operation occurs. Adding one more person or “node” to a dyad
doubles the number of linkages and introduces the first “indirect” link in the network structure
(i.e., not all nodes are equally connected). It is this indirect link that introduces redundancy
and message distortion. This is what Levi-Strauss witnessed when tribal leaders “claimed”
lineage connections that were utterly fictional but nevertheless served political ends. Network
triads modulate greater uncertainty, exceeding hierarchical limitations with aplomb. Nuanced
and capable of asynchronous and asymmetric exchanges, networks deftly elude the visible
hand of hierarchy (Chandler 1977) and the invisible hand of the market (Smith [1776] 1993).
Trust moderates the “asset specificity” of the network linkages and presents one of the most
effective means for mitigating risk.
Acknowledging heterarchy as a fourth organizational species is recently noted (McCulloch
1945; Stark 1999; Stephenson 2004, 2008, 2009). Heterarchies are a precise amalgamation of
networks and hierarchies. Instead of analyzing the links connecting person-nodes in a network,
a heterarchy is made up of hierarchies linked together in a network. A node is not a person
anymore, but a singular hierarchy. Waving away heterarchy as simply a massive network
“scaled up” might be attempted, but this overgeneralization dismisses the crucial subtleties
of tightly coupled hierarchical networks embedded in the larger heterarchy. In the same way
that a triad introduces the first indirect link in a three-person network, a heterarchy introduces
its first indirect link in a three-hierarchy network. Therefore, a basic heterarchy is composed
of three or more different organizations (hierarchies), each with its own raison d’être, where
144  Handbook on theories of governance

no single hierarchy is privileged over the others. Networked together, these hierarchies share
a common collective objective that necessitates shared governance, as no single hierarchy
could achieve the collective objective on its own. An example of a five-hierarchy heterarchy
of the United States intelligence agencies is shown in Figure 12.1.

WORLDS COLLIDING

Note: Organizational hierarchies are depicted as cylindrical silos, and the collective and collaborative actions are
depicted as the process network between the cylinders.

Figure 12.1 Heterarchy of the big five intelligence agencies in the United States
government

We know about heterarchies because of their spectacular failures, but heterarchies are not
dysfunctional by nature. They devolve into a group of dysfunctional hierarchies when a leader
of a single hierarchical entity naively or knowingly privileges his or her interests over those
of the others. Said differently, leaders mistakenly assume that their special interests are the
only things that matter. This is largely due to how they learned their tradecraft by practicing as
serial chief executive officers of single hierarchies.
Heterarchies require much more than a coalition of the willing; they demand a well-designed
and coordinated network to ensure the alignment of tasks across multiple and, at times, occa-
sionally competing organizations. Not recognizing the primacy of this network structure in
heterarchies is precisely why the most well-intentioned leader will be derailed by segmentary
politics. For example, teams or departments are created not from the ground up, but from
sub-units of existing segments, mimicking cellular division. As smaller “chiefdoms” prolif-
erate, they compete against each other, calling a truce only when a larger chiefdom threatens
their mutual existence (Sahlins 1961). For example, consider a government division where
one team jockeys for position with another, one department attacks another to protect its
budget, and the overarching division as a whole fights other divisions to defend its turf. In
these systems there is no internal structure or infrastructure to join up the system as a whole;
it is simply a collection of hierarchies or vertically “integrated” silos. As such, segmentary
 Heterarchy  145

systems are never more (and often much less) than the sum of their parts, calculating power by
comparing and contrasting their stock, status or budgets with those of other segments. If push
comes to shove, they will cannibalize other parts of the organization in order to preserve their
part (Douglas 1986). This ruthless survival tableau describes segmentary politics. If leaders
could step back and see the whole network of interacting organizations instead of only their
portion, then no one would have to die, make amends, or bear the whole brunt of the blame.
An example of segmentary politics in healthcare was exposed in 2014, when the U.S.
military healthcare system experienced an alarmingly high number of “never events” (fatal-
ities which are potentially preventable). The healthcare system is organized as a coalition of
the willing and composed of four major players: the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and the
Department of Defense (DoD). When certain “never events” were revealed in a New York
Times exposé, each leader of the member hierarchy blamed the others, when in fact forensic
analysis revealed that refusal to share patient data across the heterarchy was what had led to
the fatalities. As a former Army policy officer said, “Why should the Army safety system
want to play with DoD? Because then I have less control over my data, less control over my
kingdom, and potentially DoD is going to tell me what to do” (LaFraniere and Lehren 2014:
32, emphasis added). His words were taken straight from a page in the playbook of segmentary
politics (Sahlins 1963).
Heterarchies are a different species altogether. Member hierarchies within the heterarchy
will suppress the killer instinct in lieu of collaboration with others because they understand
that, if the higher objective is achieved, then they all stand to benefit, and not at the cost
of a peer. By leveraging crosscutting collaboration to solve crosscutting problems, greater
systemic benefits can be achieved. An example of a successful healthcare heterarchy is sum-
marized in Sobczak (2014). Wisconsin hospital administrators recognized that “coalitions of
the willing” in managing re-admissions would break down once collaboration clashed with
the individual hierarchical chains of command in participating organizations. So they designed
a sustainable heterarchy by: (1) rewriting policy to account for institutional integration and
collaboration; (2) designing the collaborative network to act like a scaffolding and support
the integration of the heterarchical structure; and (3) incorporating individual incentives into
individual performance metrics to specifically target lateral collaborative behaviors.
Heterarchies are optimally designed for solving problems that span across large swaths of
organizations. Most large conglomerates are coalitions of the willing encouraging collabora-
tion up to a point, until collaboration clashes with the particularistic interests articulated by
the leaders of hierarchical organizations. A few ways to ensure sustainable collaboration in
heterarchies are to: (1) measure them; and (2) manage them through international policy.

● Measurement: There are a variety of methods for researching and describing heterar-
chies. At the very least, cataloguing heterarchies and describing their characteristics is
a good place to start. Social network analysis (SNA, sometimes abbreviated as ONA for
organizational network analysis) provides an additional measurement tool. Social network
analysis is best defined as the practice of mapping and measuring a network of social
relationships. A network is depicted as a set of nodes, representing individual actors, and
edges, representing the relationships between the individuals and usually drawn as lines
connecting the nodes to each other. A network diagram can represent friendship, kinship,
market relations and organizational behavior. Critics of social network analysis charged
that it was a technique in search of a theory (for a review, see Stephenson and Zelen
146  Handbook on theories of governance

Table 12.2 Selected heterarchies

Date Primary location Name (purpose) Member hierarchies

2001 Washington, DC, United States U.S. Pentagon (pre- and 12 agencies
post-9/11 analysis)
2002 East Midlands, U.K. Northampton (domestic 34 member organizations
violence)
2004 Curacao Police Department and 5 organizations
Department of Justice
(corruption)
2005 United States Army supply chain (post-Iraq 14 member organizations
forensic analysis)
2007 United States Coast Guard (post-Katrina 5 sectors
hurricane)
2008 Global United Nations (cross-agency 35 agencies
leadership and collaboration)
2009 Nottinghamshire, U.K. Mansfield (local strategic 23 member organizations
partnerships)

1989). This is partially true, as social network analysis is a young practice in its infancy.
However, the combinatorial properties of heterarchies elude researchers and represent an
exciting new area of research for social network analysts to test their theories. Here is an
opportunity for practitioners and researchers to meld technique with social theory. Table
12.2 is a selection from a larger catalogue of heterarchies collected and analyzed (using
social network analysis) by the author. Space constraints prohibit further elaboration of
case studies, but the reader is referred to the reference material for additional supporting
examples (Stephenson 2008).
● Policy: The Sherman Act of 1890 and the Clayton Act and Federal Trade Commission Act
of 1914 were developed to regulate the conduct of business corporations. Their alleged
purpose was “protecting” competition based on the belief that a free, unregulated market
would inevitably lead to the establishment of coercive monopolies. The writer Ayn Rand
(1962) and other laissez-faire economists argued that, if any coercive monopolies existed,
they were due to government intervention, not the lack of it. Antitrust is now iconic and
ironic; it insulates hierarchies from collaborating as effective heterarchies. That’s why
the United States government broke up the AT&T monopoly in the early 1980s with one
hand but 30 years later cobbled together the Affordable Care Act in 2010 with the other
hand. Both are conglomerates; neither is a heterarchy. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill
was a human-made collision of special interests, which resulted in a natural disaster of
epic proportions. It is the largest oil spill on record. Multiple global organizations such
as Halliburton, British Petroleum and varied insurers were locked in dyadic (two-way)
contractual partnerships when an explosion occurred on a deep sea oil rig in the Gulf of
Mexico claiming 11 lives. In a diaspora of abdicating responsibility, organizations passed
the blame for the resulting 100 million gallons of oil spewing into the gulf because they
were prevented from collaborating as a heterarchy largely as a result of antitrust legislation.
Consequently, leaders were blinded to the fact that their kingdom (i.e., their hierarchy) was
part of a heterarchy—a larger network of interacting organizations.
 Heterarchy  147

CONCLUDING REMARKS

There is a growing sense of unease regarding the governance of our global institutions.
Canvassing the theoretical landscape reveals a deficit when addressing the structural prop-
erties of heterarchies. It is difficult to recognize heterarchical structure much less manage it,
because our theories and policies are yoked to nineteenth-century social theory and norms. If
we keep applying these concepts to twenty-first-century governance challenges, force-fitting
a square peg into a round hole as it were, then we deserve the fate these failed heterarchies
have demonstrated (Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, the
Euro crisis of 2015). What is urgently needed is a hard look with fresh eyes at our organiza-
tional taxonomies. Heterarchy is a fundamentally different organizational structure and logical
endpoint for meta-organizational governance. Heterarchy unyokes us from hierarchy and
provides more complex but more complete governing solutions. Heterarchy may yet prove to
be the antidote for outdated hierarchical policies that perhaps we could and should shrug off.

NOTES
1. This is commonly referred to as “hierarchical planning” by architects and designers.
2. Management theorists put their imprimatur on the debate with theories based on hybrid organi-
zational forms and derivative managerial approaches, such as the “U” and “M” organization and
Theories X and Y (McGregor 1957) and Z (Ouchi 1981) respectively.

REFERENCES
Chandler, A. (1977), The Visible Hand, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Coase, R. (1937), ‘The nature of the firm’, Economica, 4 (16), 386–405.
Douglas, M. (1986), How Institutions Think, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Durkheim, E. (1933), The Division of Labor in Society, New York: Free Press.
Krackhardt, D. (1990), ‘Assessing the political landscape: Structure, cognition and power in organiza-
tions’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 35 (2), 342–369.
LaFraniere, S. and A. Lehren (2014), ‘In military care, a pattern of errors but not scrutiny’, New York
Times, 28 June, 32.
Levi-Strauss, C. (1955), ‘The mathematics of man’, International Social Science Bulletin, 6 (4), 581–590.
Levi-Strauss, C. (1969), Elementary Structures of Kinship, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
McCulloch, W. (1945), ‘A heterarchy of values determined by the topology of nervous nets’, Bulletin of
Mathematical Biophysics, 7 (2), 89–93.
McGregor, D. (1957), ‘The human side of enterprise’, Management Review, November, American
Management Association.
Ouchi, W. (1981), Theory Z, New York: Addison-Wesley.
Powell, W. (1990), ‘Neither market nor hierarchy: Network forms of organization’, Research in
Organizational Behavior, 12, 295–336.
Rand, A. (1962), ‘Antitrust: The rule of unreason’, Objectivist Newsletter, 1.
Richardson, G.B. (1972), ‘The organization of industry’, Economic Journal, 82, 883–896.
Sahlins, M. (1961), ‘The segmentary lineage: An organization for predatory expansion’, American
Anthropologist, 63 (2), 322–345.
Sahlins, M. (1963), ‘Poor man, rich man, big man, chief: Political types in Melanesia and Polynesia’,
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5 (3), 285–303.
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148  Handbook on theories of governance

Sobczak, S. (2014), ‘Wisconsin hospitals tackle readmissions with inside/outside, macro/micro strategy’,
Readmission News, 3 (6), 1–3, http://​www​.wha​.org/​pdf/​Rea​dmissions0​614Sobczak​.pdf.
Stark, D. (1999) ‘Heterarchy: Distributing authority and organizing diversity’, in J. Clippinger (ed.),
The Biology of Business: Decoding the Natural Laws of Enterprise, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass,
pp. 153–180.
Stephenson, K. (1990), ‘The emergence of virtual groups’, Ethnology, 29 (4), 279–296.
Stephenson, K. (2004), ‘Toward a theory of government’, Demos, April.
Stephenson, K. (2008), ‘Rethinking governance: Conceptualizing networks and their implications for
new mechanisms of governance based on reciprocity’, in T. Williamson (ed.), The Handbook of
Knowledge-based Policing: Current Conceptions and Future Directions, San Francisco, CA: Wiley,
pp. 323–340.
Stephenson, K. (2009), ‘Neither hierarchy nor network: An argument for heterarchy’, People and
Strategy, 32 (1), 4–13.
Stephenson, K. (2011), ‘From Tiananmen to Tahrir: Knowing one’s place in the 21st century’,
Organizational Dynamics, 40 (4), 281–291.
Stephenson, K. and M. Zelen (1989), ‘Rethinking centrality’, Social Networks, 11 (1), 1–37.
Williamson, O. (1976), Markets and Hierarchies, New York: Free Press.
Williamson, O. (1985), Economic Institutions of Capitalism, New York: Free Press.
Williamson, O. (1993), ‘Transaction cost economics and organization theory’, Industrial and Corporate
Change, 2 (1), 107–156.
13. Network
Patrick Kenis

The concept of network has an elective affinity (in the sense of Max Weber’s
Wahlverwandtschaft; see Baehr 2002) with that of governance; both concepts are different but
together, and in specific contexts, produce a chemistry which leads to greater insights into the
functioning of social systems. It is from this perspective that the present chapter is designed.
Rather than providing a comprehensive treatment of the entire network theoretical field, it con-
centrates on when and how the network concept is relevant for improving our understanding of
the governance concept and how it can thus contribute to formulating theories of governance.
It is interesting to note that the history of the social network approach has developed in
a similar manner to that of the current development process of the governance approach
(something to which the present Handbook editors clearly intend to contribute). The former
originates from the seminal idea that it is important to study patterns of relationships which
connect social actors; this was an idea that was first explicitly formulated around the turn of
the twentieth century by the German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918). It was, however,
only after the 1930s that numerous lines of research for studying networks were developed.
Between the 1930s and the 1970s, the study of social networks expanded into both different
countries and fields of application. In his book The Development of Social Network Analysis,
Freeman (2004) demonstrates that, “by 1970, then, sixteen centers of social network research
had appeared. With the development of each, knowledge and acceptance of the structural
approach grew. Still, however, none of these centers succeeded in providing a generally rec-
ognized paradigm for the social network approach to social science research.” Currently, the
network perspective has gone beyond being simply a metaphor and has become a systemic
way of studying how a society interrelates with its individuals, communities and organiza-
tions, all based on its own theoretical statements, methods and research findings (see Rainie
and Wellman 2014 for a recent and excellent overview).
As has been indicated, there is an interesting parallel in the development of the field of
social networks and that of governance. The Introduction in this Handbook clearly demon-
strates that the governance concept is characterized by numerous lines of research that have
developed over the previous decades. The question addressed in this chapter is how insights
from the network approach can help and contribute to the development of a distinct govern-
ance approach, which in turn can contribute to the formulation of theories of governance.
The most fundamental characteristic of the network approach came about through the
shift from atomistic explanations in regard to independent case attributes to the phenom-
enal explanation which examines relationships among a system of inter-dependent actors
(Wellman and Berkowitz 1988). This fundamental shift entails a change in theoretical con-
structs from monadic variables (attributes of actors) to dyadic variables (relations between
actors), which constitute binary relationships among a set of actors. Dyadic connections that
are linked together form a field or system of interdependencies that is called a network. This
gives network theorizing a holistic or contextualized flavor in which explanations are sought
not only from the actors themselves but in their network environments as well; this process

149
150  Handbook on theories of governance

may include elements which are unknown to the actor but are nonetheless linked to the actor
through these connections.
Rather than center attention on predefined, formal or institutional structures, the network
approach conceptualizes any type of social system as a set of present and absent relationships
between dyads of actors. The type of relationships considered can be of any type such as
formal, informal, referral, exchange, communication and so on. Therefore, the development,
functioning and effects of the networks are at the heart of the network approach.
The modern governance approach, unlike the classic state-centric view, emphasizes the
importance of co-production, self-regulation and seeing governance as the intermediary
between market and hierarchy. Given this modern approach, it might be tempting to conflate
the network and governance approach. We consider this, however, not to be the most produc-
tive way to combine these two concepts; rather than conflating them, we will demonstrate how
the network approach can amplify the operationalization and understanding of the governance
approach. As a starting point we use the governance concept as defined in the Introduction in
this Handbook: “governance … as the process of steering society and the economy through
collective action and in accordance with common goals” (Introduction to this volume).
The network approach can best be outlined as a number of features, which have been
described in Freeman’s The Development of Social Network Analysis (2004) and in Provan et
al.’s (2007) “Interorganizational Networks at the Network Level: A Review of the Empirical
Literature on Whole Networks.” It is these features that become instructive in the further
development of the governance approach. Some liberty has been taken in arranging and refor-
mulating the features as originally formulated in order to focus on the applicable fit for the
governance discussion:

1. Links among actors are important.

2. Data that record social relations between different actors need to be collected and analyzed.
3. Reveal and display the pattern of links by employing graphic imagery.
4. Describe and explain patterns using mathematical and computational models.
5. Study the governance of collaboration in goal-directed networks.

The first feature will be presented in more detail, since it can be considered as the core of
network thinking. Following that, features 2 to 4 will be discussed as a group and their use-
fulness for the governance approach will hence be demonstrated. The fifth feature will also be
discussed in more detail, since it directs attention to the issue of a governance of collaboration,
as will be demonstrated. Whereas the first four features relate primarily to serendipitous net-
works, the last feature is related to so-called goal-directed networks; the study of goal-directed
networks has recently been attracting increased attention. In each of these sections the basis of
the network feature will be described, followed by a discussion on how the feature can instruct
the understanding and conceptualization of the governance concept.

LINKS AMONG ACTORS ARE IMPORTANT

As already mentioned, the most fundamental differentiator of the network approach, in

comparison to other approaches, is the significance it attributes to links between actors as the
starting point in the social structure analysis.
 Network  151

Once again, though the importance of social relationships between actors (and their ante-
cedents and consequences) in the study of social structure had already been demonstrated and
studied by the end of the twentieth century, the real breakthrough of this perspective took place
after the seminal article by the American sociologist Mark Granovetter, “Economic Action
and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” was published in 1985. Granovetter’s
starting point was the discovery of a middle ground between the “undersocialized” view of
an atomized actor in classical and neoclassical economics and the “oversocialized” view of
an agency-free actor in structural-functional sociology. In this middle ground, he stresses the
significance of “concrete personal relations and structures (or ‘networks’) of such relations”
in guiding social and economic action and outcomes (Granovetter 1985: 490). He also intro-
duced a great degree of both precision and conceptualization in the study of patterns created
by economic and social actions taken by networks consisting of social relationships among
actors. The more than 47 000 citations of this seminal article is a clear proof of the impact that
this idea of the importance of social relations has had on subsequent empirical investigations
(Google Scholar tracking data). These citations include research such as the study of company
survival and financing decisions (e.g., Uzzi 1997), the choice of inter-organizational partners
and governance choices (e.g., Gulati 1995) and the diffusion of governance practices (e.g.,
Davis and Greve 1997) among many others (see Granovetter’s (2005) own review of this
literature in “The Impact of Social Structure on Economic Outcomes” and many other reviews
of this literature). Granovetter’s articles and Woody Powell’s “Neither Market Nor Hierarchy”
(2003) were the founding fathers for a new field which is referred to as “collaborative govern-
ance” (see for example Vangen et al. 2015). Collaborative governance alludes to the concept
of describing patterns in which actors of very different profiles (public, for-profit, social,
community, etc.) are brought together to govern society and manage assets in collaborative
arrangements. The fields of public policy and political science have especially been inspired
by the relational approach. Sørensen and Torfing (2009) demonstrate that there are different
competing explanations of the recent surge of governance; what these explanations all have in
common is that they consider governance a new and increasingly common mode for accom-
plishing tasks.
Although the network approach has been instrumental in the development of the focus
on collaborative governance, this approach itself does not focus heavily on network govern-
ance as a strategic response, but rather on how relational structures within a policy-making
context can be both described and analyzed (for a first such conceptual attempt see Kenis and
Schneider 1991). The network approach provides a well-developed set of instruments to do so,
as will become clear in the subsequent descriptions, which brings us to the importance of the
next three features of a network approach.

ANALYZING, VISUALIZING AND EXPLAINING THE

PATTERNING OF LINKS

While the network approach has been theoretically instructive in guiding our attention to the
importance of relationship structure among social entities, it has also been equally impressive
in developing an entire catalogue of methods for studying the structures of relationships
themselves. The network concept, comparable to many other concepts in social sciences,
is still very often used metaphorically, but network analysis scholars have also developed
152  Handbook on theories of governance

an extensive field with a broad toolset to systematically collect and analyze network data.
Excellent book-length reviews of the classic network methods can be found in the volumes by
Wasserman and Galaskiewicz (1994) and Brandes and Erlebach (2005).
The three features—analyzing, visualizing and explaining the patterning of links—can be
illustrated using a study which helps to demonstrate their importance; it is also instructive in
how these features can aid the understanding and conceptualization of the governance concept.
For further details, the illustrating study is entitled “The Community Structure of the European
Network of Interlocking Directorates 2005–2010” (Heemskerk et al. 2013); it examines to
what extent Europe is getting closer from a corporate governance perspective.
The basic data in a network approach consist on the one hand of units (frequently termed
nodes)—which can be individuals, groups, regions, organizations or institutions—and on the
other hand of relationships (frequently termed links). Links can also be of many varied types
such as information exchange, trust, exchange of resources and the like. A social network
containing units and relationships should not be equated with a social group; in a social group,
there is a feeling of identity and belonging shared by its members, who tend to obey certain
rules and norms. By contrast, a network is a category of actors bound by a process of interac-
tion among themselves.
Networks are usually represented by data matrices and resulting diagrams where the units
are represented by points and relationships. Depending on whether or not they have a direc-
tion, these relationship lines will be diagramed with or without arrowheads. In the work of
Heemskerk et al. (2013), the nodes are European firms or, more specifically, the most recently
established European firms as listed in the Eurofirst top 300 (according to market capitaliza-
tion in the FTSE Developed Europe Index). The type of social relations linking the different
firms (nodes) studied here is termed interlocks; for example, when two boards share the same
director, it is said that there is an interlock. Multiple interlocks are also possible, in which at
least two directors of a board sit together on another board.
Once the mentioned data have been collected, they can be analyzed in different ways. In
the example presented, two graphs can be derived: one in which two directors are connected
if they sit on the same board and another in which two boards are connected if they share
a common director.
On the basis of these graphs, one can perform several mathematical computations: network
density (the ratio between the number of links present and the number of links in the complete
graph), distance (measured by describing the average path length in the network), diameter
(maximum length among the shortest paths), the clustering coefficient (the propensity to
form triangles that show transitivity in the network connectivity), centrality (identifying the
most important node within a graph) and so on. There is no room to treat all the details and
implications of these computational analyses, but it is clear that the network approach offers
an extensive toolbox to describe and analyze the structure of relational systems in great detail.
The article by Heemskerk et al. (2013) is thus able to conclude that, among many other
things, the network of interlocking boards in Europe is increasing and that this increase is not
confined to the national network. Rather, it includes an increasing number of links between
firms with different European domiciles: genuine European board interlocks.
Another attractive feature of the network approach is its use of graphic imagery. Being able
to draw networks, including their properties, helps not only to communicate the data but also
to explore patterns of relationships or even to explain relationships (see Brandes et al. 1999).
Graphical displays of policy networks are particularly attractive, since they enable authors to
 Network  153

display, in a compact manner, the relevant actors in a network, how they are related to each
other and what the overall structure looks like. Sociograms were early companions of social
network analysis but received surprisingly little attention during the subsequent decades.
However, since then, easy access to quality computing and graphic equipment has revived
a now rapidly growing interest in sociograms. In order to illustrate the use of sociograms, one
of the (many) visualizations is displayed in Figure 13.1.

Note: The size of a node is proportional to the square root of the number of companies in that sector; the thickness
of an edge is proportional to the number of interlocks it represents.
Source: Heemskerk et al. (2013).

Figure 13.1 Board interlocks among sectors in 2005 (left) and 2010 (right)

Figure 13.1 illustrates one of the general conclusions of Heemskerk et al. (2013), namely an
increase of interlocking boards in Europe. The sector’s graph density increased from 0.77
to 0.87 between 2005 and 2010, which indicates that the network is not segmented between
sectors but is, in fact, a basis for a broad European business community across sectors.
Apart from these more general conclusions, such visualizations draw attention to other
phenomena. For example, it becomes clear that the strength of several important links from the
bank sector to other sectors has become weaker (as shown by the diminishing thickness of the
respective edges). The utilities segment, on the other hand, seems to be increasing in strength.
As illustrated above, the network approach employs an impressive analytical toolbox to
collect, analyze, describe and explain patterns of relationships as well as their subsequent out-
comes. It is clear that these tools can be very useful in the study of governance. The example
presented has been primarily chosen for its depth and breadth in using network analytical
tools to study tendencies such as whether or not—and how—European firms are becoming
economically closer to one another. At the same time, it is also a good example of how the
concept can be applied to the concrete study of governance. The study shows that a European
corporate elite is in the making and strengthening over time, while the political project of
European unification is simultaneously receiving further critique. This is a key observation to
draw alongside Heemskerk et al. (2013)’s study; the fact is, the corporate European network
154  Handbook on theories of governance

is becoming less hierarchic and more equally distributed. The network seems to depend
progressively less on particular firms, persons and communities. Rather, it is shifting towards
a genuine European network where well-connected European firms do away with their former
strong ties in national business communities. Based on data from social relations as well as the
use of network tools in analyzing, visualizing and explaining, this example decisively illus-
trates that research endeavors can contribute substantially to modern insights into governance.

STUDYING THE GOVERNANCE OF COLLABORATION IN

GOAL-DIRECTED NETWORKS
Network scholars (such as Granovetter, Powell and Provan; for a historical perspective see
also Raab and Kenis 2009; Vangen et al. 2015) have contributed to advancing “collaborative
governance” as a way in which decisions are made in contemporary societies. In the previous
section, we demonstrated how traditional network analysis tools help to describe, analyze and
visualize these relational structures. More recently it has become clear, however, that these
relational structures not only result from serendipitous processes but often also result from
a conscious decision to install goal-directed networks. Furthermore, rather than focusing on
the advantage or disadvantage of the design choice compared to other possible designs (such
as market, hierarchy, government, etc.), scholars working within a network approach tradition
were those who also shifted from the study of “collaborative governance” to the study of “gov-
erning collaborations.” Rather than simply considering collaborative governance as an answer
to the often considered problems associated with traditional forms of governance (for a critical
discussion, see Sørensen and Torfing 2014), a network approach directs the attention to the
study of governing collaborations. The study investigates how specific cases of governance
develop, function and perform, which is accomplished by focusing on how the governance,
leadership and management of relationships between the actors involved are structured. It is
the network approach which has been instrumental in advancing an empirically based and
critical understanding of the internal mechanics of collaborative governance instances. As
such, the approach is capable of contributing to discussions on effectiveness (along different
dimensions such as efficiency, efficacy, legitimacy, etc.) and thus helping contribute to the
deeper understanding of one of the most fashionable political science terms in the world
(Sørensen and Torfing 2014).
The network approach logically studies how to govern collaborations by focusing on the
presence and absence of actors within goal-directed networks and the present and absent links
between these given actors. Once again, it is the relational structure which helps to better
explain the outcomes of these structures rather than focusing on the properties of these actors.
Provan and Milward’s (1995) widely cited study of four community mental health systems
provides a good example of such an approach. First, they argued that the provision of effective
mental health is a clear case of collaborative governance (mental health service systems in four
U.S. cities, each consisting of approximately 35 organizations). They then went on to study
the network governance (or what was previously referred to as the governing of the collabora-
tion) of the four networks. One of the conclusions was that network effectiveness can best be
explained by the structure of relationships among the actors. Integrated networks coordinated
centrally through a single core agency are more likely to be effective for the outcomes they
examined. This seminal article investigating the effectiveness of a collaborative governance
 Network  155

case illustrates how, when studying the internal structure and dynamics, a network approach
can be inferred. Since the publication of this article in 1995, the study of governing collabora-
tions has been developed as a separate field in and of itself.
Three of the most important aspects which have been researched from a network perceptive
in studying goal-directed networks and which might be relevant in contributions to the devel-
opment of governance theories are: structure, process and actors (see Vangen et al. 2015).
Focus on the structure of collaboration directs our attention to asking questions about the
actors involved—and how they are interconnected—for the purpose of the collaboration. This
information produces the type of insights we have explained before (in the context of describ-
ing serendipitous networks): it clarifies who is able to set the collaborative agenda, who may
make important decisions and who may have resources, power and legitimate authority to act.
A focus on the collaboration process suggests methods of communicating, sharing responsi-
bility and taking decisions. The network approach as it relates to governing collaborations pro-
duces ample evidence on the different forms and shapes that these processes can take as well
as their related outcomes. The method frequency and the method of communication among
the partners in the collaboration have obvious influences. For example, some processes will
encourage partners to share information, whereas others will hinder active communication.
Finally, a focus on the actors is crucial to any analysis of the governance of collaboration
from a network perspective. This perspective assumes that actors will direct, coordinate and
allocate resources towards the collaborative venture. Provan and Kenis (2008) have argued
that much depends on whether the actors are part of an “open” structure (what they call
participant-governed networks/shared governance) where all partners are equally involved in
the process of governance, or whether the network is governed by a “lead organization” or a
“network administrative organization” (NAO). Normally representatives of the “lead organ-
ization” or NAO gain greater legitimacy to direct, coordinate and allocate resources for the
activities of the network.
This discussion will not elaborate further on the above-mentioned arguments, but it should
have become clear that network-related conceptualization (structure, process and actors) of
the governance of collaboration is capable of capturing the complexity that underpins modern
governance structures. From such a perspective, it is key to pay attention to the structure, pro-
cesses and actors in order to direct, coordinate and allocate resources for governance as well
as to account for its activities.

CONCLUSION

As demonstrated, there is clear elective affinity between the concept of governance and the
network concept as has been developed in the last 50 years. Given the different developments
of these two fields, we advise not conflating both concepts but rather analyzing how they can
enforce each other. In this chapter, we started from the network perspective to demonstrate
how that perspective can contribute to the development of governance theories.
If we start from a definition of governance as the process of steering society and the
economy through collective action and in accordance with common goals then it should have
become clear from the discussion that network tools and concepts are helpful for a better
understanding of the structure and dynamics of systems of governance.
156  Handbook on theories of governance

Whether governance is studied as a serendipitous structure or as a case of a goal-directed

network, both situations offer a rich set of tools and concepts which are valuable for describ-
ing and analyzing concrete instances of governance. The outcomes of such analyses can
potentially contribute to important elements within the theory of governance. The advantage
of the network perspective is that it is initially insensitive to specific structures or the role of
specific actors (like the role of government) but rather focuses on structures, processes and
actors and their respective configurations (see also Ahuja et al. 2012). A network approach
can even be seen as beneficial for analyzing a future which is “fragmented, distributed or con-
strained” (Introduction to this volume). Thus, this approach can contribute to issues which are
of paramount importance in the governance literature, such as better decision-making, more
quickly responding to new information, provision of better coordination, faster dissemination
of important information, less waste, cleaner and fairer operations, cultivation of trust through
transparency, more efficient mobilization of expertise, confrontation of stakeholder interests
in important asset information, and so on. The network approach certainly does not give all
the answers to these important questions, but it should have become clear that it can contribute
greatly to a better understanding of governance.

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14. Public participation
Kathryn S. Quick and John M. Bryson

Public participation in governance involves the direct involvement – or indirect involvement

through representatives – of concerned stakeholders in decision-making about policies, plans
or programs in which they have an interest. Stakeholders are persons, groups or organizations
that may influence or be affected by policy decisions (Freeman 2010) or place a claim on
an organization’s or other entity’s attention, resources or outputs (Bryson 2004). Through
public participation, stakeholders may interact with government agencies, political leaders,
nonprofit organizations and business organizations that create or implement public policies
and programs. While participation may be limited to discrete acts (e.g., a town hall meeting
or citizen survey) or described by a set of practices (e.g., convening public hearings or other
types of consultation processes), participation more generally is the process of engagement in
governance.
In democracies, citizens are presumed to be important stakeholders in that they are able
to participate either directly or indirectly through elected representatives in the formation,
adoption and implementation of the laws and policies that affect them. Public participation
thus is a fundamental part of the public–government relationship in democracies (Roberts
2004; Jacobs et al. 2009; Bryson et al. 2013). The context of public participation in gov-
ernance is broader than this relationship, however. Governance encompasses formal and
informal processes of decision-making and management of domains of collective community
interest or concern (Kooiman 2003; Bevir 2013). It occurs through broad networks that often
include public agencies but are not exclusive to them. The traditional responsibilities, efforts
and effects of government are increasingly diffused across constantly changing, networked
assemblages of government agencies, nonprofits, businesses and other entities (Goldsmith
and Eggers 2004; Agranoff 2007; Provan and Kenis 2008). As governance has moved beyond
government, so too have the scope and need for public participation (Osborne 2010; Bryson et
al. 2014; Morgan and Cook 2014). Owing to space limitations, we focus primarily on public
participation in connection with government activities but invite readers to extend these frame-
works and critiques to other contexts for participation in governance. Despite a widespread
expectation for public participation in governance, practical and theoretical debates surround
its implementation. Key concerns include the following: what constitutes legitimate and useful
public participation; the relationships of diversity with representation and inclusion; the nature
and appropriate role of different kinds of knowledge and expertise in participation; and the
challenge of designing participation processes that are well adapted to their context. In this
chapter, we explore the theories that illuminate these tensions, prefaced by a brief summary of
the relationship of public participation with other key concepts in governance and an explora-
tion of what is at stake in doing public participation well.

158
 Public participation  159

DEFINITION AND SALIENCE OF PUBLIC PARTICIPATION

Public participation intersects with numerous other key concepts in governance developed
elsewhere in this Handbook. Ensuring the accountability and transparency of government is
a common motivation for public participation. Representation, power and authority – who
is represented, how much influence they have (legitimate or otherwise) and what tactics can
be used to address exclusion – are central, abiding concerns in the quality and legitimacy of
public participation processes (Young 2000). The focus of interest in public participation has
changed, however, since it first became a prominent topic in governance in the 1960s. A 1969
article by Sherry Arnstein is still one of the most highly cited and influential pieces in the
field. She described a “ladder” of increasing citizen influence and authority over government
decision-making. Her approach reflected the orientation at that time of the Civil Rights move-
ment, and other community organizing efforts in the United States, to transform social dynam-
ics and gain power for excluded groups (Boyte 1989; Polletta 2012), if necessary via direct
action by oppressed groups (Kahn 1970; Alinsky 1971) to break down the walls of government
and elitist institutions (Pateman 1970). Doubts were arising about whether public participation
could really accomplish equality and inclusion. D.P. Moynihan (1969) famously questioned
whether new federal government policies requiring “maximum feasible participation” by pre-
viously marginalized groups might not be exacerbating rather than remedying class and racial
differences, while Arnstein (1969) critiqued many ostensibly democratic processes for being
tokenistic or manipulative.
By the early 2000s, public participation had become a routine and expected feature of public
policy-making (Bingham et al. 2005). Concerns among practitioners and scholars have shifted
from whether it should occur to a general recognition that when it is well done it can be very
beneficial for decision-making, citizenship and inclusion (Bryson et al. 2013). Its practice has
become increasingly professionalized: there is a large community of dedicated facilitation
practitioners (Moore, A. 2012), and building public participation skills is a common part of
public and nonprofit managers’ training (Leighninger 2010). However, the methods of partic-
ipation vary greatly, so that there is great interest in how well it is designed and implemented
(Sandfort and Quick 2013). In this chapter, we both focus on these contemporary topics and
observe that problems of equality and exclusion have not been resolved.
The term “citizen participation,” once used interchangeably with “public participation,”
is now falling out of favor. The term excludes many participants who do not have formal
citizenship status and also neglects numerous other types of public or civic participation and
engagement. We have mentioned already that governance occurs through networks of public
agencies and other entities. Two highly influential frameworks in participation scholarship
(Arnstein 1969) and practice (International Association for Public Participation 2014) dichot-
omize the government agencies and the public, emphasizing the influence of the latter on
decision-making by the former (Nabatchi 2012). Fung (2006) asserts that appropriately char-
acterizing and analyzing the “design space” of participation in governance requires attention
not only to the dimension of participants’ influence on decision outcomes but also to what
kinds of stakeholders participate and how the participation is conducted. The dynamics of
public engagement in governance are multi-dimensional and mutually constitutive.
In fact, the implementation of participation in governance has important consequences for
constituting the public. Different processes create different kinds of democratic communities
(Quick and Feldman 2011; Dewey [1927] 2012). For example, giving testimony at a public
160  Handbook on theories of governance

hearing creates a different kind of belonging in and ownership of a problem and its solution
in comparison with engaging in long-term deliberative processes (Innes and Booher 2010).
Sometimes participation processes are oriented to the general public, sometimes to the inter-
ested public and sometimes to smaller circles of representatives of key stakeholder groups.
These variable definitions of the public and processes for representation introduce tensions in
diversity and access to decision-making. Depending upon how outreach, participant recruit-
ment and the environment and dynamics of the consultation are handled, processes designed to
involve small groups of key stakeholders can exacerbate power differences and elitism (Cooke
and Kothari 2001; Dasgupta and Beard 2007).
Who does and does not participate is highly consequential for constituting which people and
interests are considered part of the public domain (Young 2000; Disch 2012) and for people’s
sense of their rights and entitlement as members of a public (Soss 2005). Participation pro-
vides an opportunity for participants to enhance their own capacities to engage in democratic
citizenship (Pateman 1970; Mansbridge 1999), produces lasting achievements of public value
(Nabatchi 2010; Boyte 2011), helps articulate what the “public” interest is (Reich 1990) and
provides the basis for broadly based social learning (Ansell 2011). Mark Moore (2014) makes
the argument that in a democracy a “public” collectively defined through democratic processes
– involving direct or indirect participation of some kind – is the appropriate arbiter of public
value when government-owned assets are involved.
Some but not all forms of public participation involve deliberation, meaning that the
involved parties make decisions through dialogue, exchange and mutual learning, rather than
through the mere aggregation of individual interests through voting or other mechanisms for
providing input (Reich 1990; Roberts 2004). Numerous techniques and concerns associated
with stakeholder engagement in public participation are also found in the practice of collabo-
rative public management and planning, in which multiple government, nonprofit, community
or business entities coordinate their efforts to address public problems and pursue public value
(Bryson et al. 2006; Cooper et al. 2006; O’Leary and Bingham 2009; Innes and Booher 2010).
There are many purposes for public participation. These may include: fulfilling legal
requirements; embodying the ideals of democratic participation and inclusion; advancing
social justice; informing the public; enhancing understanding of public problems and explor-
ing and generating potential solutions; and producing policies, plans and projects of higher
quality in terms of their content (Bryson et al. 2013). One of the important arguments for
public participation is that it is an important end unto itself in a democratic society. We have
just noted the key role participation plays in reflecting and constituting citizenship, the public
and public values. Numerous other potential benefits of effective public participation are well
documented. While public participation requires resources such as skill, time and money, it
can generate numerous advantages (Roberts 2004; Feldman and Quick 2009). Participants
can contribute to decisions through providing new information, different ways of seeing an
issue and motivation to address problems (Renn et al. 1993), sometimes helping government
decision-makers and the public to become more informed and develop an enlarged view
of issues (Fung 2007). Public participation can also support a more equitable distribution
of limited public resources (Abers 2000; Simonsen and Robbins 2000). And it can create
resources for future problem-solving and implementation to address new public issues by
enhancing trust and legitimacy, building relationships and generating knowledge and interest
about policy issues and processes (Feldman and Quick 2009; Ansell 2011). Whether partici-
pation actually does produce these benefits depends on a number of factors discussed below.
 Public participation  161

KEY THEMES OF THEORIES OF PARTICIPATION

Legitimacy

Participation’s potential benefits are realized when the process goes well, but often it does
not. Despite a great deal of practical knowledge and research, stories abound of participation
failures. Legitimacy is one of the most contested features of public participation, typically
expressed in terms of the adequacy of participation or representation, the technical or political
workability of the decision outcomes and the procedural fairness of the process. When public
participation is not seen as legitimate, it can alienate the public from government and disrupt
the implementation of policy decisions (Innes and Booher 2004; Ozawa 2012).
How legitimacy is accomplished and evaluated can be viewed through multiple theoretical
lenses. One commonly used in discourse about deliberative democracy is about the quality
of the exchange, namely that legitimate participation requires that the participants explain
themselves clearly, use logical arguments and utilize valid criteria for evaluating options and
outcomes (Gastil 2000; Jacobs et al. 2009). Another relates to the legitimacy of the policy
outcomes, meaning whether the decisions fulfill criteria for good policy, such as equity,
efficiency or technical implementability. Indeed, one of the compelling reasons for public
participation is to ensure that government policy and program choices are legitimate in terms
of being acceptable by and addressing the needs of the public (Fung 2006).
Another theoretical lens for understanding legitimacy relates to the quality of the process.
Procedurally just and procedurally rational processes are likely to be high in quality.
Procedural justice refers to whether, or the extent to which, the process embodies democratic
values such as fairness, transparency, attentiveness to stakeholders’ concerns and openness
to public input. A procedurally just process is presumed to increase the acceptability of the
decisions reached (Innes and Booher 2010). Procedural rationality involves collecting, ana-
lyzing and using information that is relevant to the decision (Dean and Sharfman 1993). The
presumption is that procedural rationality will help assure that final choices are substantively
rational, meaning that they make sense on many grounds, including, for example, technical,
administrative, legal, ethical and stakeholder support criteria (Simon 1996: 26–27).
Process legitimacy is also connected to trust. Trust is problematic in any process involving
people with diverse interests and levels of power (Huxham and Vangen 2005), but, when
diverse voices are included and power is managed so that potentially marginalized groups
do influence outcomes, there are strong payoffs for the legitimacy of the process, the quality
of decisions and effective decision implementation. Stakeholders are more likely to accept
a decision that they believe was produced in a procedurally just manner, even when it is not
their individually preferred outcome (Tyler and Degoey 1996). This enhanced “buy-in” to
decisions can limit delays, mistakes and lawsuits during project and policy implementation
(Laurian and Shaw 2008). Conversely, the interested public will be unsatisfied and may even
protest vehemently if the participation process seems perfunctory, tokenistic or manipulative
(Arnstein 1969; Flyvbjerg 1998). For example, public hearings are the most ubiquitous form
of public participation and serve an important purpose of transparency and accountability in
governance. Yet they are also very commonly considered illegitimate “window dressing”
because decisions have effectively already been made (Innes and Booher 2004).
162  Handbook on theories of governance

Diversity and Inclusion

Leaving the public out of decision-making is an example of tensions regarding inclusion in and
exclusion from governance. A key challenge in participation is ensuring an appropriate range
of interests is engaged in the process, including those normally excluded from decision-making
by institutionalized inequities (Abers 2000; Young 2000; Parekh 2002; Schlozman and Brady
2012). All too often, supposedly participatory processes end up including the “usual suspects,”
people who are easily recruited, articulate in the language and logics being used to make
decisions, and reasonably comfortable in public arenas. Indeed, most public participation is
not inclusive: it does not involve deliberation and creating new understandings together but
rather is oriented to “consulting” with the public to gather input (International Association for
Public Participation 2014) or just allowing people to express different perspectives (Innes and
Booher 2004).
Stakeholder analysis and the active management of conflict and power are thus needed to
ensure that under-represented and marginalized groups are at least considered and may have
a place at the table (Bryson 2004). Practitioners and scholars raise questions, however, about
the impact on inclusion and diversity of the recent valorization of deliberative, collaborative
and consensus-oriented approaches to public participation (Innes 2004). Depending upon how
conflict and power are managed, participation may enhance marginalized groups’ influence
and provide a robust container for negotiation among differences (Crosby and Bryson 2005;
Forester 2009). Conversely, dissent may be silenced even while the sponsors of a process
claim legitimacy through adopting the veneer of a participatory approach (Young 2000;
Bulkeley and Mol 2003).
Inclusion and exclusion are often about the ethnic, racial, gender or socioeconomic diver-
sity of the people taking part in public participation. This locates the focus of diversity on
the status of the people taking part in a participation process. It may also be associated with
concerns about the representativeness of the people participating, for example in terms of their
socioeconomic diversity, relative to the people who have a stake in the policy decision. A com-
plementary theoretical lens re-conceptualizes inclusion as practices of engaging a diversity of
perspectives to discover new understandings of problems, resources and options (Quick and
Feldman 2011). In this view, inclusion involves active negotiation among differences in per-
spectives, identities, institutional boundaries or issue definitions (Quick and Feldman 2014).

Expertise and Participation

Including a variety of perspectives in decision-making through public participation often

agitates concerns about whether substantively rational outcomes can be attained and legit-
imated. Many concerns center on the nature and proper place of expertise in governance.
Policy-making typically privileges what Scott (1998) and Yanow (2004) characterize as
expert (i.e., certified, specialized, decontextualized, codified) knowledge over lay (i.e., locally
specific, experiential, context-based) knowledge (Ozawa and Susskind 1985; Fischer 2000). In
one view, giving the public influence over choices traditionally left to those with specialized
expertise may produce poor outcomes. For example, involving residents in deciding how to
address a traffic congestion problem may give currency to options that civil engineers would
consider unsafe, too costly or technically infeasible. Public participation may also provide
a platform for well-resourced “not-in-my-backyard” (NIMBY) advocates who oppose policies
 Public participation  163

or programs (e.g., group homes or affordable housing) that the greater public needs (King et
al. 1998). Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge that the empathetic, experiential under-
standings that are expressed through public participation introduce important knowledge and
values into decision-making processes (Feldman et al. 2006; Thacher 2009; Innes and Booher
2010) and can provide a vehicle for important civic learning (Ansell 2011).

The Challenge of Designing Participation Processes

The solutions to these concerns are not simple. There is no formula for good participation.
Unlike cars, which despite different models and updates operate in more or less the same
way with predictable results even in different environments, public participation is not based
on a fixed, reliable technology. Instead, public policy problems, the participants, methods
for organizing the process and other features of the context interact uniquely in every setting
(Pfister and Godana 2012; Sandfort and Quick 2013). Of course, research is uncovering
important generalizations, but the generalizations do not amount to anything like a set of rules
or step-by-step guide.
For example, currently there is a lot of excitement about the use of social media and other
emerging forms of information technology to support participation (Evans-Cowley and
Hollander 2010; Slotterback 2011). However, social media will not inherently transform the
operation and effects of participation. Whether analyzing physical or online participation,
the same questions arise. These include, for example: the accessibility of the participation
space and representativeness of participants; the level of effort, competence or authenticity
that the agency brings to the process; and the influence participants have on decision-making.
Forms of e-government are highly variable (Coursey and Norris 2008), and the latest research
suggests that social media are serving primarily as a new mechanism for reinforcing a long-
standing form of government–public interaction – unidirectional communication from public
agencies to their constituents about their activities – rather than as a platform for new forms of
engagement (Mergel 2013).
Design science provides a fresh perspective on questions about how to assemble the best
resources, techniques or procedures for a particular problem. The theoretical perspectives
presented thus far are drawn from typical social science approaches to hypothesis testing and
generalizable theory development. Design science, in contrast, turns attention to achieving
desired outcomes in problematic real-world situations. It makes use of evidence-based sub-
stantive and procedural knowledge and emphasizes the need to respond to particular contexts
(Romme 2003; Aken 2007). A design science approach to public participation thus makes
explicit that processes should be designed and re-designed based on new knowledge and
experience (Bryson et al. 2013).
Other context-based differences that are relevant to how well a given approach to partici-
pation will work include: the relative centralization and authority of the government entities;
the distribution of power among stakeholders; the particular history of and people’s attach-
ments to a given place; which terms of argument are persuasive (e.g., equity, environmental
sustainability, no new taxes); the expectations of government (e.g., level of confidence in
government capacity and competence, corruption, values about what is the job of government
or other entities); what other avenues for influence are available (e.g., lawsuits, direct political
mobilization); competition among priorities (e.g., how participating ranks with other house-
164  Handbook on theories of governance

hold activities, the relative interest in a particular planning topic); and other dynamics of civil
society.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR THEORIES OF PARTICIPATION IN

GOVERNANCE

We have named several key theoretical concerns regarding public participation in governance
relating to legitimacy, inclusion, the proper role of expertise and the challenge of designing
participation processes. These are actively negotiated issues in all contexts of democratic
governance. Because democratic governance is traditionally defined as occurring by, for and
with the public, the boundaries between public agencies, elected officials and the public are
inherently complex and contested. Many anxieties about the practice and theory of public
participation are related to how democratic governance is conceptualized and how that affects
the nature of participation. This is especially important in polities, such as the United States,
which are characterized by significant inequalities, sharply divided public opinion on many
issues, intensely partisan politics, powerful organized interests and numerous veto points built
into the system (Jacobs 2014).
Indeed, we opened the chapter by noting that concerns regarding inequality, oppression,
and exclusion from decision-making animated early interest in the practice and study of
public participation. Before recommending new directions for theory development regarding
participation in governance, we want to emphasize the value and necessity of revisiting and
re-emphasizing these old themes. Despite participation becoming a routine part of government
policy-making, there is nonetheless a growing sense that government is unresponsive or
not representative of many segments of the public or perhaps even the majority (Mann and
Ornstein 2012; Jacobs 2014). Racial minorities and the poor continue to feel disciplined by
policies in which they are central stakeholders and which are ostensibly intended to empower
them (Soss et al. 2011; Alexander 2012; Moynihan, D. et al. 2015). The societal concerns
about inequality and exclusion that animated the push to public participation in the 1960s
are still with us today, meriting renewed focus on the relationship between participation in
processes of governance and personal, group or societal inclusion, empowerment and equality.
We conclude by recommending two areas where theory development is particularly needed.
The first relates to how much participation is desirable and workable. Huxham and Vangen
(2005) insightfully observed that the rapid rise in the popularity of collaborative governance
could be misread as meaning it is a good or easy solution and instead cautioned that it is a hard
solution to a hard set of problems. Similarly, public participation is not easily accomplished,
and may not always be appropriate. As we noted, the move to incorporate design thinking
frameworks into governance processes (Cowan 2012) offers a new lens for considering how
to accomplish participation well for particular settings (Bryson et al. 2013). Participation is
a particularly wise route to policy-making when it is legally required or when it is the only or
most efficacious way of gaining one or more of the following: needed information, political
support, legitimacy or citizenship development (Thomas 2012).
The second relates to the implications of increasingly diffuse systems of governance for
opportunities for public participation. These include: the move to contract with non-governmen-
tal entities to provide public services through the New Public Management (Behn 1998); the
“Big Society” push in the United Kingdom to relocate government services to communities
 Public participation  165

and volunteers (Kisby 2010); decentralization efforts in the developing world (Hadiz 2004);
and the European push towards the “co-production” of public services (Bovaird 2007) in
de-centered networks involving many non-governmental entities. These movements are
leading many observers to speak of the New Public Service (Denhardt and Denhardt 2000),
the New Public Governance (Osborne 2010; Morgan and Cook 2014) or public value govern-
ance (Bryson et al. 2014) as a necessary approach to governing and managing effectively in
a shared-power world. This changed nature of governance may well enhance opportunities
for public participation in shaping public policies and implementation. At the same time,
however, these shifts have raised concerns about where and how public participation can occur
to ensure the accountability, transparency and responsiveness of these governance actors.

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15. Representation
Lucy Taylor

As the Introduction in this Handbook notes, governance processes have spread throughout
contemporary political and social life and have an impact in most countries, right across the
world. More agencies and people at different levels and realms of society are being drawn into
policy-making and administration, but most join these political conversations and activities
without having been elected. Does this make them undemocratic? We reach for this question
because traditionally Western democracies associate democracy with elections. At first glance,
this seems to present a problem, but perhaps, rather than questioning the democratic credibility
of governance processes, we might ask whether conventional approaches to representation are
too narrow, and explore different wider and broader understandings of representation which
more accurately reflect the lived experience of politics and governance (Saward 2005; Taylor
2010).
This shift to wider understandings of the political realm and its processes also makes sense
in light of the sustained and worsening crisis of electoral representation. Electoral turnouts are
plummeting, levels of trust in politicians are low and the legitimacy of government has been
called into question from the U.S. to Argentina, and from Greece to the United Kingdom,
via Afghanistan, Egypt and Thailand (Wessels 2011). The transition to governance in both
academic study and public policy is a symptom of this crisis but also an attempt to find other,
more credible and responsive ways of shaping our societies and implementing policies.
These questions and issues will be explored here by drawing on a range of different
academic approaches to representation today. The chapter begins by discussing develop-
ments in the more conventional branches of the field, turning then to discuss two influential
new approaches: Michael Saward’s “representative claim” and John Dryzek and Simon
Niemeyer’s “discursive representation.” The chapter then focuses on the question of inequality
and representativity through a discussion of gender, which highlights the importance of sym-
bolic representation to the everyday practice of politics.

REPRESENTATION STUDIES AND THE GOVERNANCE

PERSPECTIVE

The modern field of representation studies emerged in the 1960s, driven by the dramatic
expansion of behavioralist political science and inspired by the ground-breaking theoretical
work of Hanna Fenichel Pitkin (1967). It was interested in how and why people voted a certain
way in elections and the impact of different electoral or institutional systems on those voting
trends, analyzing the quality of representation through this definitive event. Much of the work
done in the field continues this trend, drawing “big picture” conclusions from the statistical
analysis of electoral data, and it is certainly very useful in discerning (or refuting) the pres-
ence of trends identified anecdotally (e.g. Rosema et al. 2011). As a consequence, theirs is
a precisely targeted approach to governance, focused on voter–candidate/politician relations.

169
170  Handbook on theories of governance

However, while Pitkin’s definition of representation as “acting in the interest of the repre-
sented, in a manner responsive to them” (Pitkin 1967: 209) is linked to this election-focused
work, her book also recognizes that representation is multi-layered and symbolic. Thus she
created two highly influential categories of representation, which continue to shape thinking
today: “acting for” a person, which is linked to the direct, substantive relationships of author-
ization and agency; and “standing for” a person, in which the descriptive or symbolic element
of representation is emphasized. She thus better expresses representation’s elusive nature by
thinking of it as: “the making present in some sense of something which is nevertheless not
present literally or in fact” (Pitkin 1967: 8–9). However, Pitkin’s work is embedded in her own
experiences of representation in a stable, prosperous and distinctly Western liberal democ-
racy. While her theory has universal pretensions, then, it expresses a very particular vision,
promotes a particular normative agenda (national, institutionalized representative democracy)
and is embedded in a particular historical and cultural context (European/Western) which is
unerringly assumed to be “correct.”
These motifs continue to characterize the vast majority of writing on representation (Saward
2010). However, conventional representation studies has also responded to both the crisis of
representation and the governance debate (Näsström 2011). Jane Mansbridge’s important
work (2003) shifted the emphasis away from the “electoral event” to interrogate the on-going
political relationships which surround elections. She questions the assumption that citizens
vote according to what the candidate promises, pointing out that candidates often promise
what they know – or think – that their electorate want, rather than voters responding to
a political platform. Moreover, she identified that, once elected, voters have very little control
over their representatives, who might enact entirely different policies (“gyroscopic representa-
tion” (Mansbridge 2003: 520–522)). Thirdly, she identified that one’s interests as a person
(such as gay rights) might be promoted by a representative from a different constituency for
whom one could not directly vote (“surrogate representation” (Mansbridge 2003: 522–525)).
Mansbridge’s insights are important, because they suggest that important dynamics of rep-
resentation are peripheral to the electoral event and that indirect, non-elected relationships can
be highly functional in representative terms. Others in the “conventional” school also critique
the limited nature of electoral representation (such as Manin 1997). Adam Przeworski et al.,
for example, argue that “elections are an inherently blunt instrument of control” (1999: 49) and
identify the complex interplay of political factions, lobbyists, other parties, state bureaucrats
and business as the real stuff of decision-making. While their embrace of governance as an
approach is not explicit, these scholars nevertheless recognize that politics is a multiple and
many-layered process of negotiation and call for creative, innovative institutional design in
order to provide more frequent and improved opportunities for the representation of citizens’
views within this maelstrom of extra-parliamentary influences.
Two other theories, though, engage more fully with the governance agenda, generating
theories of representation which both imagine and promote complex patterns of governance.
John Dryzek and Simon Niemeyer’s proposal to develop “discursive representation” (2008)
implicitly acknowledges the reality of governance processes today and seeks to enhance their
deliberative capacity. Dryzek and Niemeyer recognize the crisis of representative democracy
and propose that democratic politics should move away from attempting to represent (millions
of) people, shifting rather to focus on the representation of discourses, which would be smaller
in number and therefore a more feasible task. They think of a discourse as “a set of catego-
ries and concepts embodying specific assumptions, judgements, contentions, dispositions
 Representation  171

and capabilities” (Dryzek and Niemeyer 2008: 481), and propose that all discourses, both
mainstream and minority, should have a firm and equal place in the representative discussion.
This discussion (within a limited and manageable group of representatives) would take place
in a chamber of discourses, which might operate instead of parliament or, more likely, would
operate alongside conventional forms of constituency or party representation. It is easy to see
the echoes between this chamber and the stakeholder forums or policy network meetings, and
their model, though speaking to a representation rather than governance agenda, brings highly
relevant insights.
For example, they propose that the representatives be chosen for their capacity to consist-
ently and clearly articulate a certain way of understanding the world in general, or an issue in
particular. They represent neither a geographical group of people, nor a sector of the popula-
tion (Catholics, women, etc.) but rather a coherent set of views and priorities. Interestingly,
they suggest that such representatives be chosen using social science methodologies, perhaps
starting with a survey and then narrowing the choice by interviews in order to identify likely
candidates, who then might be appointed or elected. Naturally, those active in shaping thinking
in the social realm (religious, business or community leaders, NGO workers, expert profes-
sionals) would be well placed to act as discourse representatives. In this way, the proposal
dovetails with governance approaches to public policy formulation or understandings about
the way in which politics is negotiated in the social world. Moreover, it offers a way to oper-
ationalize governance negotiations as a representative relationship, lending it the authority of
formal institutionalization. As such, it offers a way to conceptualize the claim to representa-
tivity of governance actors.
This proposal is genuinely innovative, because it breaks with hallowed convention. It
questions whether we need the mythologized but usually dysfunctional relationship between
voter and parliamentarian in order to have democratic representation; it delinks democracy
and parliamentary elections by arguing that democracy involves the exchange and integra-
tion of views shared by different groups of actors rather than merely the aggregation of the
preferences of voters and their elected representative. As such, it unsettles the foundations of
actually existing “representative” democracy but provides an alternative model which more
accurately expresses the realities of multi-actor, multi-level governance. Their proposal could
allow many opinions to join the conversation – many more than are expressed by parliamen-
tarians, who are drawn from a limited number of parties and, increasingly, from a small group
of professional politicians. As such, it also offers a tool to improve policy-making by creating
negotiation arenas which prioritize “good” governance over party affiliation and loyalty.
A different proposal is that offered by Michael Saward through his theorization of the repre-
sentative claim (2010). Saward robustly criticizes conventional thinking about representation
for its tendency to: focus on its definition, rather than what it does; over-emphasize elections;
and downplay the international realm. In particular he advocates that we pay attention to the
constitutive dimension of representation (the way its practice shapes society, and vice versa):
that we recognize its overbearing normative agenda and pay attention to “what is going on in
representation” and in the messy realities of real-world problems (Saward 2010: 9). Thus he
argues that representation is not “a given factual product of elections [but rather] a precarious
and curious sort of claim about a dynamic relationship” (Saward 2010: 34). This openness
chimes with Hanna Pitkin’s subtle definition, and it pays attention to the concerns of the gov-
ernance agenda and the people who influence political life in the social, cultural and economic
realm.
172  Handbook on theories of governance

Saward brings a series of sharp analytical tools with which to analyze relationships of
representation from a governance perspective, particularly his serious approach to the sym-
bolic (image-conscious) element of representation. Thus he explores the “constructedness
of representation,” emphasizing the links between “aesthetic, symbolic and cultural aspects”
and political practice, especially through its performance to various audiences and the use of
symbol in generating clusters of opinion (Saward 2010: 35). Indeed some scholars like Ernesto
Laclau argue that symbolic representation is the central mechanism of political subjectivity,
which engenders both “the people” and their supposed representative in a process of mutual
constitution (Laclau 2005: 157–164). This wider, deeper understanding of representation
allows Saward to take seriously the politics of a wide range of representative instances, such
that “representation ‘happens’ in a great variety of spaces and scales in any society (and
between different societies)” (Saward 2010: 161; see also Taylor 2010). The breadth of scope
for representation that he envisages clearly chimes with governance approaches, dovetailing
with a socially embedded and multifaceted arena of ideas, actors and locations. His vision
actively embraces the local and international (and global) dimensions of policy and opinion,
and understands “non-political” actors such as NGOs and business to be capable of making
legitimate representative claims and effecting social change.
Given this breadth, Saward’s definition of representation is quite general: “A maker of
representations (M) puts forward a subject (S) which stands for an object (O) that is related to
a referent (R) and is offered to an audience (A)” (Saward 2010: 36). Importantly, he under-
stands representation to be an ongoing process of proposing, accepting and rejecting claims to
represent beyond the scope of elections. Given that it occurs within a wider context of other
claim and counter-claim making in dialogue with the audience and other claimants, Saward
pays attention to the performativity of representation (both persuasive rhetoric and mundane
governmentality) and its capacity to shape society and people’s views.
This emphasis has the potential to enrich and sharpen the analysis of governance processes.
It focuses attention on the capacity of governance actors, especially in stakeholder scenarios, to
make a legitimate claim to represent others. Moreover, his theory provides an effective way to
ask questions about the representativity of those sitting around the stakeholder table, because
he takes seriously not only the representative but also those who are represented. Saward
imagines them not (just) as wielders of periodic votes but as agents whose ideas and actions
shape the social world and who are shaped by it in turn. This places the focus of his theory of
representation squarely in lived experience, decentering political power away from parliament
and dispersing it throughout the social world. His theory is thus open to understanding social
movements, business and international agencies as players on the field of political representa-
tion, and as such it is a theory that fits well with those who study or promote governance.
Through Saward’s insights, we can identify that the legitimacy of such governance mecha-
nisms rests, then, on a different understanding of representativity than the electoral mode. The
participants cannot claim to represent people because they were chosen by them in elections
(delegation) but rather because their claim to represent the views of others is credible (see
Saward 2005). In this way the representatives face two audiences: those they claim to speak
for and the other representatives with whom they will engage in discussions. Their credibility
with the former is what endows them with the authoritative voice in the stakeholder meeting
or forum where they will argue their case. It is the validity of their claim to represent which
makes their intervention in governance arenas credible, and allows them to speak on behalf
of others without being accused of despotism – or hubris. In addition, this rather precarious,
 Representation  173

vulnerable legitimacy can be strengthened, or undermined, by the processes and institutions of

governance itself. Where governance processes generate satisfaction, the validity of the claim
to represent and the representative bodies themselves are strengthened, but a failure to deliver
or suggestions of corruption can quickly erode the representative claim.
Saward’s theory does have its problems – not least of which is his tendency to imagine
that all political communities work like prosperous, secure Western liberal democracies (and
indeed that they ought to). However, his approach to theorizing representation does break
significant new ground, not only because he challenges the orthodoxy of representation studies
but because, as his theory contains the seeds of a more general theory of how politics works
(through representation), it thus makes a contribution to governance studies more generally.

GOVERNANCE, REPRESENTATION AND (GENDER)

INEQUALITY

The field of representation studies has come a long way in the past ten years in challenging
orthodoxies and imagining fresh approaches. However, in my view, it still has to grapple
effectively with one of the central characteristics of the social world, and one with profound
implications for both representation and governance: inequality. All imagine that when “repre-
sentatives” or “voters” enter that role they do so as equals. However, the realities of our daily,
lived experience tell us that the social world is skewed by inequalities of race, gender, class,
disability and so on, and that for every woman of color in parliament there are thousands who
feel that such a place is not their place (Puwar 2004).
Although governance processes draw in a wider range of voices from business, NGOs
or perhaps community groups, inequality and exclusion remain a problem for governance,
and for a range of reasons. From a utilitarian perspective, the under-representation of
women or other political minorities means that the pool of talent on which society might
draw is restricted. Moreover, policies might be designed or implemented in less effective
ways because the perspectives of a large group of users – like women – are not taken into
account. From a neo-liberal position, such distortions mean that the market cannot operate
optimally, and costs and inefficiencies are incurred. For those who see governance as a way
to democratize the political or policy-making process, practices and habits which exclude or
subordinate certain people create serious obstacles to the realization of their goal. This is Iris
Marion Young’s point; she argues for women’s inclusion in political life because their exclu-
sion undermines the legitimacy of deliberative processes (or multi-stakeholder negotiations,
perhaps) (Young 2000: 5).
Scholarship on representation has explored inequality in particular through gender quotas.
Typically, quota advocates argue that increasing women’s visibility and activity will help
to erode discrimination, an idea theorized by Anne Phillips’s “politics of presence” (1995).
Moreover, if more women become involved in decision-making, then more pro-woman pol-
icies will be advocated and adopted, a theory which is complemented by Drude Dahlerup’s
argument that quotas are needed to generate a “critical mass” (usually set at 45 percent) of
women in powerful positions (2006). While it is clear that gender quotas have (usually) led to
more women taking up places in parliament, the response of wider society to their increased
presence – and the wider impact on gender equality that gender quotas seek to promote – has
been highly variable. For example, studies in both Belgium (Meier 2012) and Rwanda (Burnet
174  Handbook on theories of governance

2012) found that gender quotas were generally embraced by women parliamentarians but
were often resisted by their male counterparts, who were unsettled by changes to gender roles.
Indeed, in the Belgian case the resentment of male parliamentarians might even have been det-
rimental to the expansion of women’s rights within parliament. Gender quotas help to reveal,
then, that questions of representation are not somehow divorced from the social world but are
entangled in its patterns of inequalities, discriminations and complex codes of acceptable (and
unacceptable) behavior. Moreover, dynamics of gender inequality intersect with other dimen-
sions such as class and race to create complex patterns of oppressions and opportunities (Htun
and Ossa 2013), such that less privileged women (lower-class or Black women, for example)
are less likely to benefit (for example, Joshi and Och 2014). It seems essential, then, that we
adopt a socially embedded view of representation (such as Saward’s) and an understanding of
political process which recognizes its multiple and overlapping sites of engagement beyond
parliament and government (governance perspectives). This is beginning to happen in more
recent gender quota scholarship which retains its focus on women parliamentarians but ana-
lyzes their impact within the wider social and economic realm and in relation to the wider
women’s movement (Franceschet et al. 2012: 3–24).
Indeed, women (and other political minorities) are far more likely to participate in social
movements and community organizing than in electoral politics, so governance approaches
which take extra-parliamentary politics seriously are predisposed to recognize their presence
as political actors (Duerst-Lahti and Kelly 1996; Larner et al. 2013). However, recognizing the
role of community activism (and indirectly appreciating the role of women) does not solve the
problem of inequality. Indeed, these gender biases match the asymmetric power relations of
governance networks and institutions, such that male-dominated (still-powerful) government
institutions wield de facto power within stakeholder forums; community groups or NGOs
might have a voice, but it may well be subordinated within policy conversations. Including
women via social organizations within the governance process is a positive step, then, but not
enough to create meaningful equality.
Insights from (gender) representation theory help to illuminate this problem, because gen-
dered inequalities of power are intimately linked to the symbolic realm of representation. This
reflects an understanding of power as being present not so much in the central institutions of
the state but dispersed and embedded in human relationships, including everyday relations
between people. Thinking from the symbolic position, and in light of feminist insight, we can
perceive that it is not what women are that works against them, but what they symbolize: weak-
ness, vacillation, and an emotional (not logical) response to problems. In contrast, the linkage
between (white, middle-class) men and “real” politics is so strong that supposedly masculine
characteristics actually define traits associated with “good” political actors: strength, decisive-
ness, rational and (if needs be) tough responses to problems (Pateman 1989). Nirmal Puwar’s
work on race and gender in the U.K. parliament adds a related issue: that bodily markers of
gender and race work to make certain sorts of bodies seem appropriate or inappropriate in
powerful spaces. While “white male bodies of a specific habitus continue to be the somatic
norm” in parliaments, women (and people of color) are “space invaders” (Puwar 2004: 141).
Another dimension first explored by gender quota studies is also highly relevant to the
governance field: while men are understood to represent those who voted for them (men and
women), women are understood, in addition, to represent other women and the (caring) social
roles ascribed to them. They are burdened with symbolic representations which they cannot
escape and which cause trouble. If women embrace their symbolic role, and promote women’s
 Representation  175

rights, they are chided for ignoring the needs of male electors; if they try to be gender neutral,
they are upbraided for betraying their sex and ignoring the realities of sexism (Dahlerup 2011).
Eroding gender – or indeed any other – inequalities is not simply a matter of importing
female bodies into public life, then, but rather a far more complex undertaking which requires
a holistic approach. The capacity of governance to contemplate politics as a multi-level,
multi-actor, highly interconnected and socially conditioned activity makes this approach
a more feasible and realistic framework within which to develop theories and policies that
might be able to contemplate, if not solve, social policy issues.
The new theories of representation outlined by Saward, and Dryzek and Niemeyer offer
a number of tools to assist this endeavor, given their capacity to theorize representation beyond
parliamentary processes. Indeed, recent discussions within the gender quotas literature often
engage constructively with notions of the representative claim (e.g. Celis 2013). By focusing
on the claim to represent rather than a moment of choice or representative act, Saward’s theory
can comprehend the entanglements and processes of mutual constitution which shape the way
that we represent ourselves and others, as well as whose voice has authority (and those whose
voice is ignored). John Dryzek and Simon Niemeyer’s “discourse representation” proposal
also offers a feasible way to think about networks of governance actors, especially collabo-
rative governance, through the chamber of discourses. Moreover, their proposal to use social
science methods as part of the selection process is intriguing and bears further thought in order
to strengthen the representativity of collaborative groups. From the perspective of those who
voice minority or more radical views, their insistence that “the key consideration … is that
all vantage points for criticizing policy get represented” (Dryzek and Niemeyer 2008: 482) is
a major step forward. We might imagine that one or more feminist discourses might credibly
join policy conversations, based not on a feminist’s gender position but rather on his or her
opinions and world-views. Moreover, the shift from descriptive representation to discursive
representation would allow the multiple subjectivities of a person (e.g. female, Muslim, aca-
demic) to be represented in multiple ways, rather than relying on mono-focal representational
forms.

CONCLUSION

The new theories of representation have the potential to enrich and deepen governance
debates, and the points of compatibility are obvious. It is essential that governance take ques-
tions of representation seriously, not only because traditional political arenas are experiencing
a crisis of representation but also because new media of representation – governance processes
– are fulfilling representational roles which cannot be understood by thinking from electoral
models. A focus on the authority of a claim to represent, rather than an electoral event, is
a key move in this process, and a focus on discourse rather than delegative representation is
a useful way to delink representation and elections without destroying the spirit of democracy
which is deemed to be so essential. However, expanding the number and scope of people and
organizations that might join policy-making conversations is not the same as creating an even
political playing field. Questions of inequality remain pending, and will not be solved through
institutional tinkering but rather by addressing the broader and deeper landscape of power
relations and inequalities which shape and sustain sexism, racism, imperialism and a host of
other powerful discriminatory dynamics. For this reason, and in my view, both representation
176  Handbook on theories of governance

studies and governance studies scholars should ask deeper questions about how power works,
and for whom, when they are considering the fairness and effectiveness of political forums;
and they should pay attention not only to the material and economic elements of inequality but
also to the symbolic and cultural realm of human relationships.

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 Representation  177

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16. Deliberation
PerOla Öberg

DELIBERATION AND DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY

Governance involves a plethora of public and private actors aiming to realize common objec-
tives through collective action. Researchers often suppose this interaction to take the form of
deliberation (Fung and Wright 2001; Hendriks 2009: 173; Dryzek 2010), making deliberation
a key concept in governance theories (e.g., Hajer and Wagenaar 2003; Sørensen and Torfing
2005: 208, 2009: 236; Ansell and Gash 2008; Emerson et al. 2012: 12; Klijn and Edelenbos
2013). However, they seldom explain how and under what conditions deliberative governance
works, which is highly problematic, since research on deliberation also contains severe con-
troversies over key issues.
Discussions on this topic often embed deliberation in normative ideas about deliberative
democracy, which is aimed at producing a democratic system based on high quality citizen
participation (Chambers 2003: 308). Theorists assert that a legitimate political order presup-
poses public policy to be publicly articulated, explained and justified (Thompson 2008: 502).
Hence when discussions emphasize deliberative democracy, moral principles are included in
the definition of deliberation, such as everyone’s right to speak (e.g., Bächtiger et al. 2010).
This inclusion means that deliberation (or deliberativeness) is just one component of deliber-
ative democracy, along with for example inclusiveness (including persons or discourses) and
consequentiality (impacting formal decision making; e.g., Dryzek 2009).
Deliberation theorists who are primarily interested in deliberativeness query whether
deliberative processes produce democratic outcomes or worsen political inequalities. From
this perspective, more participation is not necessarily equal to more or better deliberation,
since there is a potential tension between epistemic fruitfulness and inclusion (cf. Grönlund et
al. 2014: 227; Estlund and Landemore 2018). Also, improved deliberation is not necessarily
more democratic. Hence common assumptions in the literature that it is possible to “enhance
deliberative quality by improving participation” (Dodge 2014: 176) must be qualified.
Still, ideas of deliberative governance include both a search for the truth through disputes
about the better reasons, as well as a participatory component aiming to produce shared con-
victions, or at least shared understanding and acceptance of policies among citizens (Lafont
2019).

BASIC COMPONENTS OF DELIBERATION

Important elements distinguish deliberative theory from other perspectives. The theory
was developed out of a criticism of democratic decision making as an aggregation of fixed
preferences (Bächtiger et al. 2018). Individuals do not start a decision making process with
a complete set of coherently ranked preferences; instead, they discover new information, gain
new insights and develop informed preferences during the exchange of evidence (Manin 1987;

178
 Deliberation  179

Bächtiger and Parkinson 2019). Deliberative theorists argue that the communication process is
more important—and more interesting—than the voting procedure that (sometimes) follows.
Even though theorists criticize a vote-centric perspective, and believe that agreements can be
reached through continued discussion (the talk-centric perspective; Chambers 2003: 308),
they often assume that these two perspectives are complementary (Ferejohn 2008).
Although severe disagreements exist on the definition of deliberation, most researchers
agree that social interaction based on reasoned discussion aimed to produce well-informed
opinions is at the heart of deliberation (Chambers 2003: 309; Steiner et al. 2004; Bächtiger
et al. 2018). Deliberation is a demanding form of communication, since all participants are
expected to give reasons for their political claims and respond to others’ reasons in return
(Habermas 2006: 413; Thompson 2008: 498; Jennstål et al. 2020). Thus deliberation is not
only a decision making mechanism; it also contains elements of collective learning (Hajer and
Wagenaar 2003; Habermas 2006) or even truth seeking (Risse 2000; Niemeyer 2014: 185).
Hence deliberative governance aims not simply to mirror the sum of individual preferences,
but to produce “enlightened” (Dahl 1989) or “refined” public opinions, which are more
informed (cf. Fishkin 2018). Therefore deliberative decision making is a problem solving
process based on competing validity claims, where actors justify their positions, listen to each
other with mutual respect, and are willing to re-evaluate their initial preferences in the light
of counter-arguments and new information.
For a long time, deliberation theory rested on an ideal of undistorted communication free
from power and political strategizing, much like an ideal research seminar. In recent attempts to
connect theoretical and empirical studies, theorists have relaxed several components embraced
in earlier literature (Thompson 2008; Bächtiger and Hangartner 2010). Most notably, they have
criticized key components that are (to some degree mistakenly) associated with Habermasian
communicative action, such as authentic and sincere reason-giving (Bächtiger et al. 2010: 34,
40). Relaxing these components opens the discussion to more realistic ideas of deliberation in
real life governance but runs the risk of stretching the idea of deliberation too far.
One important development in the literature regards consensus, which used to be a key
component of deliberation (e.g., Cohen 1989; Dryzek 2010: 15). Consensus is still considered
important in many deliberative governance studies (Ansell and Gash 2008); however, few
deliberative theorists today argue that complete consensus is the goal of deliberation (cf.
Friberg-Fernros and Karlsson Schaffer 2014: 100ff.; Bächtiger et al. 2018). Although deliber-
ation should help participants to capture common interests, the goal is to clarify and structure
conflicts, not suppress the articulation of different views (Warren and Mansbridge 2013: 93).
Instead, theorists argue that the goal of deliberation is to produce a meta-consensus—a common
understanding of the problem, with common ideas on regulating conflicts (Dryzek 2010)—and
reach agreements founded on reasons (Warren and Mansbridge 2013).

ARENAS FOR DELIBERATIVE GOVERNANCE

The Public Sphere

Deliberation in the public sphere is very important, since it ensures a plurality of public
opinions for consideration in formal governance structures (Habermas 2006: 416; Chambers
2009). Public speeches, news articles and letters to the editor used to be of primary importance
180  Handbook on theories of governance

but have recently been almost replaced by Internet based communication. Twitter, chatrooms
and other online participation open up new possibilities for deliberation, and the research com-
munity is trying hard to keep up with this development. Although findings are inconsistent,
researchers have found only modest evidence for reasoned discussions in online participation
(Schlosberg et al. 2008; Niemeyer 2014) and dispute whether online participation can—and
should—impact formal democratic decision making. Theorists also contest the role of civil
society organizations in public deliberation. On the one hand, such organizations contribute
different perspectives and activate groups that would otherwise be marginalized. On the other
hand, the aim of many civil society organizations is to defend special interests, and these
organizations may only contribute to deliberation under specific conditions (Öberg 2002;
Hendriks 2006; Öberg and Svensson 2012). Many researchers in the field agree with Dodge
(2014) that we lack understanding about how civil society organizations shape deliberative
governance (Chambers 2003: 311; Dryzek 2010). This lack is a challenge to take research on
deliberative governance more seriously. In this regard, studies of collaborative governance
are an interesting literature (Ansell and Gash 2008; Emerson et al. 2012). However, the delib-
erative quality of the “collaboration,” as well as effects on political equality, is still mainly
unknown.

The Empowered Sphere

Conditions for deliberation in formal decision making arenas such as parliamentary institu-
tions have recently attracted increasing interest, even though full deliberation is not expected.
In these highly politicized arenas, stating reasons and listening with respect may not be
important, especially not for actors in power: If you have the votes, you do not need reasons
for your choices (Ferejohn 2008: 206). However, research shows that deliberative processes
can be found in formal decision making in local politics (e.g., Lundin and Öberg 2014) and
in international politics (Naurin 2009) under certain conditions. The development of the
Discourse Quality Index and its use on parliamentary debates (Steiner et al. 2004) has shown
that different institutional settings impact the quality of deliberation. Still, many findings
remain unexplained and call for theoretical development and more elaborated empirical tests
(Steiner et al. 2004: 125).

Deliberative Forums

Different kinds of citizen consultations have long been considered examples of real life delib-
eration, and are increasingly popular around the world (Grönlund et al. 2014). In deliberative
forums, citizens are invited to discuss specific policy problems in citizen conferences, consen-
sus conferences, planning cells, citizen panels, citizen juries, citizen dialogues and so on. The
idea is that such forums should be “small enough to be genuinely deliberative, and representa-
tive enough to be genuinely democratic” (Goodin and Dryzek 2006: 220). Deliberative forums
have different goals: to augment legitimacy through participation; to promote public-spirited
perspectives and mutual respect through inclusion; and to enhance the quality of decisions
through informed debate (Chambers 2003; Fung 2003). Some forums have been successful in
fulfilling these goals, in particular to enhance public opinion formation (Gastil and Knobloch
2019) as for example demonstrated by the Irish Citizens’ Assemblies on abortion and
 Deliberation  181

same-sex marriage (Farrel and Suiter 2019). Sometimes politicians set up deliberative forums
for strategic reasons (Parkinson 2004), with little intention to improve deliberation.
How participants are recruited to deliberative forums varies. Some forums are open to
the public and are based on self-selection. Usually, citizens are invited because they live in
a certain area or are selected as part of a “mini-public” intended to mirror the social character-
istics in a larger community. Due to restrictions in size, motivation to participate may however
also produce biases in these cases, based on attitudes or personality traits (Jennstål 2018).
Another kind of deliberative forum is based on partisanships, such as stakeholders, often with
the purpose to mediate between them. Some researchers within the field argue that “partisan
forums” are better at handling deliberation on hot issues and producing democratic legitimacy
(Fung 2003: 346; Hendriks et al. 2007: 362), although this argument is also disputed (Hendriks
et al. 2007). Fine-tuned institutional settings are obviously necessary to achieve deliberation
between stakeholders, as shown in corporatist governance in Nordic countries (Öberg et al.
2011).
Deliberative forums will definitely constitute an important element of (deliberative) gov-
ernance structures in the future. The growing number of deliberative forums around the world
testifies to their popularity. However, many challenges still remain. Researchers question the
deliberative capacity of these forums and discuss the definition of representativeness (Lafont
2019). Some theorists emphasize the importance of a plurality of initial points of view in
deliberative forums (Goodin and Dryzek 2006: 221) and argue that discourses, not persons,
should be represented (Dryzek and Niemeyer 2008). This position challenges ideas of political
equality in the same way as corporatism does, where functional interests rather than persons
are represented.
Researchers on deliberation also question how deliberative forums can provide input to
ordinary institutions of representative democracy (Goodin and Dryzek 2006: 220). Even if
deliberation is successful in forums, it is difficult to scale up to legitimate decision making in
larger society (Bächtiger and Wegmann 2014: 118; Niemeyer and Jennstål 2018). At the core
of the discussion is mini-publics’ democratic functions (Lafont 2019; Fishkin 2018). Many
deliberative democrats argue that democracies should only convene advisory mini-publics that
promote deliberation in the public sphere (Bachtiger and Goldberg 2020). But this may change
in the future as experience on when and how to organize them increases.

CONTROVERSIES

What Is Deliberation?

Important disagreements exist regarding all the main components of deliberation, but most
focus on the understanding of reason-giving. In response to researchers who argue that reasons
are context bound and that impartial reasons in one context may be considered partial in other
cultures or in relation to “marginalized groups” (Young 2000; Chambers 2003), deliberative
theory has moved away from a narrow, highly rationalistic view to a more pluralistic and flex-
ible understanding of what a reason can be. This shift has produced an expansion of the kinds
of expression that are accepted as reason-giving, and developed an understanding that different
kinds of communication are appropriate in different places (Dryzek 2010: 7). Storytelling
and references to personal experience, and even affective appeals, are accepted under certain
182  Handbook on theories of governance

conditions (Hajer and Wagenaar 2003: 23; Chambers 2009; Dryzek 2010; Holdo et al. 2019),
as are interest advocacy (Hendriks 2011), rhetoric (Dryzek 2010) and strategically thought
out arguments in defense of self-interest (Mansbridge et al. 2010). Accepting these forms of
communication is obviously controversial, since there are limits on how far the understanding
of reason-giving can be stretched. At the very least reason-giving must be understood as part
of an exchange of reasons within a specific community, and hence must be “accessible to the
relevant audience” (Thompson 2008: 504) and call for a reasoned reply.

Can Citizens Deliberate and Are They Willing to Deliberate?

Conceptual controversies are futile if they do not relate to the behavior of real world actors.
Therefore the question of whether politicians and citizens have the capacity and willingness to
deliberate is crucial. Studies show that this premise can be questioned. Some even argue that
deliberation “rests on weak and naïve foundations” (Baccaro and Papadakis 2009). Citizens
do not want to participate in deliberation; they simply aim to advocate their interests and be
heard (Sanders 1997; Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2002). Researchers also argue that people in
general are conflict aversive and therefore avoid “hearing the other side” (Mutz 2006), and
that few individuals have the psychological characteristics required to deliberate (Rosenberg
2007).
These studies have been severely criticized by normative theorists and other empirically
oriented researchers (Fung 2006; Neblo et al. 2010; Emerson et al. 2012; Nabatchi et al. 2012;
Öberg and Uba 2014). To some extent, these disagreements are based on conceptual diversity
and different operationalizations of the elements of deliberation.

What Factors Are Conducive to Deliberation?

An important explanation for the mixed empirical results lies in the fact that deliberation is
context dependent (Thompson 2008: 499; Jennstål et al. 2020). This dependence is mirrored
in discussions on whether openness (i.e., transparency and publicity; cf. Naurin 2007) is
conducive to deliberation (Chambers 2004). On the one hand, theorists claim that publicly
audited processes may force participants to behave with what Goodin (1986) calls “laundering
preferences” in public debates. Self-interested motives are frowned upon in public debates,
forcing actors to concede to the norm that politicians should speak in the name of the common
good (Steiner et al. 2004). Therefore theorists often state that, when speakers defend their
preferences before a large and diverse audience, they are more likely to take their opponents’
views seriously (Thompson 2008: 510).
On the other hand, when participants engage in discussions within closed rooms, protected
from publicity, they have less incentive to engage in public posturing, and are more inclined
to recognize complexities, reveal information and offer concessions (Öberg 2002; Chambers
2003: 318; Thompson 2008: 510; Naurin 2009). In fact an overwhelming number of empirical
studies on the matter show the benefits of closed-door interaction (Warren and Mansbridge
2013: 108). Hence decision making behind closed doors can be the key to problem solving
in complex issues. However, since closed-door decision making is difficult to reconcile with
democratic norms (Warren and Mansbridge 2013), this topic poses a challenge for future
research on deliberative governance.
 Deliberation  183

In addition to openness, many other conditions relate to deliberation. For example, deliber-
ation seems less likely when positions are polarized (Grönlund et al. 2014: 234 and chap. 12;
cf. Öberg and Uba 2014) and under politically heated conditions with high political stakes
(Steiner et al. 2004; Naurin 2009; Lundin and Öberg 2014; cf. Hajer and Wagenaar 2003).
Another pressing issue for future studies is how power inequalities over political information
constrain the number of policy options that are seriously deliberated over by citizens and
politicians (Hajer and Wagenaar 2003: 27–29; Öberg et al. 2015). Research has, however,
demonstrated that many of these problematic conditions for deliberation can be mitigated, for
example in well-designed mini-publics (Bächtiger and Goldberg 2020).

Does Deliberation Promote Democracy or Technocracy?

Related to the issue of whether citizens are able and/or willing to deliberate is the controversy
over the role of experts and the epistemic value of deliberation (Christiano 2012; Estlund and
Landemore 2018). Many deliberative democrats assume that deliberation empowers margin-
alized groups and civil society outside formal decision making bodies. However, emphasizing
the force of the better argument may still produce an elitist decision making process.
One way to handle this dilemma is to organize governance structures in which a group
of experts proposes policies to a deliberative body, which in turn revises them and sends
them back (Dahl 1989; Thompson 2008: 515). It has been shown that an expert based public
administration could propose policy alternatives to a democratically elected body as input for
deliberation (Hajer and Wagenaar 2003; Lundin and Öberg 2014). Recent promising attempts
to bring citizens and scientists together in deliberation on the global level (Dryzek et al. 2020)
may inspire new solutions in the future.
Research on deliberation is still expanding and improving. In order to move research on
deliberative governance forward, it is important to continue to translate deliberative theo-
ry’s normative language into operational terms, and to incorporate findings from empirical
research on deliberation into theories on governance.

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Bächtiger and Maija Setälä (eds), Deliberative Mini-publics: Involving Citizens in the Democratic
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186  Handbook on theories of governance

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Gunnar Thesen (2011), ‘Disrupted exchange and declining corporatism: Government authority and
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17. Power
Mark Haugaard

The power debates in political science and sociology began with Mills’s claim that the United
States was dominated by a power elite of 400 (Mills 1956). In response, Dahl argued that
Mills’s conclusions were based upon a conflation of political power with power resources
(Dahl 1957). Dahl identifies power in terms of the capacity of an actor A to make a second
actor B do something which actor B would not otherwise do (Dahl 1957). This agent-centered
and conflict-based view of power dominated the three-dimensional power debates. Although
Lukes (1974) argued for a subtler structural and cognitively based view of power, he still
insisted upon agency and conflict as constitutive of power. In the 1980s, Foucault’s work
moved the Anglophone perceptions of power beyond visible agency and conflict. For many
authors (Clegg 1989; Flyvbjerg 1998; Dean 2010), Foucault’s work represented a new par-
adigm, suggesting discontinuity with the three-dimensional debates. However, Haugaard
(2020), integrates Foucault’s work with the dimensional approach, arguing that there are four
dimensions of power.
When we look at the concept of interactive governance, at first sight this mode of social
organization would appear to move us beyond the concerns of the three- dimensional power
debates. Interactive governance refers to “the complex process through which a plurality of
social and political actors with diverging interests interact in order to formulate, promote,
and achieve common objectives by means of mobilizing, exchanging, and deploying a range
of ideas, rules and resources” (Torfing et al. 2012: 14, italics in original). If we look at this
formulation we see a process that is specifically geared to avoid the idea of A in conflict with
B. Rather, actors negotiate, exchanging ideas, common rules and so on, which appears con-
sensual. In essence, interactive governance seems to be avoiding dominating power altogether.
However, like Torfing et al. (2012: 48–70), I would argue that this is a naïve view.
In this chapter I begin by re-theorizing the three-dimensional power debate in a way that
moves us away from the conflictual agent-centered perspective. This entails a re-theorization
of the three dimensions of power, which constitutes a significant departure from the origi-
nal formulation. It is a reformulation that is consistent with aspects of Foucault’s analysis.
Foucault’s hypothesis will be integrated and divided into two. Some of Foucault’s observa-
tions upon power/truth concern the third, epistemic dimension (hereafter: 3-D), while subject
formation will be the fourth, ontological dimension (4-D). With these four dimensions of
power in place, the concluding part of the chapter will show that all four dimensions of power
have implications for interactive governance.

THE FOUR DIMENSIONS OF POWER

Aside from the conflictual premises of the 3-D perspective, there is a more consensual tradi-
tion of power analysis that emphasizes power-to, as the capacity for action. This perspective
of power was introduced by Arendt (1970) and Parsons (1963) but was relatively ignored in

187
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the power literature until recently, when it was revived by Amy Allen (1999, 2007) and Peter
Morriss (2002, 2009). The central point of these theorists is that power entails a capacity for
action, which is power-to. It is secondary how that power is used, whether to empower others
or to dominate them. Power-to precedes power-over (Pansardi 2012). Actor A is powerful if
they have the capacity for action, not simply when they use it to kick others around (Morriss
2009).
Following this lead, the first dimension of power (1-D) entails the capacity of A to make
a difference in the world, or power-to. This is the agent-centered aspect of power, but does not
necessarily entail conflict. In a complex interdependent society, the power-to of A is premised
upon A’s ability to harness the power of others.
In his original formulation, Dahl argued that a police officer directing a car to the right,
where it would normally go left, constitutes the bedrock idea of power (Dahl 1957). Let us
for a moment examine the 1-D exercise of power more closely. It is true that police officer
A gets B to do something that B would not otherwise do. However, what gives A this power?
Is B turning left because A is threatening B with a gun, as in armed robbery? Usually, the
answer is no. A has the powers they have because they are a police officer—they are wearing
a particular uniform which actor B routinely responds to in a particular way. A has authority,
which is a significant power resource (Haugaard 2018). The modern state not only has a near
monopoly of coercive power, but is also the most significant source of authority (Haugaard
2018; 2020: 24‒35).
The police officer is part of a structured system, of law and order and rules of the road, to
which B is responding. The powers of A are a reflection of more deeply structured rules of the
game. As Clegg argues, what is really significant, from the perspective of power, is not the
momentary exercise of power but the deeper dispositions that are structurally and systemically
constituted (Clegg 1989).
Is the agency of the traffic police officer really one of conflict? It is power-over, but there is
no real conflict between A and B, as B’s compliance is a consequence of the reproduction of
social structures that B regards as legitimate. Episodically there has been conflict, but disposi-
tionally there has been none (Haugaard 2012a). In fact, to the extent to which these rules facil-
itate power-to, B has become empowered through their compliance (Haugaard 2020: 23‒24).
The rules of the road, staffed by traffic police, constitute a shared facility, which empowers
actor B. Therefore, A’s power-over B gives B power-to. This applies right across social life.
Organizations are usually created with shared objectives in mind, using power-to. However,
organizations are usually premised upon a complex division of labor, which entails hierarchy
and power-over. This power-over does not equate to conflict.
Rules of the road and organizations presuppose shared goals. However, it is a premise
of classical democratic theory that society is essentially plural. For the purposes of politics,
consensus will never last. So democracy is not an organization. The objective is to manage,
not eradicate, conflict. However, democracy is premised upon the compatibility of conflict
and consent. If we imagine A and B as United States presidential candidates, this is a conflict
within a highly structured set of rules of the game, in which winning is premised upon shared
consent to those rules.
The stability of democratic conflict is premised upon turn-taking. B is willing to concede
defeat because B thinks that the rules of the game are so constituted that even though they
lose this time, they can win at some future date. It is for this reason that in ethnically divided
societies winner-takes-all democracy does not work, because it delivers permanent minorities
 Power  189

who never stand a chance of government. Consociational democracy (Lijphart 2008) is meant
to overcome this by giving minorities a chance (Haugaard 2020: 195‒196).
In a well-balanced democracy actors prevail over each other episodically, while disposi-
tionally they are empowered. When in the United States the Republicans concede defeat to
the Democrats, and vice versa, it is in the knowledge that there will be another election, which
they can win. In that sense, conceding defeat is only episodic defeat, because the reproduction
of the structures of the democratic system constitutes reproduction of shared dispositional
power. Episodic defeat is not a total loss.
Normatively, in the democratic process power-over does not equate to domination. The
democratic process is a way of structuring social conflicts so that they are played out in
a non-dominating way. In contrast, in a typical coercive relationship, such as armed robbery,
A prevails over B and in the process B is a means to A’s ends, which is the essence of domi-
nation. However, by bringing episodic conflict into an open arena, the structures of democracy
constitute a form of long-term empowerment for society as a whole. It is for this reason that
Donald Trump’s refusal to consent to defeat after the 2020 presidential election was both
highly infelicitous and constituted a fundamental attack upon the democratic process.
To conclude, 1-D entails agency, which includes both power-to and power-over. Many
exercises of power are a blend of both. Structured power-over does not equate to domination,
as many exercises of power-over entail capacity-building, or power-to, for both the more
powerful and the less powerful actors. These are ideal types: many political systems that call
themselves “democratic” fall short in subtle ways, which brings us to the next dimensions of
power.
Bachrach and Baratz argued that decision-making was only a single face of power. Power
is also found in the structuring of the decision-making process (Bachrach and Baratz 1962).
For reasons of perceived good scientific practice, Bachrach and Baratz followed Dahl by
insisting upon an agent-centered episodic perspective. Structural bias was theorized as a form
of non-decision-making; typically, deliberate agenda-setting. However, Crenson (1971) exe-
cuted the most successful empirical work on the second face of power, which demonstrated
that in single-company towns there was a structural bias against pollution control. This was
structurally systemic, therefore not reducible to specific non-decisions.
As re-theorized here, the second dimension (2-D) concerns the social structures, which
define the rules of the game. Irrespective of deliberate agency, all systems entail the mobi-
lization of bias; some issues are structured into the process, while others are structured out.
According to Giddens’s (1984) theory of structuration, structures are both enabling and
constraining. For instance, the rules of the road, or the English language, constrain us, but that
very constraint is what enables us to use the roads safely or to communicate using language.
The process of structuring in and out of issues can be forms of domination, but this is not
necessarily so. The central element of liberal democratic theory is the idea of the political
system as a set of neutral institutions. In this regard Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” is archetypi-
cal (Rawls 2001). In a thought experiment test, the structures of the political process must be
so constructed that they would be chosen by social actors behind a veil of ignorance of their
actual position, or specific interests, in society. They would choose without knowledge of
their gender, social class, ethnicity, abilities, and so on. This is akin to asking a child to divide
a cake, while telling the child in advance that someone else will choose a piece for the child.
Assuming that someone else will choose the smallest slice for the child, they will make every
effort to divide the cake equally, so that there is no significantly smaller slice. Behind a veil
190  Handbook on theories of governance

of ignorance the objective becomes how to create social structures that organize out particular
interests, while organizing in collective shared interests.
Again it has to be emphasized that the ideal type of neutral political institutions is never
actualized, but exists as a regulative ideal, which confers legitimacy upon the system. In
real life, political institutions are not, in a clear black-and-white sense, either neutral or
biased. Rather, they are more or less neutral or biased. The less biased they are perceived to
be, the more consent and compliance they will receive. Therefore they will be more stable.
For instance, recently a significant number of the citizens in countries that bailed out banks
perceived these bailouts as a structural bias in favor of banks. Whether this perception is true
or not will not concern us here; the key point is that this perception entailed a decrease in the
perceived legitimacy of the political systems of these countries. Normatively, many citizens
perceived the bailout as domination. They (the taxpayers) were being asked to consent to a set
of structures that used them (their money) as a means to someone else’s (bankers’) ends.
Most liberals accept that neutrality is a regulative ideal, which can never be realized but
nevertheless normatively informs the revision of political structures. However, neutrality is
a matter of perceptions, which can be manipulated, which brings us to the next dimension of
power.
Lukes theorizes 3-D power using the Marxist vocabulary of false consciousness, ideology
and hegemony (Lukes 1974), and insists upon agency (Lukes 2005; Hayward and Lukes 2008),
which are moves that I reject. The idea of false consciousness obscures the Foucauldian insight
that many forms of epistemic domination take place through appeals to truth. Furthermore,
systems of thought are not usually agent-specific.
The structuring of social life takes place relative to an interpretative horizon, which is
largely tacit. A qualified driver sees a person in uniform as a police officer, or a voter interprets
a paper with a list of names as a ballot paper, which are concept-linked perceptions that reflect
those actors’ tacit interpretative horizon; what Elias (1994) and Bourdieu (1990) refer to as
habitus, Giddens (1984) as practical consciousness and Foucault (1970) as episteme (see also
Haugaard 2008). Our tacit epistemic interpretative horizon enables us to structure our interac-
tion with others. This is largely done with a taken-for-granted “natural attitude” (Schutz 1967),
which is second nature (Elias 1994).
This second nature is, of course, a product of socialization. However, most of the time, when
making sense of the outside world, social actors do not experience it as their interpretative
horizon. Rather, they assume interpretation as part of the natural order of things: just the way
the world is. If relations of domination are socialized into this interpretative horizon, these
relations will also appear as part of the natural order of things. Critique entails showing the
constructedness of the tacit knowledge that informs interpretation, thus making that which is
something that could be otherwise (Foucault 1988: 36–37). Let us be clear: there is no escape
from interpretation. However, social actors are not passively abject. They can question their
taken-for-granted interpretative framework by realizing its constructed and contingent nature.
Thus, for instance, when a theorist of nationalism, such as Gellner (1983), shows us that the
concept of a nation is a social construction, which is relatively modern, he is practicing social
critique by implicitly telling us that nations were made; therefore they can be unmade.
Normatively this form of critique follows the pattern of enlightenment critique. This sug-
gests that we raise the banner of truth against domination. However, following Foucault, the
process is made more complex than that. What makes it possible to unmake social structures is
that they are conventional, reflecting a particular way of life. However, truth claims in modern
 Power  191

secular societies function like the word of God in traditional societies. They are often used to
reify (Haugaard 2012b; 2020: 94‒113). If something represents truth, or the word of God, it
is no longer conventional. The modern use of scientific truth springs from the positivist idea
of science, which assumes scientific claims to be devoid of social construction. However, as
argued by Kuhn (1970), science works through human interpretation and thus presupposes
social construction. From the perspective of social critique, we should always remember that
there is no such thing as truth in itself, but rather ideas and hypotheses that have not, as yet,
been falsified, which is a more modest claim.
As the concept of second nature suggests, these interpretative horizons are linked to the
social formation of social subjects. The formation of social subjects is a historically contin-
gent phenomenon that reflects local ways of life. Following Elias (1994), the socialization
of a feudal knight is one of volatility, and violence, fundamentally different from that of
a modern subject. As also argued by Foucault (1979) in his account of the Panopticon, the
creation of the modern social subject entails the creation of a social being in the world who is
disciplined toward self-restraint. On a thirteenth-century road the best disposition was fight or
flight, while on the modern highway the competent social actor is one with a high capacity for
self-restraint and rule-following (Elias 1994; Haugaard 2020: 143‒171).
With respect to Dahl’s example of the traffic police, the constitution of social agents, the
police officers, is not that of random individuals plucked out of a social context and given
uniforms. Rather, they are products of modernity who have been further trained in police acad-
emies. In other words, they are made as a certain kind of social agent who structures the world
predictably. Similarly, reflecting wider socialization, other social agents—citizens—respond
in a specific way. When the police force is considered legitimate, others confirm the legiti-
macy of these acts of structuration by responding appropriately; thus the power structure of the
police is reproduced. These appropriately responding citizens are social subjects with specific
dispositions specific to that society. With regard to liberal democratic theory, the dispositions
of public officeholders are those embodied in the action of bracketing self-interest behind
a veil of ignorance. When in public office, office holders treat everyone the same, regardless
of status, gender, and so on. This impartiality does not extend to every part of life. When public
office holders go home, they are expected to shift into a more subjective, affective mode. They
do not treat their children and family as numbers on a file, because they belong to the private
realm.
With regard to democratic conflict, actors are expected to restrain themselves, allowing the
structures of the democratic game to override their particular desires to win. A feudal knight
would not concede defeat because he got fewer votes than someone else, while a politician
would be expected to concede defeat by letting the electoral process override their immediate
episodic desires (Haugaard 2020: 186‒217).
Of course, discipline and self-restraint are not inherently normatively desirable. An over-
disciplined subject will lack the reflexivity necessary to realize the constructedness of social
life (3-D). The person willing to follow orders under all circumstances is the normatively
undesirable product of modern subject creation, while the person capable of impartiality is its
normatively desirable outcome. On the normatively negative side, there is also the phenome-
non of social death (Patterson 1982), where social subjects are destroyed by extreme forms of
domination which include slavery, solitary confinement and concentration camps (Haugaard
2020: 172‒185).
192  Handbook on theories of governance

THE FOUR DIMENSIONS AND INTERACTIVE GOVERNANCE

With its emphasis upon interaction and consensus-seeking, interactive governance appears to
transcend many of the normative concerns of the four dimensions of power. However, appear-
ances are deceptive.
With regard to the first dimension, unlike in the democratic process, in interactive govern-
ance the emphasis is upon power-to, rather than power-over, which is normatively desirable.
However, we live in complex plural societies, and it is reasonable to be skeptical of the idea
that all conflict can be subsumed into collective goals. What is more likely is that disagreement
remains but is less visible because of the emphasis upon consensus.
The danger is that the more powerful still decide what the common goals are, through
a process where conflict is subsumed. In adversarial democracy the more powerful prevail,
but because conflict is taken as given, the dissenting voice is visible. For the subaltern actor,
acknowledged dissent, even if it results in defeat, can be more satisfying than being subsumed
into an unreal consensus. There is still the possibility of prevailing another day and the dignity
of having your difference acknowledged. However, once that danger is acknowledged, and
there are suitably lateral discursive structures in place to voice dissent and acknowledge dif-
ference, interactive governance has genuine emancipatory potential.
With regard to 2-D, interactive governance entails that structures are negotiated. In many
respects this is normatively desirable. Structures become the outcome of an amalgam of the
interests of the contending parties. However, with public–private partnerships and the constant
blending of public and private interests, from a liberal point of view there is a danger that
awareness is lost that complex plural societies also require social structures that are relatively
impartial, in order to remain stable and just. In the liberal perception, the structures of the
political require a public–private distinction, which the partnership aspect of interactive gov-
ernance would appear to be at odds with. Of course, against this, it has to be acknowledged
that the public–private distinction can be used to protect private spheres of domination, as
feminists often argue. Again, awareness of these dangers, combined with genuine openness to
the fact that people do require private spaces, where difference has legitimate space.
Much of interactive governance revolves around Jan Kooiman’s assertion that in contem-
porary society no single actor, public or private, has the knowledge and capacity to solve
complex, dynamic and diversified problems (Kooiman 1993: 4; Torfing et al. 2012: 21). From
the perspective of 3-D, a possible normative danger of this is the tendency for policy outcomes
to reflect the decisions of expert committees and what is considered “best practice.” This can
have the normatively undesirable consequence of linking decision-making to a regime of
truth production. If, for instance, the field of education becomes run according to what expert
committees glean from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
reports on best practice (Alasuutari and Rasimus 2009), there is a real danger that we arrive at
government by nobody, which Arendt (2004) described as a form of anti-politics or tyranny.
A politician making a decision based upon the cut and thrust of party politics is perceived
as being accountable for that decision in a way in which an expert committee is not. No one
thinks the politician is speaking the language of truth, while people may be under the impres-
sion that the expert committee is.
Against this concern, it has to acknowledged that the abuse of truth, which is a form of
the reification of truth, making it Truth, as if it were the word of God, co-exists with more
modest use of truth claims. These are truth claims that acknowledge contingency and fallibility
 Power  193

(Haugaard 2020: 115‒120). Interactive governance, where there is real open dialogue between
dissenting viewpoints, is likely to allow for this modest use of truth. In such contexts, the
expert with authority is not outside dialogue with the citizens, but is in dialogue with citizens.
With regard to 4-D, interactive governance is associated with the rise of a new form of
subject creation (Foucault 1982) that emphasizes flexibility and adaptability (Triantafillou
2012). This is no longer the classical liberal subject of the public‒private distinction, but the
subject who adapts to living in a complex society of interacting networks that make conflict-
ing demands. This corresponds to Elias’s viewpoint that complex interdependence deepens
self-restraint in a manner that allows for greater respect for the other.
Normatively the concern here would be that this flexible subject may be relatively uncritical
of the status quo because of the emphasis upon adaptability. Critical distance demands the
capacity not to fit in, despite social pressure (Bauman 1989). In that sense there is a danger that
the contemporary flexible subject, while different in many ways from the disciplined modern
subject, has the same normative weakness as the overdisciplined subject, that is, of being too
prone to rule-following. Against that, on the normative positive, this flexibility may also lead
to the creation of a social subject who is less likely to reify the order of things. If interactive
governance is genuinely interactive in a lateral way, there will be a fundamental respect for
reason-giving. As has been argued by Forst (2007, 2015), normatively legitimate authority
power is not downward, power-over, of the kind “obey this command because I have the
authority to command it.” Rather, normatively desirable power is always based upon reasons,
which the compliant actor accepts as reasonable. In this context, reasonable means that
power-over does not simply advantage the powerful, but also delivers power-to to the compli-
ant actor (Haugaard 2020: 191‒195). The less hierarchy, the more lateral the decision-making
process, the greater the possibilities for reason-giving, thus normatively egalitarian authority.
Accountability and transparency are normatively desirable in that these processes expose
2-D bias in favor of specific interests. In particular, if all social structures are opened up to
justification, then dominating social structures become open to social change. However,
normatively negative consequences are also possible. Once uncoupled from the liberal
public–private distinction, transparency would appear to extend the 4-D realm of panoptical
surveillance into everyday life. For instance, Facebook pages become open to scrutiny, which
is part of the realm liberals consider private.
In organizations, overconsciousness of transparency can lead to privileging procedure over
outcome. Individual decision-makers may become obsessed with getting the procedure right,
with the danger that transparency leads to government by no one. In a curious trap, accounta-
bility has the potential to lead to its absence, with regard to outcomes. Against that, of course,
the objective of accountability is to limit the scope of authority to decisions that are beneficial
to those who are affected by that authority.
Against the liberal critiques it can be argued that interactive governance does not replace
the political democratic sphere, which remains one of open contestation that structures the
wider rules of the game, including metagovernance (Torfing et al. 2012: 122–144). In this way
of thinking, the sphere of interactive governance is another sphere, between the political and
civil society. In this case, it may fit with the liberal democratic concerns. However, we should
acknowledge that there is a potential danger if interactive governance colonizes the liberal
democratic process as a whole. To use a metaphor, while it may be desirable in some respects
to cut off the king’s head, there may be dangers in it too.1
194  Handbook on theories of governance

In conclusion, when the power debates began, and there was the three-dimensional power
debate between Dahl (1957), Bachrach and Baratz (1962) and Lukes (1974), there was
a shared assumption that power was intrinsically against people’s interests (Lukes 1974: 27).
Post-Foucault, there is a realization that not only is there no escape from power, but also that
power is not necessarily against the interests of social subjects. All decision-making involves
hierarchy of some kind, which means authority. However, authority does not need to be
command and obedience, it can be based a more lateral interactive process of governance,
where accountability is based upon reason-giving, that is justifiable in terms of empowerment.
When we go through the four dimensions of power, they all have potentially dominating
aspects, yet simultaneously also empowering aspects. The challenge for structuring norma-
tively desirable practices of interactive governance is to be aware of the duality of power,
which entails constant awareness of the potentially dominating aspects, while seeking out the
empowering sides of power. So, for instance, with respect to the third dimension of power,
social actors must be aware that complex interdependence requires expert authority, which is
based upon truth claims. However, those truth claims should be with a small t, always fallible
and revisable. Once truth claims are reified, seen as absolute, Truth (with a capital T) is a source
of domination. Similarly, with respect to the fourth dimension, the creation of social subjects is
not necessarily subjection, as assumed by Foucault (1982) and Butler (1997), as certain subject
formations are a condition of possibility for the creation of citizens who have the restraint
necessary to respect the equal moral worth of other citizens. Such self-restrained citizens are
a condition of possibility for truly egalitarian interactive governance. So, we must constantly
interrogate subject formation, so as to avoid creating the kinds of docile subjects that Foucault
and Butler were concerned about. However, subject formation cannot be escaped, so it must be
done by an awareness of the ultimate purposes of socialization, as empowerment.

NOTE
1. I owe this concluding metaphor to my friend and colleague Kevin Ryan.

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 Power  195

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18. Legitimacy
Sylvia I. Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen

INTRODUCTION
Legitimacy is a key concept for any effort to theorize how governance works. It contributes
both to understanding how the ‘interactive processes through which society and the economy
are steered towards collectively negotiated objectives’ (Introduction in this Handbook) can
be effective and how they can be normatively evaluated. However, the concept of legitimacy
has, as do most central concepts in the social sciences, numerous connotations, definitions and
(sub)categorizations.
The starting point for this brief summary of how legitimacy can be theorized and understood
in diverse contexts of governance is the understanding of legitimacy as being about justifi-
cation of authority (Bodansky 1999). Traditionally, the concern about legitimacy has been
centred on how the delegation of authority and power from citizens to (national) governments
can be justified. Depending on the political system, some key principles of justification have
evolved related to the nature of the political regime (democracy, monarchy, theocracy, etc.)
(Chapter 17 in this Handbook). There is also a body of literature on organizational legitimacy
that approaches the concept either from the perspective of the strategic efforts by organiza-
tions (across the private and public spectrum) to gain societal approval, or from a broader
sector-wide institutional perspective where legitimacy is not seen as an operational resource
but rather a package of beliefs constructed by culture and external institutions (Suchman
1995).
The emerging literature on legitimacy in contexts of governance draws on both these
strands of literature. Its diversity, however, is considerable. It is diverse in the types of gov-
ernance it addresses: from the legitimacy of ‘traditional’ governance beyond the nation-state
through intergovernmental organizations and norms at regional or global level (Bodansky
1999; Scharpf 2000; Howse and Nicolaidis 2003; Moravcsik 2004; Zürn 2004; Buchanan and
Keohane 2006; Wolfrum and Röben 2008; Elliott 2012; Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen and McGee
2013; Hurd 2019; Tallberg and Zürn 2019; Dellmuth and Schlipphak 2020), to transnational
forms of governance through non-state, public–private or multi-stakeholder (regulatory)
initiatives (Bernstein and Cashore 2007; Black 2008; Mueller et al. 2009; Cutler 2010;
Schepers 2010; Take 2012; Mele and Schepers 2013; Widerberg and Pattberg 2015; Hahn
and Weidtmann 2016; Siems and Nelken 2017), and various governance arrangements and
contexts in domestic settings (Sørensen and Torfing 2005; van Oosterhout 2007; Klijn and
Edelenbos 2012; Haveri et al. 2019; Melnychuk and de Loë 2020). The empirical fields of
governance analysed in this literature include energy, water, environment, metropolitan issues,
security, trade, economics and finance. The literature is also quite diverse in the approaches
it utilizes to conceptualize and assess legitimacy, and in the depth of analysis of this concept.

196
 Legitimacy  197

MULTIPLE NOTIONS AND SOURCES OF LEGITIMACY

The most fundamental distinction in analysing legitimacy in relation to political orders is

between its normative and sociological connotations (Bodansky 1999; Black 2008). While
the former refers to a fundamental normative validity of justifying the exercise of authority,
the latter concerns the societal acceptance of expressions of authority (Zürn 2004). When
processes of governance enter the scene and aspire to gain authority, the ability to outline
normative arguments that provide a coherent justification for that authority is fundamental for
a society that wants to be reflective of its value foundations. The societal acceptance of the
authority of governance can be seen as a normative requirement linked to theories of democ-
racy, but it is also important for the more widespread cooperation by citizens to achieve public
objectives.
There are multiple categorizations of sources of legitimacy in the literature, includ-
ing Scharpf’s (1999) distinction between input and output legitimacy as one of the more
well-known ones.1 Input legitimacy in his connotation is about legitimacy gained from the
process of government, government by the people, while output legitimacy is gained from
the result, government for the people (Scharpf 1999). Scholars have also identified more
fine-grained categorizations that build on this basic distinction and include a number of sub-
components of legitimacy (see for example Bodansky 1999 and Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen and
Vihma 2009 for a discussion of normative legitimacy). It is particularly valuable to consider
some of these subcomponents of legitimacy in governance contexts, as discussed below.

LEGITIMACY FOR WHOM? THE IMPLICATIONS OF BLURRY

BOUNDARIES

There is one issue with regard to governance and legitimacy that has implications across
several components of both input and output legitimacy, and this concerns who the subject
is. Legitimacy for whom? Governance often blurs boundaries with regard to who exercises
authority over whom. Even if governance is defined as being an activity with public purpose,
the question still arises: which public, or which portion of which public, is being addressed?
This becomes particularly relevant when a number of non-public actors become involved in
governance, some of whom may largely have non-public purposes, and when the impacts of
governance crosses jurisdictional borders. For reflections on normative legitimacy this can be
phrased as identifying the appropriate moral community (local, national, global, the powerful,
the vulnerable, shareholders etc.).
The number of public–private or non-state regulatory regimes in the field of social and envi-
ronmental issues has provided the academic community with ample opportunity to examine
whose legitimacy claims count or should count (Elliott 2012; Mele and Schepers 2013; Haack
et al. 2014). Elliott (2012: 375) suggests that those who should count for a rule system to be
legitimate are ‘those who are most directly affected by those rules because they are required to
implement them or conform to them’ and ‘those who are most affected by the impact of rules
and rule systems’. In any context of governance, but particularly in contexts of multilevel,
transnational and global governance, the cultural, socio-economic and political diversity of
relevant individuals and groups, as well as their large numbers, presents a very basic challenge
to sociological legitimacy. But also for normative legitimacy the possibility to transfer justifi-
198  Handbook on theories of governance

catory motivations from one context of authority to another is widely debated, such as between
national political authority and international law (Scharpf 2001; Howse and Nicolaidis 2003;
Clark 2005). Furthermore, the position of states as the only formal members of the interna-
tional community and as the key actors in global governance has underlain the principles of
legitimacy (Clark 2005). An alternative cosmopolitan perspective considers global justice
among both people and states as a fundamental objective of governance, thereby disclaiming
states as the only entities with a right to rule or as subjects to that rule (Elliott 2012).

INPUT LEGITIMACY

Where governance is emerging as a new source of authority – either where governments have
earlier taken charge, or where no authority has been exercised previously – questions can and
will be raised about who is or should be part of those claiming authority, that is, having a seat
at the decision-making table. Such claims may be particularly contested where there is limited
tradition to build on, and rules for who is in or out have to be negotiated. From a normative
perspective, inclusiveness of participation is often considered a key source of input legitimacy.
This can refer to adequate representation of those who are ‘governed’, making sure that not
only the powerful but also the vulnerable are included, as Eckersley (2012) discusses for
global climate governance. Inclusive participation in global governance has come to refer both
to universal governmental participation – for example, contrasting the low legitimacy score
for minilateral governance forums such as the G8 and G20 with the universal multilateralism
of the United Nations (Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen and McGee 2013) – and to participation of
non-state actors, particularly from civil society (Reinicke and Witte 2000; Scholte 2002). The
participation of non-state actors is typically expressed as a response to the democratic deficit
of global governance (Elliott 2012) or as a means of governing ‘with the people’ (Mügge
2011). It is the voice of those who are expected to follow the rules and are influenced by them
that is desired in such participation, although it may bring a risk to only consider ‘stakehold-
ers’ rather than ‘right-holders’ in the context of relations of unequal power (Elliott 2012).
However, the practical inclusion of many actors at the table poses grave challenges, including
information asymmetries and power struggles, which may put effective governance at peril
(Mele and Schepers 2013). Here it is also relevant to point out the particular role of law and
legality ‒ conformity with law ‒ as a source of normative legitimacy (Beetham 2013), and that
some forms of governance often relies less on formal ‘hard’ law in domestic, transnational and
international contexts. Such reliance on soft law and absence of linkages to legislative arenas
has been argued to reduce democratic accountability and thereby legitimacy (Føllesdal 2011).
A number of issues are also raised for input legitimacy – which others specify as throughput
legitimacy, or the quality of decision-making processes – includes transparency and the quality
of deliberation (Cutler 2010). Lack of transparency is an often-raised critique of governance
arrangements in minilateral global governance arenas (Hajnal 2007; Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen
and McGee 2013) and in non-state regulatory regimes (Black 2008). Detached from formal
government contexts, such governance arrangements have to negotiate principles for transpar-
ency both internally and externally. On a more systemic level the mechanisms of, for example,
transnational governance are mostly discussed in expert circles and may seem impervious to
the general public (Haack et al. 2014). The quality of deliberation is linked to the existence of
‘genuine deliberation and argumentation processes’ that are created by ‘clear and fair process
 Legitimacy  199

arrangements between actors where they share knowledge and explore possible solutions and
exchange value judgements’ (Klijn and Edelenbos 2012: 634, 635), as depicted in theories of
deliberative democracy (Dryzek 2006). If governance provides greater actor diversity there
is considerable potential for richer and more diverse inputs and expertise, but there is also
a considerable risk of power differences and conflicts.
One reason why transparency in the deliberation and decision-making process is consid-
ered important is that it enables (but does not ensure) the possibility to hold those involved
to account for decisions made and the implications of these. The concept of accountability
(also discussed in Chapter 17 of this volume) is an important dimension of input legitimacy
(Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen and Vihma 2009). However, enabling accountability meets consid-
erable challenges in a governance context where actors are many and boundaries for who is
responsible for what are blurry. Koppell (2005), who identifies five dimensions of accounta-
bility – transparency, liability, controllability, responsibility and responsiveness – highlights
the challenges of organizations that, in contexts of governance, fail to handle conflicting
accountability demands. A common critique of (transnational) non-state regulatory regimes is
that they evade domestic or international law and that those affected by their decisions have
no possibility of calling them to account politically or legally. The constitutional mechanisms
of accountability that have become part of liberal democratic systems are not available (Black
2008; Groff and Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen 2018). Such accountability gaps are likely to be generic
issues in many governance contexts, as are the challenges for accountability stemming from
the multitude of diverse actors involved in governance and its often polycentric nature. Who
can then be held to account for what, and for whom? The ambiguity in identifying the relevant
constituency in private transnational governance is well illustrated by Cutler’s (2010) case of
private security firms operating at the request of states: who is the relevant public in this case,
and to whom should they be accountable: local residents, corporate employees, shareholders
or the local government? Other central aspects of accountability that bear particularly on
governance are its dialectical nature – the accountee and accountor are mutually dependent on
each other – and its communicative character: participants in the accountability relationship
use it to ‘make sense of their own and each other’s role’ (Black 2008: 16).
Another potential source for (claiming) legitimacy of governance arrangements is expert
knowledge. One example of an empirical context where this has been central to the legit-
imation argument is in the field of privatization of security operations where states have
outsourced their operations (Cutler 2010). While these private actors may claim to have par-
ticular scientific expertise and local knowledge, they are simply assumed to act in the public
interest, while in fact it is very unclear whose interests these actors represent and who they are
accountable to (Cutler 2010). This may be a very specific example, but Cutler (2010) sees this
‘authorizing role of experts’ as symptomatic of how governance navigates in a contemporary
transnational risk society enabled by neoliberal forms of regulation and governance, which
raises important issues around political legitimacy. Mügge (2011: 57) sees the same trend of
governance relying increasingly on experts employed by non-majoritarian institutions, but
argues that because it is impossible to objectively define ‘whose knowledge and opinions
should count’, it ‘makes expertise ineligible as a criterion for legitimacy’. While this per-
spective seems even more pertinent when observing developments of the erosion of trust in
expertise and the phenomenon of ‘fake news’, scientific knowledge and expertise is a strong
element of transnational governance in its various forms (networks, partnerships, etc.) and one
important source of their legitimacy (Stone 2019).
200  Handbook on theories of governance

OUTPUT LEGITIMACY

The output legitimacy of governance depends on its capacity to provide (public) benefits and
potentially also to do so comparatively better or more efficiently than other ways of governing.
Another common element of the ‘quality’ of output is equity, which has been particularly
featured in academic and other discussions about legitimacy where grave inequity prevails.
Governance that perpetuates or worsens inequality, for example in global governance, is
normatively considered to possess low legitimacy (Hirsch 2004). What are seen as desira-
ble (public) benefits are linked to ideology and belief and thus constituitive of sociological
legitimacy. For example, the legitimacy of global trade governance through the World Trade
Organization depends on people’s assumptions about the benefits of trade (Mügge 2011).
The large number of potential perspectives on the legitimacy of governance can thus raise
a number of difficulties for identifying outputs deemed desirable. Føllesdal (2011) highlights
two risks for output legitimacy of new modes of governance in the European Union that are
likely to be relevant for other (transnational) governance efforts: fragmentation, because these
new modes of governance are issue- or sector-specific; and associated negative externalities
associated with the absence of overarching democratic institutions, which might have been
willing and able to address them. Referring to her study of roundtables in global value chains,
Schouten (2013) argues that because these governance arrangements are voluntary, those
who join them need to have their own private interest to join. At the same time the regulatory
measures these roundtables develop are claimed to have a primarily public purpose. This
potential dissonance will make evaluations of output legitimacy challenging, as contribution
to some kinds of public goods can be seen as a condition for such legitimacy. The importance
for sociological legitimacy that governance does contribute to a desired objective is apparent
in the field of global environmental governance, where the inadequacy of governance systems
created to address the challenges raises serious concerns about their legitimacy (Elliott 2012).
One distinguishing feature of many governance contexts is the high reliance on legitimacy
as a source of influence since it cannot resort to legal sanctioning systems (Black 2008).
Indeed, for some actors a particular governance arrangement may be seen as legitimate on
the condition that it lacks enforcement mechanisms, such as in the case of corporations in
the United Nations Global Compact (Mele and Schepers 2013) or in the Paris Agreement
on Climate Change and other multilateral environmental agreements. While this reliance on
voluntary regulation with its dependence on only soft means of coercion (such as deliberation,
learning and persuasion often linked to legitimacy claims) has produced critical comments
about the potential for influence and output legitimacy, it has also led governance actors to
become highly engaged in processes of legitimation. One implication of the network character
of governance is that the legitimacy of a particular governance arrangement is highly depend-
ent on the performance (compliance) of its affiliates (Haack et al. 2014). Factors that have
been identified as sources for sociological legitimacy then become important, varied as these
may be. For example, Suchman (1995) identifies three types of sociological legitimacy linked
to three primary sources for viewing an organization and its activities as legitimate: pragmatic
legitimacy linked to self-interest based evaluations of an organization by groups it influences;
moral legitimacy linked to normative (not self-interested) evaluations of an organization and
its activities; and cognitive legitimacy linked to an organization being seen as inevitable and
taken for granted. Another example is legitimacy in the eyes of states. This is argued to be
 Legitimacy  201

a primary force for their compliance with international rules (legal and non-legal), and states
find even stronger reasons to comply with rules that are also seen to be just (Franck 1990).

LOOKING FORWARD

The literature on legitimacy in contexts of governance is rich and growing. It is possible to

identify some directions for future and further efforts that would be valuable for its advance-
ment. One direction is a deeper consideration of those particular challenges that come with
legitimacy in relation to governance. For example, what factors are essential to consider in
justifying authority normatively and sociologically across various socio-political and cultural
contexts? How, in particular, is it possible to analytically handle the blurry boundaries of such
authority? The diversity in the sources of legitimacy in different societies is linked to shared
norms and understanding of history (Bernstein and Cashore 2007).
Another direction that is now relatively invisible in the literature is to address the dynamic
nature of legitimacy. On the one hand, how do normative and sociological notions of legiti-
macy change over time? How do these notions change, and what drives such changes? On the
other hand, and relatedly, what is the relationship between normative and sociological legiti-
macy, theoretically and empirically? Legitimacy is ‘not fixed or given’ but rather ‘a product
of shifting norms about who should do what and how’, and such an understanding merges
normative and subjective approaches to the concept (Elliott 2012: 368). These shifts are also
not bereft of the influence of power, as Clark (2005) shows for shifting legitimacy principles
among states in global governance. The factors identified as sources for normative legitimacy
are linked to shifting standards of legitimacy among individuals and groups, as well as to shift-
ing discourses and theoretical and normative paradigms in the academic and political realms.
Conversely, dominating normative theories of legitimacy could have influence on what com-
ponents are considered relevant for subjective legitimacy in societies (Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen
and Vihma 2009). Another point of inquiry around legitimacy dynamics is the relationship
between input and output legitimacy. Can output legitimacy trump input legitimacy, and on
what conditions? Are the trade-offs different in contexts of governance rather than govern-
ments exerting authority?
Finally, it would be valuable to more systematically explore and address the methodological
challenges of analysing the legitimacy of governance, because there is a lack of ‘instruments
to subject governance institutions to a comprehensive and empirically founded “legitimacy
audit”’ (Mügge 2011: 53). For normative legitimacy, an analytical framework that identifies
its central components has been developed (Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen and Vihma 2009; Mügge
2011). But how universal can such frameworks be across socio-political, administrative and
cultural diversity? Furthermore, Mügge (2011: 67) concludes that at least with respect to
output legitimacy it is impossible to objectively assess this, because it is ‘not a property of
real-world institutions, but a function of observers’ preferences and normative convictions’.
Then if legitimacy is rather looked at as being ‘possessed objectively, yet created subjectively’
(Suchman 1995: 574), there is a need to solicit the views of those observers, through surveys,
interviews and so on (see e.g. Klijn and Edelenbos 2012). There are several efforts made in
this direction with regard to the perceived legitimacy of international and transnational organ-
izations (Schouten and Bitzer 2015; Dellmuth and Schlipphak 2020; Tallberg and Zürn 2019).
202  Handbook on theories of governance

However, the question of whose views to consider again comes to the fore. The complexity of
governance makes legitimacy ‘audits’, whether normative or sociological, a challenging task.

NOTE
1. There is considerable variation in concepts used. For example, output legitimacy has also been
referred to as substantive legitimacy, and sociological legitimacy as empirical legitimacy, among
other terms.

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Schouten, G. and V. Bitzer (2015), ‘The emergence of Southern standards in agricultural value chains:
A new trend in sustainability governance?’, Ecological Economics, 120, 175‒184.
Siems, M. and D. Nelken (2017), ‘Global social indicators and the concept of legitimacy’, International
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19. Trust
Bart Nooteboom

ESSENTIALS
A widely accepted definition of trust is that it is a mental state with a ‘willingness to be vulner-
able’ (Deutsch 1973; Mayer et al. 1995), engaging in actions that carry risk or uncertainty that
cannot be fully controlled. There has been debate on whether trust and control are substitutes
or complements, and the conclusion is that they are both (Das and Teng 2001; Bachmann
2001). The more trust there is, the less control is needed, and they then are substitutes (Sako
1998); but both are limited, and where they end, the other begins, and then they are comple-
ments. Often, uncertainty is involved, as distinguished from risk, in that one does not know all
that can happen, or all possible consequences of actions, so that one cannot attach probabilities
and calculate risk, and that typically occurs in relations. Uncertainty can be environmental;
epistemic, in not knowing for sure to what extent what one thinks one knows is true; and
behavioural in that one does not even always know how one will act.
A number of aspects of trust need to be taken into account, about which misunderstanding
regularly still occurs. One aspect concerns the level of trust: of the individual, organization
or wider social system. For example, mistrust of banking can concern individual bankers, the
bank, the system of financial markets and the regulatory environment. Individual bankers may
behave unethically while regretting it but feeling forced to do so by their position and their
career; banks may be forced by shareholders or competition, or the threat of takeover; govern-
ments may feel constrained in regulatory action by international financial markets, and wary of
banks moving out of the country. One may trust a person at a bank but be unsure of the extent
to which their superiors, or staff, will support their actions. One can trust a bank on the basis
of its reputation, but be unsure that appropriate behaviour will be upheld by individuals. For
trust, one needs to consider all these levels.
A second issue is the difference between competence trust and intentional trust (Nooteboom
2002). The first concerns the technical competence to honour commitments, and the second
concerns the commitment to do so to the best of one’s competence. That requires attention,
dedication and fairness, that is, the absence of opportunism.
Many years ago a survey in the Netherlands showed that citizens had intentional trust in
the police, in the sense that they were not perceived to be corrupt or racist, but there was
some doubt concerning their competence in catching thieves. That is better than the other way
around: nothing is worse than a police force that is competent in its corruption. In surveys such
as the survey of generalized trust in ‘The World Values Survey’, the question is as follows:
‘Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very
careful in dealing with people?’ There are several problems here. It is not clear whether one
means competence trust or intentional trust, which lowers the trustworthiness of the survey:
the respondent may hesitate between the two types of trust. If you ask, for example, whether
one trusts a politician, which type of trust does one mean? The distinction is important,
because the two types of trust evoke different responses. With competence distrust one may

205
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engage in training, whereas with intentional distrust one may resort to warnings or incentives.
Also, it is not clear how far ‘most people’ extends, how large the ‘radius’ is. Does it transcend
social classes and communities?
Economists often catch trust in a ‘trust game’, as follows. A is given an amount of money x,
and is asked to give some to B. What he gives is multiplied by three by the game supervisors.
B then decides what he gives in return. If A gives all of x, B gets 3x. If B returns half to A, they
both have 1.5x, which is considered fair. If A does not trust B, and expects B to return nothing,
he will give nothing. Most people want to be fair and trusting, giving x . For the outcome, it
matters whether A and B are allowed to see each other and talk. It also matters whether the
game is repeated, because then reputation comes into play. One can see the trust game as
a simplistic reduction of trust, which lacks context and realistic motivation, but its advantage
is that one can conduct experiments.
Trust does not entail being ‘nice’ to one’s partner. Precisely because there is trust, one can
exercise pointed criticism, voicing complaints. Albert O. Hirschman (1970) proposed the
notions of ‘exit’, as in walking away when disappointed; ‘voice’, in signalling disappointed
expectations, with the intention of solving the problem together; and ‘loyalty’, as simply sub-
mitting to discontent, for lack of self-confidence or power or opportunities for exit.
Self-confidence can be too small, in the ‘Calimero syndrome’ of feeling small or other-
wise vulnerable, and expecting that others will take advantage of that, and then expecting
it, ‘putting salt on every snail’. Many fruitful relations between small and large firms have
collapsed under such suspicion. Self-confidence can also be excessive, expressed in overcon-
fidence, with people being so confident that they neglect risks. If relations last long without
problems, trust tends to increase (Galati 1995), but this may be because the relation becomes
routine and awareness of risk declines.
Trust suffers from ‘causal ambiguity’: when something goes wrong on the side of one’s
partner, one does not directly know the cause. It could be a mishap that is nobody’s fault, or
due to lack of competence, or lack of attention and commitment, or outright opportunism. In
the case of opportunism, the perpetrator – and especially a cheat ‒ can claim a small mishap.
How can one know? This has important implications for openness. If a mishap occurs on one’s
own side, one is tempted to hide it, if only because of embarrasment. That is unwise, since
sooner or later it is bound to come out, leading to the justified complaint of the partner that one
should have admitted it earlier, when something could still be done. Trustworthy behaviour
is to own up directly, offer to help to prevent problematic consequences as much as possible,
and promise to deliberate on how to prevent such mishaps in future. If not, one is accused of
opportunism, and that breach of trust is difficult to repair. But the other side should extend the
benefit of the doubt, and give the partner an opportunity to explain.

ALTRUISM

Trust requires some degree of altruism, defined as giving something up without adequate
return for doing so. The return may be immaterial, in valuing the feeling of being of help or
being a good citizen. People generally feel an initial mistrust towards outsiders, and reserve
trust for family, clan, friends, community, peer group or nation. Outsiders may be given
a chance to prove their trustworthiness, however paradoxical that may be. A fairly recent
insight is that of ‘parochial altruism’ (de Dreu et al. 2014), which entails altruism within the
 Trust  207

group one feels to be a member of, at the cost of suspicion and discrimination of outsiders.
Frans de Waal (2014) showed that even animals (bonobos) exhibit such behaviour. Unlike
chimps and humans, they welcome foreigners, and make abundant love with them, as they
do among themselves. Because of risk and uncertainty, trust requires the virtue of courage, in
a non-rational ‘leap of faith’ (Moellering 2009).
Some economists (Williamson 1993) have held that altruism cannot exist in markets, since
that would require sacrifice without a quid pro quo, and is to be reserved for friends and
family. He claimed that trust entails give and take, which one cannot afford under the pressure
of competition in markets. I have disagreed with that, claiming the opposite: that without trust,
one cannot survive in modern markets, since those require the courage of the ‘leap of faith’
for a fruitful relationship of collaboration (Nooteboom, 2019a). This is needed in view of the
uncertainty involved in modern markets, in profiting from different but complementary com-
petencies of different people and firms to achieve high quality and the ‘novel combinations’
of innovation.

GOVERNANCE OF RELATIONS

Trust has an emotional side, mostly due to uncertainty and the vulnerability it involves. That
depends on the extent of self-confidence, but can also be subjected to a rational analysis of
motives for behaviour, and ways to affect them, in forms of control, in the governance of
relations. Inability to predict, under relational uncertainty, does not imply that one cannot
analyse conditions. Rational analysis requires analysis of the extent to which the partner
has grounds for reliability. There is a wide notion of ‘reliability’, and a narrower notion of
‘trustworthiness’. Reliability can be defined as adhering to expectations for whatever reason,
including control, with contracts, reputation, hierarchy or incentives. Trust goes beyond that,
in the expectation that ‘things will go all right, even if the partner has both the opportunity and
incentive to not abide by an agreement’ (Nooteboom 2002). Its value should also be intrinsic,
a matter of morality and conviction. That will be elaborated later, in a discussion of the gov-
ernance of relations.
For the sources of reliability, see Figure 19.1, derived from Nooteboom (2002). This con-
cerns intentional, not competence trust. Figure 19.1 shows the sources of intentional reliabilty,
outside and inside the relationship.
The figure can be used for the diagnosis of a relation, seeing what sources of trustworthiness
are absent and present, and for therapy, seeking to use or add new sources. The figure indicates
the following sources.
In the top part of the figure one finds control, or coercion. This has two forms: affecting the
scope, the room for action, by contract (outside) or hierarchy (inside); and affecting the choice
of action within that space, by reputation outside the relation (on the golf course, for example),
or incentives inside the relation. The drawbacks of contracts are that they take time to draft and
can be costly to monitor, and that they can signal distrust, which calls forth reciprocal distrust,
which once there is difficult to remove. Distrust is not necessarily the case, since a contract
may be devised for technical reasons, not to prevent opportunism, but to document who is to
do what (Klein Woolthuis et al. 2005), like the minutes of a meeting.
One can also use the instrument of a hostage. That is something of value to the hostage-giver
but not the hostage-taker, so that the latter will not hesitate to destroy the hostage when its
208  Handbook on theories of governance

Figure 19.1 Sources of intentional reliability

giver does not honour obligations. It is an ancient instrument, with kings giving nobles from
the court or family members as hostages. Now it can take the form of competition-sensitive
information that can be divulged, or members of the labour force. Another instrument is rep-
utation. Like contracts, hierarchical control, incentives and hostages, in the upper part of the
figure, reputation is also a matter of self-interest: one behaves well so as not to destroy options
for valuable relations in the future.
Beyond control there is trust, beyond self-interest, in the lower part of the figure. Outside
the relation, in the left part, there may be general trust, on the basis of morality, as a matter of
culture. Inside the relation there may be personal bonding on the basis of (extended) family,
clan or friendship.
Beyond the figure, there is also the possibility of go-betweens, or intermediaries, who can
help to prevent or reduce mistrust (Nooteboom 2002). They can serve to break through emo-
tional deadlocks, and put the deliberation on a more sober, rational track. They can advise on
how to proceed in deliberation. They can serve as guarantors, instead of a contract.
The figure can also be used to understand differences between countries. It has been used,
for example, for a comparison of trust between the United States (US) and Japan (Nooteboom
2019b). In the US, along the horizontal line across the figure, trust is partly based on contract
and reputation, and partly on hierarchy, incentives and hostages. A disadvantage of contracts
and reputation is that both are expensive, yielding high transaction costs, and slow. As
Fukuyama (1995) claimed, the US has low generalized trust. But while he also claimed that
Japan is a ‘high trust society’, the Japanese researchers Yamagishi and Yamagishi (1994)
showed that generalized trust in Japan is low. There, relationships in business are based on
hierarchy and bonding in family and clans. This is indicated by the vertical line through the
figure. The disadvantage of bonding is that relationships are locked into such clans, excluding
variety from outside, which can be bad for innovation, because that needs variety from outside.
In the Netherlands I think that all sources are in play, with hierarchy being relatively weak. In
both Japan and the Netherlands, American governance is being adopted more than in the past,
in a juridification of relations, in contracts and litigation. This is due to a general spillover of
American conditions, in the prominence of contracts and hierarchy.
 Trust  209

How to start and end a relationship? Suppose the partner is unknown, so that reputation
does not work. One may be tempted to start with a contract, but that runs the risk of setting the
relation off on the foot of distrust, which is difficult to turn around. If one has the time, one
may start with small investments and up the ante as trust grows. That may be too slow. An
alternative is to call in the help of an experienced go-between.
In public governance, there is a striking contrast between the trustworthiness of people in
following rules imposed for fighting the coronavirus pandemic, in a spirit of solidarity and
commitment to the public cause, and a sense of urgency, in the first wave of the virus. Earlier,
I claimed that external pressure for survival can unravel trustworthiness, but the example of
coronavirus shows that it can also bind people in solidarity and civic obedience. However, the
current breaking away from conformance shows that this can unravel in an urge for freedom
of movement and self-interest, as seen in the second wave of coronavirus. This is due, in part,
to a loss of trust in public institutions of government, health care and science, and a loss of the
sense of urgency, in a swamp of conspiracy theories.
There has been a general decline of public trust, and trust in institutions, contributing to the
rise of populism (Hosking 2019). That entails more complications than can be discissed here,
in an intertwining of economic causes and identity politics (Hosking 2019: 103). Hoskins
notes that the decline of trust in public institutions has a double effect, impacting both on
trust in private parties such as banks, private health care providers, pharmaceuticals, science,
consultants and other professionals; as well as on the blind trust by citizens based on the
assumption of oversight by public institutions of many things that the citizen cannot judge,
which is now seen to fall short.
In private relations, the problem of a possible lack of trustworthiness becomes especially
acute if the relation requires ‘specific investments’, which are dedicated to the partner and
lose value when the relationship breaks down (Williamson 1975). Examples are: investments
in facilities close to a customer at an isolated location, without alternative customers nearby;
machinery, instruments and training of personnel that are useful only in that particular rela-
tion; or getting to know who is who, and who is reliable in the partner’s organization, and
the building of trust. Such specific investments yield dependence. The partner may utilize
this to gain leverage in negotiation, with the threat of exiting from the relation, leaving the
partner with a useless investment. A solution is to share the property, and with it the risk of
the investment. Also, one needs to be confident that the relation will last sufficiently long to
recoup the investment. This goes against the rhetoric of maximum flexibility, and instead goes
for optimal flexibility. Relations should last sufficiently long to elicit specific investments, but
not so long as to create rigidity.
In public governance, this may occur when a public body outsources an activity to a private
party, has to make a specific investment in it, and becomes dependent and vulnerable. This
can become a source of expenditures rising above the level they had when the activity was
still public.
Zucker (1986) indicated the institutional underpinnings of trust or the lack of it. Pagden
(1988) recounted how in the eighteenth century in Italy, public trust was deliberately broken
down by the Habsburg empire, as a form of suppression, after the experience of the costly sup-
pression by military force in the Netherlands. This was done by breaking down the influence
of the nobility as a possible cohesive oppositional force, and drastically lowering the standards
of the study of law, so that the country was swamped by worthless lawyers. The resulting
institutional vacuum was filled by the destructive order of the Mafia.
210  Handbook on theories of governance

Another question is about how to end a relationship (Nooteboom 2002). One way is to
prepare one’s departure in secret, on the sly, no longer making specific investments, and taking
the time to seek a new partner. The motive for doing this is to avoid giving the partner time and
opportunity to try and keep one from leaving. It is a well-known phenomenon in behavioural
economics that people act more extremely when they stand to lose something of value, in a
‘loss frame’ ‒ in this case, losing a valued partner ‒ than when they set out to gain something
(Tversky and Kahneman 1981). People are known to try and tie down their partner in front of
a judge even though they do not stand a chance.
The alternative is to timely announce one’s departure, to let the partner make no more spe-
cific investments and allow for more preparation, and promise to help them find a new partner.
The risk is that thereby one allows time for the partner to resist. But if the relation was one of
voice, and give-and-take and trust, the secret exit approach would be unexpected, would not
be seen as in good faith, and might evoke a vociferous response, damaging one’s reputation
(Nooteboom 2002). The hazard of losing reputation as a trustworthy partner is especially
damaging for a public body.

WHERE TRUST GOES TOO FAR

Rarely, the question is asked about when trust goes too far (Gambetta 1988). There is a pos-
itive bias in trust, as if it is always a good thing. I have written much about trust, and my
approach was mostly positive. But trust can go too far, in several ways:

● Trust in untrustworthy people is misplaced. If trust decreases because trustworthiness

decreases, that is a good thing.
● Blind trust in disregarding the possibility or evidence of a lack of trustworthiness. This can
arise from overconfidence in one’s ability to solve problems.
● Trust out of desperation: there is no alternative. This connects to Albert Hirschman’s
recognition of ‘loyalty’ next to ‘voice’ and ‘exit’. If there is no basis for deliberation, in
voice; and no option of exit, in being pinned down or coerced; there is only one option,
of staying put and making the best of it. In Russia under Stalin, people talked lovingly of
‘little father’ Stalin, in spite of his blatant terror. Psychologically, it was unbearable to face
reality (Nooteboom 2002).
● The disadvantage of bonding in family or clan ‒ as in Japan, for example ‒ is that rela-
tionships are locked into such clans, excluding variety from outside, which can be bad for
innovation.
● One can have multiple, conflicting obligations, to job, family, personnel, customers, sup-
pliers, environment, community or nation, that can necessitate disloyalty to at least one of
them, in a crisis where one might have to choose.
● Due to harsh outside conditions that threaten survival, people who intend to be trustwor-
thy can no longer afford to be so. On the other hand, external crisis can bond people in
solidarity.
● According to the philosopher Nietzsche, benevolence and pity is the result of the power-
play of the weak, to protect them against the strong or exert vengeance on them. This can
yield forced or hypocritical trust.
 Trust  211

● According to Bernard Mandeville, private vices are public virtues. I would say that the
duty of benevolence can eliminate the virtuous power of thymos, the urge to excel and
perform of the entrepreneur, discoverer, sportsman, scientist, and so on.

Bernard Mandeville claimed that there is little evidence of virtue, and that a society endowed
with all the virtues would be a static, stagnant society. Virtues might suppress initiative and
thymos, the drive and spirit of life, too much, which can harm the individual, taking away the
gist of life, and render society pallid and dull in the absence of entrepreneurship in business,
science, politics and discovery.
However, one can be open and honest in some of those conflicts, ask for sympathy, offer
recompense, or accept retribution. One can be trustworthy in one’s untrustworthiness.
In judging trustworthiness, one should be wary of impostors and con artists, and one should
consider the conditions of survival and the multiple loyalties that people may have, in what
Aristotle called phronesis.
The principle remains that the default should be trust: trust someone until evidence or the
needs of untrustworthiness arise. The other way around ‒ distrusting people until trustwor-
thiness is proven ‒ is impossible, in the same way that logically a theory cannot be proven
to be true. It is also counterproductive, in encouraging people to resort to make-believe and
deception, or lack of initiative.

RELATIONAL SIGNALLING

In Lindenberg (2000, 2003) a perspective was used of ‘relational signalling’. It proposes that
people can be in one of two alternative ‘mind frames’. A mind frame shapes perceptions and
interpretations, and triggers actions from a given repertoire attached to the frame. One frame
is defensive, intent on ‘saving one’s resources’, perhaps for the sake of survival; and the other
frame is intent on ‘solidarity’, in granting room for the partner and giving them the benefit of
the doubt if expectations are not fulfilled. It is related to the ‘voice’ advocated by Hirschman.
The first frame blocks trust, and the second is a condition for trust to emerge.
The point now is that for trust to be viable, in one’s actions one should try to implement the
‘solidarity frame’ on both sides of the relationship, signalling that one is in that frame, and try
to bring the other side in that frame and maintain it. In this way trust becomes processual, and
it shows that trust requires maintenance.
Six (2005) implemented this idea in a comparative study of two engineering consultants.
She noted actions that clustered onto different dimensions, as follows (see also Six et al.,
2005):

A. Signaling that one is in the solidarity frame, with the following actions:
1. Show care and concern for the other person.
2. Recognize the legitimacy of the other’s interests.
3. Give help and assistance.
4. Take responsibility (don’t pass the blame).
5. Show a bias to see the other person’s actions as well intended.
6. Initiate and accept changes to your decisions.
7. Seek the counsel of others.
8. Accept and value the counsel of others.
9. Receive help and assistance.
212  Handbook on theories of governance

10. Make yourself dependent on the other person’s actions.

11. Give responsibility to the other person.

Also, prevent misattribution of a self-interested frame due to causal ambiguity:

12. Be open and direct about task problems.
13. Be honest and open about your motives.
14. Disclose information in an accurate and timely fashion

A. Bringing and keeping the other side in the solidarity frame.

B1. For maintenance of the solidarity frame, prevent disappointments:
1. Clarify general expectations.
2. Explore specific expectations in detail as the relationship develops early on in
a new relationship, don’t promise more than you can deliver.
3. Surface and settle differences in expectations.
4. Process and evaluate how effectively you are working together at regular intervals.
B2. Bolster self-confidence of the other (if needed), to prevent the Calimero syndrome:
5. Give positive feedback (compliment) in a private meeting.
6. Give compliments in a public meeting.
7. Give negative feedback in a constructive manner.

Since trust may unravel when expectations are not satisfied, do not promise more than you can
deliver. Politicians are distrusted because prior to elections they make promises which they
know they cannot or will not keep.
Details can matter. If one gets an e-mail, take the trouble of responding, even if that is not
strictly necessary. If not, the other will wonder whether you are interested or have taken notice,
and will take action when appropriate.

HORIZONTAL CONTROL

About ten years ago, the Dutch tax authority introduced ‘horizontal control’ in taxing firms,
first the large ones and subsequently also the smaller ones (Moellering 2015). The underlying
idea is that nowadays, in advanced professionalization, it is odd to presume that one can judge
someone’s actions. Control is turned around, in that the object of control is asked to indicate
how they can best be controlled. The aim of both sides is to minimize control, thus saving
costs, not stifling professional work too much, and giving maximum room for innovation and
motivation. With the present mushrooming of controls the danger is that a mentality arises of
not assuming one’s responsibilities, since everything is laid down in protocols anyway, and
one is learning not to bother.
Further advantages are that since the forms of control now arise from the shop floor, they
are more likely to be effective and implemetable. And in the deliberation about control, the
controlling agency becomes more and more knowledgeable about what works, to the point
of becoming an attractive discussion partner, and a force in the diffusion of knowledge and
experience. Negotiations lead to an agreement on controls and their implementation, which is
laid down in an agreement that is monitored from time to time.
Experience after ten years showed that the tax authority had some difficulty in combining
the system, which they saw as a system of trust, with some form of oversight and control,
which they saw as reflecting distrust. The sanction had to be maintained of falling back on the
 Trust  213

old system of detailed, top-down control if the party to be controlled did not play the game
fairly and did not honour the agreements.
Ideally, the system is implemented in the organization to be controlled, along the different
levels of hierarchy, with people being judged on how well they practise horizontal control of
their own staff.
Meanwhile, there arose some debate on whether one could also implement this approach
in the oversight of hospitals by health insurance companies. That has now been implemented,
but only concerning procedures for proper reporting of billable activities; hence, concerning
the cost but not yet the quality of care. A complication is that the system requires agreements
that for any given hospital need to be the same for different insurers, for the sake of efficiency,
but that requires sharing and deliberation between those insurers, which is forbidden by
competition law. They did, however, manage to get around this. The system could also be
implemented in schools.

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Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar
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Williamson, Oliver E., 1993, ‘Calculativeness, trust and economic organization’, Journal of Law and
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Motivation and Emotion 18, 129–66
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Barry M. Staw and L.L. Cummings (eds), Research in Organisational Behavior: An Annual Series of
Analytical Essays and Critical Reviews, Vol. 8, Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 53–111.
20. Accountability
Yannis Papadopoulos

INTRODUCTION
In contemporary complex and democratic societies governance is often seen as an interactive
process, in which the achievement of policy goals results from the cooperation between
various interdependent state and non-public agents.1 Collectively binding decisions are formu-
lated or implemented in a collaborative manner by polymorphous networks, usually involving
politicians, administrators, interest representatives, stakeholders and experts.2
How does accountability operate in such complex governance processes? Although
accountability is sometimes valued as a virtue, for analytical purposes it should be treated
as a social mechanism (Bovens 2010): a relation in which an actor can be held to account by
another actor and face consequences. In such a relation the first actor provides information
on, and justifications for, their action or inaction. These are evaluated by the second actor;
a debate may ensue, perhaps also some bargaining: the accountability relationship has
a dialogical component that may be more or less emphasized. At the end of this (admittedly
stylized) “time-line” (Lindberg 2013: 212) of accountability the first actor is rewarded or
sanctioned—directly or by a third party such as a court—depending on the judgment of the
second actor.3 Accountability is typically a control mechanism that constrains those wielding
power: in democratic government the delegation chain is supplemented by an accountability
chain running in the reverse direction, with members of parliament (MPs) being accountable to
their constituencies, government to parliament, ministers to the prime minister, and members
of the administration to their political superiors (Strøm 2000).4 However, with the prevalence
of interactive forms of governance involving a plurality of actors of a different nature, this kind
of straightforward relationship is undermined.5
This chapter seeks to identify how accountability is exercised (or not) in the case of col-
laborative forms of governance. It first discusses accountability in interactive governance
arrangements in relation to their democratic anchorage, and then scrutinizes the impact on
accountability of the prevailing cooperative logic, the weak visibility of governance networks
and their loose coupling with the formal decision-making institutions. It also distinguishes
between the collective accountability of governance networks and the individual accounta-
bility of participants in them. Finally, it discusses the problem of a possible disjuncture in
interactive governance between accountability and democracy.

ACCOUNTABILITY AS A CONSTITUTIVE PART OF THE

DEMOCRATIC ANCHORAGE OF INTERACTIVE GOVERNANCE

Seen from a normative perspective, the democratic anchorage of interactive forms of gov-
ernance is all the more crucial, as governance arrangements are highly influential in the
formulation or the implementation of collectively binding decisions. According to Sørensen

215
216  Handbook on theories of governance

and Torfing (2009), such an anchorage should be ensured if governance arrangements display
the following attributes: broad inclusiveness and procedural fairness; control by elected
politicians; accountability of actors participating as representatives of collective interests;
and possibility of critical scrutiny and contestation by stakeholders.6 The first attribute has
to do with the “input” (participation) and “throughput” (process) dimensions. To what extent
the democratic standards regarding inclusiveness and equal treatment are met in governance
networks is an open question: their degree of pluralism is admittedly variable,7 and there are
reasons to think that pluralism may be limited regarding the representation both of interests
and of values and thus the democratic anchorage of interactive governance is undermined.
Collusive behavior may be expected by “insiders” whose interest lies in reaping the benefits
of participation in sites of power while externalizing any costs incurred (“rent-seeking”
behavior). Moreover, “groupthink” may be expected too, because of prolonged deliberations
in camera possibly conducive to intellectual closure and bounded rationality (Papadopoulos
2014: 282). There is also a risk that unconventional narratives are marginalized by “a techno-
cratic, managerial ‘getting things done’ rhetoric” (Sørensen 2013: 74), so that arena-shifting is
followed by “discursive depoliticisation” (Wood and Flinders 2014).
Interestingly the three remaining attributes of a democratic anchorage have to do with the
accountability of governance arrangements and of their participants to different “forums”
(Bovens 2010), which may concern either the outputs or the process. Let us take them one by
one.
First, it is often argued that interactive governance takes place in the “shadow of hierarchy”
(Scharpf 1997), which means that deliberations and negotiations are conducted under the
“sword of Damocles” of public intervention. The assumption is that governance sites are
collectively accountable to bodies enjoying democratic legitimacy, which critically scrutinize
their outputs and retain the competence to endorse them or not. This is supposed to act as
a disciplining device, because the more actors involved in interactive forms of governance are
aware of such ex post controls, the more they will be induced to be responsive to the prefer-
ences of democratic principals. Important in that respect is the fact that controls and sanctions
need not be used; the existence of a shared belief that they can be activated in case of necessity
is sufficient.
Second, participants in governance networks are also individually accountable to their con-
stituencies (in a sense, accountability “at home”): this applies not only to politicians, but more
generally to all sorts of interest representatives whose action should in principle be scrutinized
by the rank and file, members and perhaps also donors of their organizations.
Third, such an “internal” accountability based on ownership (Bovens et al. 2014: 5) may
be supplemented by “external” accountability based on affectedness, which refers to control
by a possibly different constituency, that is, the targets of governance outputs as well as third
parties subject to externalities triggered by these outputs (Grant and Keohane 2005). Not only
elected institutions or the constituencies of representatives, but any actor convincingly claim-
ing to have an interest, and even the public at large, should be informed about the processes
of interactive governance and able to challenge their outputs. The deliberations in governance
networks should be accompanied or followed by a debate in the public sphere, and the coop-
erative logic of interactive governance should be coupled with the “contestatory” (Pettit 2012)
logic of public controversies, in order to preserve “the negative power the sovereign people
retains as a power to investigate, influence and censure their lawmakers and laws” (Urbinati
2011: 26). This points to the interdependence between accountability “forums”: for stakehold-
 Accountability  217

ers and the public to be informed for instance about problems, they depend on actors with a
“fire alarm” function such as the media, who have no formal sanctioning capacity but may
act as “whistleblowers” and cause reputational damage to governance actors. In that respect
accountability is often mediated (Warren 2014: 49).

THE COOPERATIVE LOGIC OF INTERACTIVE GOVERNANCE

As already mentioned, interactive governance is characterized by the interdependence of its

constituent parts (individuals, organizations or institutions). Obviously, interdependence is
a strong incentive for cooperation; however, since actors do not share the same interests and
values, antagonism is not absent either: “antagonistic cooperation” is the rule (Marin 1990). In
interactive governance settings actors depend on the cooperative spirit of other actors, but this
also means that “veto players” can more or less openly threaten to block decisions they do not
agree with. Interdependence entails thus the risk of mutual vetoes; in other words it causes the
“joint decision trap” problem (Scharpf 1988). This problem can of course be overcome if the
involved actors display an inclination towards problem-solving or compromise. However, this
weakens democratic accountability; mutual deliberation and negotiation are possible only if
those involved are not tightly constrained by the preferences of their “principals” (citizens or
parliaments), only if the coupling between participants in governance arrangements and those
to whom they are accountable is “loose” (Benz 1998).
Moreover, even agents who are formally accountable or who receive precise mandates from
their principals will only be accountable on paper if the accountability forums are impeded
in their controlling power by a situation of informational asymmetry. As a matter of fact,
monitoring entails costs, and only those who are close to participants in governance networks
are familiar with the intricacies of deliberations and bargaining in them. In addition, because
many actors are involved in often opaque rule-making processes, it is hard to evaluate who is
responsible for what, and by how much (Considine and Afzal 2011: 376). This is the “problem
of many hands” (Thompson 1980) or the “paradox of shared responsibility” (Bovens 1998:
45–52): in such settings actors can engage in “blame-shift games,” so that it becomes easier
to avoid sanctions for poor performance (Hood 2010). Clearly, the cooperative logic in
policy-making inhibits the allocation of responsibility, at least on behalf of outsiders. As dis-
cussed in the next section, visibility is a precondition for accountability: if the accountability
forums do not possess adequate information on interactive governance processes, they will not
be able to critically scrutinize their operation.

THE LACK OF VISIBILITY OF INTERACTIVE PROCESSES

Problems of “hidden action” and “hidden information” have been pointed out by the
“principal–agent” theory of delegation:8 “principals” often delegate tasks to “agents” because
the latter possess more relevant expertise, but if agents have different interests from principals
they can exploit their advantage to undertake actions for their own benefit that principals are
unable to see or to identify correctly. Principal–agent theory emphasizes situations of delib-
erate concealment, and it may be argued that there is a good reason in favor of the opacity of
governance arrangements: the achievement of compromise, which is necessary for the govern-
218  Handbook on theories of governance

ability of complex societies with a high degree of fragmentation. Compromise-seeking may

require that negotiations between interested parties take place behind closed doors, because
publicity entails the risk of favoring “plebiscitary reason” (Chambers 2004), and public
accountability to voters or to the rank and file may prevent solutions that inevitably cannot be
easily “sold” to them, since they do not completely mirror their preferences.
Therefore, “informalization” strategies may be preferred by policy-makers to avoid public
scrutiny. However, the lack of formalization of governance arrangements is not always due
to instrumental considerations but simply to the prevalence of efficiency concerns (Klijn and
Koppenjan 2014: 248) and to improvisation combined with a neglect of normative standards
in design (Vibert 2011: 13). Similarly, the lack of visibility may not be an intended outcome;
it may for example be due to the fact that in interactive governance policy-making power is
conferred to actors who are not the “usual suspects,” that is, public office-holders. This means
that accountability deficits may not be deliberate. Even if governance actors do not evade
accountability, accountability forums may not have the ability or the willingness to perform
their role. The media and the public are usually not aware of the arcane features of interactive
governance, so there is little room for contestation: “It is a world that is comprehensible only to
experts and specialists” (Vibert 2011: 36). Such ignorance may be deliberate: politicians (not
to mention ordinary citizens) may have other priorities than playing a “watchdog” role, and
may prefer to deal with matters that are more salient or electorally more rewarding, and the
media may display interest in interactive governance only in exceptional situations—such as
conspicuous policy failure—that allow them to produce meaningful and sellable “news.” Even
if it has been argued that we live in the era of “audience” democracy (Manin 1997), where the
conduct of politicians becomes the object of increased (and feared) media scrutiny and where
politicians adjust their behavior to media “dramaturgy” (Hajer 2009), the day-to-day practice
of interactive governance is largely immune to “(self-)mediatization” and to the scrutiny of
“monitory” (Keane 2009) bodies.

THE LOOSE COUPLING OF GOVERNANCE SITES WITH FORMAL

DECISION-MAKING INSTITUTIONS
As mentioned above, there may be good reasons to shift decision-making power to sites of
interactive governance: including stakeholders and actors with local knowledge is expected
to increase the epistemic quality and the acceptance of policy. In addition, the cooperative
style that tends to prevail in governance networks is considered a welcome depoliticization
of policy-making. Too tight a coupling of governance networks with the circuit of politique
d’opinion (Leca 1996) can be problematic, because networks can then be instrumentalized by
partisan actors to the detriment of problem-solving (politique des problèmes). Probably as part
of a general mood of suspicion against politics, negative views of politicians (short-sighted,
captured by sectoral interests, self-interested, etc.) tend to penetrate academic discourse as
well.9 One should however reflect on the consequences for democracy of the empowerment of
governance networks in which elected officials are not always present, and if present are not
necessarily influential.
If decisions are made by governance networks, the legislative function of democratic
institutions may be eroded, and if they are implemented by them it is their control function
that may be weakened. As a result, although interactive governance is not the only factor
 Accountability  219

leading to “deparliamentarization” (von Beyme 2000) or, more radically, to the advent of
a “post-parliamentary” democracy (Benz 1998), it is likely to contribute to such a trend.10
The uncoupling of interactive governance from democratic principals has yet another facet.
A crucial issue is who is in charge of “meta-governance,” that is, the governance of govern-
ance networks themselves. This task seems to be frequently delegated to the administration,
which usually decides about the design of networks, their participants, their attributions, the
framing of issues on their agenda, and their management (Torfing 2007: 13).
“Managers-as-designers” may be more or less sensitive to issues of democratic control
(Jeffares and Skelcher 2011). What about their own accountability? On the one hand, members
of the administration are subject to vertical accountability to their political superiors, and the
latter are subject to democratic accountability through the risk of electoral sanctions. On the
other hand, the length of the chain of delegation combined sometimes with the magnitude of
administrative discretion can make the accountability chain fictitious. However, it may be
objected to this that (as argued above), even if governance networks are dominated by tech-
nocrats and elected politicians are marginalized, networks continue to operate in the shadow
of democratic institutions, which would thus exert an indirect influence on their outputs. This
would be an illustration of the “law of anticipated reactions” (Friedrich 1937): if participants
in networks fear that their choices will be rejected by the democratic institutions that are in
charge of their formal ratification, then there are strong incentives for them to internalize the
preferences of these institutions. This anticipated reaction, however, may be put into ques-
tion: parliamentary assemblies may have the formal right to overrule decisions formulated in
networks or to supervise how decisions are implemented by them, but whether this represents
a credible menace is an open question. As a matter of fact, one may raise doubts as to whether
MPs have sufficient resources (time and expertise) to exert effective oversight, and even if
they do they may prioritize issues that are more salient to them.
Finally, the more interactive governance arrangements are uncoupled from the spheres of
democratic government, the higher the likelihood that “the public’s task in assigning blame
to the appropriate targets” (Maestas et al. 2008: 609) is complicated. Especially because of
media attention, elected officials are highly visible targets for sanctions without necessarily
being at the core of policy-making in the complex processes of interactive governance. The
effectiveness of the democratic feedback loop is thus reduced: the incumbent parties are held
responsible for decisions whose formulation or implementation escapes their control, at least
partly, and candidates for office make pledges that they will not be in a position to fulfill
because, once in power, they will have to negotiate in networks with other influential actors.

THE INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNTABILITY OF PARTICIPANTS IN

INTERACTIVE GOVERNANCE

One should distinguish between the organizational accountability of governance bodies as

decision-making entities (for example, to elected institutions) and the individual accountabil-
ity of participants in these bodies (for example, to their constituencies).
As already noticed, the major actors in interactive governance are elected officials, members
of the bureaucracy and of non-governmental organizations, and experts. Among them, the only
actors who are directly accountable to the citizenry are politicians, but it is not sure whether
they are key players of interactive governance; and even if they are, we know that their action
220  Handbook on theories of governance

in networks lacks visibility: as a result, they may be democratically accountable but not for
their deeds in interactive governance. As also noted, politicians sometimes delegate much of
their power to members of the bureaucracy, who are only indirectly accountable to the citi-
zenry owing to the lengthy chain of delegation. As for experts, they are only credible if they
are considered independent and not tied to any particular interests. They are accountable to
their professional community, a form of “peer” accountability (Goodin 2003: 378). The risk of
loss of reputation is the main sanctioning mechanism of such a “social accountability regime,”
which differs from the formal accountability regime in public governance (Mashaw 2006).
Representatives of interest groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are also
accountable to limited constituencies and not to the general public. If we look at their internal
accountability, they are accountable to members of their organizations (and their organizations
are possibly also collectively accountable to donors). The problems of informational asymme-
try that negatively affect the accountability relationship between politicians and their electoral
constituencies may also be present in the accountability relationship between interest repre-
sentatives and the members of their organizations. As regards external accountability—that is,
to the populations affected by rules formulated or implemented by governance networks—it is
hard to establish. Let us first note that defining who is affected by a rule (and by how much) is
a controversial exercise. In addition, the larger the represented population and the more diffuse
the represented interest, the more nebulous the accountability links. One should not forget that
NGOs often act as “surrogates” (Mansbridge 2003) for the populations whose well-being is of
concern to them; however, usually no procedures are foreseen with the purpose of subjecting
such self-proclaimed representatives to tests of recognition of their claims. Self-appointed
advocates of causes should receive an authorization to act by the constituencies whose inter-
ests they claim to put on the agenda and should be held accountable to these constituencies
(although usually not through electoral means; Montanaro 2012; Saward 2010).
In addition, actors participating in governance networks—whatever their profile—may
be caught in accountability dilemmas. They usually have to satisfy multiple accountability
forums, and the preferences and expectations of their constituencies and of affected popu-
lations may not coincide with those of their partners in interactive governance.11 How can
they cope, then, with such “multiple accountability disorders” (MAD) (Koppell 2005)?
This is difficult to assess, but it may be hypothesized that the more network members are
emancipated from “principals” with whom they would be in a delegation relation, the more
they are insulated from the target groups of rule-making, the more governance networks are
small and cohesive (so-called “policy communities”) and the more they are durable (entailing
repeated interactions), then the more accountability dilemmas will be resolved to the benefit
of “peer” accountability. Network members become, then, primarily accountable to their
network partners in “soft” horizontal accountability relations: “each member needs to explain
and justify his or her actions to peers who know enough to understand and evaluate the situ-
ation” (Mansbridge 2014: 64). In this kind of “interdependence” accountability (Scott 2000:
50–52), disciplining effects are expected to occur through the fear of “naming and shaming.”
Such informal horizontal accountability links mostly based on the individual sense of dignity,
lacking formal obligation and broader publicity, should not be considered a functional equiva-
lent of vertical accountability to democratic principals or to the affected constituencies.
 Accountability  221

A DISJUNCTURE BETWEEN ACCOUNTABILITY AND

DEMOCRACY?

In contemporary governance “power and accountability have been divorced, if not de jure so
de facto and we now need to assess what this means for democratic governance,” writes Pierre
(2009: 592). Is this exaggerated? There is no straightforward answer to this question, which is
primarily an empirical one.
The fragmentation of sites of authority is often followed by a proliferation of control
mechanisms, leading “to a more diversified and pluralistic set of accountability relationships”
(Bovens 2007: 110) that can enlarge the possibilities for holding power-wielders to account
(Willems and Van Dooren 2012). The emergence of complex accountability regimes may thus
be viewed as an adaptation to the complexities of interactive governance, but this implies that
accountability matters much for the design of interactive governance arrangements, which
does not seem to be the rule (Michels and Meijer 2008). For Klijn and Koppenjan (2014: 255),
“complex accountability networks … are badly understood, encompass incompatible compo-
nents, leave things uncovered, provide opportunities for shirking and opportunistic behavior,
or result in confusion.” To be sure, accountability can operate more effectively if the various
accountability forums agree on their demands, exchange information and coordinate to over-
come any collective action problems. This may, however, be difficult if the forums have diver-
gent preferences. In addition, being placed under the scrutiny of “too many eyes” may induce
risk-averse behavior and blame-avoidance strategies on the part of the controlled. Excess
accountability may be inimical to organizational learning, successful adaptation or innova-
tion (Bovens and Schillemans 2014: 676). It may lead to fatalism or indifference, because it
increases the randomness of control (Hood 2010). In the end, an inflation of accountability
mechanisms may fuel “mutual suspicion and intrusive surveillance” (Warren 2014: 44), and
thus undermine the trust relationships that are necessary in interactive governance.12 The
situation is further complicated by the fact that the accountability mechanisms at work may be
of the “soft” type: non-codified and operating through peer pressure or through public stigma-
tization. The efficiency of “hard” sanctions is disputed: they are likely to be counterproductive
if they undermine motivation and destroy mutual trust (Mansbridge 2014). Yet the (often
conditional) impact of “soft” sanctions is not clear either. Given the frequent lack of formali-
zation of interactive governance, informal accountability relations tend to prevail (Romzek et
al. 2012); not only is their degree of effectiveness unknown but, in addition, they may lack (as
in the case of peer accountability) publicity, which is necessary to enable the general public, if
it is interested or willing, to be the final judge.
Ultimately, one should then address the question of the relationship of the complex account-
ability regime of interactive governance with democracy. Although accountability might be
in good supply (or even in excess), there may be a gap regarding democratic accountability
(Papadopoulos 2010). Obviously, “there are many forms of accountability that have nothing
to do with democracy” (Warren 2014: 39). While democratic accountability mechanisms
aim to ensure responsiveness and respect for the “congruence principle”—the preferences of
rule-takers should be reflected (input) in rule-making (output)—many accountability mecha-
nisms in interactive governance perform different functions, such as ensuring mutual learning.
Hence, the divorce is not so much between power and accountability as a whole, but rather
between power and democratic accountability. Furthermore, even if accountability to stake-
holders is safeguarded and normatively welcome since it targets those having the most intense
222  Handbook on theories of governance

preferences on policy issues, this may well happen to the detriment of accountability through
the vote to the citizenry at large, based on the egalitarian principle of “one person, one vote.”
And even if accountability mechanisms available to citizens are not in short supply, interactive
governance may be alien to them, so that demand for democratic accountability may be low.13
Therefore, the emergence of alternative forms of accountability should not be seen as a coun-
terweight to an erosion of democratic accountability, because this would mean that interactive
governance—notwithstanding its undeniable contribution to effective policy-making (Ansell
2011: 166–183)—would not be an improvement but a regression of democratic governance.

CONCLUSION

Although interactive forms of governance are often praised for their contribution to policy
legitimacy, the issue of their democratic anchorage remains contested and should be scru-
tinized empirically. A core aspect of such an anchorage is the accountability of governance
arrangements. Are networks of interactive governance accountable as collective actors to
democratic principals or to the (sometimes nebulous) affected constituencies, and does their
shadow induce them to anticipate and align with their preferences? Neither de jure nor de facto
accountability is guaranteed, and the latter depends very much on the monitoring capacity and
willingness of the accountability forums. Knowing that sites of interactive governance are not
always formalized and that responsibility is shared by multiple actors in governance networks,
informational asymmetries and visibility problems may impede monitoring by outsiders. In
addition, the accountability relations of individual participants in governance networks should
be considered. The lack of accountability may for example aggravate problems caused by
the “rise of the unelected” (Vibert 2007) in governance arrangements, if the unelected are at
the same time unaccountable. However, in complex governance and accountability regimes
actors may face dilemmas, and accountability competes with other values, since there might be
trade-offs between publicity and the problem-solving goals of governance networks.
In interactive governance, accountability may be divorced from the spheres of
power-wielding, and democratic accountability may be less prominent. However, the consid-
erations developed in this chapter are to some extent speculative and as such should be treated
with caution. More empirical research is needed on accountability in interactive governance
with the purpose of systematically scrutinizing who is accountable to whom, for what, and
how the accountability process unfolds. Research should ideally be comparative, in order to
identify both the factors that affect positively or negatively the different dimensions of the
accountability process, and the scope conditions that allow for the generalization of findings.
We can expect such research to have positive policy implications too, since it can contribute
to evidence-based “design thinking” (Stoker 2010: S80).

NOTES
1. In addition, public actors sometimes belong to different decision-making levels, as in “multi-level”
governance (for an update see Stephenson 2013).
2. Public–private partnerships are a typical case of interactive governance, but the concept applies to
the much broader and often informal processes of collaborative governance. Private corporate actors
are also sometimes directly part of these processes. For reasons of space I refrain from dealing with
 Accountability  223

the problem of their accountability (see, however, Leader 2014). Most arguments presented in this
chapter are discussed in more detail in Papadopoulos (2014). See also Klijn and Koppenjan (2014),
who conclude with suggestions for remedies to accountability problems.
3. There is no necessary covariation between these three facets of accountability (Brandsma and
Schillemans 2013).
4. This mainly applies to parliamentary systems, while the image is more complex in presidential
systems.
5. If interactive governance is not considered as significantly different from more traditional societal
steering by the government (Bell and Hindmoor 2009), then it is not imperative to discuss any
changes in accountability.
6. For a comparative empirical analysis see Skelcher et al. (2011).
7. Not to mention that “stakeholder democracy, even if improved, is not necessarily public-interest
oriented democracy” (Schmidt 2013: 18).
8. See, among many others, Lupia (2003).
9. Flinders (2012) describes this as “the bad faith model of politics.”
10. Other factors are the complexity of many policy issues that favor the exercise of technocratic power,
and the internationalization of policy-making that entails a shift of the locus of decision beyond
national democratic institutions or at least a strengthening of executives to the detriment of the
legislature.
11. In a similar vein, specialists of interest intermediation identified a trade-off between the “logic of
influence” and the “logic of members” faced by organizational elites involved in cooperative deci-
sional processes (Schmitter and Streeck 1999).
12. For other “pathologies” related to accountability “overloads” see Halachmi (2014).
13. This deficit can be seen as part of a broader “societal depoliticisation” concomitant with changes in
governance styles (Wood and Flinders 2014).

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21. Transparency
Jenny de Fine Licht and Daniel Naurin

Transparency—the availability of information about an organization’s or actor’s internal

processes and decisions1—plays a major role in theoretical, normative, and policy-oriented
discussions on good governance (Hood and Heald 2006; Peters 2011; Torfing et al. 2012;
Cucciniello et al. 2017). In particular, transparency’s association with the interrelated con-
cepts of accountability, efficiency and legitimacy has made it a central component, as well as
a buzzword, in reforms aimed at improving governmental steering and services and enhancing
citizen trust.
In this chapter, we discuss the role of transparency in analyzing governance from the per-
spectives of three types of actors: government; the public; and civil society and the private
sector. The central theme is the potential trade-off between democratic accountability and
legitimacy on the one hand, and efficiency on the other. Through this brief exposition, we
aim to clarify some important distinctions, variations and concerns within the concept of
transparency, and facilitate further analysis on the role of information in governance theories.
In addition, we will show that, despite the high expectations from transparency reforms to
improve governance, increased transparency can actually have unintended or even negative
consequences (Erkkilä 2012; Grimmelikhuijsen 2012; de Fine Licht 2014). To assess and
predict its effects, the “empty” concept of transparency should be filled with more substantive
content regarding the type of information, forum and target audience.

THE GOVERNMENT’S PERSPECTIVE

From the perspective of political office holders, transparency can denote a policy tool to
monitor public services and actors in the private sector as well as a commitment to allow
scrutiny of their own activities.
As a policy tool, transparency is attractive to governments for several reasons. The gov-
ernment obliges the public administration or actors in the private sector to reveal information
about their workings and results; this is sometimes referred to as “targeted transparency” (Fung
et al. 2007). In principal–agent terminology, this means that the government acts as a principal
trying to control the behavior of agents with an information advantage to secure efficiency
and regulation enforcement (Prat 2006). When transparency requirements are mandated as
part of regulatory measures (Etzioni 2010), they might be easier to implement than strict and
detailed rules, because agencies and corporations are more likely to accept them. In addition,
transparency requirements enable the public to regulate public services and the private market
by making informed choices (cf. Fung et al. 2007), thereby partially relieving the government
from the task of designing tools for higher scrutiny.
However, transparency requirements may be less effective than rules and laws that regulate
behavior, and ensuring that agencies and organizations adhere to transparency norms is not

226
 Transparency  227

costless. Therefore, transparency as a steering tool for governments may be more attractive in
theory than in practice.
As a commitment, transparency requirements oblige the government to reveal information
about its internal processes and actions as well as its relations with other governments and
civil society and private sector actors. Transparency of governments is a classic right-to-know
approach (“publicity” in many historical texts; see Gosseries and Parr 2018), in which
transparency constitutes a tool for securing the democratic right of citizens to monitor repre-
sentatives’ behavior—thereby securing that decision-makers behave in a dutiful manner and
work toward a common goal—and if necessary demand accountability by their votes. Using
principal–agent terminology, the government is the agent that works on behalf of the public,
which is the principal.
Why would governments impose transparency requirements on their own workings? One
answer could be that they follow a norm of appropriateness and normative pressure. Transparent
governance is a core democratic value and, especially from a global governance perspective,
most democratic governments would find it politically costly to formally resist transparency
requirements (Roberts 2006). Another answer could be that they believe increased transpar-
ency will provide desirable outcomes. In this respect, the quality of decision-making might be
a concern. It is often argued that decision-makers are compelled to behave in a more civilized
manner in front of an audience. They must provide arguments for their views and positions,
carefully consider counter-arguments, and conclude with decisions that are reasoned and
include important information (e.g., Elster 1998; Chambers 2004; Naurin 2007). This speaks
in favor of transparency as a tool to gain well-reasoned and informed decisions. A related
concern is legitimacy in the eyes of the public. From a democratic viewpoint, legitimacy of
the political system often stems from input, that is, from the procedures preceding decisions,
which clearly speaks in favor of transparency as it facilitates public insight, input and reaction.
In line with this reasoning, transparency is a promoter of public acceptance and trust (Heald
2006; de Fine Licht et al. 2014), which makes it central to gain public support to implement
one’s decisions and avoid “unfair” eviction from office (Rosendorff and Doces 2006). Related
to this, it is possible that politicians pass transparency laws partly because they want to secure
access to information once in opposition (Berliner 2014).
At the same time, it is fairly uncontroversial to say that high-quality decision-making often
requires some degree of secrecy. Delicate political matters such as diplomacy and national
security, or concerns for individual privacy or business secrecy, can arguably motivate exten-
sive degrees of seclusion. In addition, there are considerable indications that transparency
can disturb decision-making processes and, under certain circumstances, provide less optimal
outcomes. Instead of forcing decision-makers to behave well, decision-making in public can
make them hesitant to change their minds in light of new arguments, ask important questions,
or agree on policies which they know their constituents will disapprove of (e.g., Elster 1998;
Meade and Stasavage 2006; Naurin 2007; Stasavage 2007; Malesky et al. 2012). In other
words, decisions made under conditions of transparency can be more time-consuming and
less optimal in terms of reasons and consequences than those made under conditions of at
least partial secrecy (but see, e.g., Novak and Hillebrandt 2020 for discussion). Empirical
studies also indicate that, in contrast to normative theories of democracy, a positive relation-
ship between increased transparency and trust or perceived legitimacy is far from certain
(Grimmelikhuijsen 2012; de Fine Licht 2014; Roelofs 2019), and that transparency can affect
228  Handbook on theories of governance

people differently depending on, for example, their level of prior knowledge and predisposi-
tion to trust government (Grimmelikhuijsen and Meijer 2014).
These points highlight a potential trade-off between democratic and efficient governance.
Although democratic decision-making clearly demands government transparency, the capac-
ity to act and “get things done” is also a core democratic value (Warren and Mansbridge 2013),
which relates to output legitimacy, that is, legitimacy from results that are gained. It is possible
that if the public does not get basic services on time, or important political decisions with
broad consequences are delayed in stalemates, the public will care less about transparency and
more about finding solutions. However, the question is not so much about transparency versus
secrecy, but rather of the type of transparency that should be used under given circumstances
and the time at which information should be released. As Torfing et al. (2012: 225) argue,
secrecy in decision-making is not necessarily a democratic problem “as long as voters, clients,
and stakeholders accept the existence of those moments of secrecy, and have the opportunity
to assess the final outcomes and means to sanction those who are responsible for those out-
comes” (see also Gutmann and Thompson 1996).
Mansbridge (2009) suggests that, in certain circumstances, “transparency in rationale,” that
is, transparency about decisions and the facts and reasons on which they are based, should
be preferred to “transparency in process,” that is, transparency about the decision-making
process and the decision-making deliberations.2 By allowing for deliberation and negotiation
behind closed doors but later carefully explaining the decision and its underlying reasoning,
decision-makers may be able to establish a sufficiently effective decision-making procedure
that allows for public scrutiny and accountability. From the government’s perspective, this can
be highly valuable. To use transparency in rationale as a way of handling the trade-off between
efficiency and democratic insight might, however, be more difficult in practice than in theory,
especially when the government acts in collaboration with interest groups, firms or other
types of actors that are not democratically accountable. In these situations, negotiating behind
closed doors is likely to produce not only high efficiency but also increased public demands
for insight—for good reasons.
In sum, for governments, the question of transparency is largely about concerns regarding
democracy and legitimacy and efficiency. Transparency is both a steering tool and an ideologi-
cal and normative concern. The design and expected effects of a particular transparency policy
or initiative largely depend on the decision-making context and the issue at hand.

THE PUBLIC’S PERSPECTIVE

The public can play at least two roles in relation to transparency: they can act primarily as
citizens or as customers (cf. Kosack and Fung 2014).3 These roles relate to the distinction
between transparency of governance and transparency for governance (Mitchell 2011), where
the former refers to the ability to monitor the regulators or other powerful actors, and the
latter refers to policies or institutions designed to alter the behavior of the objects subject to
regulatory measures.
Government transparency enables the public, as citizens, to monitor and scrutinize political
decision-makers and their decisions, either in real time or in retrospect, thereby encouraging
public action or demands for accountability by voting, if necessary. As citizens, the public may
also use transparency tools to enforce responsible behavior in the private sector by pressuring
 Transparency  229

actors that do not behave in a socially or environmentally responsible way (Kosack and Fung
2014). As customers or beneficiaries of public services, citizens can use information provided
by the requirements of “targeted transparency” (Fung et al. 2007) to make informed choices
between public service providers and among private sector product or service producers. With
a surge in new public management, this method of steering has gained much popularity, where
the public regulates the market by “voting with their feet” and choosing the actors that ought
to stay in business.
From the public’s perspective, the default attitude toward transparency is positive. When it
comes to increased government transparency and targeted transparency of services or prod-
ucts, at first glance there seems to be everything to gain and nothing to lose. Transparency
empowers the public by enabling it to govern itself democratically and make informed choices
regarding contracts or business partners.
However, successfully implementing transparency requirements takes time and effort,
making it of more dubious value than is often presented. Making informed choices— about
whether a certain political decision should be supported, or which public service provider to
choose—is demanding in terms of collecting and processing information. It is not evident
whether members of the public generally have the time or interest to engage in these activities
(e.g. Fenster 2015). In some cases, the public might even feel that the government is trying
to shirk its responsibilities by placing the burden of making the right choices on individuals,
rather than regulating public services or the private market by laws and authoritative enforce-
ment. Since representative democracy generically means that elected representatives act on
behalf of the citizens, the public might have a legitimate claim in being indifferent toward
making the right choices all the time. Parents, for example, might prefer that their represent-
atives secure the quality of education in their children’s school rather than having to choose
from a large number of schools on the basis of extensive data. Making information available
and then leaving it to the public to act upon it tends to undermine the mechanism of political
accountability in its traditional sense, since the blame for any negative outcomes is placed
solely on the individual.
From the public’s perspective, this means that more information is not necessarily better
than less information. For example, Roberts (2012) argues that the enormous release of
WikiLeaks documents represents “an illusion of transparency,” because mere disclosure
in itself is not enough for information to reach the intended audience (i.e., the public) and
influence them to act upon it. First, too much information might cause information overload
(Eppler and Mengis 2004) or feelings of drowning in (trivial) choices (Schwartz 2004), which
might cause frustration. In addition, there is the potential risk that important information is
lost in large amounts of insignificant data, which can have detrimental effects on substantive
outcomes and public confidence in the political system. Further, being presented with a lot of
negative information may spark public resignation rather than political engagement (Bauhr
and Grimes 2014), implying that it may not be an efficient way of empowering the public as
either citizens or consumers.
Second, to create an effect, information should be not only disclosed but also distributed
and critically scrutinized, which points to questions regarding the existence of a free press (or
other intermediaries) and whether information is readily understandable (Lindstedt and Naurin
2010). When it comes to distribution, one might argue that transparency’s main function is to
make government representatives as well as private actors aware that they might be watched,
and that this awareness will—in accordance with Bentham’s famous image of the Panopticon
230  Handbook on theories of governance

(Bentham 1791)—make the actors behave in an efficient manner at all times, even if no one
is actually looking. However, at least from a time perspective, actual supervision is needed,
which means that someone must have the time and resources to grasp the available information
and decipher its key points. With respect to comprehension, detailed, technical or bureaucrat-
ically formulated information stands in the way of an accurate analysis of consequences or
sound consumer choices. Incomplete or ambiguous information can do more harm than good,
especially if it is related to health or security (Fung et al. 2007). In sum, the general public
is likely to endorse principles of transparency—in terms of government transparency and
targeted transparency in public and private services—but is clearly interested in the type of
information provided by transparency initiatives. Under some circumstances, information that
is less detailed but more condensed, available on demand rather than proactively distributed,
and about decisions or outcomes instead of processes, might be preferred to total insight and
full disclosure. Since citizens rarely have the time and resources, the presence of a free media
and interest organizations which can critically evaluate information is crucial in implementing
transparency requirements.

CIVIL SOCIETY AND PRIVATE SECTOR PERSPECTIVES

The civil society and private sector broadly include private firms and corporations as well
as non-governmental organizations and interest groups. From their perspective, transpar-
ency requirements have at least two roles: transparency of government and regulations, and
transparency requirements posed on their own activities and procedures by government or
voluntary commitments.
Increased transparency of governments is generally a positive asset for civil and private
sector actors, as it enables them to follow and monitor the workings of the regulators, thereby
facilitating attempts to either adapt to or proactively influence public policy changes. Several
actors, such as interest organizations and media corporations, function explicitly as intermedi-
aries or negotiators in government–public interactions, which means that transparency of gov-
ernment workings is a necessary condition for them to efficiently perform their jobs. However,
transparency requirements imposed on the government also mean that contacts and contracts
between the government and other actors become more visible, potentially making informal
consulting and lobbying (or, for that matter, outright corruption) more difficult.
As for transparency requirements directed toward the civil society and private sector, actors
have different concerns to balance. On the one hand, to agree on (or even promote) transpar-
ency requirements might be a way for civil and private sector actors to avoid extensive forms
of regulations by the government (Etzioni 2010) and build trust in their own organization
or brand by adhering to the powerful norm of openness (Oliver 2004). In addition, it gives
actors access to increased knowledge about their competitors and potential partners, which
enhances their capacities to make strategic choices and form lucrative alliances. On the other
hand, transparency requirements can violate aspects such as corporate secrecy or intellectual
property, making private sector actors hesitant or hostile to certain transparency initiatives.
In sum, the reaction of civil society and private sector actors to transparency initiatives is
largely dependent on the context and type of requirements proposed. Since few would openly
argue against transparency, potential resistance might be difficult to detect and map. To pay
 Transparency  231

lip service to transparency or engage in the sophisticated forms of “window-dressing” is easier

than shirking strict rules and laws.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

This brief account of transparency from a governance perspective emphasizes two main
points. First, transparency comes in different shapes and forms. The general definition of
transparency as the availability of information about an organization’s or actor’s internal
processes and decisions allows for a large variation when it comes to how that information is
produced, designed, distributed and received. Therefore, transparency effects will always be
highly context-dependent, and researchers should carefully specify the particular conditions
of transparency in the analysis at hand. Second, although transparency is predominantly seen
as a positive value in governance discourses, increased transparency may have less positive
effects than is often assumed, and might occasionally be dysfunctional rather than beneficial.
Broadly speaking, transparency is likely to be positive for input legitimacy, that is, what
feeds decision-making; but the effects for output legitimacy—that is, the results of decisions,
policies or agreements—are more dubious. There is a strong connection between output legit-
imacy and efficiency and the capacity to “get things done.” Since transparency can sometimes
delay or disturb the decision-making process (or hide important pieces of information in an
ocean of data), we cannot conclude that transparency reforms will automatically generate
“good governance.” Important future questions for studies on governance include how to
separate—analytically and normatively as well as practically—the conditions under which the
different forms of transparency and secrecy enhance democratic accountability and efficiency,
and in cases of obvious trade-offs, how to weigh these values.

NOTES
1. See for example Hood (2006) and Grimmelikhuijsen (2012) for discussions of definitions of
transparency.
2. Torfing et al. (2012) draw a similar distinction between transparency in process and that of
outcomes.
3. The public may also be objects of transparency in that individual information can be (officially or in
secret) collected by official authorities or corporations and made available to others. Since this form
of information gathering is closer to surveillance than governance, it will not be further discussed
here.

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22. Evidence
Paul Cairney

Traditionally, the word ‘evidence’ has not featured strongly in studies of policymaking or
governance, although there is an increasing focus on the problematic idea of evidence-based
policymaking. In contrast, in the study of health or climate change, references to evidence or
‘the evidence’ often seem so frequent as to be taken for granted (Cairney 2016). This contrast
highlights a fascinating comparison of perspectives, in which some exasperated researchers
ask why policy and governance is not based on the evidence, and others wonder why anyone
would think that ‘evidence-based’ policymaking could ever be a realistic or attractive possi-
bility (Cairney 2020a: 235‒236).
In that context, researchers of policy processes and governance can offer a major contribu-
tion to the interdisciplinary study of the relationship between evidence and policy even if they
would not ask its key questions routinely, that is: why is there a large evidence‒policy gap,
and how can we bridge it?
In particular, researchers could help distinguish between several different explanations
that could inform putative solutions. A policy-based evidence making approach emphasizes
the pathologies of politics and failings of politicians: policymakers do not use good research
evidence whenever it provides inconvenient truths or goes against their beliefs or interests, or
they cherry pick to identify the evidence that supports their position. As such, the commonly
expressed solution is for politicians to do better, or for citizens to elect new politicians.
A policy theory approach emphasizes the complexity of policymaking and the inevitable gap
between what researchers require from political systems and what they can realistically expect,
regardless of the sincerity and competence of policymakers. If so, the solution is for research-
ers to learn about and adapt to the policymaking systems they seek to influence, rather than
bemoan the non-existence of their preferred model of governance. A collaborative governance
approach emphasizes the benefits of thinking differently about evidence and governance: treat
governance as a form of collaboration between many actors such as policymakers (rather than
providing a single source of authority to which researchers can refer) and treat knowledge
exchange as informing a process of deliberation that does not simply rely on research evidence
from experts. In other words, studies of governance can help researchers think differently
about an alleged evidence‒policy problem.
This chapter addresses three key elements of governance that map onto this field of study.
First, the evidence‒policy gap often connects to the idea that there is a governance problem,
and that the problem is a lack of central government competence and control. Ideal-type dis-
cussions of evidence-based policymaking (EBPM) connect strongly to the classic ideal-type
of comprehensive rationality in which there is a single, authoritative and knowledgeable
centre of government to which researchers can supply the evidence, which is then digested,
operationalized and acted upon. Policy process research helps explain why this governance
setup is impossible, and why the concept of ‘multi-centric policymaking’ is more instructive
(Cairney et al. 2019).

234
 Evidence  235

Second, studies of models of governance help challenge the simplistic idea of an evidence‒
policy gap. The decision to assign more or less value to different types of knowledge is highly
contested, and this contestation can play out in very different ways. For example, relatively
centralized forms of governance appear to be the most conducive to evidence use based on
a hierarchy of methods, with the systematic review of randomized control trials at the top.
These methods require uniform policy solutions and fidelity to a precise intervention, which
precludes more localized and collaborative approaches. In contrast, collaborative forms of
governance are not as conducive to hierarchy. Rather, the main aim is to project respect for
diverse forms of knowledge and to seek consensus rather than assert hierarchies. In one model,
the evidence‒policy gap relates to the lack of fidelity to policy and the unwillingness or ina-
bility of a central government to address it. In another, this pursuit of uniformity and fidelity
is impossible and undesirable.
Third, the idea of good governance is a regular feature of interdisciplinary studies. In this
case, scholars debate the principles that researchers and governments should use to ‘estab-
lish evidence advisory systems that promote the good governance of evidence – working
to ensure that rigorous, systematic and technically valid pieces of evidence are used within
decision-making processes that are inclusive of, representative of and accountable to the
multiple social interests of the population served’ (Parkhurst 2017: 8). The issue here is that
there are competing forms of good governance, producing different expectations about how
the good governance of evidence would fit into a larger collection of rules on democracy and
collaboration.

THE EVIDENCE‒POLICY GAP AS A GOVERNANCE PROBLEM

Supporters of EBPM seem to imagine that there is a small group of powerful elected poli-
ticians at the heart of the centre of government looking for evidence that can help them in
designing the right policy (Cairney 2019, 2021a). This vision for EBPM is akin to post-war
hopes for ‘rational’ policy analysis based on a centralized process with few actors inside
government, translating science into policy, to produce an ‘optimal’ solution from one per-
spective by analysing a policy problem and solution with one metric (such as via cost benefit
analysis) (Enserink et al. 2013: 17‒25). If so, the evidence‒policy gap relates to the centre’s
limited competence and understanding of the research evidence supplied by analysts, and can
be addressed by the suppliers of evidence using new advances in methods and information
technology (Botterill and Hindmoor 2012: 367).
As such, this image of effective governance relates strongly to the strand of policy theory
that identifies a governance problem in relation to a lack of central government control (see
Cairney 2020a: 131‒136). The classic reference point is the idea of a policy cycle consisting
of key functional requirements of a government’s centre: define a problem, generate solutions,
make and legitimize a choice, implement and evaluate. It relates to two kinds of ideal-type.
‘Comprehensive rationality’ describes the ability of a policymaking centre to gather and
analyse all relevant information to inform a set of consistent choices. ‘Perfect implementation’
describes the conditions that need to be met to ensure policy delivery from the top down,
including: policymakers specify and communicate clearly their objectives, they are carried out
by ‘obedient’ bureaucrats, and the implementation agency does not depend on others to fulfil
those aims (Hogwood and Gunn 1984: 204–206).
236  Handbook on theories of governance

However, the crucial difference is that EBPM supporters use these ideas to describe an ideal
to seek, or what they would expect to see. If so, they conflate two very different problems: the
potentially temporary poor use of evidence by individual politicians; and an ever-present gov-
ernance problem in which the centre does not deliver on evidence-based policies because there
is a gulf between the ‘appearance of central control and what central governments can actually
do’ (Cairney 2020b). In contrast, policy theories use an artificial ideal-type to compare with
real-world policymaking to explain why these expectations could never be met (regardless of
the motivation and competence of individual politicians).
Policy theories draw on two main concepts to help EBPM proponents understand the
governance problem that they are trying in vain to solve. First, ‘bounded rationality’ (Simon
1976) helps explain the need for policymakers to ignore most evidence. There is an almost
infinite amount of information and a finite ability to pay attention to it (Baumgartner 2017).
This limitation prompts people use two cognitive shortcuts, often described provocatively as
‘rational’ (such as using well-established rules to identify high-quality sources of information)
and ‘irrational’ (such as using gut instinct, emotion and beliefs) (Cairney and Kwiatkowski
2017). These shortcuts help explain the selective use of evidence: policymakers define a policy
problem and a feasible response in relation to their beliefs and their perceived ability to solve
the problem, and both aspects determine the policy relevance of evidence. They might exclude
some forms of evidence as inconvenient truths, but also ignore any evidence that relates to
powers they do not possess. Or, they limit their attention to evidence by paying attention to
a select few issues and delegating the rest to bureaucrats and other organizations. In turn, while
policymaking organizations have more resources to process evidence, they too must develop
standard operating procedures to limit their search for information to inform choice (Koski and
Workman 2018). For example, bureaucrats rely on other actors for information and advice,
they build relationships on trust and information exchange, and these policy communities
process most policy beyond the centre of government (Jordan and Cairney 2013). In each case,
central control in theory translates into decentred policymaking in practice (Cairney 2020b).
Second, ‘multi-centric policymaking’ (Cairney et al. 2019) helps explain the gap between
perceived and actual powers of policymakers at a single centre. Many approaches – including
studies of multi-level, polycentric and complex governance – describe explicitly the role
of multiple authoritative or semi-autonomous venues, which cooperate, compete or operate
independently to contribute to policy outcomes (Bache and Flinders 2004; Hooghe and Marks
2003; Ostrom et al. 1961; Ostrom 2010; Aligica and Tarko 2012; Feiock 2013; Geyer and
Cairney 2015; Chapter 46 in this volume). Others describe a policymaking logic in which
the centralization of power in one core organization is not possible (see Cairney et al. 2019:
28‒30). A common story is as follows: there are many policymakers and influencers spread
across many venues, and each venue has its own formal and informal rules and practices,
networks of participants, and dominant understandings of policy problems and solutions. To
some extent, this delegation or sharing power is a choice, in which written constitutions or
collaborative regimes (described below) spell out the roles and responsibilities of each partici-
pant, and how they contribute to a greater whole. However, policy process research also iden-
tifies the necessity of such relationships in relation to the cognitive and organizational limits
to central control (Cairney et al. 2019: 8‒12). If so, to seek influence, policy actors need to
find out where the (formal and informal) authoritative action is, learn the rules of the game and
the currency of debate, and form alliances in more than one policymaking centre (ibid.: 53‒5;
as described by Cairney 2021b in relation to UK COVID-19 policy ‘guided by the science’).
 Evidence  237

These studies seem to suggest that EBPM enthusiasts should adapt to their task by treating
this dynamic as a feature of policymaking rather than as a governance problem. However,
there is one major caveat: many policymakers in many central governments do not take that
advice, particularly in political systems in which there is a high expectation for singular
authoritative government (such as in Westminster systems). A separate governance problem
relates to a continuous and often futile process of dealing with the limits to central powers:
‘centralisation will be confounded by fragmentation and interdependence that, in turn, will
prompt further bouts of centralisation’ (Bevir and Rhodes 2003: 6). Consequently, adaptation
requires a more sophisticated strategy to engage with central government policymakers who
either:

1. think they are more powerful than they are, and act accordingly, producing routine unin-
tended consequences; or
2. might be pragmatic enough to recognize the limits to their powers and seek delegation and
collaboration with others, but also see the political benefit of maintaining the fiction that
they are in control (Hay 2009; Cairney 2020b; compare with Sørensen and Torfing 2009
on the tools of metagovernance).

MODELS OF GOVERNANCE IN RELATION TO EVIDENCE USE

This focus on more-or-less central control helps us understand the politics of evidence use
in relation to models of evidence-informed governance. First, consider three commonly used
solutions to the sense that elected policymakers are not in control of their policymaking envi-
ronments and are unable to prevent or solve complex policy problems (Cairney and St Denny
2020):

1. Centralize. Try to assert or enforce centralization, to project the sense that you know who
is in charge and who to blame.
2. Localize. Delegate responsibility and blame to other authoritative venues.
3. Collaborate. Encourage forms of collaborative governance (Ansell and Gash 2008), in
which politicians show leadership by encouraging many venues and actors to cooperate to
produce and share innovative solutions to complex problems (Torfing and Ansell 2017).

Second, consider often highly contested debates about what counts as good evidence. In
research fields such as health and public health, it is common to refer (albeit often critically)
to a hierarchy of evidence quality based on the methods to produce it and communication
primarily via publication in high-profile scientific journals after peer review. The systematic
review of randomized control trials (RCTs) is at the top of this hierarchy, expert opinion is
at the bottom, and there is no apparent role for other forms of knowledge via experience or
practice. In contrast, many fields ‒ such as social work, social care, policing and education ‒
are more likely to entertain or prioritize the experience of service users and practitioners, often
informally and via storytelling. The former relates to the idea that we can generalize from
common experience, while the latter emphasizes the complexity and uniqueness of each case
and diversity of experience (Boaz et al. 2019; Dobrow et al. 2006; Fleming and Rhodes 2018;
Nutley et al. 2013; Stoker 2010; Petticrew and Roberts 2006: 57‒68). Or, the latter relates
explicitly to the politics of knowledge production and use, to criticise a narrow scientific
238  Handbook on theories of governance

Table 22.1 Three ideal-type models of evidence-informed governance

1. Centralization and EBPM 2. Compromise and local learning 3. Collaboration and storytelling
The main story Evidence-based policy requires Policy learning requires central Knowledge-informed policy
a single central government governments to identify promising requires widespread collaboration
to roll out interventions based evidence, train practitioners across many centres, informed by
on the systematic review of to use improvement methods, participants telling stories of their
randomized control trials and experiment with local policy relevant knowledge.
(RCTs). interventions.
How should you gather With reference to a hierarchy of Identify promising interventions, With reference to principles of
evidence of effectiveness evidence and evidence-gathering encourage practitioners to adapt collaboration, knowledge-sharing
and best practice? methods. interventions to their area, and and deliberation.
gather comparable data on their
experience.
How should you ‘scale Introduce the same model in If your practice is working, keep Tell stories based on your
up’ from evidence of each area. doing it; if it is working better experience, and invite other
best practice? Require fidelity, to administer elsewhere, consider learning from people to learn from them.
the correct dosage and measure their experience.
its effect.
What aim should you To ensure the correct To train local practitioners to To foster key principles, such as
prioritize? administration of the same active experiment and learn how best to collaboration and respect for the
ingredient. turn evidence into practice. knowledge of participants.

Sources: Adapted from Cairney (2017, 2020b) and Cairney and Oliver (2017).

view of evidence as exclusionary and contributing to the further marginalization of vulnerable

groups (Althaus 2020; Smith 2012).
In practice, there are many different approaches to governance and evidence. Policymaking
systems contain confusing mixes of approaches, and many commentators seem to promote
a pragmatic ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’ attitude to the value and use of knowledge in
policymaking. Therefore, we can identify simple models of evidence-informed governance to
compare them in abstract terms, but recognize that few policy participants do so.
Table 22.1 summarizes the key distinctions between three very different ideal-types of
evidence-informed governance. They do not connect perfectly to the central‒local‒collabora-
tive distinction above (approach 3 is also local, and approach 2 is often described as a com-
promise between 1 and 3), but they do highlight the underlying political tensions in relation to
evidence hierarchies.
In particular, relatively centralized forms of governance appear to be the most conducive
to evidence use based on a hierarchy of methods (model 1). These methods require uniform
policy solutions and fidelity to a precise intervention because the RCT evidence relates to
a specific solution whose impact is measured multiple times (elsewhere, to develop its interna-
tional reputation, and domestically, to track its effect in a new setting). This condition seems
to precludes most localized or collaborative approaches (models 2 and 3).
Collaborative forms of governance are not as conducive to centralization and uniformity,
partly because key aims are to project respect for multiple sources of knowledge and seek
consensus rather than assert hierarchies based on a claim to superior authority (model 3). For
example, Emerson et al.’s (2012) framework describes the establishment of a ‘collaborative
governance regime’ to foster action based on ‘principled engagement’ characterized by fair-
ness and deliberation ‘informed by the perspectives and knowledge of all participants’, ‘shared
 Evidence  239

motivation’ based on mutual understanding and trust and commitment, and ‘capacity for joint
action’ facilitated by the rules co-produced by participants. In theory, a collaborative approach
could be used to define a problem and select a uniform solution for a large population – such
as via design thinking to develop prototypes ‒ but their emphasis is on developing solutions
continuously in light of new knowledge and deliberation.
Table 22.1 also outlines one type of pragmatic compromise (model 2), establishing a strong
central role but also delegation to allow local actors to experiment and learn in their own
context. However, in practice, many such models exist because there is a clear trade-off in key
stages, such as when introducing an evidence base on which to build initial experimentation,
and when setting the parameters for freedom to experiment during training. In other words,
there are centralized and localized, and evidence-heavy and evidence-light versions of this
compromise (Cairney and Oliver 2017).
Overall, these models of evidence-informed governance help us rethink the idea of an
evidence‒policy gap. In model 1, it can relate to the too-limited use of RCT evidence to
inform policy and/or the limited fidelity to specific interventions. In model 3, this rationale
is non-existent and the identification of such gaps make little sense. Indeed, models of col-
laborative governance often do not use the word ‘evidence’ at all, preferring to discuss the
‘knowledge’ of participants, many of whom would not be seen as useful or legitimate sources
of evidence in model 1. Or, as in model 2, approaches may describe ‘learning’, or gathering
new information to update knowledge and skills (see also Dunlop and Radaelli 2013, 2017).
In each case, the comparison shows us that we should not consider the status and use of evi-
dence in a vacuum, separated from wider considerations of governance. A strict hierarchy of
evidence may make sense to the narrow requirements of actors operating in relative isolation
in a specific profession, but not to a wider set of actors involved in using evidence to inform
policy in the real world.

GOOD GOVERNANCE AND THE GOOD GOVERNANCE OF

EVIDENCE
These insights inform debates on the appropriate relationship between evidence production
and use. In particular, we can view Parkhurst’s (2017) aim ‒ to promote the ‘good governance
of evidence’ – as addressing the aims of EBPM and collaborative governance enthusiasts.
For EBPM enthusiasts, good governance requires us to address the problem of technical
bias, when: organisations produce bad evidence; some parts of government cherry-pick,
manipulate or ignore good evidence; and some politicians misinterpret the implications of evi-
dence. Politicians do it strategically for political gain or because their cognitive biases affect
their analysis. For example, they can seek evidence that confirms their position, and/or only
believe the evidence that confirms it. For enthusiasts of collaborative governance, it requires
us to address issue bias, when some actors use the mantra of ‘evidence-based policy’ to depo-
liticize issues or downplay the need to resolve conflicts over values, and/or seek to focus on
the problems most conducive to study via RCTs. In other words, methodological rigour trumps
policy relevance and simple experiments trump the exploration of complex solutions. So, we
lose sight of the unintended consequences of producing the ‘best’ evidence to address a small
number of problems (while downplaying political choices about the allocation of research
240  Handbook on theories of governance

resources and attention). Again, this action can be strategic or not, since researchers are not
immune to cognitive bias.
To address both problems pragmatically, Parkhurst (2017: 8) identifies two key principles
or practices ‘to ensure that rigorous, sys­tematic and technically valid pieces of evidence are
used within decision-making processes that are inclusive of, representative of and accountable
to the multiple social interests of the population served’.
First, produce ‘good evidence for policy’:

1. Relate evidence more closely to policy goals.

2. Modify research approaches and methods to answer policy relevant questions.
3. Ensure that the evidence relates to the local or relevant context.

Second, produce the ‘good use of evidence’ by combining:

1. Input legitimacy, to ensure democratic representative bodies have the final say.
2. Throughput legitimacy, to ensure widespread deliberation.
3. Output legitimacy, to ensure proper consideration of the most systematic, unbiased and
rigorously produced scientific evidence relevant to the problem.

Parkhurst (2017) suggests that these aims can be pursued in many ways, which raises the
possibility of a variety of – potentially contradictory – models of the good governance
of evidence even if they pay lip service to all three forms of legitimacy. For example, an
EBPM-driven model might prioritize output legitimacy to focus on producing the best possible
evidence (from a particular scientific viewpoint) and making sure that it is incorporated into
a well-functioning democratic system. A collaborative model might prioritize throughput
legitimacy to focus on producing a well-functioning collaborative regime built on engage-
ment, trust and co-produced rules, and incorporating scientific evidence into one part of that
regime. While these models might seem at first to be complementary, they prioritize very
different problems and they leave unresolved: (1) whose evidence and knowledge counts; and
(2) who should be in charge of doing something about it. In other words, even in theory, we
will always face inescapably political choices, reflecting different preferences on evidence
and processes. Further, they remain as models rather than actual practices, and the design of
new ways of working usually seems less realistic than adapting to or refining the practices that
already exist.

CONCLUSION

Research on policymaking helps us move beyond the slogans – evidence-based policymaking

versus policy-based evidence making – that sum up a political position rather than a coherent
and well-informed approach to governance. A policy-based evidence-making approach high-
lights some commonly expressed and reasonable concerns about governance: policymakers
do not use good research evidence whenever it goes against their beliefs or interests, or they
cherry-pick the evidence that supports their position. However, it also tends to conflate two
problems relating to: (1) the conduct of individual politicians; and (2) the dynamics and rules
of the policymaking systems or environments in which they operate. In the absence of a more
sophisticated understanding of multi-centric policymaking, these accounts will not be able
 Evidence  241

to identify and respond to the inevitable gap between researcher requirements and actual
policymaking processes. In the absence of insights from collaborative governance, they will
miss the benefits of thinking differently about the relationship between evidence, policy and
policymaking.
The problem of seeing politics through an EBPM lens relates initially to a misplaced
expectation for centralized policymaking. From the perspective of researchers, seeking to
identify an authoritative audience for their evidence, centralization may seem like an attrac-
tive prospect. The idea of comprehensive rationality involves getting as close as possible to
a powerful central government that is able to gather, process, understand and act upon the
best available evidence. The idea of a policy cycle gives researchers a clear sense of when
and how to engage: gather evidence about the size and urgency of a policy problem, generate
evidence-informed solutions, use evidence from previous applications to model or predict
their effects, and evaluate the results using well-established research methods.
Insights from multi-centric policymaking highlight two key reasons not to expect a powerful
centre to deliver evidence-based outcomes. First, policymakers need to find cognitive short-
cuts and organizational rules to ignore most evidence and make choices. Second, they do so in
a policymaking environment over which they have limited knowledge and even less control.
Combined, these insights suggest that even the most ostensibly powerful central governments
must – by necessity, as well as choice ‒ pay attention to a few issues and delegate responsibility
for the rest. Necessity and choice help explain why there are many policymaking centres, each
with their own formal and informal rules, networks and ways to interpret problems. Further,
this outcome has profound implications for EBPM enthusiasts: adapt to the ways in which
policymakers understand and use evidence, and to the rules, networks and dominant under-
standings in the venues you seek to influence; and accept the level of uncertainty that comes
with such engagement.
Insights from collaborative governance suggest that a powerful centre, delivering
evidence-based outcomes, is not something to which research enthusiasts should aspire.
Centralization is conducive only to a model of EBPM that emphasizes a narrowly defined
hierarchy of evidence related to a small number of scientific methods. It fosters the sense
that researchers can generate the best evidence of successful interventions, to be delivered
uniformly and with fidelity to their dosage. As such, this narrow view of what counts as
‘evidence-based’ contrasts heavily with the collaborative forms of governance that identify:
(1) a tendency for policy problems to be too complex to be addressed simply via RCTs and
a single source of authority; and (2) different principles on which to base democratic and
knowledge-informed policymaking. These principles include an appeal to fairness and delib-
eration built on including knowledge and perspectives from all participants, supported by
co-produced rules and norms and the development of trust via regular respectful interaction.
Both insights help us rethink what we might mean by ‘good governance’ in relation to
the alleged gap between the supply and use of evidence in policymaking. In one vision, an
evidence‒policy gap arises whenever a small group of policymakers, at the centre of govern-
ment, fails to use the best research evidence to define and solve policy problems. In another,
we would not want or expect to find a single centre of government or insist on such a narrow
view of what counts as good, policy-relevant knowledge. ‘Policy-based evidence-making’ is
a catchy slogan, in keeping with current concerns about the pathologies of politics in many
political systems. However, ‘evidence-based policymaking’ does not offer a realistic or desir-
able vision of how to address such concerns.
242  Handbook on theories of governance

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23. Learning
Tanya Heikkila and Andrea K. Gerlak

INTRODUCTION
Governance involves complex decision-making processes where a variety of actors, including
policymakers, stakeholders and administrators, consider and debate shared problems as well as
identify and implement mechanisms to address those problems. Within governance processes,
learning among the participants or actors can be critical for shaping whether actors agree on
the definition and scope of shared problems and solutions. Therefore, learning is often neces-
sary for fostering institutional or policy change (Sabatier 1988). More broadly, learning can be
seen as an essential element of effective and productive governance, for without learning it is
difficult for governance actors to understand the complexity of many public sector issues and
resolve conflict among competing interests.
While learning is an important feature of governance processes, it is not a straightforward
phenomenon. First, as we discuss in more detail later, learning can be seen as both an outcome
and a process (Heikkila and Gerlak 2013). Second, learning involves individual-level psycho-
logical processes that are difficult to observe directly. Third, in the context of governance,
learning can be a collective phenomenon. Moreover, the collective contexts where govern-
ance actions take place can vary widely: they may include interest groups, public agencies,
coalitions, policy networks, epistemic communities, commissions and legislatures, to name
a few. Finally, governance issues may overlap multiple decision-making contexts and involve
the participation of numerous and diverse actors, which can further complicate our ability to
define, theorize about and observe learning.
Given that learning is a complex and important phenomenon for governance, scholars have
explored the meaning of learning and its relationship to governance from a diversity of per-
spectives. These include policy learning (e.g., Heclo 1974; Sabatier 1988; Bennett and Howlett
1992; May 1992; Dunlop and Radaelli 2013), policy diffusion and transfer (e.g., Meseguer
2005; Berry and Berry 2007; Nicholson-Crotty 2009), network governance (e.g., Liebeskind
et al. 1996; Knight 2002; Newig et al. 2010), collaborative governance (Daniels and Walker
1996; Ansell and Gash 2008; Gerlak and Heikkila 2011), social learning (e.g., Mostert et al.
2007; Pahl-Wostl 2009; Lebel et al. 2010) and adaptive governance (e.g., Walters and Holling
1990; Folke et al. 2005; Scholz and Stiftel 2005). Given the extensive interest in the concept
of learning in the governance literature, empirical analyses of the processes and products of
learning have been a rapidly growing area of research (Gerlak et al. 2017, 2019; Armitage et
al. 2017; Moyson et al. 2017; Gerlak and Heikkila 2019; Riche et al. 2020). In this chapter we
explore how these literatures define and explain learning, the factors that can shape learning,
the types of governance processes that facilitate learning, and challenges for studying learning.

244
 Learning  245

DEFINITIONS OF LEARNING IN GOVERNANCE CONTEXTS

Within the governance literature, the concept of learning has been defined in a variety of ways.
Some emphasize how learning is part of the governing process. For example, Lasswell (1971)
defined learning as the ‘intelligence’ phase of the policy process, where gathering, processing
and disseminating information occur. Rose (2005), similarly, has suggested that learning may
take place through a series of steps such as looking for new alternatives and evaluating how
such alternatives work. Birkland (2006) indicates that learning involves a process of gathering
new information from experience and using that information to improve policy design. Those
who have emphasized the process of learning sometimes identify specific stages or phases of
the process through which learning emerges (e.g., see Nilsson 2006). Such stages may include
acquiring information, ideas or knowledge, assessing or translating information or ideas, and
disseminating or institutionalizing that knowledge.
In contrast to those who focus on learning as a process, others view learning as a product or
outcome. For instance, Sabatier defines learning as ‘relatively enduring alterations of thought
or behavioral intentions that result from experience and that are concerned with the attainment
(or revision) of public policy’ (Sabatier 1998: 104). While Sabatier defines learning around
changes in beliefs or intentions, Bennett and Howlett (1992) argue that many authors equate
learning with policy change. Literature on the diffusion of innovation in policy and governance
settings, for instance, frequently depicts policy diffusion as the product of learning (e.g., Berry
and Berry 2007; Nicholson-Crotty 2009). Additionally, a common assumption in the literature
is that learning results in new and improved outcomes (Walters and Holling 1990; Chiva et al.
2010). This may not always be the case, as learning processes may lead to reinforced beliefs
or strategies (Lord et al. 1979), or products that later experience tells us are bad or ineffectual
(Miner and Mezias 1996). Some scholars argue that learning is rare; most organizations tend
to follow a process of adaptation that fails to recognize links within a shared problem-space, as
opposed to learning by putting consensual knowledge to work defining and solving problems
as interconnected (Haas and Haas 1995).
Drawing from these different perspectives on learning, our research has offered a definition
of learning that integrates both the process and product elements. We have argued that learn-
ing as it relates to governance is both: ‘(1) a collective process, which may include acquiring
information through diverse actions (e.g. trial and error), assessing or translating information,
and disseminating knowledge or opportunities across individuals in a collective, and (2)
collective products that emerge from the process, such as new shared ideas, strategies, rules,
or policies’ (Gerlak and Heikkila 2011: 623). While this definition emphasizes the collective
nature of learning in governance settings, we recognize that learning occurs within the minds
of individuals participating in governance settings (Heikkila and Gerlak 2013). However,
individuals in governance settings often must come to a common understanding of what they
individually learn in order to translate ideas or knowledge to collective products such as shared
strategies or policies.
In exploring the products of learning, some researchers emphasize different ‘types’ of learn-
ing, which can help researchers differentiate ‘what’ is learned. May’s (1992) typology, for
instance, is frequently cited in public policy studies that highlight learning (e.g., see Bennett
1997; Birkland 1997; Meseguer 2005). His typology includes: political learning, which is
learning about the strategies or tools to influence policy; instrumental learning, or learning
about the feasibility and effectiveness of policy implementation; and social policy learning,
246  Handbook on theories of governance

which is about the definition or social construction of a policy issue. Other typologies refer
to ‘conceptual’ or ‘technical’ (Nilsson 2006), ‘episodic’ versus ‘transformative’ (Gunderson
2010), ‘cognitive and relational’ (Armitage et al. 2017), and ‘cognitive, normative and rela-
tional’ learning (Huitema et al. 2010). Such typologies provide useful ways to compare learn-
ing outcomes across contexts, and for scholars to develop more specific and nuanced theories
and hypotheses of how or why different types of learning may emerge.

FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE LEARNING

Another key area of the learning literature focuses on the different characteristics or factors
within governance settings that can facilitate, or potentially impede, learning processes and
outcomes. Some of the governance literature examining factors associated with learning builds
on the rich body of work on organizational learning (e.g., see Siebenhüner 2002). In previous
research, we have categorized these factors according to the social, structural and technical
features of governance settings (Heikkila and Gerlak 2013).
Social factors shaping learning include the interactions and dynamics among governance
actors, such as their levels of trust, levels of conflict or cooperation, and frequency of interac-
tion (Newig et al. 2010; Heikkila and Gerlak 2013). One of the central findings of the literature
is that these social dynamics can be critical to learning. That is, when diverse actors interact
regularly to define the problems, share knowledge, and set and implement solutions, learning
is more likely (Mostert et al. 2007; Pahl Wostl 2009; Munaretto and Huitema 2012). Others
have argued that the level of conflict or collaboration within a governance setting also matters
for learning. For instance, Weible et al. (2010) find that collaborative, rather than adversarial,
subsystems are more conducive to learning. In adversarial subsystems, such as oil and gas
governance, policy actors may be resistant to new information that counters their core policy
beliefs (Montpetit and Lachapelle 2017; Heikkila et al. 2020). We also know, however, that
learning in adversarial subsystems can be easier when interactions occur in forums dominated
by professional norms (Leach and Sabatier 2005; Jenkins-Smith et al. 2014).
The structural features of a group or governance setting, which include the organization of
the actors, their functions and roles in governance, also affect how easily actors acquire and
disseminate new sources of information (Heikkila and Gerlak 2013). For instance, having
skilful leaders to promote information exchange, or who are capable of brokering between
actors who have competing interests or goals, can play a key role in governance learning
(Riche et al. 2020). Additionally, in governance networks that include actors with established
connections to external actors, learning can be enhanced through access to external sources
of information and knowledge (Bodin et al. 2006; Bodin 2017). Conversely, particularly in
complex governance settings, structures that limit interactions between different subgroups
can impede learning (Bodin 2017). However, the causal relationship between governance
structures and learning is far from settled. In a more centralized or integrated structure, gov-
ernance actors may have more opportunities to acquire information and adopt new learning
products more quickly. Yet, homogeneity of actors in such structures may also constrain the
diversity of ideas and impede learning (Henry 2009; Newig et al. 2010). Riche et al. (2020:
12) argue that learning is most effective in governance networks when informal norms allow
for creativity and consensus, but also when formal rules help mitigate power imbalances and
allow for adequate information exchange.
 Learning  247

The technical and functional domain of a governance context, such as the information,
resources and tools available, may also play a role in learning. For instance, research on
learning in policy subsystems has found that learning is more likely around problems that have
quantitative data and accepted theory (Jenkins-Smith et al. 2014). Similarly, in collaborative
governance settings when the issues or functional activities of interest to a collective group
are well understood and narrowly defined, groups can acquire the information and process
the information they need for learning more easily (Gerlak and Heikkila 2011). However,
inaccurate assumptions about the full range of uncertainties around issues within the govern-
ance domain can ultimately hinder learning (Nair and Howlett 2017). At the same time, the
types of technical tools for processing and sharing information in a governance setting can
influence learning (Heikkila and Gerlak 2013). For example, having information acquisition
systems that are well balanced to the capacity of the actors, and avoiding information overload
or information underload, can be important for facilitating the translation or interpretation of
information (O’Reilly 1980).
Numerous other factors can influence learning in governance settings. For example, the
rules of a governance setting that determine the scope of governance, the actors involved
and their authority, and what actions are permitted or forbidden, will condition the social,
structural and technical factors described above (Heikkila and Gerlak 2019). Additionally,
factors that are exogenous to the governance setting, including political, social and economic
changes, media attention and crises, can both spark and hinder learning (Sabatier 1988;
Weyant 1988; Hall 1993; Kingdon 1995; Siebenhüner 2002). At the same time, the cogni-
tive characteristics of individuals participating in governance settings play a role in shaping
learning processes or outcomes. In particular, scholars employing boundedly rational models
of human decision-making highlight how individual cognitive limits can affect how informa-
tion is received, understood and processed (Simon 1985). Sagan (1993), for instance, argues
that learning is constrained by bounded rationality and politics, and that people often cannot
afford to learn from their mistakes. This is because policy actors are prone to filtering infor-
mation based on their core beliefs and often dismiss information that counters those beliefs;
a phenomenon known as biased assimilation (Lord et al. 1979; Leach and Sabatier 2005). For
governance scholars, this may mean that beliefs and political interests inhibit learning even
when actors actively seek out information to inform governance decisions.

GOVERNANCE PROCESSES ASSOCIATED WITH LEARNING

In addition to identifying which features of the governance context can affect learning, some
literature has begun to explore how specific governance processes or forums can create or
promote learning. Dunlop and Radaelli (2020), for instance, identify four modes or types of
governance processes where policy learning occurs: epistemic communities, reflexive stake-
holder processes, hierarchies, and negotiated/bargaining arrangements. Each mode can impose
distinct incentives for learning, as well as particular dysfunctions in learning. This is due in
part because different governance processes tend to be more cooperative versus competitive.
The types of governance processes that foster learning can also depend on the level of
complexity in the institutional setting. In settings with multiple overlapping or polycentric
venues, scholars have suggested that boundary organizations can provide opportunities for
finding intersections among divergent social groups to broker or mediate interactions across
248  Handbook on theories of governance

individuals with diverse purposes and incongruent values (Guston 2001). Similarly, bridging
organizations, or organizations that link multiple actors through some form of strategic con-
nections (Westley and Vredenburg 1991), also promote learning (Hahn et al. 2006; Olsson
et al. 2007). In particular, bridging organizations provide an arena for learning and space for
trust-building and conflict resolution and for bridges to be built between science and other
forms of knowledge (Hahn et al. 2006; Olsson et al. 2007).
One way that these types of processes support learning is by establishing shared ‘ways of
knowing’, or common perspectives on policy issues (Lejano and Ingram 2008; Feldman et al.
2006). Governance settings that allow for different ways of knowing to emerge among diverse
stakeholders can lead to learning. For instance, Mukhtarov and Gerlak (2014) apply a ‘ways
of knowing’ approach to water policy, examining how creating space for multiple conflicting
epistemologies and bringing in non-expert stakeholders can help resolve policy stalemates.
Such processes allow diverse governance actors to understand and trust one another by explor-
ing policy issues from multiple dimensions.
The idea of ‘ways of knowing’ is similar to empirical findings and theories in the gov-
ernance literature that describe how learning might emerge from the interaction of diverse
actors when governance processes encourage intentional and shared knowledge-building. The
literature on adaptive governance, for instance, emphasizes this line of thinking. Adaptive
governance, in theory, involves decision-making processes that connect individuals, organi-
zations and agencies at multiple levels and provide for collaborative, flexible, learning-based
approaches, particularly for complex and uncertain systems (Dietz et al. 2003; Folke et al.
2005). Adaptive governance further requires continuous learning among diverse stakeholders
(Folke et al. 2005). Other scholars recognize that learning can occur in multi-level governance
processes when they are designed to include not only deliberation among diverse actors but
also explicit approaches for collecting and tracking performance among lower-level units and
periodically adapting decision-making (Sabel and Zeitlin 2008).
Across each of these literatures on governance processes we see general agreement on the
importance of designing processes that support the social factors known to support learning,
including opportunities for shared dialogue, trust-building and interactive feedback. This lit-
erature also underscores how structural features and the technical domain might condition the
feasibility of designing effective learning processes.

ISSUES AND CHALLENGES FOR STUDYING LEARNING

To answer questions associated with learning and governance, many scholars have used case
studies to explore qualitatively how a governance process led to, or hindered, a collective
learning outcome such as a policy change (e.g., see Siebenhüner 2002; Kröger 2005; Nilsson
2006; Armitage et al. 2008; Albright 2011). However, a limitation with this research is that
the evidence for learning is often indirectly measured, or simply assumed, making it difficult
to determine how or whether individuals actually learned. The social learning literature, for
instance, often equates learning with the establishment of governance processes for dialogue
among diverse stakeholders. This may stem from a lack of consensus on the definition of
social learning, or from a lack of direct empirical measurement of social learning outcomes
(Armitage et al. 2008; Muro and Jeffrey 2008). Therefore, it is critical to operationally define
 Learning  249

and measure learning, including specific types of learning, and to differentiate learning from
a governance process within which learning may emerge.
To observe learning more directly, some scholars who study policy learning and collabo-
rative learning have adopted document analysis, interviews and surveys (Crow and Albright
2019; De Voogt and Patterson 2019; Koebele 2019), and cognitive mapping processes with
participants in a governance process (Huitema et al. 2010). Others use process tracing and
ethnographic approaches (Mukhtarov et al. 2019), or participant observation (Ricco and
Schultz 2019; Rietig 2019). How scholars measure and study learning depends upon whether
they are interested in focusing on a particular slice of a learning process or a learning product
and which level of analysis within a governance context (e.g., individual actors, policy venues,
collaborative groups, networks) is most relevant for their learning questions at hand. Some
start by looking to existing theories that specifically employ learning, and then replicating
or expanding upon previous operational definitions and data collection procedures employed
within that framework. Others synthesize across theories and frameworks from subfields of
governance to guide operationalization and approaches for inquiry (Heikkila and Gerlak 2013;
Crow and Albright 2019; Newig et al. 2019). Although we have seen notable advancements
in empirical approaches to learning, more comparative and longitudinal approaches are still
needed to measure learning across different governance contexts (Gerlak et al. 2017).
Finally, more empirical research is needed to understand when learning does or does not
lead to improved governance outcomes. Based on a review of numerous governance studies,
we know that learning does not necessarily lead to improved outcomes (Newig et al. 2019).
Additionally, often ignored in the literature is that the process of learning may not be what is
important for improving governance outcomes; rather, what is learned or unlearned is key (Löf
2010). Although learning processes can be associated with improved governance, questions
remain around which governance processes are most effective in balancing the trade-offs
inherent in complex governance systems (Gerlak et al. 2013, 2017; Gerlak 2014).

CONCLUSION
Learning has proven to be a central concept across a diversity of governance literatures. It is
featured prominently in research on policy change and diffusion, adaptive governance and
environmental governance, policy networks and collaborative governance. While the various
literatures have emphasized different elements of learning in defining this concept, we have
argued that these diverse definitions are compatible and can be integrated to highlight the
process elements of learning and the products of learning. At the same time, the literature
provides insights into the types of factors that can facilitate or constrain learning. Some emerg-
ing streams of literature further delve into a few of the specific governance processes where
learning, theoretically at least, is likely to emerge, such as in adaptive governance processes
that include diverse stakeholder perspectives and new ‘ways of knowing’ among governance
actors.
Despite the widespread attention to learning, a number of researchers have argued that we
still need to develop better concepts, methods and metrics for conceptualizing, measuring
and testing learning within governance contexts (Reed et al. 2010; Crona and Parker 2012;
Heikkila and Gerlak 2013; Gerlak et al. 2017, 2019). One of the challenges with advancing
the literature is related to operationalizing and measuring such a complex phenomenon that
250  Handbook on theories of governance

involves multiple process and product elements. Focusing on one feature of learning – such
as the element of cognitive change – may be one way to simplify and clarify analyses. Yet
doing so comes at the risk of producing invalid insights into the nature of learning. In-depth
case study research that can track learning processes and products may help in this regard,
complemented by longitudinal and comparative studies of learning in both similar and dif-
ferent governance settings. Improving our diagnosis and measurement of learning, as well as
the characteristics of governance settings that promote or inhibit learning and the conditions
under which learning is associated with successful governance outcomes, will be fruitful areas
of future research.

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24. Innovation
Jean Hartley and Jacob Torfing

INTRODUCTION
Academics as well as public leaders and managers are increasingly attracted to concepts and
practices of ‘innovation’ and ‘governance’, although these concepts are still not often put
together (Moore and Hartley 2008; Sørensen and Torfing 2011; Eshuis and van Buuren 2014).
Innovation has been championed as a means to increase efficiency or effectiveness of public
services, to address pressing societal needs and problems, and to restore legitimacy in gov-
ernment (Osborne and Brown 2011; Hartley 2005; Dekker et al. 2020). National innovation
strategies, award schemes, and local innovation labs and training programmes have prolifer-
ated (Borins 2014; Hartley and Downe 2007). Trying to meet new or hitherto unmet social
demands and solving intractable (‘wicked’) problems in societies facing fiscal constraint has
heightened interest in innovation (Kiefer et al. 2015).
At the same time, governance discourse and research has also grown over the last two
decades. Governance refers to the process of steering society and the economy in accordance
with common goals. While public hierarchies and private markets may be seen as the main
contributors to governance in this generic sense of the term, there has been a growing interest
in multi-actor governance, often referred to as interactive or collaborative governance (Ansell
and Gash 2008; Emerson et al. 2012; Torfing et al. 2012). This interest is partly prompted by
the need or desire to mobilize and exchange the resources, competencies and ideas of public,
private and third sector actors to facilitate joint problem-exploration and problem-solving in
societies which have become polycentric in terms of power and knowledge. Interdependent
actors are brought together in networks, partnerships and mini-publics in which decisions are
made on the basis of collaboration that combine elements of bargaining with elements of delib-
eration (Sørensen and Torfing 2007). In some areas collaborative governance plays a crucial
role, although it often operates in the shadow of hierarchies and markets (Peters 2011).
A number of writers have criticized the ‘pro-innovation bias’ in certain parts of the innova-
tion literature, whereby the unwarranted assumption is made that innovation inevitably leads
to improvement (Hartley 2005; Meijer and Thaens 2021). Scholars have also noted the dangers
of a bias towards collaborative governance including the assumption that it inevitably adds
public value (Hughes 2010; Hartley et al. 2013). So, there is a need to examine these concepts
critically and carefully.
In this chapter, we will explore what is known and where the gaps are in relation to two key
questions. First, how can various governance arrangements and processes enhance or inhibit
innovation, and with what consequences? Second, how can innovation processes change insti-
tutional forms of governance and thus lead to ‘governance innovation’? These two framings
enable the unpacking of the impact of governance on innovation and the role of innovation in
transforming governance.

254
 Innovation  255

DEFINING INNOVATION

Definitions of innovation vary in both research and public policy (Osborne and Brown 2011),
so theoretical and empirical research may be based on quite divergent assumptions. However,
most scholars emphasize that innovation is defined by the implementation of new ideas, not
just their creative invention (Bessant 2005). Innovation is the development and realization of
new and creative solutions that challenge conventional wisdoms and/or break with established
practices in a given context (Sørensen and Torfing 2011). So, innovation is disruptive, involv-
ing step-change, not just incremental improvements, since otherwise innovation is indistin-
guishable from general change (Lynn 1997). The step-change may be small (the innovation
does not have to be systemically radical, indeed it may be incremental and under the radar of
higher management or policy-makers, for example; Fuglsang 2010), but it involves a shift in
perspective or mind-set along with changed practices, though the shift may be socially con-
structed (Greenhalgh et al. 2004). The innovation may be something entirely new to the group,
organization or network, or it may derive from the adoption of innovation from elsewhere.
Hence, it is not the source of innovation, but rather the context of implementation that deter-
mines whether something is an innovation or not (Roberts and King 1996).
Innovation ought not to be defined as success, because many argue that innovation is the
process of creation and implementation of new solutions whether or not they are successful
(Moore 2005; Hartley 2011). This is for several reasons. The failure rate in innovation is
generally high (Tidd and Bessant 2013), and in any case, evaluation of success or failure (or
a combination) may change over time and vary according to stakeholders or location (Hartley
2011).
Finally, diffusion, or spread, of innovation is particularly salient for public organizations,
which are morally if not operationally bound to try to share innovations which improve quality
or reach of public services or which contribute to greater social justice. Quite a lot is known
about the conditions which lead to or prevent the spread of innovation within and across organ-
izations and networks (Rogers 2003; Greenhalgh et al. 2004; Hartley and Rashman 2018).
Innovation has some rational, intentional processes but in practice is characterized by
actions, iterations and feedback loops which are unplanned and unexpected (Van de Ven et al.
1999; Bason 2018). Despite this complexity, for analytical purposes a number of broad phases
can be discerned in the innovation process. One widely accepted approach is to conceive of the
phases as consisting of invention, implementation and diffusion (Osborne and Brown 2005;
Hartley 2013). It is useful to delineate analytical phases, because innovation processes and
outcomes may vary by phases.
The public innovation literature is only now breaking out from domination by models and
research about the private sector with its frequently found market competition assumptions (de
Vries et al. 2016; Hartley et al. 2013; Fuglsang and Pedersen 2011). Scholars have roundly
demonstrated that the idea of an ossified public sector and an innovative private sector is
a myth (Hartley et al. 2013; Mazzucato 2013). The public sector contains strong innovation
drivers in terms of its large size, its access to new scientific knowledge, and the political
and social pressures from users and citizens and from some of its professionals. The driver
of public innovation is less about market competition and more about creating new ways to
achieve value for society. Of course, this situation is complicated by the fact that both public
and private sector organizations vary in their ‘publicness’ (Bozeman and Bretschneider 1994),
with overlaps of characteristics. In addition, there is increasing evidence of hybridization
256  Handbook on theories of governance

whereby processes are combined from different sectors, such as adopting management styles
from the private sector or treating users as customers. However, an underlying and important
key distinction between the public and private sectors relates to the beneficiaries of innova-
tion. Private sector innovation aims to create value which is appropriated primarily by private
shareholders, whereas public innovation aims to produce value for a service sector and for
society at large (Bason 2018).

GOVERNANCE SYSTEMS AND THEIR IMPACT ON INNOVATION

Innovation can occur within a number of different public governance systems (Hartley 2005;
Windrum 2008), and these are now explored, focusing on traditional public administration,
new public management and collaborative governance as three principal paradigms.
Mazzucato (2013, 2019) has been particularly articulate in demonstrating that the public
sector has a long history of innovation; she points to the invention of the internet, which has
revolutionized economics, politics and society, but also extends this to a wide range of tech-
nologies, including the Global Positioning System (GPS), bio-engineering and pharmaceuti-
cals. One can also point to new organizations and institutions such as the European Union, the
United Kingdom’s Open University, and new and changed public services (see also Windrum
2008). Clearly, innovation has been happening in the public sector for some considerable time.
Innovation can occur under ‘traditional public administration’ (governance primarily by
government, based on political direction and bureaucratic administration). In these contexts,
national and local politicians are likely to set the policies, tone and direction, and allocate the
resources for innovation, through radical, often large-scale and sometimes transformative
policy reforms, with public servants responsible for finding ways to implement the proposed
innovation. Such an approach to innovation was prevalent in the period after the Second World
War in Europe and the United States (US) and is responsible for the spate of technological
innovations commercialized by the private sector, according to Mazzucato (2013). Traditional
public administration approaches to innovation are also currently found in some developing
countries, where large-scale step-change is sought (Mackintosh et al. 2007). Politicians may
also allocate large budgets to scientists and professionals working for the public service to
develop ‘blue-sky’ innovation, such as occurs in the US military, which provide many techno-
logical innovations, exploited across all sectors.
‘New public management’ (Hood 2006) is a different governance paradigm with different
implications for innovation. While this is a broad umbrella term, it includes adopting many
features of private sector management and practices, such as performance management,
performance-related wage systems, and attempts to separate formal politics from service
production through a variety of decentralized organizational structures, some of which are
provided by private firms operating in publicly sponsored quasi-markets. However, although
it was assumed that new public management (NPM) would lead to a flourishing of innovation
due to the emulation of private sector management practices combined with increased reliance
on competitive tendering, the evidence suggests that there has been a more mixed impact
(Hartley et al. 2013; Windrum 2008). The focus in NPM on performance management created
as many barriers to innovation as enablers, because the relentless focus on performance targets
made taking risks more difficult, and marketization restricted the knowledge-sharing which
underpins the diffusion of innovation. The innovations that were created through the strength-
 Innovation  257

ening of managerial incentives were more in efficiency than in effectiveness. Windrum (2008)
notes that NPM tended to favour organizational innovations in terms of decentralization,
privatization and the contracting out of services. Service users are treated as customers, and so
the innovations focus on the innovative capacity of public managers and their staff, rather than
on citizens, private stakeholders or politicians as sources and drivers of innovation.
Collaborative governance ‘brings multiple stakeholders together in common forums with
public agencies to engage in consensus-oriented decision making’ (Ansell and Gash 2008:
543). It provides a pluricentric alternative to unicentric government and pluricentric markets
(Sørensen and Torfing 2011; Ansell and Torfing 2014), and is the third arrangement we
consider for its influence on innovation processes and outcomes, including its advantages and
drawbacks.
Collaborative governance is of great interest to policy-makers, practitioners and academics,
in part because of its approach to ‘wicked’ problems (Rittell and Webber 1973; Head and
Alford 2015). The issue of wicked problems is now well-rehearsed in the public management
field (e.g. Weber and Khademian 2008), but as a brief recap: they are the many social and
economic problems with no agreed ‘diagnosis’ (different people may formulate the problem
in different ways, and the problem is multidimensional and often systemic); the solutions are
not fully known or agreed; and attempts to solve the problem require political judgement as
well as technical expertise. The political aspects of wicked problems can make them unruly in
the sense of being conflict-ridden and difficult to form a consensus about. Examples include
inner city decay, climate change, obesity and rural employment problems. Collaborative gov-
ernance has some advantages over the other two modes of governance because the variety of
collaborative actors can each contribute information, values and perspectives which provide
the requisite variety (Ashby 1958) to address the complexity of the wicked problems. In
a polycentric governance world, how wicked problems are socially constructed affects how
they might be addressed.
Collaborative governance is one way to try to foster innovations so that wicked problems
can be tackled in new and different ways (Hartley et al. 2013). Research suggests that col-
laboration can strengthen and improve each of the different phases in the innovation process
(Sørensen and Torfing 2011; Torfing and Triantafillou 2016). First, the definition and framing
of problems and challenges is enhanced when public and private actors with different expe-
riences, understandings and forms of knowledge engage in collective processes of reflection,
sense-making and agenda-setting (Koppenjan and Klijn 2004). Second, the generation of new
and creative ideas and practices is spurred when different ideas and suggestions are circulated,
challenged, expanded and explored through mutual learning (Gray and Ren 2014). Third,
the selection and testing of the most promising ideas is improved when actors with different
vantage points jointly assess the risks and benefits associated with different solutions, decide
which risks they are willing to take in order to achieve particular benefits, and adjust the
preferred solution in iterative rounds of design, testing and redesign (Bason 2018). Fourth, the
implementation of innovations is enhanced by collaboration that facilitates the coordination
between actors in order to avoid overlaps and create synergies, the sharing of risks and benefits
among the participants, and the creation of a common ownership to the new solutions that
helps to reduce implementation resistance (Eggers and O’Leary 2009; Hartley et al. 2013).
Finally, the diffusion of innovative ideas and practices is propelled by the participation of
actors who can help to spread knowledge and information about the innovative solution
through their social and professional networks (Rogers 2003; Greenhalgh et al. 2004). As
258  Handbook on theories of governance

such, collaboration provides a potent method for developing and realizing innovative solutions
to wicked problems.
However, collaborative governance for innovation also has some weaknesses. There are
areas and situations where collaborative innovation is neither feasible nor desirable, for
example where there is a political preference for confidentiality and seclusion (Torfing et
al. 2012), such as might occur in security situations or where the privacy of private firms or
citizens would be compromised. Collaborative innovation might also be difficult in geograph-
ical regions or policy areas with deep-seated ideological, religious or ethnic conflicts where
interactions are difficult or distorted by inter-group rivalries. Furthermore, collaborative gov-
ernance can be problematic where there are large imbalances in the power resources of the key
stakeholders (Gray 1989). So collaborative innovation may be at risk where particular private
actors are able to capture or frame the collaborative arena and exploit the process of innovation
and its results to their own advantage, rather than creating public value (Benington and Moore
2011). Vangen and Huxham (2010) and Benington (2001) also note that collaboration can
create inertia instead of focused energy if the collaborative processes are not well led, and that
collaborations are often clearer about ideas than about accountability and action.
Summing up, the analysis suggests that collaborative governance in networks, partnerships
and other interactive arenas has considerable potential for creating new public policies and
service, particularly in the context of wicked problems, but that it is not a governance strategy
that works in all contexts. Instead, this chapter argues that innovation can occur under a variety
of governance arrangements (here analysed as traditional public administration, new public
management and collaborative governance), each with their own advantages and disadvan-
tages in relation to the invention, implementation and diffusion of innovations. In addition, it
is important to remember that innovation is not a goal in itself, but merely a means to achieve
the ultimate goals of public governance such as efficiency, effectiveness and democratic legit-
imacy, and to avoid the ‘dark side’ of public innovation which includes low public value and
low public control (Meijer and Thaens 2021).

INNOVATIONS IN GOVERNANCE
While competing governance systems contain different drivers and barriers to public inno-
vation, innovation processes may also transform the institutional forms of governance. The
research on public innovation has primarily focused on policy and service innovation and
underemphasized the many attempts to transform the ways that public organizations are
organized, connected, steered and managed. Such innovations can have as their focus the
ways in which, political and democratic institutions operate, and how the interactions between
different organizations, sectors and levels are institutionalized (Smith 2009; Hughes 2010).
Here, the chapter focuses on ‘governance innovations’ that are step-changes that transform
the modus operandi of public governance and perhaps shift the responsibility for governing
between different public, private and civil society actors.
In considering innovations in governance, it can be seen that there is a huge variety of
changes in the way that governing processes are structured and institutionalized. Here are some
examples: changes in formal political structures that lead to devolved government or more
centralized government; changes in the rules and procedures for political decision-making, for
example through reforms of European Union treaties; greater citizen engagement in political
 Innovation  259

processes through the introduction of collaborative planning and deliberative democracy

mechanisms, such as citizens’ juries, participatory budgeting; and reformulating public service
resourcing, for example through greater deployment of volunteers in crime prevention, public
libraries and child protection; innovations in the ways in which public services are financed
such as new charging regimes or public‒private finance arrangements; shifts to different forms
of co-production and co-creation in public services; changes in the ways in which the quality
of public services are assessed, for example through user satisfaction surveys; and finally,
changes in accountability and reporting mechanisms such as the use of peer reviewing and
other forms of horizontal accountability mechanisms. From these examples it appears that
innovations in governance are all around us. These innovations in governance arrangements
deserve close attention, because they provide new insights not just about governance per se,
but also about how to conceptualize and theorize innovations more broadly for the public
sphere. Many are documented by academics (Polsby 1984; Berry and Berry 2017; Moore and
Hartley 2008; Sørensen 2020; Fung 2012). They analyse, among other elements of govern-
ance, the democratic input to the political system and the systemic innovations that change the
way that different organizations interact across different areas, sectors and levels, and the role
that the different organizations and leaderships play in this interaction. Governance innova-
tions invite analysis of innovation in whole systems terms.
Innovations in governance may involve more and different forms of resourcing. Working
with private firms, or with volunteers, or encouraging citizens to participate in public services
and decision-making, all involve tapping into different sources of contribution to making
society function. Some may be direct financial resources while others may be human energy,
imagination and labour. Some resources offered may be valuable for creating public value,
while others may be partisan or sectional. Having a framework for understanding what is to
be achieved by the innovation and how it is going to be realized (as far as can be predicted) is
helpful in deciding what resources to harness, from whom and in what ways.
This highlights an important issue, which is that innovations in governance, because they
are about political steering and decision-making, have to be evaluated in wider terms than
the innovation itself. Efficiency, quality or reach of the innovation are insufficient criteria
alone by which to judge innovations in governance, because these dimensions address only
policy and service outputs, not the processes by which decisions are made or the outcomes
which they may have on society. A public value perspective is necessary (Benington 2011,
2015; Benington and Moore 2011; Bason 2018). Governance innovations shift the ways in
which public value is created, decided or assessed (or whether public value is lost, wasted or
displaced), so these innovations need to be assessed in terms of their contribution to fairness,
legitimacy and social justice – their contribution to the public sphere ‒ and not just assessed
in technocratic or efficiency terms. Furthermore, deliberative methods may be needed to make
those assessments (Meijer and Thaens 2021; Benington and Hartley 2019). Moore and Hartley
(2008) showed that some innovations in governance shift, in a subtle but significant way, not
only the formal decision-making or contributions by a variety of actors, but also the moral
claims about who is involved in decisions and the uses of public resources. For example, the
greater engagement of volunteers and community organizations in the upkeep of New York
City parks created greater psychological ‘ownership’ for the servicing of parks but also started
to shape whose voices were influential in other decisions relevant to the parks. These elements
of legitimacy and justice are a feature of public innovations which deserve further research.
260  Handbook on theories of governance

CONCLUDING REMARKS AND FUTURE RESEARCH TASKS

This chapter argues that innovation may flourish under a governance system of ‘traditional
public administration’, under ‘new public management’ and under ‘collaborative governance’,
but that the strengths and weaknesses of these governance systems are different. Hence, there
is a pressing need for the elaboration of a contingency framework, which recognizes which
forms of governance may encourage or suppress different types or dimensions of innovation.
This is a key research agenda for the future: to map carefully and analytically where, when,
how and why innovation flourishes under different governance systems. They each continue
to exist, in different countries, services and institutions (and some elements may overlap in
any case). However, there seems to be a strong pull to collaborative innovation at the present
time, and this is understandable, given the polycentric nature of many societies and the current
focus on collaborative governance. But a contingent view of how, why and where innovation
flourishes or is suppressed (wittingly or unwittingly) would be a substantial contribution to
understanding the relation between governance and innovation.
We also need to know much more about the leadership and management of innovation pro-
cesses in different governance systems. For example, leadership of collaborative innovation
is a highly skilled affair, requiring experience and judgement to bring together the collabora-
tors and to ensure this leads to collaborative energy and focus, and not collaborative inertia.
Innovations under other forms of governance may require more management and less leader-
ship, but still under all conditions an ability to deal with risk and overcome obstacles (Sørensen
2020; Osborne et al. 2020; Hartley and Knell 2021). Open and social innovation, involving
a variety of publics, requires clarity of strategic focus and leadership beyond authority in order
to shape direction, retain legitimacy of governmental bodies and create public value.
Research into innovations in governance as a distinctive kind of public innovation is still in
its infancy. The study of innovations in governance offers a real hope for innovation studies to
have a truly public dimension, breaking out of the private sector literature which emphasizes
private appropriation of value, and instead focusing on public value (what is valued by the
public, and what adds value to the public sphere; Benington 2011). The success or otherwise
of innovations cries out to be judged by criteria of effectiveness for society, including fairness,
legitimacy, democracy and social justice. This creates a much wider (and more difficult)
research agenda than examining the benefits of innovations in terms of efficiency only (though
that remains a relevant dimension). But it is a challenge which researchers need to grasp if we
are to understand innovations in governance as well as innovations in public services.

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25. Risk
Ortwin Renn and Andreas Klinke

INTRODUCTION
With the advent of increased global challenges such as climate change, water scarcity, biodi-
versity losses, unsustainable agriculture, and the increase of authoritarian populist movements,
traditional instruments for dealing with risks have reached their limits to effectively prevent
or reduce global threats to human beings and the environment (Lucas and Renn 2020).The
three “generic” categories of handling risks—that is, risk assessment, management and
communication—are not sufficient to understand, analyze and improve the risk governance
processes. The characteristics of modern risks require new concepts which are able to deal
with a situation in which risks are complex, interconnected and global. This means that besides
the “factual” dimension of risk (which can be measured by risk assessment professionals) and
the handling of risks by risk managers and regulators (risk management) the “socio-cultural”
context of experiencing and coping with risks has to be included as well. This necessitates
a transition from the techno-scientific risk analysis to a new interdisciplinary concept of risk
governance.
In the last decade the term “governance” has experienced tremendous popularity in the
literature on political science and international relations, policy studies, sociology of environ-
ment and technology, science and technology studies, as well as risk research. Governance
has been defined both broadly and narrowly. A broad understanding means “the processes
and institutions, both formal and informal, that guide and restrain the collective activities of
a group” (Keohane and Nye 2000: 12). On a national scale, governance describes structures
and processes for collective decision-making involving governmental and non-governmental
actors. Governing choices in modern societies are seen as an interplay between governmental
institutions, economic forces and civil society actors (such as non-governmental organi-
zations). At the global level, governance embodies a horizontally organized structure of
functional self-regulation encompassing state and non-state actors bringing about collectively
binding decisions without superior authority (cf. Rosenau 1992). In this perspective, non-state
actors play an increasingly relevant role and become more important, since they have decisive
advantages of information and resources compared to single states.
“Risk governance” involves the “translation” of the substance and core principles of gov-
ernance to the context of risk and risk-related decision-making (Renn 2008: 8). The term refers
to a complex of coordinating, steering and regulatory actions performed by institutions and
facilitated processes that lead to collective decision-making under the condition of uncertainty
and ambiguity (Rosa et al. 2014: 6). Risk sets this collection of processes in motion whenever
the risk impacts multiples of people, collectivities or institutions. Risk governance comprises
both the institutional structure and the policy process that instruct and confine collective activ-
ities of individuals, groups and societies. Its aim is to regulate, reduce or control risk problems.
In this line of argumentation, the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC) in Geneva
has developed a generic risk governance framework (IRGC 2005, 2007). This framework pro-

264
 Risk  265

vides guidance for the development of comprehensive assessment and management strategies
to cope with risk. The framework integrates scientific, economic, social and cultural aspects,
and includes the engagement of stakeholders. The concept of risk governance covers a broad
picture of risk: not only does it include what has been termed “risk management” or “risk
analysis,” but it also looks at how risk-related decision-making unfolds when a range of actors
is involved, requiring coordination and possibly reconciliation between a profusion of roles,
perspectives, goals and activities (Renn 2008: 366). Drawing on this perspective, recent trends
in the debate on risk governance accentuate the delicate interplay between scientific expertise
and practical experience, and highlight the corresponding role and relevance of discourse and
deliberation, especially with regard to issues of complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity. The
importance and organization of discourse and deliberation on issues of complexity, uncer-
tainty and ambiguity have been discussed as post-normal risk governance in the context of
generic risk concepts (Klinke and Renn 2014), and as global risk governance in the context of
the world risk society (Klinke 2014).
Klinke and Renn (2012) have proposed some alterations to the original IRGC risk govern-
ance model, because it appears too rigid and standardized to apply to complex, uncertain and
ambiguous risks. They developed a comprehensive risk governance model with additional
adaptive and integrative capacity. The modified framework suggested by Klinke and Renn
(2012) consists of the following interrelated activities: pre-estimation, interdisciplinary risk
estimation, risk characterization, risk evaluation and risk management. This requires the
ability and capacity of risk governance institutions to use resources in the most effective,
efficient, resilient and fair fashion (see Figure 25.1).
This chapter features the risk governance process as designed by the IRGC and modified
by Klinke and Renn. It introduces each stage (pre-estimation, interdisciplinary risk estimation,
risk characterization and evaluation, risk management, and risk communication and participa-
tion) and points to the application of this framework to risk regulation. The chapter concludes
with some basic lessons for risk governance.

PRE-ESTIMATION
Risk pertaining to phenomenological evidence is only understood via mental constructions
resulting from how people perceive uncertain phenomena (Rosa et al. 2014, 14ff). Those
perceptions, interpretations and responses are shaped by social, political, economic and
cultural contexts (OECD 2003; IRGC 2005: 3). At the same time, those mental constructions
are informed by experience and knowledge about events and developments in the past that
were connected with real consequences (Renn 2008: 2f.). That the understanding of risk is
a social construct with real consequences is contingent on the presumption that human agency
can prevent harm. Hence, anticipating risk by means of pre-estimation is a central motivating
force, and it is a normal process of human action to speculate about the future and to realize
goals of prevention of risk that we know in advance. The understanding of risk as a construct
has major implications for how risk is considered.
While risks can have an ontological status, understanding them is always a matter of
selection and interpretation. What counts as a risk to someone may be regarded as destiny by
someone else, or in other instances as an opportunity.
266  Handbook on theories of governance

Note: The adaptive and integrative risk governance model is based on a modification and refinement of the IRGC
framework (IRGC 2005).
Source: Klinke and Renn (2012).

Figure 25.1 Adaptive and integrative risk governance model

Although societies over time have gained experience and collective knowledge of the
potential impacts of events and activities, one can neither anticipate all potential scenarios nor
be worried about all of the many potential consequences of a proposed activity or an expected
event (Irwin 2008). At the same time, it is impossible to include all possible options for
intervention. Therefore, societies always have been and always will be selective in what they
choose as worth considering and what they choose to ignore (Renn 2020).
Pre-estimation, therefore, involves screening to choose from a large array of actions and
problems that are risk candidates. Here it is important to explore what political and societal
actors (e.g., governments, companies, epistemic communities and non-governmental organ-
izations) as well as citizens identify as risks. Equally important is to discover what types of
problems they identify and how they conceptualize them in terms of risk. This step is referred
to as framing: how political and societal actors rely on schemes of selection and interpretation
to understand and respond to those phenomena that are relevant risk topics (Kahneman and
Tversky 2000; Reese 2007). According to Robert Entman (1993: 52), “to frame is to select
some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communication text,
 Risk  267

in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, casual interpretation, moral

evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.” Perceptions and inter-
pretations of risk depend on the frames of reference.
Framing implies that pre-estimation requires a multi-actor and multi-objective governance
structure. Governmental authorities (national, supranational and international agencies),
risk producers, opportunity-takers (e.g., industry), those affected by risks and benefits (e.g.,
consumer organizations, local communities and environmental groups on behalf of the envi-
ronment) and interested parties (e.g., the media or experts) are all engaged. They will often
debate about the appropriate frame to conceptualize the problem. What counts as risk may
vary greatly among these actor groups.
It is therefore essential in any risk analysis to start with the frames of those who are involved
in the issue. If these frames are not taken seriously, the risk governance effort may create
major controversies and conflicts right from the beginning. Once frames are ignored it is very
difficult to develop a risk assessment and management strategy that is supported and accepted
by all the major stakeholders.

INTERDISCIPLINARY RISK ESTIMATION

The interdisciplinary risk estimation comprises two activities: (1) risk assessment, or produc-
ing the best estimate of the physical harm that a risk source may induce (Cohen 1996); and
(2) concern assessment, or identifying and analyzing the issues that individuals or society as
a whole link to a certain risk (IRGC 2005; Renn 2008: 72f.). For this purpose, the repertoire
of the social sciences, such as survey methods, focus groups, econometric analysis, macroe-
conomic modeling or structured hearings with stakeholders, may be used (Renn et al. 2011).
Why are two types of assessments needed in risk governance? For political and societal
actors to arrive at reasonable decisions about risks in the public interest, it is not enough to
consider only the results of risk assessments, scientific or otherwise. In order to understand the
concerns of affected people and various stakeholders, information about their risk perceptions
and their concerns about the direct consequences if the risk is realized is essential and should
be considered by risk managers.
Interdisciplinary risk estimation consists of a systematic assessment not only of the risks to
human health and the environment but also of related concerns as well as social and economic
implications (cf. IRGC 2005; Renn and Walker 2008). The interdisciplinary risk estimation
process should be informed by scientific analyses; yet, in contrast to traditional risk regula-
tion models, the scientific process includes both the natural sciences and the social sciences,
including economics.
In 2000, the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU 2000) suggested a set of
criteria to characterize risks that go beyond the classic components of probability and extent of
damage. They isolated and validated eight measurable risk criteria through a rigorous process
of interactive surveying. Experts from both the natural sciences and the social sciences were
asked to characterize risks based on the dimensions that they would use for substantiating
a judgment on risk acceptability. Their input was subjected, through discussion sessions, to
a comparative analysis. To identify the eight definitive criteria, the WBGU distilled the experts’
observations down to those that appeared most influential in the characterization of different
types of risk. In addition, alongside the expert surveys, the WBGU performed a meta-analysis
268  Handbook on theories of governance

of the major insights gleaned from existing studies of risk perception, and evaluated the risk
management approaches adopted by countries including the United Kingdom, Denmark, the
Netherlands and Switzerland. The WBGU’s long exercise of deliberation and investigation
pinpointed the following eight criteria for the evaluation of risks:

1. Extent of damage, or the adverse effects arising from a risk, measured in natural units such
as deaths, injuries, production losses, and so on.
2. Probability of occurrence, or an estimate of the relative frequency of a discrete or contin-
uous loss function that could arise from the manifestation of a risk.
3. Incertitude, or an overall indicator of the degree of the remaining uncertainties inherent in
a given risk estimate.
4. Ubiquity, which defines the geographic spread of potential damage and considers the
potential for damage to span generations.
5. Persistency, which defines the duration of potential damage, while considering potential
impact across the generations.
6. Reversibility, or the possibility of restoring the situation, after the event, to the conditions
that existed before the damage occurred (for example, restoration techniques including
reforestation and the cleaning of water).
7. Delay effect, which characterizes the possible extended latency between the initial event
and the actual impact of the damage it causes. The latency itself may be of a physical,
chemical or biological nature.
8. Potential for mobilization, understood as violations of individual, social or cultural inter-
ests and values that generate social conflicts and psychological reactions among individu-
als or groups of people who feel that the consequences of the risk have been inflicted upon
them personally. Feelings of violation may also result from perceived inequities in the
distribution of costs and benefits.

Subsequently, the United Kingdom (UK) Treasury Department (2004) recommended a risk
classification that includes hazard characteristics, the traditional risk assessment variables
such as probability and extent of harm, indicators of public perception, and the assessment of
social concerns. The document offers a tool for evaluating public concerns against six factors
that are centered on the hazard(s) leading to a risk, the risk’s effects and its management:
● perception of familiarity and experience with the hazard;
● understanding the nature of the hazard and its potential impacts;
● repercussions of the risk’s effects on (intergenerational, intra-generational, social) equity;
● perception of fear and dread in relation to a risk’s effect;
● perception of personal or institutional control over the management of a risk; and
● degree of trust in risk management organizations.

Assessing risks and concerns by means of scientific inquiry provides the data and information
for the next step: the evaluation.
 Risk  269

RISK CHARACTERIZATION AND EVALUATION

A heavily disputed task in the risk governance process concerns the procedure of how to
evaluate the societal acceptability or tolerability of a risk. In classical approaches, risks are
ranked and prioritized based on a combination of probability (how likely it is that the risk will
be realized) and impact (what the consequences are if the risk does occur) (Klinke and Renn
2002; Renn 2008: 149ff.). However, as described above, in situations of high uncertainty, risks
cannot be treated only in terms of likelihood (probability) and (quantifiable) impacts. This
standard two-dimensional model ignores many important features of risk (Aven and Renn
2019). Values and issues such as reversibility, persistence, ubiquity, equity, catastrophic poten-
tial, controllability and voluntariness should be integrated into risk evaluation. Furthermore,
risk-related decision-making is neither about risks alone nor usually about a single risk.
Evaluation requires risk–benefit evaluations and risk–risk trade-offs. Risk evaluation is mul-
tidimensional by definition. In order to evaluate risks, the first step is to characterize the risks
on all the dimensions that matter to the affected populations. Once the risks are characterized
in a multidimensional profile, their acceptability can be assessed.
Furthermore, there are competing, legitimate viewpoints in evaluations over whether there
are or could be adverse effects and, if so, whether these risks are tolerable or even acceptable.
Drawing the lines between “acceptable,” “tolerable” and “intolerable” risks is one of the
most controversial and challenging tasks in the risk governance process. The UK Health and
Safety Executive developed a procedure for chemical risks based on risk–risk comparisons
(Löfstedt 1997). Some Swiss cantons such as Basel experimented with roundtables comprising
industry representatives, administrators, county officials, environmentalists and neighborhood
groups (RISKO 2000). As a means for reaching consensus, two demarcation lines were drawn
between the area of tolerable and acceptable risk, and between acceptable and intolerable risks
(Figure 25.2). Irrespective of the selected means to support this task, the judgment on accepta-
bility or tolerability is contingent on making use of a variety of different knowledge sources;
in other words, it requires taking interdisciplinary risk estimation seriously.
As a general epistemological issue, risk evaluations rely on causal and principal presuppo-
sitions as well as worldviews (cf. Goldstein and Keohane 1993). Causal beliefs refer to the
scientific evidence from the risk and concern assessments of whether, how and to what extent
the risk might potentially cause harm, and to what degree people are worried or concerned.
This dimension emphasizes cause–effect relations and provides guidance over which strategy
is most appropriate for meeting the goal of risk avoidance, risk reduction or adaptation. But
risks typically embed normative issues, too. Looming over all risks is the question of what
is safe enough, implying a normative or moral judgment about acceptability of risk and the
tolerable burden that risk producers can impose on others. The results of the assessment can
provide hints about what kind of mental images are present and which moral judgments guide
people’s perceptions and choices.
In sum, risk evaluation involves the deliberative effort to characterize risks in terms of
acceptability and tolerability. The contexts in which risk materialize often imply that neither
the risks nor the benefits can be clearly identified. Multiple dimensions and multiple values are
at work and have to be considered.
Finally, risk can shift over time. Notwithstanding great uncertainties, decisions need to be
made. It may well be possible at a certain point in time to agree whether risks are acceptable,
270  Handbook on theories of governance

Source: Klinke and Renn (2012).

Figure 25.2 Acceptability and tolerability of risk

tolerable or intolerable. When the tolerability or acceptability of risks is heavily contested, that
too is a highly relevant input to the decision-making process.

RISK MANAGEMENT

Risk management starts with a review of the output generated in the previous phases of inter-
disciplinary risk estimation, characterization and evaluation (Klinke and Renn 2019). If the
risk is judged acceptable, no further management is needed. Tolerable risks are those where
the benefits are judged to be worth the risk, but risk reduction measures are necessary. If risks
are classified as tolerable, risk management needs to design and implement actions that either
render these risks acceptable or sustain that tolerability in the longer run by introducing risk
reduction strategies, mitigation strategies or strategies aimed at increasing societal resilience
at the appropriate level. If the risk is considered intolerable, notwithstanding the benefits, risk
management should be focused on banning or phasing out the activity creating the risk. If that
is not possible, management should be devoted to mitigating or fighting the risk in other ways,
or to increasing societal resilience by enhancing the elasticity, robustness, redundancy, diver-
sity, adaptability, and so on, of social systems. If the risk is contested, risk management can
be aimed at finding ways to create consensus. If that is impossible or highly unlikely, the goal
is to design actions that increase tolerability among the parties most concerned or to stimulate
an alternative course of action.
 Risk  271

Risk management is confronted with three major challenges: complexity, uncertainty and
ambiguity (Klinke and Renn 2002, 2012; Renn 2008: 187ff.; Rosa et al. 2014). Complexity
refers to the difficulty of identifying and quantifying causal links between a multitude of
potential candidates and specific adverse effects. Uncertainty denotes the inability to provide
accurate and precise quantitative assessments between a causing agent and an effect. Finally,
ambiguity denotes either the variability of scientifically legitimate interpretations based on
identical observations or data assessments, or the variability of normative implications for risk
evaluation (judgment on tolerability or acceptability of a given risk). Based on the distinction
between complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity, one can distinguish four risk management
paths (Figure 25.3).

Source: Renn (2008: 280).

Figure 25.3 Relationship between stakeholder participation and risk categories in risk
governance

In a case where scientific complexity is high, and uncertainty and ambiguity are low, the
challenge is to invite experts to deliberate with risk managers to understand complexity.
Understanding the risks of oil platforms may be a good example of this (Renn 2014). Although
the technology is highly complex, and many interacting parts can lead to multiple accident
scenarios, most possible pathways to a major accident can be modeled well in advance. The
major challenge is to determine the limit to which one is willing to invest in resilience.
272  Handbook on theories of governance

The second route concerns risk problems that are characterized by high uncertainty but low
ambiguity. Expanded knowledge acquisition may help to reduce uncertainty. If, however,
uncertainty cannot be reduced (or only reduced in the long run) by additional knowledge,
“precaution-based risk management” is required (Klinke and Renn 2002). Precaution-based
risk management explores a variety of options: containment, diversification, monitoring
and substitution (Stirling 2003). The focal point here is to find an adequate and fair balance
between overcautiousness and insufficient caution. This situation argues for a reflective
process involving stakeholders that allows them to ponder concerns, economic budgeting and
social evaluations.
For risk problems that are highly ambiguous (regardless of whether they are low or high
on uncertainty and complexity), the third path recommends “discourse-based management.”
Discourse management requires a participatory process involving stakeholders, especially
the affected public (Klinke and Renn 2019). The aim of such a process is to produce a col-
lective understanding among all stakeholders and the affected public about how to interpret
the situation, and how to design procedures for collectively justifying binding decisions on
acceptability and tolerability that are considered legitimate. In such situations, the task of risk
managers is to create a condition where those who believe that the risk is worth taking and
those who believe otherwise are willing to respect each other’s views and to construct and
create strategies acceptable to the various stakeholders and interests. But deliberation is not
a guarantee for a smooth risk management process. Lidskog et al. (2011) argue that complexity
and ambiguity are grounds for continuous conflict that is difficult, if not impossible, to resolve.
The reduction of complexity simultaneously implies reducing the number of actors who are
relevant or legitimate participants. The resolution of ambiguity requires a broad representation
of all actors involved in the case via public deliberation (Klinke and Renn 2014). Defining
the perfect path between functionality and inclusiveness proves to be difficult. In any case,
a prudent response to this inherent conflict is to invest in structuring an effective and efficient
process of inclusion (who to include) and closure (what counts as evidence, and the adopted
decision-making rules) (Renn 2008: 284ff.; Aven and Renn 2010: 181ff.).

RISK COMMUNICATION AND PARTICIPATION

Effective communication among all relevant interests is one of the key challenges in risk
governance. It is not a distinct stage (in contrast to how it is often treated in the risk literature),
but central to the entire governance process. Positively framed, communication is at the core of
any successful risk governance activity. Negatively framed, a lack of communication impedes
an effective risk governance process. Early on, risk communication was predicated on the view
that disagreements between experts and citizens over risks were due to the lack of accurate
knowledge by citizens. The solution was sought in the education and persuasion of the defi-
cient public (Fischhoff 1995). Implied in this solution was the belief that an educated public
would perceive and evaluate risks in the same way as experts. However, this deficit model has
been subject to considerable criticism. For one thing, increased knowledge has often elevated
citizen concerns about risk, creating an even greater divergence between citizens and experts.
For another, as Pidgeon et al. (2005: 467) phrased it:
 Risk  273

One of the most consistent messages to have arisen from social science research into risk over the past
30 years is that risk communication needs to accommodate far more than a simple one-way transfer
of information … the mere provision of “expert” information is unlikely to address public and stake-
holder concerns or resolve any underlying societal issues.

Third, research on risk controversies has demonstrated that in general the public does not
always misunderstand science or distort the facts. It may also be the case that experts and
governments may misunderstand public perceptions (Horlick-Jones 1998).
The important point to emphasize is that risk communication and trust are delicately
interconnected processes. There is a large volume of literature demonstrating the connection
between trust in the institutions managing risks and citizen perceptions of the seriousness of
risks (Whitfield et al. 2009). Communication breakdowns can easily damage trust. At the
same time, communication strategies that misjudge the context of communication, in terms of
the level of and reasons for distrust, may boomerang, resulting in increased distrust (Löfstedt
2005).
Communication strategies proliferate. Communication refers to meaningful interactions
in which knowledge, experiences, interpretations, concerns and perspectives are exchanged
(Löfstedt 2003). In the context of risk governance, exchanges among policy-makers, experts,
stakeholders and affected publics are of special interest. The aim of communication is to
provide a better basis for responsible risk management. Its aim is also to enhance trust and
social support (Poortinga and Pidgeon 2003). Depending on the nature of the risks and the
context of governing choices, communication will serve various purposes. It might serve the
purpose of sharing information about the risks and possible ways of handling them. It might
support building and sustaining trust among various actors where particular arrangements or
risk management measures become acceptable. It might result in actually engaging people in
risk-related decisions, through which they gain ownership.
The United States National Research Council report (Stern and Fineberg 1996) is an
important milestone in the recognition of the need for risk decision-making as an inclusive
multi-actor process. The report calls for an analytic-deliberative process when making
decisions on complex, uncertain and ambiguous risks. The analytic-deliberative model of
decision-making is a germinal precursor to the idea of risk governance, with its emphasis on
the coordination of risk knowledge and expertise with citizen and other stakeholder priorities
(see e.g. Jasanoff 2004; Stirling 2008; Klinke and Renn 2014).
One key challenge to risk governance is the question of inclusion: Which stakeholders and
publics should be included in governance deliberations? The inclusion challenge has deep
implications. Contrary to the conventional paradigm where risk topics are usually identified
by experts, with the analytic-deliberative process underpinning risk governance, public values
and social concerns are key agents for identifying and prioritizing risk topics. Inclusion means
more than simply including relevant actors. That is the outmoded practice of “public hearings,”
where relevant actors are accorded a fairly passive role. Inclusion means that actors play a key
role in framing (or pre-assessing) the risk (IRGC 2005; see also Roca et al. 2008). Inclusion
should be open to input from civil society and adaptive at the same time (Stirling 2008; see
also Klinke’s discussion on democratic inclusion in governance, Chapter 8 in this Handbook).
Crucial issues in this respect (see also Renn and Schweizer 2009) are: Who is included? What
is included? and What are the scope and mandate of the process?
Inclusion can take many different forms: roundtables, open forums, negotiated rule-making
exercises, mediation, or mixed advisory committees including scientists and stakeholders
274  Handbook on theories of governance

(Rowe and Frewer 2000; Renn 2008: 332ff.). Owing to a lack of agreement on method, social
learning promoted by structured and moderated deliberations is required to find out what level
and type of inclusion are appropriate in the particular context and for the type of risk involved.
The methods available have contrasting strengths and weaknesses (Pidgeon et al. 2005).
A focus on inclusion is defended on several grounds (Roca et al. 2008). First, one can argue
that, in view of uncertainty, there is a need to explore various sources of information and to
identify various perspectives. It is important to know what the various actors label as risk
problems, and which most concern them. Here inclusion is interpreted to be a means to an
end: a procedure for integrating all relevant knowledge and for including all relevant concerns.
Second, from a democratic perspective, actors affected by the risks or the ways in which the
risks are governed have a legitimate right to participate in deciding about those risks. Here
inclusion is interpreted as not just a means but also an end in itself. At the same time, inclu-
sion is a means to agree on principles and rules that should be respected in the processes and
structures of collective decision-making. Third, the more actors are involved in the weighing
of the heterogeneous pros and cons of risks, the more socially robust the outcome. When
uncertainty is prevalent, there is no simple decision rule. In that view, inclusion is also a way
to organize checks and balances between various interest and value groups in a plural society.
Inclusion, thus, is intended to support the co-production of risk knowledge, the coordination
of risk evaluation and the design of risk management. To meet the challenges of inclusion, we
argued for a functional division of labor that establishes a communication and participation
system engaging the political and administrative sector, experts, a societal stakeholder group
from the economic and civil society sector, and the broader public (Klinke and Renn 2014).
It provides a platform for a deliberative discourse between experts, civil society stakeholders,
economic actors and political decision-makers. The division of labor builds upon a functional
differentiation along the special services and competences that each actor can contribute to
the process. While the experts can deliver systems knowledge about what may be more or less
effective, the economic sector adds efficiency, the civil society actors include social values
such as fairness, and the political and administrative sector ensures due process, legitimacy
and—in particular in complex risk situations—resilience (Collins et al. 2020).

CONCLUSIONS

This chapter has described the genesis and analytical scope of risk governance. It argues for
a broader, paradigmatic turn from government to governance. In the context of risk, the idea
of governance is used in both a descriptive and a normative sense: as a description of how
decisions are made, and as a normative model for improving structures and processes of risk
policy-making. Risk governance draws attention to the fact that many risks are not simple:
they cannot all be calculated as a function of probability and effect or consequence. Many
risks embed complex trade-offs of costs and benefits. Risk governance underscores the need
to ensure that societal choices and decisions adequately address these complicating features.
However, conventional risk characterization typically treats, assesses and manages such risks
as if they were simple. This practice has led to many failures to deal adequately with risks.
In a pluralistic society where the pressure to legitimize political action is always high,
the process of developing and locating potentially dangerous technologies or engaging in
high-risk activities encounters widespread skepticism and deep distrust. More than in other
 Risk  275

policy arenas, decisions on risks must be made plausible to a wider audience (i.e., based
on intuitively understandable reasoning) and depend on trust in the major actors involved,
the respective industry and the regulatory agencies. Hence, risk governance can only be
successful if there is an intense, communication-oriented dialogue with the major actors and
the interested public. The larger the number of individuals and groups that are impacted by
a technology development or deployment, the more likely it will be that conflicts will arise.
These conflicts deal with issues of risk acceptability or tolerable risk levels as well as, notably,
equity issues such as a just distribution of risks among the affected population and, even more
important, the distribution of benefits. If equity issues are ignored or not given due attention,
people tend to amplify their experience of risk and lower the thresholds of tolerability as an
indicator of their discontent with the process rather than the resulting risk (Kasperson et al.
1998). Hence the timely and mutual participation of social actors in decision-making about
risks is both scientifically appropriate, as they may bring important local knowledge to the
decision-making process, and democratically imperative, as the distribution of risks and bene-
fits demands a legitimate process for designing a fair risk–benefit sharing initiative. Effective
participation helps technology providers, users and political decision-makers to secure greater
legitimacy in siting processes, thus contributing to the democratic culture of a country.
The proposed IRGC framework is an attempt to address these wider issues of inclusive
governance. In particular, the modified framework by Klinke and Renn (2012) offers
substantial advantages over conventional models of risk governance. First, it joins the two
crucial elements of risk governance: analysis (i.e., knowledge generation) and management
in the process of decision-making. These two elements are kept separate from an analytical
perspective, but work hand in hand operationally. Second, the analytic distinction of risk char-
acteristics—complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity—helps to tackle governance issues that
include social, cultural and political context conditions. This distinction not only highlights
deficits in our knowledge about a risk issue, but also points the way forward by highlighting
potential management options. Third, the risk governance framework attributes public and
stakeholder participation as well as risk communication as important functions in the risk
governance process. The framework suggests efficient and adequate public and stakeholder
participation. Concerns of stakeholders and/or the public are integrated in the risk appraisal
phase via concern assessment. Furthermore, stakeholder and public participation is an estab-
lished part of risk management. The optimum participation method thereby depends on the
characteristics of the risk issue. Finally, the framework helps to identify governance gaps and
deficiencies. At the same time, it proposes alternative actions.
Yet, the framework is certainly far from being perfect. It offers a procedural pathway
through the governance process, and includes normative advice of how to address the various
challenges at each step of the governance process. It does not offer any theoretical concept
of why risk governance succeeds or fails in certain context conditions. It is a framework (not
a theory) that helps to structure research as well as enlighten decision-making processes. It
provides a sort of checklist of what to consider when dealing with complex risk situations. We
still lack, however, a comprehensive theory of risk governance that would be able to explain
how risk assessment, perceptions, social processing of risk and risk handling in plural societies
are functionally related, and how this process is embedded in a typology of regulatory styles
and manifestations of political culture. It is our hope that our framework may facilitate the
development of such a theoretical concept.
276  Handbook on theories of governance

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26. Steering
Renate Mayntz

THE TERM AND ITS USE

The term “steering” has not played a focal role in the English-speaking social science litera-
ture; it simply refers to efforts at deliberate control of a given social or political phenomenon
by a given actor, something that occurs in reality as one of a great number of processes. Its
German version “steuern” in contrast has become a hallmark term in the political science liter-
ature, mainly in the period between the 1960s and the 1980s. To describe, as in this chapter, the
emergence of a Steuerungs or steering paradigm and its subsequent changes affords a glance at
the relation between changes in reality and in the perspective of social science.
The meaning of the German concept of steering or steuern is the same as that of the English
“govern,” whose Latin root gubernare means to steer or pilot a ship or carriage. In tracing
the development of the paradigm of steering it is important to distinguish between the term
(steering, or steuern) on the one hand, and the substantive concept or paradigm on the other
hand. The development of a theory of political steering began in the 1960s, when governments
aspired explicitly to steer their nation’s social and economic development towards specific
goals. Something that warrants being called a theory of political steering (Theorie politischer
Steuerung) developed especially in (West) Germany, where the legacy of state theory proved
fertile ground in the historical situation of social and political reconstruction. German state
theory had famously been concerned with the state–society relationship, considering the
state not as a force of domination and subjugation but as one for disciplining selfish private
interests in the service of the public good; a very continental European conception, rooted
in the history of Prussian Germany and absolutist France. After World War II, a democratic
polity able to serve the public good effectively had to be built in West Germany, and planning
was a way to do so. In the late 1960s a veritable planning euphoria developed, and a largely
prescriptive theory of planning evolved (Kaiser 1965–72; Kahn 1969). In this context, the
term Steuerung was introduced to the German social science discourse as a translation of the
English “control,” a concept that played an important role both in cybernetics and in Talcott
Parsons’s systems theory that became popular in Germany in the 1960s (Parsons 1976). In the
1970s, the term Steuerung started to appear in the title of social science publications, growing
continuously over the following years before being overtaken by publications featuring the
term “governance” in their title.
Originally the term Steuerung was understood in the narrow sense of political steering, and
continued to be thus understood when used in the context of public policy-making, not least
with reference to technology policy (e.g. Kruedener and Schubert 1981; Grimmer et al. 1992).
At the same time, however, the concept of “control media,” crucial to Parsons’s systems
theory and translated into German as Steuerungsmedien, led to a wider understanding of the
term in the context of sociological macro-theory. Here Steuerung became equated with efforts
at social coordination. Different forms of social coordination were distinguished, notably
hierarchy (or state), market, network (or association) and community. Within political science,

278
 Steering  279

however, the term Steuerung continued to be limited to political steering, defined as the delib-
erate political attempt to steer, guide or direct (parts of) society, including the economy.
In the Anglo-Saxon countries, the term “steering” did not become the hallmark of an
expanding field of research and theorizing as it did in Germany. The subject matter of steering
was dealt with in the evolving theory of the policy process. This is evident, for instance, in
Paul Sabatier’s characterization of this theory: “The process of public policy-making includes
the manner in which problems get conceptualized and brought to government for solution;
governmental institutions formulate alternatives and select policy solutions; and those solu-
tions get implemented, evaluated, and revised” (Sabatier 1999: 3). In the Anglo-Saxon liter-
ature, public policy was understood as a hierarchical mode of social coordination, contrasted
to the market and subsequently also to networks, clans and community as alternative forms of
social coordination. The paradigm of public policy suffered a similar change as took place in
the evolution of steering theory to the more recent theory of governance.

THE PARADIGM OF STEERING

The basic elements of the concept (or paradigm) of steering consist of: (1) a steering subject,
typically the government, the state or some public authority; (2) steering instruments, in
particular law; (3) a policy goal; and (4) the target group or object of steering (Mayntz 1987).
Steering presupposes the political intention to direct a specific social process or effect a spe-
cific change in the economy or civil society, but the concept does not imply that the goal of
intervention is in fact achieved. Steering is an actor concept; it is state-centered and employs
a top-down perspective. The paradigm of political steering was first developed in the context
of political planning in Germany, and social reform in the United States (US), but the term
“steering” was hardly used. As many of the intended reforms did not achieve their stated goals,
political scientists started to question the planning model and to investigate public policy
empirically in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Step by step, these empirical studies elaborated
the basic paradigm (Mayntz 1996).
Asking for the reasons of observed policy failure, political scientists identified, and speci-
fied, the preconditions of potentially effective policy choice. It became clear that policy failure
can be the consequence of cognitive mistakes in planning. Cognitive failure could involve
data, theory or both. Information about the details of a perceived problem could be insuffi-
cient, and policy decisions might be based on a wrong theory of the causal factors and causal
connections at work in the policy field. Another cause of failure to reach a given policy goal
can be the choice of an inadequate instrument, or the lack of appropriate resources, be they
financial or legal (Mayntz 1987). There are, for instance, constitutional barriers to the choice
of given political interventions, and budget constraints can stand in the way of introducing
financial incentives, or engaging in costly programs of public provision. It was also recognized
that the way policy-making is organized affects the substantive content of a policy. State
bureaucracy involved in policy development was especially studied with a view to improving
the effectiveness of public policy.
In the early theoretical model of steering, focus was on the development of policy; and,
where the state appeared as steering subject, the implementation of policy was tacitly included.
But policy success does not depend only on good policy design. The best policy design can
result in failure if its implementation is deficient, as the path-breaking study by Pressman and
280  Handbook on theories of governance

Wildavsky (1973) made evident. The 1970s were the heyday of empirical studies of policy
implementation (see Hood 1976, and the contributions in Mayntz 1980). The attention now
paid to implementation constitutes a first significant extension of the original steering model.
It was recognized that implementation does not simply mean enactment of rules. Deficits
in the capacity of public administration, individual and organizational interests of the target
actors, and diverging normative convictions of the agents of implementation, easily lead to
divergence between policy goals and policy outcome. The initial hierarchical steering model
changed further when the belief in the effectiveness of the interventionist state eroded and
a crisis of governability was diagnosed (Hennis et al. 1977, 1979). New social movements,
unorthodox forms of political protest, and refusal to comply with legal provisions called atten-
tion to the fact that policy failure may result from the recalcitrance of the target group and the
ability of powerful actors in the policy field to resist compliance or subvert the achievement
of a policy’s goal. This led to the modification of the top-down perspective of the paradigm of
steering, by including bottom-up processes of resistance and selective compliance with policy
measures (Mayntz 1996).
The shift of attention from the steering subject to the object of steering, and thus from gov-
erning to governability, meant that the structure of the policy fields and the action dispositions
of the targets of political steering now became an important object of research. Policy fields
can consist of a population of small units such as students, households or the unemployed,
or of a set of large organizations such as firms, interest associations and unions. These struc-
tural properties were recognized as important factors in policy success; among other things
because they permit or preclude interaction and negotiation between policy-makers and target
groups in the policy development and implementation phases. The attention now paid to the
object rather than the subject of political steering did not simply follow from an autonomous
cognitive dynamic, but was a reaction to events in the socio-political context. The so-called
crisis of governability, exacerbated by the oil crises and the slowdown of economic growth in
the 1970s, posed both a practical and a theoretical problem. As has often been the case in the
history of political theory, the public perception of a new problem had stimulated the extension
of the steering paradigm. However, the modified model of political steering still referred to the
nation state, and to domestic politics.

CRITIQUE AND EXTENSION OF THE STEERING PARADIGM

The failure of ambitious reform policies that had been pursued in the post-World War II era
of reconstruction led to the demise of the strong interventionist state and hierarchical control
both in theory and in practice. Disappointment with the state as an effective political steering
center of society gave rise to the search for alternative modes of guiding socio-economic
development. Though the US lacked the tradition of a strong interventionist state, there was
concern with policy failure here too, and deficits both in policy design and in implementation
had been studied. Theoretically, the shift away from the earlier focus on the steering subject—
that is, government and its executive arm—undermined the very basis of the model of political
steering: the assumption that the state is the control center of society. In a first step, giving
up the still state-centered model of steering led to a concern with policy instruments. In par-
ticular, regulation in the narrow sense of legal norms that command or prohibit, the preferred
policy instrument of the interventionist state, came to be seen critically. Attention turned to
 Steering  281

alternative policy instruments, notably persuasion (e.g. information campaigns) and financial
incentives and disincentives (e.g. taxes and tax rebates). In the US, market instruments were
used to replace regulation in environmental policy (Kneese and Schultze 1975), and they
continue to be used in the European Union.
But more than a change in policy instruments was involved when state control itself came
to be questioned. It was in the late 1970s and the 1980s that political scientists observed a shift
away from hierarchical modes of government to a more cooperative style of policy-making
and a higher regard for different forms of social self-organization and self-government. This
was noticeable especially in Western European countries that used to have strong inter-
ventionist states. Characteristic forms of non-hierarchical government were also found and
studied in the US (see e.g. Heclo 1978) but did not strike observers as particularly new, since
the US lacks the tradition of a strong interventionist state and has always stressed individ-
ual autonomy and self-government. Disappointment with the problem-solving capacity of
hierarchical control directed attention to cooperative forms of government and to alternative
forms of societal coordination, notably private-interest governments and market principles. It
now appeared typical of modern society to be governed by a combination of hierarchical and
non-hierarchical modes of societal coordination, which were both subsumed under the concept
of governance (Botzem et al. 2009). Both in practice and in theory, the paradigm of govern-
ance superseded the paradigm of steering. In the last change of the initial paradigm, political
steering became one of the several modes of governance.
The term “governance” is mostly used to indicate a mode of governing different from the
old hierarchical model in which state authorities exert sovereign control over the people and
groups making up civil society. In governance, non-state corporate actors participate in the
formulation and implementation of public policy. This means that the function of the state
changed from control to intermediation, and thus to defining the rules of the game played by
societal actors it did not control directly. The sudden rise in the number of publications explic-
itly dealing with governance reflects the change in perspective that took place in the 1980s up
until the rupture of the Cold War configuration in 1989. Where governance is understood in
the very wide sense, covering all forms of social coordination, its meaning is that of Steuerung
in the wide sense sometimes used in macro-sociology. In this wide sense of the term, not only
mixed public–private networks and private interest governments but also market principles are
considered a form of governance.
The concept of political steering is not only too narrow to cover the different forms
of exerting control in a society constituted as a polity. It has also been criticized for the
problem-solving bias that is evident in definitions of “steering” found in the literature, defi-
nitions that consider political steering as well as policy-making as state action trying to solve
collective problems in the service of the public interest (Mayntz 2001). The problems in
question typically involve domestic policy fields such as social welfare, education, migration,
public health or infrastructure. This conceptualization of political steering is highly selective,
tacitly assuming that policy-making, or governmental intervention into economy and civil
society, is in fact motivated by the intention to solve collective problems and serve the public
interest. This clearly misrepresents political reality, ignoring the role played by considerations
of achieving and maintaining power: the power of incumbents, of one’s party or faction, or
of the present government. The roots of this normative bias can be traced back to classical
antiquity, where both Plato and Aristotle developed conceptions of the philosopher-king or
monarch, intent on serving the well-being of his subjects. From here a line can be drawn to
282  Handbook on theories of governance

modern theories of state function, still operative in the backdrop of planning theory. Theories
of political steering do not neglect power per se, but consider it only as an instrument in the
service of policy for the common good, not as a goal sought for its own sake in the interest
of a given government, political party or political class. The crucial issue of cui bono, the
question whether policy is made in the name of the public interest or some narrower private
interests, is not dealt with in the theory of political steering. The cooperative state of govern-
ance theory is similarly assumed to serve as a central problem-solving institution. In this way
steering (and governance) theory becomes a legitimizing fiction (Mayntz 2005).
Another often-criticized selectivity of the political steering paradigm is its neglect of
democratic processes and thus of the input dimension of policy. In the literature on European
policy-making, the “democratic deficit” of the European Union has often been noted (Scharpf
1999). What is a recognized deficit in the European policy process—that is, the lack of an
effective democratic input structure—has not been discussed as a problem in theories of
steering (and later in theories of governance) applied to nation states; implicitly, a democratic
input structure has been assumed to exist at the national level. In fact, democracy theory and
the theory of political steering (and of governance) have developed in isolation from each
other as two unconnected scientific fields. The assumption that a well-functioning political
input structure exists in national policy-making warrants focusing attention on questions of
output effectiveness, but this is of course a questionable assumption. Negotiation in mixed
public–private networks may be a way of interest representation, but it is no substitute for
a democratic process of decision-making.

FROM STEERING TO GOVERNANCE AND BEYOND

In the context of the new political ideologies of neoliberalism and Thatcherism, market
principles were considered a more effective alternative to regulation; a typical example is the
already cited study by Kneese and Schultze (1975). The turn to market coordination took the
form of deregulation and privatization. To substitute the market for government was expected
to liberate forces of innovation, to stimulate economic growth and to increase economic
efficiency. At the end of the 1980s, the breakdown of state socialism strengthened the belief
in the superiority of the market. These promises have meanwhile been discredited by reality.
In contrast to economists, political scientists have tended to doubt that market principles
can solve all problems of social and economic development, and have rejected the model of
market-based competition. With the discourse shifting from political steering to governance,
increasing attention has been paid to cooperative modes of policy development and to societal
self-regulation. The so-called third sector of public service organizations, private-interest gov-
ernment, neo-corporatist arrangements and more generally all forms of mixed public–private
organization, were looked at with interest and studied empirically.
Looked at from the viewpoint of the earlier top-down conception of political steering, the
negotiation of political with societal actors in policy networks or neo-corporatist arrangements,
and the delegation of regulatory functions to institutions of local or sector self-government,
indicate a loss of steering capacity. The state appears weak and only “semi-sovereign”
(Katzenstein 1987). This perspective is consonant with modern systems theory and concepts
of postmodernism, both of which view society as having no center. Critical of state-centered
political theory models, sociological systems theory from Talcott Parsons to Niklas Luhmann
 Steering  283

denies the political subsystem the role of a steering center of society at large. To maintain
that the political subsystem is unable to exert directive control appears to reflect the same
Zeitgeist that led to the shift from “political steering” to “governance.” But empirical political
scientists were quick to point out that state actors are very special and privileged participants
in policy networks and neo-corporatist arrangements, and that the state retains crucial meas-
ures of intervention even where decision-making has been devolved to institutions of societal
self-government (Mayntz and Scharpf 2005). The state normally retains the right of legal
ratification of privately developed norms, and the right to intervene by legislative or execu-
tive action where a self-governing system fails to meet political expectations. The “shadow
of hierarchy” (Héritier 2008) induces warring factions in self-regulating networks to agree
on a compromise. Legal framing and process management can achieve better results than
top-down political control (Kooiman 2003). Societal self-government and hierarchical control
are not mutually exclusive, but are ordering principles that are often combined. Small-scale
steering efforts may be one form of governance, and they may fail to achieve their goal, but
steering continues to be part of political reality.
After the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, globalization prom-
ised an era of worldwide interdependence (Farrell and Newman 2016). The non-hierarchical
forms of coordination typical of governance appeared better adapted to analyze multi-level
transnational systems in which processes are loosely coupled rather than hierarchically related.
Governance in particular emphasized coordination and compromise solutions of conflictive
policy topics. But at least since the end of the 2008 financial crisis, this view of the world
of politics has changed. Over the past years, the general view of the world of politics and
the economy emphasizes conflict and the threat of disintegration. Tell-tale marks are the
titles of recent publications, such as Flassbeck and Steinhardt’s (2018) book Gescheiterte
Globalisierung (failed globalization), and Guilén’s (2017) Architecture of Collapse. Political
and economic processes follow different logics, and are interdependent in a non-cooperative
way. After the heyday of globalization, the divergence between international economic and
political structures has proved problematic. Politics are tied to competing nation states, while
the structure of the economy is becoming truly international, and not only at the level of big
transnational corporations. Political conflicts attempt to instrumentalize national economies
for political purposes. Indirectly connected to the conflictive relation between politics and
economy, increasing civil strife arises in leading countries. Efforts at international collabo-
ration, as in the European Union, have not solved these conflicts; the European Union has
established neither an extended hierarchy nor a genuine federal state, but remains a complex
multi-level political system fighting against its loss of influence vis-à-vis the great powers
of China and the United States. Both domestic and international conflicts, exacerbated by
the coronavirus pandemic, define a general climate of insecurity and impending disruptions.
Steering, as a forceful guidance of specific processes to a defined end, becomes an illusion
in a world of present-day complexity, characterized by massive interdependencies between
intentional actions and their systemic effects.

REFERENCES
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284  Handbook on theories of governance

Farrell, Henry and Abraham Newman (2016), ‘The new interdependence approach: Theoretical devel-
opment and empirical demonstration’, Review of International Political Economy, 22 (5), 713‒736.
Flassbeck, Heiner and Paul Steinhardt (2018), Gescheiterte Globalisierung. Ungleichheit, Geld und die
Renaissance des Staates, Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Grimmer, Klaus, Jürgen Häusler, Stefan Kuhlmann and Georg Simonis (eds) (1992), Politische
Technik-steuerung, Opladen: Leske + Budrich.
Guilén, Mauro F. (2017), The Architecture of Collapse, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heclo, Hugh (1978), ‘Issue networks and the executive establishment’, in Anthony King (ed.), The New
American Political System, Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, pp. 87–124.
Hennis, Wilhelm, Peter Graf Kielmannsegg and Ulrich Matz (eds) (1977), Regierbarkeit: Studien zu
ihrer Problematisierung, Vol. I, Stuttgart: Klett.
Hennis, Wilhelm, Peter Graf Kielmannsegg and Ulrich Matz (eds) (1979), Regierbarkeit: Studien zu
ihrer Problematisierung, Vol. II, Stuttgart: Klett.
Héritier, Adrienne (2008), ‘The shadow of hierarchy and new modes of governance’, Journal of Public
Policy, 28 (1), 1–18.
Hood, Christopher C. (1976), Limits of Administration, London: Wiley.
Kahn, Alfred J. (1969), Theory and Practice of Social Planning, New York: Russell Sage.
Kaiser, Joseph H. (ed.) (1965–72), Planung, Vols I–VI, Baden-Baden: Nomos.
Katzenstein, Peter (1987), Policy and Politics in West Germany: The Growth of a Semisovereign State,
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Kneese, Allen V. and Charles L. Schultze (1975), Pollution, Prices, and Public Policy, Washington, DC:
Brookings Institution Press.
Kooiman, Jan (2003), Governing as Governance, London: Sage.
Kruedener, Jürgen von and Klaus von Schubert (eds) (1981), Technikfolgen und sozialer Wandel: Zur
politischen Steuerbarkeit der Technik, Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik.
Mayntz, Renate (ed.) (1980), Implementation politischer Programme, Königstein im Taunus: Athenäum.
Mayntz, Renate (1987), ‘Politische Steuerung und gesellschaftliche Steuerungsprobleme – Anmerkungen
zu einem theoretischen Paradigma’, in Thomas Ellwein, Joachim J. Hesse, Renate Mayntz and Fritz
W. Scharpf (eds), Jahrbuch für Staats- und Verwaltungswissenschaft, Vol. 1, Baden-Baden: Nomos,
pp. 89–110.
Mayntz, Renate (1996), ‘Politische Steuerung: Aufstieg, Niedergang und Transformation einer Theorie’,
in Klaus von Beyme and Claus Offe (eds), Politische Theorien in der Ära der Transformation,
Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, pp. 148–168.
Mayntz, Renate (2001), ‘Zur Selektivität der steuerungstheoretischen Perspektive’, in Hans-Peter Burth
and Axel Görlitz (eds), Politische Steuerung in Theorie und Praxis, Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 17–27.
Mayntz, Renate (2005), ‘Governance Theory als fortentwickelte Steuerungstheorie?’, in Gunnar
Folke Schuppert (ed.), Governance-Forschung: Vergewisserung über Stand und Entwicklungslinien,
Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 11–20.
Mayntz, Renate and Fritz W. Scharpf (2005), ‘Politische Steuerung – Heute?’, Zeitschrift für Soziologie,
34 (3), 236–243.
Parsons, Talcott (1976), Zur Theorie sozialer Systeme, introduction and ed. Stefan Jensen, Opladen:
Westdeutscher Verlag.
Pressman, Jeffrey L. and Aaron B. Wildavsky (1973), Implementation: How Great Expectations in
Washington are Dashed in Oakland, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Sabatier, Paul A. (ed.) (1999), Theories of the Policy Process, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Scharpf, Fritz (1999), Governing in Europa: Effektiv und Demokratisch?, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
27. Soft and hard governing tools
Paula Blomqvist

How do governments govern? One way to approach this fundamental question is to distin-
guish between different types of tools, or steering instruments, used by governments for this
purpose. While there are many competing proposals for how to classify policy tools, the most
common distinction relates to differences in how binding they are for those subjected to the
steering. Policy tools classified as “hard” include legislation and other forms of binding regu-
lation, while “soft” tools refer to forms of steering where compliance is voluntary. Arguably,
the distinction between soft and hard governing tools offers a powerful analytical lens through
which a deeper understanding of the nature and conditions of governance can be gained. By
examining the nature of different governing tools and the characteristics that make it possible
to classify them as hard or soft, even if this dichotomy, as we will see, often becomes blurred,
we get a fuller picture of the ways in which states affect societies and how their subjects, be it
individuals, firms, or other branches of government, respond to their steering efforts. In recent
decades it has often been argued that soft policy tools have become more important, reflecting
attempts by governments to replace traditional modes of governance like legislation and hier-
archical control with steering based on voluntariness, such as recommendations or guidelines.
Others have warned against overstating this shift, pointing to the continued importance of
legislation and the fact that soft governing tools often presuppose the existence of formal legis-
lation, or threat thereof, in order to have a steering function (Héritier and Rhodes 2011; Jordan
et al. 2013). Recent research on policy tools has also emphasized the ways in which hard and
soft policy tools are often used together, complementing each other.
In this chapter I provide an overview of the research on soft and hard governing tools,
showing how it first developed in the 1970s with attempts to classify government steering
instruments, thereafter widening to incorporate new and broader theories about governance
and the structuring effects of policy instrument choice. An important influence in recent years
has been developments in the European Union (EU), where the adoption of governing modes
such as the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) led to a renewed interest in soft forms of
regulation and the conditions under which such governing techniques might be preferable to
hard ones. The area has also been theoretically enriched by developments in international rela-
tions research, where discussions about the characteristics of hard and soft law in international
regimes have led to a deeper understanding of the nature of law and its role in governance.
The final section of the chapter identifies a set of issues that has grown out of the research on
governing tools, such as national policy styles, compliance, and the occurrence of hybrid tools.

WHAT ARE HARD AND SOFT GOVERNING TOOLS?

The categories of soft and hard governing tools refer to different kinds of instruments used by
governments to achieve policy goals, where the main distinction between them is that “hard”
tools are legally binding, while compliance with “soft” ones is voluntary. Hard governing tools

285
286  Handbook on theories of governance

are exemplified by legislation, while examples of soft tools include measures like recommen-
dations, guidelines, targets, information, or voluntary agreements, for instance with private
organizations. Such steering techniques are soft in the sense that compliance with them cannot
be enforced through courts but relies instead on the willingness to cooperate on the part of
those governed. Soft governing tools are sometimes also referred to as “new” modes of gov-
ernance, while hard tools like legislation are seen as more traditional. It has been questioned
whether this label is appropriate, given that soft policy tools such as agreements with private
organizations (for instance social partners in the labor market) or government recommenda-
tions have been used for a long time in some countries (Jordan et al. 2005, Halpern 2010).
The concepts of soft and hard governing tools are relational, which means that they make the
most sense when contrasted, directly or indirectly, with each other. Soft policy tools acquire
their main characteristic from being different from hard ones, that is, by not being legislation
or binding regulation but representing a different way of steering on the part of governments.
Likewise, a policy tool like legislation may not seem all that significant or interesting in and of
itself, as it is the most well-known way of governing, but when it is conceptualized as “hard”
the question could be asked in what way a particular law or regulation can assessed as hard,
and why this type of steering was chosen over other, softer, alternatives.
A second distinction between hard and soft governing tools is that compliance with hard
tools can be sanctioned by adjudicative bodies in accordance with prescribed procedures,
such as courts or other organizations entrusted with this authority. Such a delegation of
decision-making powers to third parties also implies that these can interpret and elaborate the
content of the rules. A prime example is court rulings, which can become part of legal statutes,
giving further direction on how they should be interpreted and followed. In the case of soft
policy tools, failure to comply with a policy directive is not addressed by courts but rather
through deliberation between the government, or regulating body, and those subjected to gov-
ernance. This may occur in the case of guidelines or recommendations, where discrepancies
can lead to questions about why a certain protocol is not followed but, if there are good reasons
for it, it may be accepted by the regulatory body. A third difference between hard and soft gov-
erning tools noted in the literature is how precise the directives for action are and what amount
of discretion can be used on the part of the actors implementing them. An example may be
guidelines in human services like social work, where states typically allow professional social
workers discretion to use their own judgment and expertise when making decisions regarding
individual cases (Evans 2016). While hard policy tools are typically seen as more specific in
content, providing clear and uniform rules of conduct, soft governance tools tend to be more
open-ended and vague, providing room for interpretation and adaptation by the implementing
actors (Franck 1990; Abbott et al. 2000). In this sense, soft policy tools are often understood
as more flexible than legislation (Héritier 2002). The flexible character of soft governing tools
also stems from the fact that these, in contrast to formal legislation, usually do not have to
be enacted by an elected assembly such as a parliament but can be issued directly by public
agencies or other regulatory bodies. This means that they usually can be revised more quickly
and without the cumbersome procedures and political struggles that may be associated with
formal legislative processes.
A final distinction that has been identified between hard and soft governing tools is that
hard tools such as legislation are more authoritative in character, representing hierarchical
or “top-down” power structures, whilst soft governing instruments are understood to be
more deliberative or consensual, displaying a “bottom-up” steering logic. In this sense, soft
 Soft and hard governing tools  287

Table 27.1 Differences between hard and soft policy tools

Hard governing tools Soft governing tools

Legally binding Non-binding
Sanctions and enforcement delegated to courts or other third Non-sanctionable by courts or other third parties
parties
Precise in content Vague in content
Fixed Flexible
Authoritative Participatory

steering tools have been seen as more participatory, allowing those subjected to steering more
opportunity to influence policy content and act as ‘partners’ to the state rather than subjects
to be controlled. The participatory nature of soft governing tools has also been associated
with governance through networks, where governments seek to implement policies through
agreements with and coordination among a multitude of actors (Sörensen and Torfing 2016).
While such participatory, or negotiation-based, forms of steering have been praised as being
more inclusive than traditional legislation, they have also been seen by some as a threat to
democratic values in that they tend to side-step formal processes of political deliberation and
accountability characteristic of formal democratic decision-making (Mörth 2009; Garsten and
Jacobsson 2013). The most commonly identified differences between hard and soft governing
tools in the literature are summarized in Table 27.1.
Even if the characteristics of hard and soft policy tools have often been formulated as
dichotomies, many have pointed out that, in reality, it may be rather a question of a scale,
with “hardness” at one end and “softness” at the other (see, for instance, Falkner et al. 2005;
Peters and Pagotto 2006; Trubek and Trubek 2007). Few governing tools are completely hard
in the sense of being both binding and prescribing fully fixed and precise measures of action.
In reality, many legal acts are fuzzy in their wording and open to interpretation. Moreover,
their implementation may not always be fully supervised or sanctioned. Similarly, there are
examples of government guidelines and recommendations which may not be formally binding
but have a high degree of precision and are carefully monitored, for instance by government
agencies. Similarly, legal scholars have argued that, rather than adopting a binary view of the
categories of “soft” and “hard” law, the nature of a policy directive should be seen as reflective
of its particular combination of hardness and softness along the central dimensions of legality,
notably how binding it is, how precise it is and to what extent authoritative power to monitor
its enforcement has been delegated to a third party. Together, these characteristics can be said
to constitute a three-dimensional continuum of legality, where a high degree of “hardness”
would require high scores on all three dimensions (Hart 1961; Abbott et al. 2000).
Discussions about legalization have been particularly salient in international relations
research, where the general level of legality is lower than in domestic politics owing to the
absence of a centralized enforcement authority. Processes of legalization in international
relations can be said to take place when agreements between states become more precise,
expectations of compliance increase, and third party organizations such as the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or the World Trade Organization (WTO) are entrusted with
monitoring and sanctioning powers (Abbott and Snidal 2000; Finnemore and Toope 2001,
Raustiala and Slaughter 2002). Legalization in an international setting has also been under-
stood as a gradual transformation of discourse and norms in relations between states, where
288  Handbook on theories of governance

values such as reason, technical knowledge, and judgment by impartial parties gain more
weight (Schauer and Wise 1996; Abbott et al. 2000).

STUDYING GOVERNING TOOLS

Distinctions between soft and hard governing tools in domestic policy settings grow out of
a more general preoccupation with the instruments of governance after the 1970s (Hood 1983;
Majone 1996). This first wave of research centering on governing tools was characterized
by attempts to classify different types of policy instruments, or techniques, used by govern-
ments to achieve their goals (Howlett 1991; Howlett and Ramesh 1995; Salamon 2002). One
well-known example of such classifications comes from Rist et al. (1998), who identified three
main types of policy instruments: “carrots”, “sticks” and “sermons”, where “carrots” refer to
financial incentives, “sticks” to binding regulation, and “sermons” to diffusion of information
in order to alter the behavior of the governed subjects. The early research on policy tools also
sought to understand why governments chose certain instruments over others, and which
type of tool was most appropriate for different tasks. This has led to a critique of its allegedly
functionalist character, where policy instruments are seen as given, constituting an available
tool-box from which governments could choose the most effective instrument. Proposing
a political sociology perspective on policy instruments, Lascoumes and Les Gales suggest
instead that policy instruments should be understood as institutions, structuring the policy field
and allocating power among the actors involved. This broader interpretation of policy instru-
ments implies that they have wider political and societal effects than previously believed and
that they might influence policy objectives, rather than the other way around (Lascoumes and
Les Gales 2007). During the 1980s and 1990s, policy instrument research became influenced
by the political trends of deregulation, privatization, and market-based governance, which
included the introduction of new steering techniques such as contracting, performance-based
management, and purchaser/provider schemes (Hood 1995; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011). Just
as in the case of the earlier policy instrument research, concepts like “soft” and “hard” policy
tools were not much used in this literature, even if many of the changes in steering techniques
introduced under the banner of market-based governing modes in fact implied softer, less
hierarchical, forms of governance (Salamon 2002).
In the 2000s, research on policy instruments was nearly eclipsed by what became known
as the new governance literature, where the role of states was seen less as authoritative
bodies and more as centers of coordination. Conceptualized as a shift from “government” to
“governance,” a development was identified were states relied less on public bureaucracies
and command-and-control measures to try to steer societies and instead sought to delegate
public tasks to a multitude of non-state actors (Rhodes 1996; Pierre and Peters 2000). While
“governance” can be understood as a broader and more encompassing phenomenon than just
governments’ use of policy tools, the two discourses are connected in that the shift to soft,
non-hierarchical, governing tools constitutes a central part of the governance concept (Rhodes
1996; Kjaer 2004). There is a distinction in that terms like governing tools, or soft law, still
place states at the center of the governing process, suggesting that states are unique and more
authoritative than the other policy actors, even if they have delegated some of their powers to
these actors (Hood 2007). Like governance scholars, students of policy instruments note that
the use of soft, or voluntary, governing instruments has become more common, even if some
 Soft and hard governing tools  289

warn that the magnitude of this shift may be over-stated (Pierre and Peters 2000; Jordan et al.
2013).
The reasons behind the increased use of soft governing tools have been sought in devel-
opments like globalization, which has left states more powerless to exert their authority
in relation to capital and firms, and the reduced legitimacy of traditional government that
followed the surge of neo-liberal ideology in the 1970s and 1980s (Self 1993; Clarke and
Newman 1997; Djelic 2006). A case in point is privatization, or delegation of formerly public
tasks to non-state actors, which has led states to enter into different forms of agreements with
such actors. Another explanation for the increased use of soft governing tools is the growing
complexity of modern societies and the higher speed of communication and technological
innovation, which requires governments to react faster in their steering efforts. Offering more
flexibility, soft policy tools make it easier to adjust policy content and goals to new knowledge
and changes in the policy environment (Jordan et al. 2005). One example of such flexibility
is the certification of environmentally-friendly products (eco-labeling), which can swiftly be
adjusted to reflect new information about environmental hazards. Another example is guide-
lines for treatment in medical care, which can be updated without delay to be consistent with
rapid advancements in medical research and technology (Sheaff et al. 2003; Fredriksson et al.
2014). In international relations research, debates about the relative merits of hard and soft
law have pointed to the fact that hard law may be costlier to produce, in that highly binding
and more precise agreements between states are harder to reach. In this context, soft law may
present a more politically feasible option, as it preserves state sovereignty to a higher degree
than hard law. Soft law treaties can also be easier to agree on in that they are more loosely
worded, placing fewer specific demands for action on governments (Abbott and Snidal 2000).

HARD AND SOFT GOVERNING TOOLS IN THE EU

It seems no exaggeration to state that, in recent years, the most vigorous new research on the
relationship between hard and soft policy tools has come out of studies on governance within
the European Union. This reflects the development and diffusion of new governing techniques
within the EU during the 1990s and 2000s and the role that these have come to play in the
integration of the member states. The prominent role of soft governing tools within the EU
is related to the circumscribed role of authoritative regulation. The EU, being at least in part
a supranational organization, has the authority to enact binding legislation in relation to its
member states through the European Parliament and Council. Such legislation can be enforced
by the European Court of Justice and formally sanctioned through financial penalties. This
legal power was increased after 2009 when the Treaty of Lisbon came into force and increased
the range of areas where qualified majority voting could be applied. The legal mandate of the
EU is restricted, however, in that the member states retain legal sovereignty in certain areas,
such as foreign policy or social policy. In other areas, such as taxation and common defense
policies, binding decisions by the union can only be made through unanimity between all
member states, which is hard to achieve in practice. As a consequence, non-binding governing
tools have come to play a central role within the EU as the member states continue to try to
coordinate their policies in virtually all areas.
Soft regulatory measures are used within the EU both in areas where there is restricted
legal competence and in areas where this competence exists. Examples include steering and
290  Handbook on theories of governance

information documents issued by the Commission, Council, and Parliament, such as white and
green papers, action programs, declarations, communications, and agreements between the EU
and private actors (for instance through the so-called Social Dialogue with the social partners)
or the member states (for instance the 2000 Charter on Fundamental Rights). In the 1990s,
after the completion of the European Single Market provided a legal basis for free movement
of goods, services, financial capital, and people between the member states, concerns were
raised that the common European legislation had assumed too heavy a market bias and that
social values would be threatened. Supplementing the pro-market regulations with social
protection laws was not seen as a feasible option, however, as social policy was an area where
the members had strongly divergent traditions and showed no willingness to surrender their
sovereignty (Scharpf 2002). The solution to this impasse in the integrative efforts within the
union became a partly novel form of governance in the form of voluntary policy coordination
among the member states. In the so-called Lisbon Summit in 2000, this form of soft govern-
ance was officially recognized as the main strategy by which the EU would achieve its goals
for the coming decade: economic competitiveness and social inclusion (Borrás and Jacobsson
2004). The new governing method, which drew on established policy practices within the EU
with regard to the use of guidelines, benchmarking, and peer review as means to coordinate
national policies, was named the Open Method of Coordination (OMC). Its adoption repre-
sented a new development in that it became more formalized and systematic than the previous
usage of voluntary policy coordination, while at the same time providing union bodies like
the European Commission and Council with a considerably more active role in formulating
common policy goals and overseeing their implementation. In this sense, the OMC has been
interpreted as a mixture of intergovernmentalism and supranationalism (Jacobsson 2004;
Trubek and Trubek 2005, 2007).
The OMC builds on the logic of official (but non-binding) policy guidelines, formulated by
the European Commission, agreed upon by the member states, and formally decided on by the
European Council. After the guidelines, which usually take the form of distinct policy goals,
such as a certain level of employment by a given date, have been established, more specific
performance indicators are agreed upon by the members, typically in the form of statistical
information to be submitted. Thereafter a cyclic process of national reporting and systematic
review of the performance of the member states starts. The specifics of the process differ
between the policy areas where the OMC is applied (for instance employment, social inclu-
sion, health, pensions, and care for the elderly), but in most cases the member states produce
written country reports and data on a regular basis so that their progress can be monitored by
the Commission and the other members. Poor performance can be sanctioned by written rec-
ommendations by the Commission to individual members. This is a soft form of sanctioning
which is built on the social mechanisms of naming and shaming, where poor performance is
publicly exposed and pressure thus asserted towards compliance (Héritier 2002). The adoption
of the OMC has given rise to a lively debate among students of European integration about its
effects and significance (see, for instance, Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2006; Tholoniat 2010;
de la Porte and Pochet 2012). Zeitlin notes in a review that, even though there are relatively
few examples of the OMC resulting in concrete policy convergence, for instance in the form
of all members meeting stated unemployment targets, there is evidence that the method has
sparked reforms in many member states, leading them to re-orient policies (Zeitlin 2009).
Most examples of usage of the OMC can be found in social policy areas, where the member
states typically have showed little willingness to share decision-making powers with suprana-
 Soft and hard governing tools  291

tional institutions, but it has also been applied in asylum and immigration policies, education,
and culture. Other forms of soft regulation commonly used within the EU include recommen-
dations, opinions, declarations and bench-marking.

CURRENT ISSUES IN THE RESEARCH ON POLICY

INSTRUMENTS: POLICY STYLES, HYBRIDS, AND COMPLIANCE

The research on policy tools is currently developing in different directions, reflecting the
variety of scholarly discourses (policy implementation, network governance, Europeanization,
regime theory, legalization) and governance levels (domestic, European, global) where it
is located. A few more general questions can be identified, however, that seem to engage
scholars in the field at present. One of them is the “old” question of why governments use the
governing tools they do (Vabo and Røiseland 2012). While one might expect such decisions
to be made on the basis of rational considerations, most research so far indicates that choices
between policy instruments are typically made ad hoc, reflecting processes like policy drift,
where policy tools previously adopted take on a different function from the one originally
intended, or layering, where governments add new policy instruments to old ones without
taking notice of the incoherence, or unintended interaction effects, that may result (Howlett
and Rayner 2007, 2009). Furthermore, previous studies have pointed to the existence of
national policy styles, where nation-states develop distinct patterns in how governments
employ policy tools or specific combinations thereof (Howlett 2000; Richardson 2012). For
instance, in a comparative study on the usage of soft tools in environmental policy, Jordan et
al. (2003) discovered substantial variation between the countries examined with regard to the
extent that soft tools had replaced traditional legislation. A similar finding was made by Knill
(2001) when comparing policy tools used by member states in implementing EU directives.
As patterns of national policy styles tend to be sticky over time, reflecting previous use of
the same policy instruments, this in effect limits government choices and leads to the same
governing tools being used repeatedly despite the fact that others might be more effective in
achieving policy objectives. The emergence of national policy styles reflects historical and
institutional conditions, where some influencial factors are believed to be the distribution of
power between the central and local governing levels, the relationship between the executive
and the administration, and the existence of formal sanctioning powers through the legal
system (Howlett and Tosun 2018). Generally speaking, the use of soft governing tools appears
to be more likely in countries where local governments enjoy a high degree of autonomy, the
executive tends to delegate significant powers to administrative agencies, and legal traditions
are relatively weak (Pierre and Peters 2000; Maycraft Kall 2010; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011).
Some authors have suggested, moreover, that consensual or deliberative policy-making
traditions create more favorable conditions for the use of soft governing tools, while policy
environments marked by high levels of conflict make hard legislation a more likely choice
(Pollitt and Summa 1997).
A second area of interest in recent research on policy tools is that which concerns hybrids,
or regulatory instruments which display both hard and soft qualities. One example is frame-
work legislation, which is hard in the sense of being binding but soft because its content
is often vague, declaring overriding goals and values rather than precise courses of action.
Interestingly, framework legislation may start out as soft in terms of precision (even though
292  Handbook on theories of governance

formally binding) but become harder over time, as public agencies or courts interpret its content
and formulate more precise rules. Other examples of hybrid governing tools are found in EU
law, where many formally binding directives in effect leave a lot of discretion to the member
states in how to implement them (Slominski 2008). There are also examples of hybrids which
start out as non-binding, governing instruments but which eventually assume a high level of
obligation. One is provided in a study by Brandsen et al. of the use of national non-binding
guidelines for disaster management directed to local governments in the Netherlands. The
study showed that compliance with the guidelines became carefully monitored by the Dutch
government, which also threatened the local governments with economic sanctions if they
failed to comply (Brandsen et al. 2006). As a result of the systematic monitoring and the use of
financial sanctions the guidelines in effect turned hard, displaying a high level of obligation.
A related notion to “hybrid” governing tools is that of policy mixes, or bundles of tools, which
refers to the tendency of governments to combine hard and soft types of tools in order to
achieve the desired results (Howlett and Rayner 2007). Examples of such mixes are found in
the field of environmental policy, where regulatory authorities at both the national and the EU
levels have been known to combine binding regulation. like prohibition, with voluntary meas-
ures like certification and public campaigns in order to restrict the use of non-environmentally
friendly substances (Jordan et al. 2013).
The reason why governments adopt combinations, or hybrids, of hard and soft policy tools
rather than “pure” forms has been interpreted as an awareness of the increased complexity
of the environment in which they operate and the need to carefully design policy tools, or
combinations thereof, in order to achieve desired results (Pierre and Peters 2000; Howlett and
Rayner 2009). The search for optimal “mixes” of policy instruments can also be understood
as a balancing act between different values in policy implementation, where one may be flexi-
bility, which soft policy tools tend to provide more of, and another compliance, which at least
in some cases is believed to be achieved more effectively through binding regulation. Another
value often referred to in discussions about the implications of soft and hard policy instruments
is legitimacy. In some cases, soft governing tools may be perceived as more legitimate, as
these provide more opportunity for input and participation from other policy stakeholders. In
others, legitimacy can be achieved more effectively through hard legislation, as this might be
perceived by the general public as sending a stronger message of action. A specific form of
interaction between hard and soft policy tools is what has sometimes been referred to as the
“shadow of hierarchy,” which implies that binding legislation is used as a threat, in order to
make actors comply with non-binding policy directives (Scharpf 1999; Héritier 2002).
A final issue that has evoked interest among students of soft and hard governance in both
domestic and international politics is that of compliance. As poor compliance is one of the
most commonly cited drawbacks of soft policy tools, it has been seen as important to under-
stand under what conditions this form of steering may still lead to desired outcomes. Why
comply with non-binding rules? In studies of European integration, a number of mechanisms
have been identified as promoting member state compliance with non-binding EU guidelines,
including diffusion of knowledge, transparency, persuasion, creation of common policy dis-
courses, peer pressure, and naming and shaming (Tallberg 2002; Borrás and Jacobsson 2004;
Trubek and Trubek 2005). Other scholars have pointed to the significant variation between
member states when it comes to compliance with non-binding EU regulation, identifying polit-
ical and institutional as well as cultural factors as explanations for this variation (Knill 2001;
Börzel 2002; Falkner et al. 2005; Zeitlin 2009). In domestic policy settings, compliance with
 Soft and hard governing tools  293

non-binding government recommendations has been investigated for instance with regards
to vaccination policies. In this case, when policy steering is aimed directly at the behavior of
individual citizens, factors like social norms and trust in the government have been shown
to play a significant role (Gofen et al. 2019). When it comes to compliance of other types
of actors, like private organizations and firms, the fear of sanctions appears to play a larger
role, particularly if the government is believed to be capable of effective monitoring and
sanctioning. In addition, market-based compliance mechanisms such as economic penalties
and reputation have been shown to be important (Brandsen et al. 2006; van der Heijden 2012).
Studies by legal scholars confirm that compliance with public regulations, both hard and soft,
depends on several different factors, including the motivations of those governed, the fear of
sanctions, and perceived norms and moral obligations (Coombs 1980; Fisman and Miguel
2007; Etienne 2011). These observations point to the fact that previously held conceptions
about the differences between hard and soft governing tools may prove overstated also with
regard to compliance mechanisms. In international relations, compliance mechanisms such as
reputational costs and shaming have been argued to be the most important, along with more
positive motivational factors such as idea diffusion and appeals to normative values (Hurrell
1995; Keohane and Ostrom 1995; Levy et al. 1995). It has also been shown that supranational
adjudicative bodies, like the European Court of Justice, can strengthen their enforcement
powers and increase compliance through cooperation with national courts (Abbott and Snidal
2000). Finally, soft compliance mechanisms like peer pressure and shaming have been shown
to be important also in cases where voluntary policy instruments have been used between
levels of domestic government, such as national recommendations directed at local authorities
(Fredriksson et al. 2012).

SUMMARY

The future of studies on soft and hard policy instruments looks bright. The field has undergone
significant development in recent decades. Starting out from a relatively narrow concern with
classifying different kinds of regulatory instruments, the study of policy tools has come to
reflect broader structural and political developments that have transformed the role of states
and the conditions of governance more generally. The interest in non-binding policy tools has
grown, which has resulted in new questions being asked about the nature of soft—and, by
implication, also hard—governing instruments, both in domestic and international politics. In
the coming years, studies about how these two types of governing instruments develop and
interact may prove to be one of the most fruitful avenues for deepening our understanding
of the nature of governance. Owing to the influence from international relations and legal
studies, as well as studies on European integration, the research on hard and soft policy tools
has emerged as a richer and more theoretically developed field. In this process, it has widened
its horizons, geographically as well as academically. At the same time, the research on policy
tools has started to penetrate more deeply the historical trajectories whereby distinct policy
styles have developed in individual countries, thereby gaining a more nuanced understanding
of the forces which compel governments to use some tools rather than others. Thus expanding
in several different directions at present, studies of hard and soft policy tools hold the promise
of becoming further enriched in the coming years, both in terms of empirical knowledge and
theoretical insight.
294  Handbook on theories of governance

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 PART III

THEORETICAL MODES OF
ANALYSIS
28. Information-based governance
Graham Bullock

KEY CONCEPTUAL AND DEFINITIONAL ISSUES

Building on the definition of governance presented in the Introduction in this Handbook,
information-based governance is the process by which information is used to steer society and
the economy towards collectively negotiated objectives. This definition raises two important
conceptual issues that have important implications for our understanding of this form of gov-
ernance. The first is the meaning of “information.” While information is a widely used term
that has a multitude of meanings, the first two definitions provided by the Oxford English
Dictionary (2010) are the most relevant to the governance context – “the imparting of knowl-
edge in general” and “knowledge communicated concerning some particular fact, subject or
event.” This definition raises a further question about the nature of knowledge, which gener-
ally can be understood as a “condition of knowing something” or a “faculty of understanding,”
which may or may not be accurate (OED Online 2015). Dick Stenmark (2001) further asserts
that information is most usefully conceived of as the translation of knowledge into explicit
words and symbols that can influence the knowledge and actions of others. This explana-
tion connects to Claude Shannon’s (1948) mathematical theory of communication, which
defines communication as the process by which an informer (or “information source”) sends
a message to an informee (or “information destination”) that is coded and decoded through
a channel, such as a piece of paper or a telephone system. Weaver (1949) suggests this process
can experience three types of problems – “technical problems” related to the transmission of
information, “semantic problems” related to the meaning and truth of that information, and
“influential problems” related to the extent to which the meaning conveyed to the informee
leads to the desired change in behavior. As discussed below, this typology can be useful in
analyzing the challenges facing information-based governance.
The second conceptual issue is the scope of the social and economic steering that is defined
as information-based governance. Since information is used to communicate knowledge and
influence others in a myriad of different ways and contexts, it is important to distinguish
between information-based governance and other uses of information. Along these lines,
Bullock (2011) distinguishes between: information-based management, which involves the
use of information to manage the private resources of an organization or individual in order
to create private or club goods (i.e. goods that are excludable); information-based politics,
which involves the provision of information to encourage public actors to assist private actors
in creating these private or club goods; and information-based governance, which involves the
deployment of information to encourage the creation of public and common goods (i.e. goods
that are non-excludable). In this typology, governance is defined by the nature of the goods
that it creates, and not by whether the objectives of the governance process were collectively
negotiated. Both dimensions are useful in further delimiting the scope of information-based
governance.

298
 Information-based governance  299

Mol (2008: 80–81) introduces the related concept of informational governance, which he
defines as “institutions and practices of … governance that are to a significant extent structured
and ‘ruled’ by information, informational processes, informational technologies, and struggles
around access to, control over, and production and use of … information.” This concept thus
describes the growing centrality of information across a wide range of governance contexts
(just as Castells’s (2009) use of “informational economy” refers to a “fundamental transition
of the economic order”), and includes but is not limited to the specific use of information to
steer society and the economy (Mol 2008: 82). Unlike informational governance, the concept
of information-based governance describes specific instances of governance that not only use
information but use it as their primary mechanism for driving change. While all governance
strategies use information to some degree, information-based governance begins with and
depends on the provision of information to effect change. While informational governance
provides an overarching description of the broadly transformative nature of “information in
governance,” information-based governance is a more specific and operational definition of
“information as governance.” Mol’s informational governance therefore transcends and per-
vades the governance types described in Part IV of this Handbook – according to Mol (2008:
282), information increasingly is a central part of all forms of governance, and is changing its
basic nature.

KEY EMPIRICAL VARIANTS

The scope of information-based governance is thus limited to intentional efforts to deploy

information that steers society and the economy in particular directions and does not include
the general use of information in all forms of governance. It is also limited to efforts that create
public and common goods and are oriented towards goals that are collectively negotiated,
although the precise nature of these goods, goals and negotiations may vary considerably
across initiatives. Information-based governance strategies may also vary on several other
dimensions, including the form and content of the information they provide, the methods
used to generate that information, the types of organizations behind these strategies and the
audiences they are oriented towards.
In terms of the information content provided, these strategies may focus on single or mul-
tiple issues and cover one or many sectors of the economy or society. Indeed, they are found
across a wide range of sectors and issue domains. In the financial sector, they include the U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission’s investment disclosure requirements, Moody’s and
Standard & Poor’s bond credit ratings and FICO’s consumer credit scores. In the consumer
products space, they include product safety ratings published in Consumer Reports as well as
the product ratings found on Amazon and eBay and dedicated rating websites such as epinions.
com, ratings.net and resellerratings.com. Ratings of schools, teachers, doctors and hospitals by
magazines such as U.S. News and World Report are also important forms of information-based
governance. In the media sector, Nielsen’s television ratings and the CARA movie ratings
(e.g. PG-13, R) are additional examples of this form of governance.
These strategies also extend beyond traditional economic concerns to political and social
issues – Transparency International, for example, rates the corruption levels of different
countries, while Freedom House rates their levels of freedom. Charity Navigator rates the
performance of non-profit organizations in the U.S., while Foreign Aid Ratings LLC rates
300  Handbook on theories of governance

the performance of recipients of foreign aid worldwide. Advocacy organizations such as the
League of Conservation Voters and the National Rifle Association have developed scorecards
that evaluate politicians on their policy positions. Investment research firms such as MSCI
and Bloomberg assess public companies on their environmental, social and governance (ESG)
performance, while government agencies, companies and advocacy organizations have devel-
oped a range of certifications, labels and ratings that evaluate the sustainability of different
products, including buildings (e.g. LEED), food (e.g. USDA Organic), paper products (e.g.
Sustainable Forestry Initiative) and seafood (e.g. Marine Stewardship Council).
The form of the information provided by these initiatives may be evaluative or descriptive,
relative or absolute, positive or negative, and textual, numerical or graphical. Following
Kuklick’s (1969) distinction between descriptive and evaluative meaning, descriptive infor-
mation conveys “the meaning of words … which describe or state facts,” while evaluative
information conveys “the meaning of words … which are closely connected with choice,
decision, and action.” Such evaluative meaning also often includes “emotive,” “laudatory,”
“commendatory,” “prescriptive” and “normative” content. Both descriptive and evaluative
information can be either relative or absolute – it can describe an object independently of other
objects (or “absolutely”) or in comparison with (or “relative” to) other objects.
Thus some information-based governance strategies identify one (and only one) organi-
zation that is performing better or worse than its peers, while other strategies recognize any
organization that meets a certain level of performance, regardless of how many organizations
do so. Such information may be positive, negative or neutral. Certifications and awards, for
example, provide positive information, boycotts and watch lists provide negative information,
and report cards and generic information disclosures provide neutral information (Russell et
al. 2005). This information may be presented in the form of numbers (e.g. raw data, ordinal
rankings, cardinal ratings), text (e.g. reviews, reports) or graphics (e.g. photos, artwork).
Some strategies may use all of these different forms of information, mixing both relative and
absolute information that includes positive, negative and neutral numbers, text and graphics.
These strategies may be oriented towards a diverse array of audiences. Some may
develop labels and certifications that are oriented towards consumers (or particular con-
sumer segments), while others may generate rankings and ratings that are more designed for
decision-makers in government agencies, non-profit organizations and corporations. Likewise,
these initiatives may be supported by organizations and individuals from the public, private
and/or civil sectors, and their support can be provided in the form of direct implementation,
partnerships, advising, funding, data provision, endorsements and the use of the information
provided. When they are implemented by government agencies, they may be supported by the
force of laws that mandate the disclosure of information by relevant organizations. Otherwise,
information-based governance initiatives must generate their own information or depend on
the voluntary disclosure of information by these organizations.
Despite this diversity, these initiatives all represent intentional efforts to deploy informa-
tion that steers society and the economy in particular directions. For example, the vision of
Transparency International is “a world in which government, politics, business, civil society
and the daily lives of people are free of corruption,” and the ratings, indexes and barometers
the organization produces and disseminates are designed to steer society towards that goal. It
does so by both establishing relevant criteria on what constitutes corruption and then inform-
ing the public about how countries are performing on those criteria. Concerned stakeholders
can then use that information – through either centralized, collective processes or more decen-
 Information-based governance  301

tralized, individualized processes – to combat corruption in the countries that Transparency

International has rated.

CENTRAL RESEARCH QUESTIONS

These different dimensions of information-based governance provoke four sets of important

research questions. First, how exactly do they differ from other forms of governance, and
how are they similar? Second, what does the landscape of these strategies look like? When
and where have they developed, and by whom? How are they likely to develop in different
political, cultural, geographic and economic contexts? Given the variation discussed above,
what types and forms of information-based governance are most and least common in these
different contexts? Third, what are the motivations behind the development of these initia-
tives? Why do they take different forms, and what explains their proliferation and variation?
And fourth, what are the effects of these strategies? Do they successfully steer the economy
and society in ways they are intended to? How effective are they at accomplishing the goals of
governance, and what, if any, are their unintended consequences?

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
These questions have been touched on and explored by scholars from a range of different dis-
ciplines and theoretical perspectives, including political scientists, economists, sociologists,
psychologists, philosophers, and management and marketing researchers. They are too numer-
ous to mention all of them in this short chapter, but their perspectives can be roughly divided
into four general categories. The first are those that focus on the role of information itself, from
either a macro- or a micro-perspective. Gleick (2012), for example, has analyzed the historical
development of different information technologies, from drum networks to the telegraph to the
internet, and how they have influenced the evolution of human society. Castells (2009, 2011:
422) has written extensively on the “Information Age” and the importance of communication
networks in the “construction of political power and counterpower.” Bimber (2003) has doc-
umented four “information revolutions” since the 1820s that were made possible by dramatic
technological changes and led to profound political shifts in American politics. Other scholars
have explored efforts to use information technologies such as newspapers, dictionaries and
encyclopedias to create and control information to order to steer society in particular directions
(Yeo 1991; Chartier 1994; Raymond 1999).
Psychologists and behavioral economists have taken a more micro-view of the role of infor-
mation and focused on how information can be used to influence the decisions of individuals.
Thaler and Sunstein (2008) have popularized the notion of “nudging,” which involves the
development of “choice architecture” that provides information to individuals in ways that
subtly influence the decisions they make. This approach builds on earlier work by Kahneman,
Tversky and other psychologists who have demonstrated the effects of anchoring, framing and
other biases that influence how people respond to information (Kahneman 2011). These effects
have been shown across a wide range of political and economic contexts (Levin and Gaeth
1988; Chong and Druckman 2007) and have become the basis of both liberal and conservative
political strategies and regulatory initiatives (Lakoff 2004; Luntz 2005; Subramanian 2013).
302  Handbook on theories of governance

The second category of relevant theoretical perspectives focuses on the role of the state
in the development of information-based governance. This state-based approach frames
this form of governance as a radical departure from more traditional forms of governance
that rely on either physical force or economic incentives. While some work has been done
on government-sponsored programs (such as the Blue Angel, EU Flower and Energy Star
product certifications) that depend on organizations’ voluntary participation, the primary
focus in this cluster of research has been on mandatory information disclosure policies. Magat
and Viscusi’s (1992) Informational Approaches to Regulation, for example, focuses on
generic mandatory risk and warning labels for food and household products. In Democracy by
Disclosure, Mary Graham (2002) analyzes government requirements for industrial facilities to
disclose their toxic releases to the environment, food companies to provide nutrition labels on
their products and hospitals to report their medical errors. Fung et al.’s (2007) Full Disclosure
examines eight information disclosure policies across a range of sectors and issues – from
restaurant hygiene to mortgage lending to workplace hazards – and identifies key factors that
influence their effectiveness. A volume edited by Florini (2007), The Right to Know, explores
a more international range of cases of transparency policies, from China to Eastern Europe,
and documents the debate about how much information governments and corporations should
be required to disclose to the public.
Civil society’s role in information-based governance strategies is the focus of the third cat-
egory of theoretical perspectives, and much of this work is in the areas of environmental sus-
tainability and corporate social responsibility. This scholarship can be further divided into the
laudatory, critical and theoretical. An example of the laudatory literature is Conroy’s Branded!
(2007), which provides a valuable survey of environmental and social certification programs
across a wide range of social and environmental contexts, while an exemplar of the critical
literature is Dauvergne and Lister’s (2013) Eco-Business, which asserts that these programs
are part of a far-reaching and problematic effort by business to co-opt civil society concerns
for its own purposes. The theoretical literature includes Cashore et al.’s (2004) analysis of the
rise of non-state market-driven governance in the forestry sector, which uses theories from
organizational sociology to explain the convergence and divergence of these initiatives across
different national contexts. Another example is Micheletti et al.’s (2004) work on political
consumerism, which they define as “consumer choice of producers and products with the goal
of changing objectionable institutional or market practices.” The authors argue that this is
a new form of political responsibility that involves civil society directly in solving problems
and “reflects fundamental changes in how politics is viewed” (Stolle and Micheletti 2013: 11,
13). Such changes are analyzed from an ethical perspective by David Schwartz (2010), who
concludes that consumer concerns about the supply chain effects of consumer products are
justified from both utilitarian and deontological perspectives.
These efforts by civil society actors to directly engage in steering society, often inde-
pendently of traditional government processes, frequently involve information-based gov-
ernance strategies. Corporate managers, who are usually the target of these civil society
initiatives, have also utilized these strategies, and this phenomenon is the focus of the fourth
set of theoretical perspectives that are relevant to information-based governance. These
perspectives are focused on the motivations, design and effectiveness of corporate initiatives
that involve the deployment of information, such as standards, ratings and certifications. For
example, Cutler et al. (1999: 5, 21) frame the emergence of bond rating agencies and industry
standards as examples of private authority in which firms develop legitimate “decision-making
 Information-based governance  303

power over a particular issue area.” Prakash and Potoski (2006) use the theory of club goods to
explain why companies join voluntary initiatives such as ISO 14001, a certification program
for environmental management systems. King and Lenox (2000) examine the chemical
industry’s Responsible Care Program and its effectiveness in improving the environmental
performance of participating firms, while Ottman (2011) provides an overview of marketing
efforts around sustainability and presents a series of “new rules” for green marketers to follow.
These four sets of theoretical outlooks complement each other in important ways. Taken
together, they include both macro- and micro-perspectives on information-based governance
initiatives and take into account cases from a broad range of public, private and civil society
contexts. However, they each offer different methods and standards for defining the scope,
analyzing the operations, and evaluating the effectiveness of these programs. The literature
that focuses on the governance aspects of information-based governance is generally narrow
and specialized – paying attention only to government initiatives and ignoring private ones,
for example – while the broader literature on the role of information utilizes isolated and
conflicting theoretical frameworks. The behavioral economics literature, for example, does not
generally cite or map well to the history of information literature (and vice versa), and neither
provides a full and overarching account of the use of information for governance purposes.

EMPIRICAL FINDINGS

These literatures have, however, produced important empirical findings that address the four
sets of research questions outlined above about: (1) the relationship between information-based
governance and other forms of governance; (2) the history and landscape of information-based
governance strategies; (3) the factors driving their proliferation and variation; and (4) their
effects and effectiveness. This section focuses on a selection of findings that are relevant to
the fourth set of questions relating to the effects of information-based governance. Given the
multitude of factors that influence social and economic outcomes, it is difficult for any of these
studies to empirically identify whether one particular initiative has had its intended causal
effect. Scholars have nevertheless used a variety of methods to analyze both the successes and
the limitations of this form of governance.
For example, in their meta-analysis of eight mandatory disclosure initiatives, Fung et al.
(2007) conclude that the most effective programs – restaurant hygiene disclosure, corporate
financial disclosure and mortgage lending disclosure – became embedded in the decisions
of both disclosers and users by being valuable, comprehensible and compatible with their
decision-making processes. Morgenstern and Pizer’s (2012) analysis of seven voluntary envi-
ronmental programs in the United States, Europe and Japan finds that these initiatives likely
reduce pollutants by at most 5 percent and that, while their tangible benefits may be limited,
they provide opportunities for firms and government agencies to develop practical experience
dealing with new challenges.
Such studies are hampered by the problem of “additionality”; while a facility may show
reduced environmental impact after becoming certified or being rated, such reductions may
have occurred independently of the information-based governance initiative. In order to over-
come this issue, Blackman and Naranjo (2012) use propensity score matching to compare the
performance of certified organic farms with that of similar non-certified farms. They find that
certification does significantly reduce chemical input use and increase adoption of environ-
304  Handbook on theories of governance

mentally friendly management practices. Users of information from these programs face a dif-
ferent kind of additionality, or “crowding-in,” problem: does consumption of certified organic
food, for example, lead individuals to participate more or less in other forms of governance?
Does it, in other words, crowd in or crowd out broader political participation? While evidence
addressing this question is mixed, Willis and Schor (2012) find that, in the United States,
measures of “conscious consumption” (e.g. boycotting or intentionally purchasing a product
for political, ethical or environmental reasons) are significantly and positively related to
political action (e.g. contacting politicians, writing letters, donating money, etc.), even when
controlling for political involvement in the past.
Other data reveal the limitations and unintended consequences of information-based gov-
ernance. Ben-Shahar and Schneider (2014: 13) argue that “the evidence of many decades in
many fields shows that mandatory disclosure persistently fails to achieve its purposes, cannot
be fixed, and too often causes harm.” They cite evidence, for example, that patients often
do not understand the informed consent forms they are given (Ben-Shahar and Schneider
2014: 43–44). The failure of bond rating agencies to effectively assess the creditworthiness
of firms and their contribution to the 2008 financial collapse are well documented (Scalet
and Kelly 2012). Research shows that participants in the chemical industry’s Responsible
Care Program improve their performance more slowly than non-members and suggests that
voluntary information-based programs without sanctions for poor performance have limited
effectiveness (King and Lenox 2000). Similarly, other work has found that the environmental
performance of facilities certified by ISO 14001 does not differ significantly from that of
non-certified facilities (Aravind and Christmann 2011). Research by Kraft et al. (2011) shows
that the amount of toxic pollution emitted by industry in the United States has declined signifi-
cantly as a result of the Toxics Release Inventory, which collects and disseminates information
about the environmental releases from industrial facilities. However, the authors also conclude
that these reductions vary substantially across facilities, companies and states, and in many
cases the amount of toxic releases has increased over time (Kraft et al. 2011).
Beyond these concerns about the direct effectiveness of information-based governance strat-
egies, scholars have argued that they also create serious unintended consequences. Klooster
(2006) documents how international retailers such as Home Depot and IKEA use forest
certifications to impose costly requirements on local actors in the Mexican wood commodity
network and argues that this dynamic privileges the largest forest operations and reinforces
existing power inequalities both between North and South countries and within Southern
countries. Another type of unintended consequence is the problem of hidden tradeoffs. For
example, food labeled as “low-fat” may be higher in sugar (and calories) than non-labeled
food and lead consumers to ultimately consume more calories. Indeed, while research on the
effects of nutrition labels is decidedly mixed, several studies have demonstrated such an effect
(Wansink and Chandon 2006; Geyskens et al. 2007). Likewise, Guthman (2004) discusses
how food labeled as Certified Organic often comes from large industrial farms that use inten-
sive and mechanized agricultural methods and inhumane and exploitative labor practices, and
may not be as “sustainable” as consumers believe.
A third type of unintended consequence is a “crowding out” of political action and enact-
ment of relevant public policies. As Klein (1999), Vogel (2005) and others have argued,
“brand-based politics” has inherent limitations owing to its voluntary nature and narrow focus,
and regulations are necessary to bring about broad-based economic and social change. Szasz
(2009) has described how efforts that encourage individualized and consumeristic responses
 Information-based governance  305

to health and environmental threats have encouraged people to create an “inverted quarantine”
that isolates themselves from these threats and have discouraged them from engaging in
broader political processes that deal with these problems more systemically.
Work by other scholars shows how the process of “commensuration” in information-based
governance can have both intended and unintended consequences. Commensuration refers
to the process of translating “qualities into quantities,” and transforms complex and often
ambiguous information into a single metric (Espeland and Sauder 2007: 16). Such quantifi-
cation simplifies information and makes it both easier to access and process and appear to be
more robust and authoritative (Espeland and Sauder 2007). As Espeland and Sauder (2007)
show in their analysis of how law schools respond to U.S. News and World Report rankings,
such commensuration contributes to the disciplining power that these evaluations can hold
over these institutions, as they encourage them to focus on particular metrics of law school
quality (e.g. LSAT scores) while ignoring others (e.g. student and faculty diversity, quality of
teaching, cost, etc.). While such focus on their selected metrics can and ultimately should be
a goal of the rating organization, the strategic gaming and misreporting of data that Espeland
and Sauder (2007) document most assuredly are not and are a further unintended consequence
of information-based governance.

THEORETICAL GAPS AND AREAS FOR FUTURE THEORETICAL

DEVELOPMENT

This empirical research spans a wide diversity of disciplines and research methods and has
explored the dynamics of information-based governance strategies from an impressive range
of theoretical orientations. Most of this research, however, has not centered on the use of
information by these strategies but has instead focused on other characteristics that align with
each study’s particular conceptual framework. The use of state power, mandated disclosure,
private authority, social movements, voluntary participation and choice architecture are the
primary themes of this body of work, not the provision of information for the purposes of
steering society and the economy. The result is that most studies provide an incomplete and
segmented view of information-based governance and fail to provide a complete picture of
how they operate.
A robust theory of information-based governance is therefore needed to guide more com-
prehensive studies of this phenomenon. Such a theory would build on the rich literature on the
history of information technologies and the psychology of human responses to information but
would more clearly define the use of information as a specific form of governance. It would
not be so broad as to include all uses of information in any form of governance but would
logically articulate the boundaries and contours of a distinct and important category of social,
political and economic steering that relies on information as its primary tool. It would include
not only initiatives oriented towards consumers but also those targeting policymakers, cor-
porate executives and civil society leaders. It would also encompass programs implemented
by the public and private sector institutions as well as “third party” organizations from the
non-profit sector.
Such a theory would recognize this central role of information in these initiatives and provide
a framework that enables more complete analyses of its development and effectiveness.
Without being too narrowly deterministic, this framework would identify institutional design
306  Handbook on theories of governance

features that will increase the likelihood of information-based governance strategies achieving
their objectives, depending on the context and the nature of those objectives. At a minimum, it
would address how these strategies might confront the challenges of establishing the credibil-
ity, trustworthiness, relevance and usability of the information they provide. The theory would
be useful in analyzing the four sets of questions outlined above and the technical, semantic and
influential problems that Weaver (1949) identifies as inherent to any communication process.
It would enable comparative analyses of state and non-state initiatives and would encompass
cases in which the private, public and civil sectors are all involved and their authority overlaps
and competes in determining how such information is developed and deployed.
This theoretical enterprise is the subject of an ongoing research project (Bullock 2011,
2015a, 2015b) and, once complete, will enable valuable studies of how information-based
governance relates to other forms of governance. There are obvious connections to private
governance, regulatory governance, collaborative governance and network governance, for
example, and a theory of information-based governance could benefit from the incorpora-
tion of concepts used to understand these forms of governance. The relationship between
information-based governance and regulatory governance is particularly important, and
developing a better understanding of how they can complement and undermine each other
is a critical area for future research. But it is essential that information-based governance is
first understood as a distinct form of governance that relies not on the power of the state to
coerce or the power of markets to incentivize but the power of information and its capacity
to persuade and influence.

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29. Discourse theory
Steven Griggs and David Howarth1

It is not misplaced to talk of the “shift from government to governance” as the predominant
organizing narrative for much of policy studies in recent years (Frederickson 2007; Chhotray
and Stoker 2009; Griggs et al. 2014). Of course, governance narratives accommodate a dis-
parate array of rival perspectives, taxonomies and claims (Lewis 2011). The “unresolved
polysemy” of the term “governance” has lent itself over time to multiple associations and
connections (Offe 2009: 557). But predominant narratives tend to reproduce one common plot,
one which foregrounds the increasing recourse of the state to collective decision-making in
multi-actor networks in an attempt to compensate for the failures of traditional forms of hierar-
chy and markets to tackle complex wicked policy issues (Griggs et al. 2014). Such horizontal
and self-regulating networks, it is claimed, cut across the boundaries of state and civil society.
They offer the prospect of inclusive and negotiated ways of engaging a multiplicity of public,
semi-public and private stakeholders in the collective definition of public value (Chhotray and
Stoker 2009; Klijn and Koppenjan 2012). As a consequence, state managers are called upon
to use new skills and capabilities to “steer” or “govern at a distance” complex interactions
within and across networks, thereby generating new spaces of joint decision-making and
goal-setting as the traditional capabilities of the state are “hollowed out” or reshaped (Rhodes
1997; Bang 2003; Considine 2005: 180). These predominant narratives are not without
challenge. Over-extended claims that we now live in a networked polity have arguably to be
treated with caution. Governance networks have not entirely supplanted hierarchical or market
forms of governing such that hybrid forms of governance abound across policy sectors (Klijn
and Koppenjan 2012; Torfing et al. 2012; Skelcher et al. 2013). Neither, as we suggest above,
should we necessarily equate moves to governance with the decline of the state. Governance
networks have been characterized as new forms of hierarchy or the extension of state authority
through governance partnerships (Bell and Hindmoor 2009; Hysing 2009; Davies 2011),
invoking governance as a new form of governmentality which embeds new governing tech-
nologies of participation, performance and self-governance (Swyngedouw 2005, 2010; Dean
2010). At the same time, concerns have been raised over the democratic anchorage of gov-
ernance networks (Sørensen and Torfing 2005, 2014; Klijn and Skelcher 2007; Jeffares and
Skelcher 2011) and how networks can lead to policy failure in the absence of new forms of
network management and metagovernance (Jessop 2003; Sørensen and Torfing 2009). Indeed,
recognizing the contribution of two generations of studies on the categorization and work of
governance networks, their regulation and democratic implications (Sørensen and Torfing
2007), Lewis calls for a turn towards new theoretical frameworks that can bring into question
the established assumptions that structure the field of network governance and “ensure [its]
robust, interesting and productive future” (Lewis 2011: 1221).
This chapter contributes to this discussion. It examines how poststructuralist discourse
theory can offer new insights into the critical assessment of the transformation, stabilization
and reproduction of the practices of governance networks in particular historical contexts. We
begin by setting out our approach to discourse before exploring its implications for the study

309
310  Handbook on theories of governance

of governance networks. In so doing, we foreground the political construction of governance

networks, and their constitution through acts of power and the drawing of antagonisms. By
radicalizing the insights of the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, and by drawing on the work
of Laclau and Mouffe, we argue that change and inertia in governance networks will be the
outcome of hegemonic struggles. We examine the political logics of these struggles before
analyzing how fantasmatic narratives explain the “grip” of particular governance practices.
In conclusion, we set out the critical and normative implications of our approach, cautioning
against hard and fast characterizations of the forms of network governance. Poststructuralism,
we suggest, recenters our attention on the everyday “messy” politics of governance networks
(Griggs et al. 2014).

POSTSTRUCTURALIST DISCOURSE THEORY

We begin our analysis by setting out our particular approach to discourse, which advances a
“thick” conception of discourse, in which the latter does not just consist of an abstract cogni-
tive system of beliefs and words but is a constitutive dimension of social relations (Torfing
1999; Howarth and Torfing 2005; Howarth and Griggs 2012; Howarth 2013). Adopting this
perspective means that all objects – natural things and physical processes, social and cultural
phenomena – acquire their meaning and significance in specific discourses; they are “discur-
sively constructed” in multiple ways. Although such entities certainly “exist” independently of
any particular discourse, their peculiar import – and thus how they are engaged with by social
actors – depends on their positioning and use within particular symbolic frameworks (Howarth
2000; Laclau and Mouffe 2001). Put alternatively, discourse is a “shared way of understanding
the world” which “enables those who subscribe to it to interpret bits of information and put
them together into coherent stories or accounts” (Dryzek 1997: 8). In bringing order to such
complexities, it does not simply describe or make known a pre-existing or underlying reality,
but serves to bring that reality into being (Gottweis 2003: 252). As Laclau and Mouffe insist,
“a discursive structure is not a merely ‘cognitive’ or ‘contemplative’ entity; it is an articula-
tory practice which constitutes and organizes social relations” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 96,
emphasis added).
This conception of discourse involves three conceptual steps. In the first instance, we enlarge
the purview of traditional discourse theory – the analysis of “texts and talk in contexts” – to
embrace social practices and political activities. All objects and social practices are discursive,
in that their meaning and position depend upon their articulation within socially constructed
systems of rules and differences (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000:
3). Secondly, we infuse this alternative understanding of discourse with the work of structural
linguistics, particularly the work of Saussure (1983), to develop a relational and differential
account of discourse. In this model, four particular kinds of entity – agents (or subjects),
objects, words and actions – are individuated and rendered intelligible within the context of
a particular practice, in which each element acquires meaning only in relation to the others
(Howarth 2009: 311–312). Finally, drawing on poststructuralists like Jacques Derrida (1978,
1982), Michel Foucault (1972, 1981, 1984) and Jacques Lacan (2006), we stress the radical
contingency and structural undecidability of discursive structures (Howarth 2009: 312). This
arises because we assume that all systems of meaning are, in a fundamental sense, incomplete.
By saying that discourses are incomplete, we do not mean that they are simply missing some-
 Discourse theory  311

thing; it is not synonymous with the fact that a piece of a puzzle is missing from a jigsaw box
or that our cup of coffee is only half-full. Instead, from our perspective, incompletion denotes
the presence of an absence or negativity that structurally prevents the completion of a dis-
course, thereby indicating its limits. Discourses are thus incomplete systems of meaningful
practice, because they are predicated on the active exclusion of certain elements. The excluded
elements are caught up in a chain of equivalences that signifies a threatening otherness or neg-
ativity, which simultaneously unifies the discursive system and prevents its full constitution
and structural closure. This absence or negativity is evident in particular dislocations or events
that show the incompletion of any discourse or social order, whilst the construction of social
antagonisms signifies its limits, that is, its contestation by competing political forces.
In our perspective, then, building on Laclau and Mouffe, discourse is a kind of social prac-
tice that links together and modifies heterogeneous elements in changing historical conditions
(Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 96). The outcomes of such practices are discursive formations,
in which the linkages between the elements of these systems are relational and differential.
Discursive formations are finite, uneven and incomplete. Both as a practice and as an incom-
plete system of related moments, discourse also presupposes a world of contingent elements
– linguistic and non-linguistic, social and natural – that can be linked together in various ways.
This perspective is consistent with a minimal realism that acknowledges the existence of the
objects and processes that we think about, though our practices of reflection are never external
to the life-worlds into which we are thrown. Indeed, it is only within such symbolic orders that
we encounter such objects.
More technically, the elements or components of a discourse are best conceived as “float-
ing signifiers,” which can in certain circumstances be articulated by rival political projects
seeking to fix their meaning and import, whereas moments are those elements that are firmly
positioned in a particular discourse. Nodal points are those privileged points of signification
within a discourse that partially fix the meaning of practices and institutional configurations,
while empty signifiers provide the symbolic means to represent these essentially incomplete
orders. The function of the latter is to incarnate the “absent fullness” of an essentially incom-
plete discursive system. Put differently, floating signifiers are ideological elements that are not
securely fixed in a particular discourse, and can thus be constructed in diverse ways, whereas
empty signifiers are points of symbolic fixation, which provide the representational resources
that can hold together multiple and even contradictory demands in a precarious unity (Laclau
1990, 1995).

PROBLEMATIZING GOVERNANCE NETWORKS

What does this understanding of discourse mean for the study of interactive forms of gov-
ernance in networks, partnerships and other collaborative arenas? To begin with, poststruc-
turalist traditions of inquiry provide an effective way of criticizing or challenging dominant
theories of network governance, which all tend to focus on the presumed existence of groups,
movements and networks operating in a particular political system. In contrast, they adopt an
anti-essentialist and anti-foundationalist orientation. On the one hand, this rejects accounts of
governance networks, which assume that objects, human subjects or social formations have
fixed essences. On the other hand, it dismisses totalizing narratives that impute some kind of
inevitability to the formation of governance networks. Such presuppositions are often evident,
312  Handbook on theories of governance

for example, in the economic determinism and class reductionism of Marxist explanations of
social and political change and in some predominant narratives of governance networks which
reduce governance networks to a “necessary” or “inevitable” response to changing historical
forces or shifts in the socio-economic structures, be it globalization or increasing democra-
tization (Bevir 2004). In other words, we view governance networks as political constructs,
foregrounding in explanations of the political constitution of governance networks the mean-
ings attributed to networks by “situated subjects” and the hegemonic articulations that bring
networks into being. Such perspectives necessitate an acceptance of the radical contingency of
social life. As objects of discourse, governance networks are radically contingent constructs
which can be understood and re-understood in different ways, and will take different forms
in different political and historical contexts. The primary tasks of any poststructuralist expla-
nation are thus the characterization of the practices of governance networks and the critical
examination of their transformation, stabilization and reproduction in particular historical
contexts.
Take for example the ties of mutual resource dependency which are often cited as the
collaborative “glue” of governance networks, forging the boundaries of networks and under-
pinning the collaborative dynamics within networks (Rhodes 1997; Koppenjan and Klijn
2004). From a discourse perspective, such ties of mutual dependency cannot be imputed
onto actors or assumed to emerge automatically from shared interests, collective identities,
institutional locations or the constraining complexities of policy environments (Griggs and
Howarth 2007). Rather we need to gain a critical understanding of the political practices
that produce and reproduce these interdependencies that ultimately hold networks together.
Indeed, poststructuralists are skeptical about a necessary and automatic connection between
interests, identities and agency. Sharing a common interest does not necessarily lead social
actors to become agents who are intent on mobilizing others, or joining groups or networks.
Such common interests or ties of mutual dependency, we would suggest, have to be politically
constructed through acts of power that draw boundaries between those within the network and
those who remain external to it. Put alternatively, the practices or regimes of practices across
governance networks cannot be divorced from an inclusionary/exclusionary dynamics, which
foregrounds the political and delimits the borders of networks not by pre-assumed patterns of
resource dependency but by the political construction of social antagonisms and the opposition
to an external “other.”
Against this background, we conceptualize governance networks as more or less sedimented
systems of discourse that decenter the process of governing society and the economy. In other
words, they are partially fixed systems of rules, norms, resources, practices and subjectivities
that are linked together in particular ways. Importantly, their emergence and formation are
based on the drawing of boundaries or frontiers between differently positioned social agents,
and the discourses wherein their identities are constituted. Because no discourse exhausts the
meaning of objectivity, as any identity or order is marked by a “constitutive outside,” the for-
mation and reproduction of governance networks are entwined with the politics of boundary
drawing. Governance networks thus cannot escape the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion,
which in our perspective involves the construction of social antagonisms and the creation of
political frontiers (although these frontiers can take more or less antagonistic and adversarial
forms; see below). Not only are governance networks subject to contingent events or crises,
but they are also vulnerable to challenges from those forces that are excluded. This requires
actors at particular moments to reconfigure and transform identities, articulating new mobi-
 Discourse theory  313

lizing narratives and campaigns and new means of representation and signifiers to partially
stabilize networks (Griggs and Howarth 2004).
These theoretical assumptions mean that our particular understanding of governance
networks privileges the role of power and political processes. This primacy of the political
challenges the temptation to reify rational consensus as the desired outcome of democratic
network governance. It does so by rendering obsolete the belief in the potential eradication
of antagonism through negotiation and dialogue. Politics, we argue, cannot be reduced to
a neutral terrain. As we set out above, it involves acts of power and the drawing of antagonisms
by actors engaged in hegemonic struggles to articulate political frontiers between “insiders”
and “outsiders” through the definition of a “core opposition” between “friend” and “enemy”
(Howarth 2000, 2013). In other words, governance networks as privileged spaces or “sites”
within social orders of such political contestation will be marked by the political exclusions
that forge them. Indeed, governance networks are best interpreted as spaces or “sites” for polit-
ical contestation where conflicting projects seek to universalize their narrow sectional interests
and values. Patterns of governance across policy sectors will take different forms according
to the outcome of these political battles between policy actors to articulate the multiple dis-
courses of markets, hierarchies, networks and so on. We cannot therefore forgo the possibility
of governance without networks.
But how exactly are we to understand the politics of governance networks? How are dif-
ferent actors brought together in governance networks? How are common identities or shared
interests forged? How are political boundaries constituted and reproduced? We have already
hinted at responses to these questions, pointing to the construction of political frontiers and the
masking over of differences by opposition to an “other.” In the next section, we develop such
insights further. By radicalizing the insights of the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci (1971),
and by drawing on the work of Laclau and Mouffe (1985), we argue that discourses are sta-
bilized and challenged by multiple hegemonic operations, whose general structure consists of
the logics of equivalence and difference. This means that the concept of hegemony is central to
the critical explanation of governance networks that we put forward here. Change and inertia
in governance networks will be the outcome of hegemonic struggles (Howarth 2009, 2013).

HEGEMONIC POLITICS AND THE REPRODUCTION OF

NETWORK GOVERNANCE

The concept of hegemony is complex and contested. Working within and against the Marxist
tradition, we delineate two aspects of the concept that we believe are vital in developing
a viable approach to the critical assessment of governance networks. On the one hand,
hegemony is a type of rule or governance, which captures the way in which a regime, practice
or policy holds sway over a set of subjects by a particular entwining of consent, compliance
and coercion. On the other hand, hegemony is a practice of politics that involves the linking
together of disparate demands to forge projects or “discourse coalitions,” which can contest
a particular form of rule, practice or policy. These practices presuppose the existence of
antagonisms and the presence of “floating signifiers” that can be articulated by rival political
forces in the struggle for power (Howarth 2009, 2013). With the constitution and reproduction
of governance networks in mind, it is to this second dimension of hegemony that we first turn.
314  Handbook on theories of governance

Hegemony as a practice of politics highlights the linking together of different demands and
identities in efforts to challenge and even replace a given practice or social order. Here hegem-
ony is a type of political relation or practice that involves the drawing of equivalences between
disparate elements via the construction of political frontiers that divide social fields into
opposed camps. In this way, the identities that compose such equivalential chains are modified
by the practice. For example, local campaigns to oppose particular airport expansions can
be linked together into a broader governance network, which in turn may also be linked to
wider adjacent social demands, by finding points of equivalence amongst these struggles. In
this case, the very identities of local struggles will be modified to reflect their more universal
character, whilst the content of the new demand will be given by a more general opposition to
a government’s overall national policy of airport expansion and/or its environmental conse-
quences (Griggs and Howarth 2013).
This second aspect of hegemony foregrounds the metonymical dimension of political
practices: the way in which a particular group or movement located in a particular sphere
begins to take responsibility for tasks and activities in adjacent or contiguous spheres of social
relations, thus seeking to hegemonize such demands. Yet it does not preclude the metaphor-
ical. On the contrary, the role of metaphor is essential because if a group is to successfully
hegemonize the demands and identity of others it must create analogical relations – forms of
resemblance – between such demands, whilst articulating empty signifiers that can partially
fix or condense such demands into a more universal (if ultimately precarious) unity. As we
shall argue below, in the production of empty signifiers that can hold together differences by
successfully drawing frontiers against, and that exclude, the other, one particular difference
will again begin to assume a more universal function.
To recap, we understand politics to be the contestation and institution of social relations and
practices, and it discloses the contingent character of any practice or institution by showing
the role of power and exclusion in its formation. In our terms therefore, the construction of
governance networks depends on the capacities of policy actors or entrepreneurs to cover over
the differences that exist between themselves and others in any policy subsystem. Policy actors
will forge popular demands, which construct equivalential linkages or a chain of equivalence
between previously dispersed and negated claims and demands as they attempt to integrate
hostile opponents into networks. In fact, in order for social actors to succeed in hegemonizing
different groups and sectors around their plans and projects, they have to universalize their
narrow sectional demands and values, thus providing the symbolic means to unify other iden-
tities in a common political project. The construction of these equivalential chains requires the
production of empty signifiers, a means of representation which can serve as points of sub-
jective identification to hold together a diverse set of agencies in a precarious and contingent
unity (see Laclau 1995; Howarth 1997, 2000).
However, the successful constitution of governance networks will require not only the
covering over of difference, but also the differentiation of the network from something other
than itself through acts of exclusion and the production of a “constitutive outside” (Laclau
2005: 69–71). This exclusion will be predicated upon the negation by the actors involved in
a governance network of a common “other,” for example the shared “enemy” of a rival state or
stigmatized social group. Empty signifiers are thus to be understood as a means of representa-
tion which enables the articulation of internal differences while simultaneously showing the
limits of a group’s identity, and its dependence on the opposition to other groups (see Laclau
1995; Howarth 2000). Because of this dependence on the opposition to other groups, govern-
 Discourse theory  315

ance networks, as we have set out above, will be inherently exclusionary, as individual actors
will be obliged to draw boundaries between different social groups and their demands.
Network constitution as understood with this logic of hegemony will thus be akin to a process
of spatialization that involves the political articulation and sedimentation of differential actors
and demands into a space of representation (Griggs and Howarth, 2007). This space of rep-
resentation, that is, a governance network, will be organized around a set of particular social
logics, which structure the practices of decision-making at different “sites” of social orders
(Howarth 2005). This leads us back to the first dimension of hegemony as a form of rule.
Hegemony as a form of rule speaks in general to the way in which subjects accept and conform
to a particular regime, practice or policy, even though they may have previously resisted or
opposed it. Each concrete form of governance will comprise different mixtures of force and
consent, but the rhetorical dimension of a hegemonic relation is the same: a particular set of
demands and values comes to function as universal arguments about demands and values, thus
representing a concrete “totality” or order that exceeds them (Laclau 2005: 72). Expressed in
rhetorical terms, such a relation is best captured by the figure of synecdoche, whereby a part
represents the whole. The relation between part and whole thus furnishes an important means
to conceptualize the hegemonic relation within governance networks, though a thorough
empirical analysis will also require an account of the identifications and attachments through
which subjects are gripped by such regimes and practices (as we discuss in the next section).
In exploring hegemony as a form of rule, poststructuralist traditions draw upon Foucault’s
concept of governmentality as a means of critically characterizing and evaluating the social
practices of governance networks. Within this perspective, as Howarth explains, Foucault
examines government as the “different modalities and possible ways that exist for guiding
men, directing their conduct, constraining their actions and reactions, and so on” (Foucault
2008: 1–2, cited in Howarth 2013: 222). This thus turns our attention to the multiplicity of
technologies, instruments, rationalities and forms of knowledge through which government
practices intervene in society and the economy. Importantly, as Howarth underlines, govern-
mentality recognizes that government undertakes “critical educative functions that shape cul-
tural and social practices, though they in turn are ‘educated’ and shaped by practices in other
fields” (Howarth 2013: 222). Pursuing such insights, Swyngedouw (2005) foregrounds how
urban governance networks can take-on “Janus-faced” autocratic forms of governmentality,
which through the practices of self-management and self-regulation and stakeholder participa-
tion risk reinforcing the technologies of government, whilst empowering and excluding certain
stakeholders over others, and transforming the limits of political democracy in ways that add
to the democratic deficit of contemporary societies. This democratic deficit, Swyngedouw
suggests (2010: 215), emerges from a particular dialogical form of consensus formation that
can characterize the practices of governance networks. This dialogical logic arguably frames
collaboration as the pursuit through negotiation and dialogue of an inclusive rational consen-
sus or compromise. Thus network governance risks fulfilling a post-political quest to negate
antagonism and value pluralism (Mouffe 2000, 2005). This repudiation of the antagonism that
is constitutive of the political, it is thus argued, challenges the democratic politics of govern-
ance networks, as it fuels the articulation of antagonisms, but negates or denies any legitimate
channels of expression for such antagonisms (Mouffe 2005: 4).
316  Handbook on theories of governance

THE AFFECTIVE DIMENSION OF GOVERNANCE NETWORK

PRACTICES

Whilst recognizing the hegemonic struggles that constitute governance networks, we have
said little about why and how actors are gripped by particular regimes of practices in gov-
ernance networks. How and why do subjects identify with particular rhetorical devices? Or,
conversely, how and why are subjects not held fast by a discourse? We address these questions
by turning to the affective dimension of actors’ engagements in governance networks and by
considering the related notion of lack. Here we argue that an adequate approach to governance
network analysis must also take into consideration the unconscious and affective investments
of subjects in certain rhetorical devices, signifiers and images. In many ways, governance
networks are “communities that narrate themselves into existence,” with the employment
of specific narratives binding actors into a “coherent whole” (Lejano et al. 2013: 47). The
specific “plot” of a narrative can thus account for “what is special, motivational, compelling
and affective about it” (Lejano et al. 2013: 40). In fact, it is in this context that the Lacanian
logic of fantasy, which has been developed by theorists such as Slavoj Žižek (1997, 1998), can
focus our attention on the enjoyment subjects procure from their identifications with certain
signifiers and figures or in other words certain fantasmatic narratives.
It is important to stress that fantasy is not an ideological illusion or a form of false con-
sciousness that comes between a subject and social reality. On the contrary, in this approach,
fantasies partly organize our perceptions of reality and structure our understanding of social
relations by covering over their radical contingency. Social relations thus appear to subjects
as natural and sedimented. Indeed, one of the indicators of the “success” of a fantasy is its
invisibility: the fact that it supports social reality without our being conscious of it. On the
other hand, the visibility of fantasmatic figures and devices – their disclosure and appearance
as fantasies – means that they cease to function properly in this regard. Of course, there are
different ways to come to terms with social fantasies and their grip, ranging from their repres-
sion to their traversal.
The logic of fantasy thus operates to bring a form of ideological closure to the radical contin-
gency of social relations, and to naturalize the different relations of domination within which
a subject is enmeshed. It does this through a fantasmatic narrative or discourse that promises
a fullness-to-come once a named or implied obstacle is overcome (the beatific dimension of
fantasy) or which foretells disaster if the obstacle proves insurmountable (the horrific dimen-
sion of fantasy), though in any particular instance the two work hand in hand (Stavrakakis
1999: 108–109; 2007). The beatific side, as Žižek puts it, has “a stabilizing dimension, which
is governed by the dream of a state without disturbances, out of reach of human depravity,”
while the horrific aspect possesses “a destabilizing dimension,” where the Other – a “Jewish
plot” or the lazy/overzealous immigrant – is presented as a threatening or irritating force that
must be rooted out or destroyed (Žižek 1998: 192). On the whole, then, fantasmatic logics
capture the various ways subjects organize their enjoyment by binding themselves to particular
objects and representations so as “to resolve some fundamental antagonism” (Žižek 1997: 11).
The role of subjective desire and attachment adds further elements to the conceptual
grammar of poststructuralist perspectives on how governance networks come into being and
are reproduced over time. They provide the means to explore the way in which identities are
stabilized and given direction, as well as the moments when such identifications begin to lose
their adhesion or fail to resonate at all. Indeed, in our perspective, the critical assessment of
 Discourse theory  317

the “glue” that holds networks together rests on the discernment of political and fantasmatic
logics, as it is such logics that enable us to surface the contingency and undecidability of
particular social relations and structures. For example, our study of the campaign against the
third runway at Heathrow Airport in the UK discerns how local residents opposed to expansion
brought together a broad coalition, which drew equivalences between particularist struggles at
different airports and between aviation and questions of climate change, social justice, interna-
tional development and corporate regulation. In so doing, local residents challenged embedded
fantasmatic narratives of the economic benefits of aviation growth, articulating rival narratives
that redescribed aviation as a horrific “culprit” in the sky, which undermined commitments
to lower carbon emissions and came ultimately to represent the “capture” of government by
corporate interests (Griggs and Howarth 2013).

CONCLUSIONS: CRITICAL EXPLANATION AND NORMATIVE

EVALUATION

This chapter has outlined a poststructuralist approach to the study of governance networks that
emphasizes the centrality of politics and power in the forging, sustenance and grip of govern-
ance network discourses in particular social and historical contexts. In substantive theoretical
terms, this involves the articulation of the concept of hegemony to account for the emergence
and formation of policy discourses, and it draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis and the category
of fantasy to account for the stabilization and grip of policies. Poststructuralism provides, we
thus suggest, resources for researchers to exercise a critical function in relation to existing
network governance theory. But equally its proponents seek to go beyond a purely negative
form of critique by providing an alternative grammar of concepts and logics with which to
explain and evaluate governance networks. They are also inclined at times to elaborate interim
visions, which can inform the goals and objectives of particular movements or coalitions. In
this conclusion, we explore the normative ideals that might inform our analysis of governance
networks before cautioning against the temptation to impose over-determined characteriza-
tions, which fail to recognize the “messy” politics and power struggles of network governance.
In keeping with the underlying assumptions of our perspective, it is important to eschew
an overhasty and overreaching normativism that too quickly prescribes an a priori set of
norms and principles with which to evaluate and then reorder existing institutions, policies
and practices. With this in mind, we adopt agonistic pluralism as our tentative yardstick for
democratic politics within network governance, whereby actors in the policy process contest
substantive issues as adversaries, but recognize each other’s right to difference (Mouffe 2005;
Norval 2007; Howarth 2013). The task for those evaluating democratic network governance is
thus to evaluate the extent of inclusion and exclusion within specific networks and the form of
antagonism that structures such patterns of inclusion and exclusion. First, some policy actors
will forge equivalential chains and popular demands that are more inclusive of “relevant
and affected actors” in the policy subsystem (Sørensen 2005: 354). Secondly, antagonisms,
as Mouffe argues, do not have to take the form of the division between “us” and “them” or
distinctions between “friends” and “enemies” where the existence of the “other” threatens the
identity of the “we” (Mouffe 2005: 20–21). Whilst not eliminating antagonism by reducing
conflictual actors to “competitors whose interests can be dealt with through mere negotiation,
or reconciled through deliberation” (Mouffe 2005: 20), we can envisage agonistic “we–they”
318  Handbook on theories of governance

relations where adversaries recognize the legitimacy of their opponents such that “the task of
democracy is to transform antagonism into agonism” (Mouffe 2005: 20). Thus on a normative
level, from a democratic point of view, an ideal form of network governance is one in which
there is both a maximum inclusion of different groups and interests, compatible with func-
tional decision-making, and at the same time the conditions and space for effective challenge
and contestation within such networks.
However, from the perspective that we are developing, in which processes of power and
exclusion are endemic to the formation of any network, there are at least three possible out-
comes of moves to establish network governance (Griggs and Howarth, 2007). These are,
firstly, the successful establishment of an agonistic form of network governance in which
a plurality of actors are included in the policy-making process, extending the scope of political
contestation (Sørensen and Torfing 2005, 2014). A second possible outcome is the failure to
establish a governance network, as the logics of exclusion form the basis for mutually hostile
networks of actors that engage in political competition to further their irreconcilable interests
and differences. Antagonism, here, takes the form of the “us” and “them” distinction. And,
finally, a third possibility is the appearance of a successful form of democratic network gov-
ernance, but one which is predicated on a false consensus in which groups are excluded, but
unable to contest the terms of their exclusion. Instead, those excluded remain fragmented and
unrepresented in a particular policy domain, with antagonism falsely denied and mobilized out
of the policy sub-sector under the guise of consensus.
Returning to our discussion of governance networks as a post-political form of govern-
mentality, we would seek nonetheless to caution against any overdetermined characterization
of governance networks. First, as Offe (2009: 558–559) suggests, whatever the claims of
depoliticized or decontested negotiated agreements between organizational elites in networks,
the realm of politics beyond any governance network cannot be ignored. In other words, Offe
(2009: 558) posits that agreements within governance networks may have little impact in the
world of “conflicts of interests and values that takes place in the public outside the negotiation
room” in which politicians and elites have to persuade (and cajole) actors to implement or
accept policies. Secondly, we would argue that the moment of depoliticization within any
governance network is also a moment of potential repoliticization, arguing instead for a dia-
lectical relationship between politicization and depoliticization. The practices of decontesting
the terms of political discourse in governance networks – pushing certain concepts and notions
into the background with the aim of naturalizing them – are an important dimension of depo-
liticization. Yet these practices, we suggest, rest in part on the prior recognition of a specific
issue as a political obstacle, which offers opponents the space to open up new avenues of
contestation. For example, efforts by proponents of airport expansion to depoliticize aviation
noise pollution raise the opportunity for local residents to contest definitions of noise and
move them up the political agenda. In short, attempts to depoliticize issues in and through
governance networks cannot be disentangled from efforts to politicize them (Griggs and
Howarth 2014).
In fact, this recognition of the dialectics of depoliticization and repoliticization also leads
us to guard against interpretations that draw binary oppositions between statist and societal
narratives of governance networks or between governance networks as spaces of domination
or resistance. Such unidimensional judgments, which risk over-privileging for example the
coercive elements of a governance network or the practices of resistance that it accommodates,
fail to account for how practices of freedom go hand in hand with practices of governance
 Discourse theory  319

(Tully 2008; see also Griggs et al. 2014). Indeed, as Tully (2008: 23, cited in Griggs et al,
2014: 8) establishes, being “subject” to a mode or rationality of government does not deter-
mine “the self-consciousness and self-formation of the governed down to every detail.” In
the first instance, when individuals and groups follow or apply the existing “rules” governing
the practices of governance networks, they will modify those same practices in the process of
reproducing them. Equally, they can challenge dominant practices, but do so within existing
language games and institutional channels and procedures. It is only when these institutional
strategies fail or are blocked that individuals and groups may contest such relations of dom-
ination through a strategy of struggle and transformation (Griggs et al. 2014: 7–9). In other
words, in cautioning against hard and fast characterizations, which themselves are based on
stark binary oppositions, poststructuralism recenters our attention on the “messy” politics and
power struggles that accompany the everyday practices of governance networks (Griggs et al.
2014).
Finally, it is this focus on the everyday “messy” practices of governance networks that
should, we suggest, frame future research agendas in discourse theory and governance net-
works. Discourse theory offers, as this chapter has sought to demonstrate, novel perspectives
and logics through which to examine how governance networks as spaces of multiple interac-
tive practices are constantly produced and reproduced. However, examining the everyday craft
of network governance demands that discourse theorists further engage in the production of
“thick descriptive,” longitudinal studies over the lifespan of governance networks. In our view,
such studies offer the opportunity for poststructuralists to explore in meticulous detail the
complex logics of network formation, how different legacies and histories of networks come
to make possible and constrain different strategies and tactics, while potentially surfacing
new insights into the transformative politics of networks and the conditions for their renewal
or decline. Yet future studies should also strive to contextualize networks in relation to their
wider social and political contexts, locating networks at the intersection of processes operating
at multiple spatial scales (Howarth and Griggs 2012). This examination of broad societal
tendencies “beyond” the network also draws our attention to the problematization of the inter-
action of governance networks, or the negotiation of the boundaries or frontiers of networks
and how networks might interact with other networks. This “opening up” of discourse theory
studies to the political interplay between networks, and the work of actors across networks, can
begin to generate alternative problematizations of the meanings attributed to network manage-
ment and the metagovernance challenges that it poses for government. In the process, the craft
of network management, within, across and at the frontiers of networks, offers one avenue for
poststructuralist analysis to explore how its distinctive insights on radical democracy can offer
innovative critical interventions for our understanding of network governance.

NOTE
1. This chapter draws upon and restates some of the arguments and perspectives that we have
advanced elsewhere, notably in our research monograph, The Politics of Airport Expansion in
the United Kingdom (2013, Manchester University Press), and our contribution, ‘Poststructuralist
Policy Analysis: Discourse, Hegemony and Critical Explanation’, in F. Fischer and H. Gottweis
(eds), The Argumentative Turn Revisited (2012, Duke University Press). It also draws on elements
of the arguments advanced in S. Griggs, A.J. Norval and H. Wagenaar (eds), Practices of Freedom
(2014, Cambridge University Press).
320  Handbook on theories of governance

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30. Institutional theory
B. Guy Peters

The Introduction to this Handbook makes the point that formal institutions are not the only
source of contemporary governance. This is obviously true, and has been true historically as
well as in the contemporary period. That said, however, it is difficult to understand governance
without some reference to the formal institutions of government. Even if these institutions
only function to provide a “shadow of hierarchy” (Scharpf 1997; Peters 2011) for the actions
of other actors, they are important. The role of institutions, however, generally extends well
beyond that rather passive role, and to understand even the disaggregated and devolved forms
of contemporary governance we must understand the roles played by institutions.
In outlining the role of institutions, and institutional theory, in governance I will be under-
taking two primary tasks. The first is to outline the manner in which institutional theory
explains how governance is provided and the role of formal structures in providing that crucial
commodity for societies and economies. The second task is to move beyond formal ideas of
institutions and examine the role of less formal structures in governing. While lacking the legal
formalization of some institutions involved in governing, these informal institutions are none-
theless important mechanisms for providing steering. The informal institutional structures
need to be understood in their own right, but also through their interactions with the formal
structures.
As I proceed with these discussions I will be utilizing a definition of governance that
emphasizes the role of steering (Pierre and Peters 2016). Thus, the question becomes: How do
institutional theories assume that steering is produced by institutions? Phrased somewhat dif-
ferently: What instruments are institutions using in their attempts to control social and market
actors? Much of the study of institutions in the public sector, and indeed the study of public
organizations, has been concerned with the internal control of the participants (see Christensen
et al. 2007). In this chapter I am more concerned with the external effects of institutions and
their capacity to influence their environment.
In this conception of governance there are a number of central activities, or functions, that
must be undertaken if governance is to be supplied. These activities include: goal selection,
policy formulation, resource attachment, implementation and, finally, evaluation and feed-
back. Although institutional theories, I will argue, do help to explain governance as a general
phenomenon, they may be particularly important for some of these central functions. And
given the variety of institutional theories available, not all will be as useful as others in under-
standing all of those activities.
The principal virtue of the institutional approach is that it should, at least in principle, focus
on the organizations and institutions within the public sector that make and implement public
policies. In the “old institutionalism” the emphasis on formal government structures such as
legislatures or cabinets emphasized the role of institutions in governing. The “new institu-
tionalism” has in many instances been less concerned with policy and governing, and more
concerned with the internal functioning of the institutions. The new institutionalism, however,
certainly does have the potential for explaining patterns of governance.

323
324  Handbook on theories of governance

Understanding the role of institutions in governing requires some consideration of the polit-
ical systems through which governance is provided. For example, the increasing concern with
multi-level governance, and the nature of that governance (Hooghe and Marks 2003), points
to the need to consider interactions among institutions, as well as social actors, operating with
different territorial boundaries and with varying governance resources (law, money, etc.).
As well as being fragmented vertically, political systems are fragmented horizontally, with
multiple policy areas having their own sets of actors and preferences (Peters 2014a). Both the
horizontal and vertical dimensions of fragmentation present governance challenges, but also
present opportunities for building institutions that can integrate diverse actors and preferences
(Scott 2020).
The capacity to adapt and adjust to changing circumstances—environmental and political—
is another central question for the use of institutional theory in studying governance. One of
the presumed virtues of institutions is that they provide stability, whereas a presumed vice is
that they are rigid and encounter difficulties in altering their governance patterns. Therefore,
as I examine the various approaches to institutionalism I will be concerned with the adaptive
and innovative capacities of institutions. Further, this capacity to adapt may be more evident
in the creation of more or less informal structures that can complement, or even substitute for,
the actions of the formal institutions.

INSTITUTIONAL THEORIES AND THEIR ROLE IN GOVERNANCE

To this point I have been discussing institutional theory in political science as if it were
an integrated whole. Unfortunately, that is not the case, and there are a variety of different
perspectives on the nature of institutions and their role in governance. I say “unfortunately,”
because the internal diversity in institutional approaches in political science limits the capacity
of institutionalism to be an effective alternative to more individualistic approaches to the
explanation of political phenomena.1
Although there is substantial internal diversity in institutional approaches (Hall and Taylor
1996; Peters 2017) there is some agreement on the major schools within the broad approach.
For the purposes of this examination of the governance implications of institutional theories
I will discuss five alternative perspectives on institutions: sociological, rational choice,
historical, empirical and discursive. These approaches have some common features but also
have substantial differences, being joined by a common concern with the role of structures in
defining the behavior of individuals.

Sociological Institutionalism

In most analyses there is one version of institutional theory with a strong sociological back-
ground that depends on a variety of normative instruments to exert control over, or at least
to manage, the members of the institution. The March and Olsen (1984, 1989; Olsen, 2010)
approach to institutions within political science is clearly in this school, as is the work of
scholars such as Selznick, Powell and DiMaggio (see Brinton and Nee 1998). The internal
logic of this approach is that the preferences of individuals who join an institution are shaped
by that institution, and therefore their actions are shaped by the values and symbols within the
institution.2
 Institutional theory  325

While the normative instruments involved in this version of institutionalism are discussed
primarily as means of altering the behavior of individuals, the emphasis on values can also
be used as a means of producing governance. That search for effective governance can be
conceptualized as occurring at either the macro or the micro level. That is, we can think about
governance being present for a more or less comprehensive set of policy areas, addressing
overall challenges for the society, or as occurring within individual policy areas.3
Linking sociological versions of institutionalism to micro-level governance is somewhat
easier than for macro-level governance. Actors within a single policy area are more likely
to share values, symbols and other aspects of a normative structure for governing than are
actors from broader collections of policy areas. One manifestation of this common structure
is the “epistemic communities” that define, or at least influence, policymaking in many policy
areas; especially those concerned with scientific or technical issues (Adler and Haas 1992;
Zito 2001). Even policy areas without a strong scientific background may still have their own
values and ideas, with organizations in the public sector attempting to propagate a set of norms
to govern in this area (Goodsell 2011).
At a broader level of governance, norms and ideas can still play a valuable role in steering
(Béland and Cox 2011). At this level of generality, steering requires substantial emphasis
on coordination and coherence among policies (Peters 2014a). For example, the emphasis
in steering contemporary economies has shifted toward “competitiveness” rather than more
traditional approaches to macroeconomic management. This contemporary version of eco-
nomic policy involves not only ministries of finance and central banks but also organizations
involved in education, labor market policy, social policy and all the other aspects of governing
that can make an economy more productive and competitive in world markets. Creating coher-
ent action among these disparate actors would be difficult through hierarchical means but is
more possible through the use of ideas and symbol manipulation.
The role of ideas in governance, and hence the strength of sociological institutionalism
in explaining governance, can also go beyond coordination. There may be commitments to
fundamental values of good governance—democracy, fairness, accountability—that shape the
behavior of whole systems of governance (Rosnvallon 2018). Thus, as well as shaping particu-
lar policy choices, sociological institutionalism can shape the general patterns of governing.
In addition to being better suited to micro-level governance, this version of institutionalism
is better suited for goal-setting and perhaps the formulation of means of intervention than for
other aspects of governing. The emphasis on ideas and symbols makes goal-setting an obvious
strength of this approach, but policy instruments (as means of intervention) also involve ideas
and some politics of their own (Lascoumes and Le Galès 2007). And those ideas and goals
return to the fore when policies are being evaluated, even if the managers of the evaluation
process may impose some ideas of their own (Vedung 2013).
The above having been said, the arguments of DiMaggio and Powell (1983) concerning the
interaction of institutions and their adaptation to one another do appear to have more relevance
for macro levels of governing. It is assumed that institutions are embedded in fields of other
institutions and, further, that the interaction among these institutions produces “isomorphism,”
or common characteristics, among them. Macro-level governance is produced through the
interaction of institutions. This interaction of institutional actors occurs both for the formal
institutions within the public sector—legislatures, cabinets, bureaucracies, and so on—and
for the interactions of the larger social institutions of government, law and markets. These
326  Handbook on theories of governance

interactions produce patterns of governing for larger swaths of policy and society than is true
for the more limited roles of individual institutions.

Rational Choice Institutionalism

Although March and Olsen might have considered this version of institutionalism to border on
being an oxymoron, there is a strong strand of thinking about institutions from an economic
and rational choice perspective.4 These approaches to institutions focus on the capacity of
institutions to solve collective-action problems. Perhaps most famously, Elinor Ostrom (1990)
has addressed the problems of common pool resources through the development of institutions,
largely through voluntary bargaining. Another common problem addressed by rational choice
versions of institutionalism is the problem of disequilibrium in many decision-making organ-
izations because of cycling preferences (Shepsle and Weingast 1994). And other versions of
rational choice institutionalism address structures for decision-making through the concept of
veto players and veto points, analyzing the capacity of institutions to make decisions (Tsebelis
2000) and the potential barriers to good decisions (Scharpf 1988). All of these problems
addressed by rational choice institutionalism have substantial significance for governance.
For rational choice versions of institutionalism the principal instrument available for control
internally is rules. These rules are designed to overcome the self-interest of individuals, or
perhaps represent ways in which actors can contain the self-interest of others as well as them-
selves in order to make decisions that may produce more collective benefits. Alternatively,
institutions may be conceptualized as sets of incentives and disincentives designed in order to
produce certain desirable outcomes in situations that otherwise could produce no decision or
a poor-quality decision.
The emphasis on decision-making and the capacity to solve certain types of difficult social
problems has obvious relevance for governance. Indeed, this approach to institutions has
more direct concern with governing than does the sociological version discussed previously.
Whereas the sociological approach contains a very strong set of instruments for controlling the
behavior of the members of particular institutions, its focus tends to be less on the problems
of governing. The rational choice approach tends to begin with the difficulties of making deci-
sions, and especially high-quality decisions, in the face of barriers to those decisions.
As was true for the sociological approaches, most of the relevance of rational choice
approaches is for more micro-level issues in governance. This approach can, for example,
provide good answers for how we can develop a set of rules for managing water resources in
an Asian community (Araral 2009) or for preventing the depletion of fish stocks in the North
Sea and the Grand Banks. Likewise, the emphasis on decision-making within institutions tends
to focus on particular institutions rather than broader sets of organizations and institutions
involved in governing (Money and Tsebelis 1997).
As noted for the sociological approach to institutionalism, governance at a more macro level
involves addressing issues that cut across policy domains and also may have to cut across levels
of government in multi-level governance systems. The logic of using rules and incentives can
certainly be applicable for the macro level of governing, and the collective-action problems
are at least as important in this broader governance setting. The difficulty may be, however,
in finding governance goals that are sufficiently transcendent across actors and institutions to
allow the formation of common rules. Ostrom and her colleagues (Ostrom and Basurto 2011)
 Institutional theory  327

have discussed these rules operating at a constitutional level, but these high-level rules tend to
operate through, and be enforced by, lower-level rules.
In terms of the tasks involved in governing, the rational choice approach has substantial
utility for all the tasks outlined, but may be particularly important for policy formulation and
for implementation. Formulation involves putting together sets of rules, incentives and disin-
centives, and that process is at the heart of the rational choice approach. Likewise, the imple-
mentation process involves multiple principal–agent relationships and delegation, another
aspect of governing that has been central to rational choice analysis (Huber and Shipan 2002).

Historical Institutionalism

A third version of institutionalism in political science is usually described as historical insti-

tutionalism (Steinmo et al. 1992; Steinmo 2008). In this version of the general institutionalist
approach, institutions are defined in part by ideas and in part by the persistence of those ideas
through policies and structures. That is, once created, a policy or organization in the public
sector is argued to be shaped by path-dependence and to continue along that path defined in
its “formative moment” until forced to change. In the initial formulation of this model these
changes were assumed to be major “punctuations” in the pattern, with the organization or
policy then establishing a new equilibrium and a new path.
I have pointed out that sociological institutionalism tends to rely upon the normative struc-
ture of the institution to influence both its own members and the surrounding society. Rational
choice institutionalism depends upon rules and incentive structures in order to produce its
effects. How does historical institutionalism produce its effects? Pierson (2000) has argued
that positive feedback reinforced the patterns of action of the organization or organizations
in the policy area. Economists such as David, on the other hand, have argued that the costs
associated with moving away from the path, even if that path is suboptimal, will prevent move-
ment. And Sarigil (2015) has argued that this behavior may just be habitual.
If we again consider the micro- and macro-level implications of historical institutionalism
for governance, we again find that the potential for influence is substantially greater at the
micro level than at the macro level. To some extent governance within the individual policy
areas is given as the ongoing path of that policy. That said, the need to open these paths for
change has led to ways of thinking about how these paths can be altered without a fundamental
punctuation (Mahoney and Thelen 2010). For example, change may come about by adding
new layers of policy to the existing ones or by displacing policy elements. Effective govern-
ance requires the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances, and the various mechanisms
identified for institutional change do provide that capacity.
Whether the nature of transformation of organizations and policies shaped by the concept
of path-dependency is through the extreme of punctuations or through more gradual means,
the pre-existing path could be replaced, or at least modified, by another (Peters et al. 2005).
Very much as would be seen through the advocacy‒coalition model of public policy (Weible
and Sabatier 2007), micro-governance within a single domain will involve conflicts among
contending perspectives and contending policy designs, with deviation from the existing path
requiring a viable alternative.
The historical institutionalist perspective appears less viable as a means of understanding
macro levels of governance, although with a bit of extension the argument can be made. For
example, if we argue that governance in much of the world since the early 1980s has been
328  Handbook on theories of governance

dominated by a neoliberal paradigm, then much the same logic of governing can be seen oper-
ating at the systemic level as well as at the level of individual institutions. The economic crisis
beginning in 2008 does not appear to have been a sufficient event to deflect the macro-level
governance pattern away from that paradigm, but there have been a number of instances of
layering and displacement within that persistent paradigm. Likewise, at least for Europe, the
welfare state has been a dominant macro-level paradigm for governing that would require
a significant punctuation to change it, even as it has been gradually altered in the face of
demographic and economic change. The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have unsettled the
neoliberal paradigm, with massive government interventions into the economy, while simulta-
neously reinforcing the welfare state paradigm.
The same logic about contention among alternative policy paradigms or paths may be iden-
tified as operating within multi-level governance. While in more unitary regimes there may
be a dominant paradigm covering the entire political system, in federal regimes there can be
more distinctive forms of governance existing in parallel. For example, in Canada the western
provinces were for some time significantly more conservative or libertarian than the remainder
of the country. Even in unitary regimes, alternative paradigms and paths may exist within the
same system, as in the case of Scotland within the United Kingdom.5
The basic framework of historical institutionalism is relevant for studying most elements
of policymaking, with the exception perhaps of implementation. The development of several
ideas about institutional change within the framework, however, does open the analysis to
thinking more about policy formulation or even goal-setting. In the process of changes such as
layering or displacement, new ideas about public policy, or governance, are being adopted and
hence new goals and new means of implementing those goals are being developed.

Empirical Institutionalism

Although far less theoretically driven than the other approaches to institutions discussed here,
there is a strong strand in political science that argues, sometimes implicitly, that structure does
matter. Weaver and Rockman (1983) asked the question of whether institutions—meaning, in
their case, primarily the differences between presidential and parliamentary government—
matter, and a good deal of significant research in comparative politics (see Hayo and Voigt
2010) continues to address that question. In this version of institutionalism the notion of an
institution is a rather commonsense one of structures, but the question being addressed remains
an important one for governance.
In contrast to the other approaches, the primary motivation of this form of institutionalism
is analysis of the macro level of governance. Institutional formats such as parliamentary and
presidential government can be expected to have broad influences over governing, albeit also
with some influence over the micro level. These forms of government raise questions not only
about their capacity to govern effectively on a quotidian basis, but also about their stability
in the face of challenges to their very existence (Linz 1990). Effectiveness and stability are
obviously related (Gilley 2009), but for considering governance they can also be considered as
distinct consequences of the choice of institutional arrangements.
At the micro level of governance, the more empirical conception of institutions appears of
less utility, unless one begins to move into the specifics of coalitions in parliamentary regimes,
or the capacities of presidential control over policy in other systems. This then further requires
moving away from the broad classifications of institutions into more fine-grained analyses of
 Institutional theory  329

institutions, such as coalition versus majoritarian governments and variations among presiden-
tial regimes (Lijphart 2012). Further, as one moves down to the level of individual policymak-
ing and implementing organizations in the public bureaucracy, this concern with the effects
of individual institutions on patterns of governance becomes very important (Aucoin 2012).
This approach to institutionalism appears to have some relevance for all the activities
involved in governance. That said, that relevance appears more for description of how govern-
ance is being created, rather than for any explanation of the choices being made by the actors
involved. That is, the empirical version of institutionalism is very good at identifying the
actors involved, and perhaps the internal processes of the institutions, but generally lacks any
way of explaining the choices being made.

Discursive Institutionalism

The final version of institutionalism, to some extent similar to both sociological and histor-
ical institutionalism, is defined largely by ideas. Discursive institutionalism (Schmidt 2010,
2011) argues that institutions reflect the discourses among the members of the institution, and
between the institution and its environment. Vivien Schmidt (2010) points to the existence of
two forms of discourse within an institution. First, coordinative discourse among the members
defines the meaning of the institution and its policies among the members. Second, commu-
nicative discourse is used to relate the institution to its environment and to explain its actions
to a wider audience.
As noted, the discursive approach has some similarities with sociological institutionalism,
but differs in several ways. The most important is that whereas the normative structure of an
institution in the sociological approach tends to be well established and is replicated through
the socialization of new members, in the discursive approach the norms are more contested.
On the other hand, coordinative discourse in this model of an institution is a temporary
equilibrium, and is subject to continuing discussion among the members. In this conception
the institution is defined more by the continuing discourse among the members than it is by
a stable equilibrium and an agreed-upon set of statements about what the institution means.
As was true for the sociological or normative perspective on institutions, the discursive
model is more effective in explaining the micro level of governance than it is in dealing
with macro-governance. In reality, however, this somewhat impermanent conception of
institutions, as contrasted to most others, may make governance even at the micro level more
difficult. While institutions may be criticized as being perhaps too stable to adapt adequately
to changing governance demands, the discursive version appears perhaps not sufficiently
permanent to provide continuing direction.
At the macro level of governance the discursive approach appears to have limited utility,
except perhaps as a means of generating coordination among the various actors involved.
Given that this version of institutional theory stresses discourse among actors it is analogous
to some arguments in the policy literature of framing and reframing policy issues (Schön and
Rein 1996; Bardach 1998) and its contributions to policy coordination and coherence. That is,
given the differences and potential conflicts among policy organizations, getting organizations
to work together around broader policy goals may involve working through their different
discourses and finding some agreement on the goals and instruments within a broader area of
governance.
330  Handbook on theories of governance

As well as potentially enhancing coordination among programs, the discursive approach

to institutions appears particularly suited for policy formulation and evaluation and feedback
concerning programs. To some extent the relatively lower level of institutionalization of policy
ideas or discourses enhances the range of options considered in the design of policies, as well
as the range of values that may be considered when evaluating interventions.

Summary

These various versions of institutional theory all provide some insights into governance.
They are, however, in general much better at providing governance within a particular policy
area—micro-governance—than they are in providing governance on a more systemic level.
This greater relevance for micro-governance appears in part a function of the reliance of at
least three of these versions of institutional theory on ideas or norms to define the institution.
That emphasis on ideas tends to narrow the vision of the institutional actors, while at the same
time providing them with guidance about the content of their governance actions.
The analytic question then becomes whether institutional approaches can provide useful
insights into the broader issues of governing. At a minimum these approaches do point to the
mechanisms through which governance can be provided (see below). Further, these various
approaches point most particularly to the role that ideas play in governing, whether those
ideas are expressed in terms of norms and values or in terms of discourses. For understanding
the broader macro level of governance those ideas must be more encompassing, dealing with
issues such as competitiveness rather than the more narrowly defined ideas associated with
individual policy areas such as monetary policy or tax policy.6

INFORMAL INSTITUTIONS FOR GOVERNANCE

The term “informal institutions” may appear as an oxymoron to some readers, and for more
traditional conceptions of institutions it would indeed be. But to understand contemporary
governance we should conceptualize institutions more broadly, and include institutionalized
structures that involve a range of actors and involve them in perhaps only limited ways. The
danger of thinking about institutions in only the more empirical manner described above, as
important as that may be, is that we ignore important patterns of action that fall outside, or
athwart, those formal structures.
To examine these more informal, but yet institutionalized, patterns of governance I will use
the concept of the “governance structure.” This concept is analogous to the “implementation
structure” that has been used to study policy implementation involving a wide range of actors
(Hjern and Porter 1981; Peters 2014b). These structures represent stable patterns of interaction
among a number of organizations, institutions and even individual actors in both the public
and the private sectors. These structures would meet at least a minimalist definition of institu-
tions by having patterned interactions over a period of time, and the structures interact in order
to provide governance. The governance provided is typically within a single policy area, but in
principle could be extended more broadly to cover broader policy domains.
These governance structures would also meet more stringent criteria for institutions. This
would be true most clearly for the normative or sociological perspective. In this view, going
back to Philip Selznick (1996), institutionalization involves infusing a structure with values.
 Institutional theory  331

The structure not only functions but also begins to have some meaning for the members
of that structure. These members, again whether individuals or organizations in this case,
believe that their patterns of interaction are important for them, and also for society. This is
not a simple mechanical relationship necessary to perform a task, but rather a significant part
of their professional and even personal lives. In the rational choice conception of institutions
the governance structure can also be easily modified to meet the criteria for an institution. If
an institution is to be defined through a set of rules and/or incentives for the members, which
are conceived as producing the desired behaviors from the participants, then a governance
structure can rather easily be seen as an institution. The real difficulty for this conception of the
governance structure may be in creating sufficient authority to enforce the rules, and sufficient
resources to provide adequate incentives for the participants to comply with the rules of the
emergent structure.
Having justified the conceptualization of governance structures as institutions, we must next
attempt to understand how they function. The first question is: How and why do they form?
That is a very basic question for all institutions, to which various conceptions of institutional-
ism provide differing answers (Peters 2017). Perhaps the most basic answer is the functionalist
one: that there is a recognized need for these structures.7 The existing formal structures would
be perceived as being incapable of performing the requisite tasks, or of performing them in the
manner deemed most appropriate.8
Having said that the functionalist conception may serve as the foundation of forming a gov-
ernance structure, just as it may for a more formalized institution, the manner of institution-
alizing the structure may be perceived rather differently, and may therefore involve different
dynamics. For example, as already noted, the normative perspective on institutionalization
involves the inculcation of values among the members. On the other hand, the rational choice
perspective tends to involve more of a design coming from some leader or putative leader
attempting to create the structure (Calvert 1995). And the assumption would be that such
a designer would create rules and an incentive structure that would motivate the participants
to function in the desired manner.
In addition to the functionalist and essentially design perspective on the creation of govern-
ance structures, there could also be an emergent logic for the formation of institutions, espe-
cially informal institutions. Given the assumption of informality in the governance structure,
the institution may emerge from more or less autonomous interactions among the actors, for
example in labor market policy interactions among unions, education providers, businesses
and public sector labor market organizations (Bonoli 2010). In this perspective the institution
would develop through bargaining, negotiation and continuing interactions (Thomson et al.
2003).
Somewhat confusingly, some—if not most—of the actors involved in the governance struc-
tures are themselves formal institutions. In this analysis of informal institutions the informality
refers primarily to the absence of formalized structures, even when there are continuing pat-
terns of interaction and informal, yet widely understood (and followed), rules. To some extent
these informal governance structures are capable of performing governance tasks that are not
so well suited to the formal institutions of the public sector. For example, social policies may
be delivered more readily by informal governance structures than by public bureaucracies that
may appear rigid and threatening to many potential recipients (see Hupe 2019).9
These informal governance structures may stand in a variety of relationships with the
formal institutions of governing. Helmke and Levitsky (2004) have discussed four such
332  Handbook on theories of governance

Table 30.1 Typology of informal institutions

Goals Effective formal institutions Ineffective formal institutions

Convergent Complementary Substitutive
Divergent Accommodating Competing

Source: Adapted from Helmke and Levitsky (2004).

relationships between formal and informal governance actors, including institutions as actors.
The relationships were dependent upon two characteristics of the formal institutions and their
potential informal partners. The first is the effectiveness of the formal institutions. Can the
formal governmental actors supply governance in the policy area for which they are nominally
responsible? In their original version of this argument they use the nature of the outcomes as
a second variable. In this chapter, however, I will be using the extent to which the goals of the
formal and informal actors are aligned as that second variable. I have already noted the extent
to which goal-setting is crucial for governance, and here there are two sets of goals that may
or may not be compatible.
As shown in Table 30.1, the interaction of these two variables produces four possible
types of relationships between formal and informal governance actors. The four patterns of
relationship all assume that there is a viable informal structure—the governance structure, in
my parlance—that can provide an alternative to the formal institutions operating in a policy
domain. At the extreme, the informal structure essentially replaces the formal, while in all
the others they co-exist, and in at least two will cooperate to see that governance of some sort
is provided. As already argued, in traditional thinking about institutions and governing the
state is the center, but these mixtures of the formal and the informal are now common, if not
virtually universal.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

This chapter has utilized one of the standard approaches in the social sciences— institutional
theory—to attempt to understand the process of governance. The formal institutions of gov-
erning remain important, even in states that have very strong civil society organizations and
networks. Although we know that these institutions are important, there are still important
academic questions about what sorts of theory are most appropriate for understanding and
explaining their role in governing.
I have identified five major approaches to institutionalism and demonstrated the relevance
of each of these approaches to governance. In addition to discussing governance in general,
I have also sought to differentiate between governance at a general societal level and govern-
ance within specific policy domains. Although institutionalism does have some capacity to
explain societal levels of governing, the majority of their capacity for explanation appears to
lie in micro-level governance. The interaction among institutions is the most persuasive form
for institutional analysis for understanding macro-level governance, given that the multiple
actors can work together to govern.
Finally, this chapter points out that although the tendency is to consider institutions in formal
terms, there are also informal institutional structures that are important or even essential for
governing. These informal structures involve relationships among public and/or private sector
actors that may complement the activities of the formal institutions involved in governance,
 Institutional theory  333

or perhaps attempt to substitute themselves for the formal governance institutions. Institutions
of all sorts are therefore essential for governing, and the theoretical task is to understand the
variety of linkages and their impacts on society.

NOTES
1. The initial call for a new institutionalism in political science was very much as an alternative
perspective to the calculative and individualistic assumptions that underlie much of contemporary
political theory (March and Olsen 1984).
2. The litany that is sometimes used is “myths, symbols, routines.” See Meyer and Rowan (1977).
3. This distinction also appeared in the corporatism literature. See Williamson (1989).
4. Two Nobel laureates in economics—Elinor Ostrom and Douglass North—have worked on
institutionalism from an economic perspective and indeed have worked on governance from this
perspective.
5. The devolved Scottish government has had a significantly more left-of-center policy regime in areas
such as healthcare and higher education.
6. A policy area such as taxation can, of course, be further divided and subdivided, and most policy
areas represent several levels of specialization, so that governance also may contain a number of
levels of action.
7. That, of course, raises the question of recognized by whom, and whether the actor(s) involved have
sufficient influence to bring about the creation of the interactive governance structure.
8. For example, the formal institutions of government may be capable of making policies in the issue
area, but those policies might not involve social actors in their formulation or implementation and
might therefore produce less effective policies (Torfing et al. 2012).
9. This is especially true for marginalized populations such as immigrants who are fearful of deporta-
tion, or at a minimum excessive scrutiny, by the formal institutions of the public sector.

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31. Public choice theory
Lina Ericksson

WHAT IS PUBLIC CHOICE THEORY?

Public choice theory is often defined as the application of economic theory to the study of
politics. It takes as its starting point the same assumptions as micro-economic theory: agents
are (usually) self-interested and rational utility-maximizers. Their behavior is determined by
the incentive structures within which they act. Public choice theorists ask the same type of
questions that economists ask (Mueller 2003): Are there equilibria? Are they stable? Are they
Pareto-optimal? And what is the process through which they are reached?
A central problem for public choice theorists is the capture of the political and bureau-
cratic process by self-interested politicians, bureaucrats and special interest groups, that is,
the biasing of policy outcomes in favor of some interests over those of the general public. In
analyzing this issue, the public choice analysis of governance reveals the crucial importance of
incentive structures: it focuses on whether the incentive structures facing the relevant agents
in the governance system in question are such that the outcomes will be in the interest of the
citizens, rather than biased in favor of politicians, bureaucrats or a particular special interest
group. Public choice theorists therefore focus on how the incentive structures that face politi-
cal agents and bureaucrats can be arranged in such a way that their actions will be in the public
interest.

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The historic roots of public choice theory are usually traced back to an article by Duncan Black
from 1948 on the rationale of group decision-making (Black 1948). This article laid the foun-
dations for the median voter theorem, according to which the incentives that face politicians
who want to be re-elected mean that, under certain conditions, policy will reflect the wishes of
the median voter (see for example Downs 1957 (below)). This prediction is often not borne out
empirically, and its importance is mainly due to the way the theorem specifies the conditions
that must be satisfied if political parties are going to converge to the policy position preferred
by the median voter. It thus provides a basis for thinking carefully about the implications of
those conditions, such as the distribution of voter preferences. Black followed up his earlier
work with his book The Theory of Committees and Elections in 1958.
In 1951, Kenneth Arrow published his immensely influential book Social Choice and
Individual Values, in which he proved that no aggregation mechanism can be guaranteed
always to produce a social welfare function or political decision that corresponds, in some
reasonable way, to the “will of the people.” In the wake of his results followed a wave of work
– usually referred to as “social choice theory” – on the ways individual preferences aggregate
into a collective decision, and under what conditions such aggregation will (and will not)
reflect those preferences in a way that we associate with democratic decision-making. Other

336
 Public choice theory  337

public choice theorists developed different fields of research. For example, Anthony Downs’s
An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957) put the focus on representative democracy and
vote-maximizing parties, and this too generated a lot of interest and subsequent work on how
vote-maximizing parties behave under different incentive structures and on what is sometimes
called the “voter paradox” – the fact that a lot of people vote despite Downs’s demonstration
that under certain conditions it is irrational for most agents to vote (see for example Green and
Shapiro 1994, but see also Grofman 2004). Downs and the other founding fathers of public
choice were all American or British, and therefore the initial focus was entirely on two-party
systems. But more recent research has extended the scope to include multi-party systems
(Mueller 2003).
In 1965, Mancur Olson published his seminal work on collective action problems and inter-
est group activities, explaining why collective action so often fails to take place, even though
it is quite clear that a large group of people have common interests. His arguments introduced
the theory of Prisoner’s Dilemma games to a wider audience and have provided the basis for
a huge literature on collective action (more on this below). He also introduced the principle of
fiscal equivalence: decisions about the financing of a public good should be made at that level
of governance that governs the constituency to which the benefits of the public good accrues,
so that the decision accurately reflects both those benefits and the costs in terms of taxes
required for financing it (Olson 1969).
Only a few years before, Buchanan and Tullock’s The Calculus of Consent (1962) had laid
the foundations for the field of constitutional political economy, as well as what was going to
become known as the “Virginia School”: this was a group consisting mostly of economists,
who used neoclassical micro-economic theory to analyze politics. They argued that many or
most political institutions were inefficient and that markets would enable individuals to satisfy
their preferences more efficiently by engaging in mutually beneficial exchange. Because of
their focus on political problems and failures and their belief in the efficiency of markets,
most members of the Virginia School advocated small governments, and their work often
had explicit normative implications for the organization of government and governance.
Their work proved to have significant political impact, influencing, among others, the Reagan
administration. But not all public choice theorists at the time were working within the tradi-
tion of the Virginia School. William Riker was one of the founders of the Rochester School:
its members were predominantly political scientists rather than economists, and instead of
focusing directly on the comparative advantages of markets over political institutions they
used game theory and mathematical modeling to study how governments work. They were
interested in conflicts of interest between agents and in understanding how actual electoral and
legislative institutions work, rather than what normative implications follow from political
failures. Riker’s work on coalitions – for example, his Theory of Political Coalitions (1962)
– concerned how political coalitions form and why, and others working in the same tradition
have studied legislative behavior, elections and treaty formations (e.g. see Laver and Shepsle
1996). Another focus within this school of thought has been the strategic manipulation of the
political process by rational agents, including strategic voting and manipulation of the agenda
and the framing of issue dimensions (say, by presenting an alternative as a take-it-or-leave-it
option rather than as one on a continuum of possibilities; see for example Riker 1984). Another
distinctly different kind of public choice theory grew up around Chicago-based economists,
including Nobel laureates George Stigler and Ronald Coase. They used micro-economic
theory, in particular price theory, to study a wide range of different political and sociological
338  Handbook on theories of governance

phenomena (Tollison 1989). Coase (1960) developed the theory of transaction costs, an idea
that was further developed by Williamson (1981, 2002) and is the basis for what has become
known as “institutional economics,” the study of the role political, economic and social
institutions play for the economic sphere, including economic development (see for example
Douglass North 1990). Another important insight was the theory of regulatory capture, asso-
ciated in particular with Stigler (e.g. see Stigler 1971). A regulatory agency is captured when
it, instead of working for the public good by regulating an industry, begins to promote the
interests of that industry. Capture is the result of a smaller group of agents with high stakes
in the outcome of a political decision focusing a lot of effort and resources on influencing
politicians and staff members associated with a regulatory agency, whereas the general public
have a smaller interest in the issue and thus do not mobilize to protect their interests. When
the regulatory agency is successfully captured, its implemented policies are the ones preferred
by the special interest group lobbying for them. Since a captured regulatory agency can do
more harm to the public good than the absence of any regulation can, public choice theorists
sometime caution against creating such agencies and, if they are created, against a lack of
transparency (Hamilton 2013).
Critics of public choice theory tend to focus on either the Virginia or the Chicago School
of public choice theory, without always noting that there are some important differences
between them. For example, in 1989, Donald Wittman published a highly critical journal
article, followed by a book in 1995, that took aim at public choice theory, but in fact primarily
targeted the Virginia School of public choice, with its emphasis on the inefficiency of political
institutions (see discussion below).
Public choice theory thus covers many different schools of thought, some more closely
related to recent developments in governance than others, and there is significant disagreement
among public choice theorists about both the research focus and, as we shall see, the political
implications of that research. Furthermore, the boundaries between public choice theory and
rational choice theory, as well as between public choice theory and political economy, are very
unclear and controversial. Many of the predictions made in the early public choice literature
have not been borne out empirically, something that public choice theorists freely admit (e.g.
see Niskanen 1998). Although this is sometimes taken by critics as a reason to dismiss public
choice theory, public choice theorists tend to see these early works as theoretical starting
points, which they use to conceptualize problems and formulate more sophisticated predictive
models. As Grofman (2004) points out, there is not one rational choice model of a phenome-
non; there are many. The same, he thinks, applies to public choice theory (for example, see his
discussion of early public choice predictions about voting behavior and the size of coalitions;
see also Friedman 1996).

Key Insights

Public choice theory is a very broad research program, and covers more than can be discussed
in this chapter. However, given the focus of this volume, the key insights are, I believe, the
following:

1. Collective action theory: Even if people have some interest in common, and so have an
incentive to join in collective action to further this interest, they often also have conflicting
interests. These conflicting interests mean that, although each person would prefer that
 Public choice theory  339

everybody (including themselves) take collective action to further their common interest
than that nobody does, each person is also faced with the temptation to free-ride on others’
efforts, because contributions to the collective action are costly, be it in terms of money,
time or effort. Sometimes contributing is even dangerous. Collective action theory is by
now widely recognized and used, even by people who by no means count themselves as
public – or rational – choice theorists. But given that the theory is based on applying an
economic perspective on decision-making, tracing outcomes back to incentive structures,
it is certainly part of the foundations of public choice theory and provides the basis for
much of the later work in this tradition, as we shall see in the following discussion.
2. A problem arises when costs and benefits accrue to different agents: In economic markets,
benefits and costs are more or less internalized by the decision-maker. Decisions thus accu-
rately reflect the benefits and costs of the proposed choice option. However, in political
institutions, this is often not the case. Decisions are not made by individuals but by collec-
tives and decided by a majority vote. A majority of less than 100 percent can thus decide
on policies that benefit only that majority, but whose costs are shared by, or even primarily
borne by, the losing minority. In the case of public goods, if those who pay for the produc-
tion of a public good are not the same agents as those who benefit from that public good,
the incentives for spending on the public good provision are likely to be distorted: if those
who pay but do not benefit decide, the public good is going to be under-provided; if those
who benefit but do not pay decide, it is going to be over-provided. Only by making sure
that the two groups are the same will the level of production of the public good be optimal
(see Olson 1969 on fiscal equivalence). The same basic problem underlies the analysis of
special interest group politics: when a small group stands to gain significant benefits from
a policy, the costs of which are distributed over the general public, that small group has an
interest in organizing itself into a special interest group that influences policy to its advan-
tage, but the general public has much weaker incentives to organize itself (for example,
in order to protect the environment against corporate polluters, or to protect consumer
interests).
3. The importance of competition: Competition can ensure that politicians, bureaucrats and
other relevant agents have incentives for efficient production and for being responsive to
public preferences. Monopoly power, on the other hand, does not provide those incentives
and is therefore likely to bias policy towards the interests of powerful agents and away
from the interests of the general public.
4. The principal–agent problem: When the policy-maker (the principal) is relying on some-
body else (the agent) to implement policy and to exercise discrete decision-making power
in the interests of the principal, but it is difficult for the principal to ascertain whether the
agent is really acting in the interests of the principal, there is a risk that the agent will act in
his/her own interests, rather than in the interests of the principal. So how can the principal
effectively control the agent’s actions? By ensuring that the agent’s incentives make it
in the agent’s interests to act as the principal wants him/her to do. The principal–agent
problem has a wide range of applications, from contract design to the relationship between
employer and employee, voter and politician, politician and bureaucracy, and politician
and private providers of public goods and services (for an overview of the problem and
some other applications, see Laffont and Martimort 2002). A host of different solutions
have been proposed, some of which are discussed below. Different kinds of governance
structures will give rise to different kinds – and effects – of principal–agent problems
340  Handbook on theories of governance

(see for example Papadopoulos 2007 for a discussion of principal–agent problems in

multi-level and network governance systems, or Vaubel 2006 on such problems in interna-
tional organizations).
5. Rent-seeking: The idea of rent-seeking goes back to an influential paper by Gordon
Tullock in 1967, and the label “rent-seeking” was introduced by Anne Krueger in 1974.
The term itself is somewhat confusing, since the phenomenon has nothing to do with what
we normally refer to as rent. Rather, the term refers to when people seek economic privi-
leges through the political system. Such privileges include tariffs on import from foreign
competitors or regulations that constrain domestic competition, as when a taxi licensing
system only serves to protect existing taxi companies from new competitors, or a firm gets
an advantaged position as a government contractor. When such economic privileges are
available, agents will spend resources in order to obtain them. But these resources are not
contributing to society’s productivity. Lobbying, for example, does not contribute anything
– the activity makes sense for the rational agent, say, a firm, if the cost spent on lobbying
is outweighed by the gains from the privileges obtained, but from society’s point of view
that money would have been better spent on other things such as research and development
activities. When agents compete over such economic privileges, society as a whole is
losing. It is difficult to estimate just how much money is wasted on rent-seeking. Krueger
(1974) found that, in many developing economies, the costs associated with rent-seeking
can be very significant. Tullock (1993) leans, somewhat tentatively, towards thinking
that in developed economies, in contrast, the costs are not very high. However, others,
including Joseph Stiglitz, argue that in developed countries, rent-seeking activities by the
wealthy are a major cause of wealth inequality (Piketty et al. 2011; Stiglitz 2012). Rational
political agents will act so as to increase their chances of winning, and this includes, in
particular, strategic manipulation of the political process. William Riker coined the term
“heresthetics” for such strategic manipulation (1984, 1986). There are many different
ways to manipulate the political decision-making process, including manipulation of the
political agenda, strategic voting and the framing of a political decision to emphasize some
issue dimensions rather than others. In particular, it can be useful to influence decisions
about the constitution this way: if you can bias the basic rules of the game in your favor,
you get an advantage. The idea of strategic manipulation of the decision-making procedure
has been further developed by other public choice scholars (e.g. see Moser et al. 2009)
and applied to a variety of cases (e.g. Cohen 1991 on military coups; Wawro 2001 on the
US House of Representatives; Black et al. 2013 on the US Supreme Court). In general, it
is now widely recognized that such manipulation of the decision process can happen, and
when it does it can have significant effects (McLean 2002), but there is disagreement about
how common the phenomenon is. Analysis of the particular historical cases that Riker used
as evidence has put some of them into doubt (see Mackie 2003).

Public Choice Methodology

Public choice theory is about the analysis of incentive structures. As noted above, it is
heavily influenced by micro-economic theory, which portrays agents as rational and usually
self-interested, acting so as to maximize their utility within a given incentive structure. Public
choice theorists often use mathematical and game-theoretical modeling of what such utility
maximization would amount to under different incentive structures in order to construct
 Public choice theory  341

models that can help us understand whether there are equilibria, and predictions are typically
tested using quantitative methods.

PUBLIC CHOICE THEORY APPLIED TO KEY AREAS OF

GOVERNANCE

Collective Action Theory

Collective action theory is the theory about how, and under what conditions, people work
together to achieve some common interest. At the heart of the theory is the recognition that
such collective action is difficult to achieve because of collective action problem(s). In 1965,
Mancur Olson published what would turn out to be a hugely influential book – The Logic
of Collective Action. He pointed out that, even if people have a shared goal, such as having
a union that negotiates salaries and working conditions, contributions to the creation and
running of such a union involve costs in terms of money, time and/or effort. If the benefits
achieved by the union, such as higher salaries and better working conditions, can be enjoyed
by everyone regardless of whether they paid a share of the costs involved, the common good
– in this case the union – is called a common (or public) good. Because contribution is costly,
each person has an incentive to free-ride on others: enjoying the benefits in terms of higher
salaries and better working conditions while letting others bear the costs of organizing and
sustaining the union. But, if the benefits could be restricted to those who had contributed to the
collective action necessary to achieve them, no collective action problem arises: people will
contribute to the union if and only if the benefits the union can bring them outweigh the costs
of contribution.
The incentive structure that generates collective action problems of this type is often
described in game-theoretic terms as a Prisoner’s Dilemma game. Although everyone prefers
to contribute to a union rather than there being no union, their most favored option might
still be that others bear the costs of the union, so that they themselves can enjoy the benefits
without paying the costs. And of course, if nobody else is contributing, you have no reason to
contribute either, since a union requires the contributions of more than one person.
For each person, it is thus better not to contribute: if others contribute, they themselves
can free-ride on those contributions, and, if others do not contribute, their own contribution
would not be enough to achieve the beneficial results. An individual is therefore better off
not contributing, no matter what others do. The result, however, is that nobody contributes,
even though everyone might prefer the outcome in which everyone – including themselves –
contributes over the outcome in which nobody contributes (and the benefits are not achieved).
This is a case of what is often referred to as an individually rational but collectively irrational
outcome: everyone would be better off if everyone contributed than if nobody did, and yet
nobody will contribute.
A common version of the problem, in particular relevant for governance, is when a large
group of people have a common interest, but the stakes for each person are not very high
and the logistics involved in identifying others with the same interests and contacting them
are difficult to manage, while there is a smaller group of people with a conflicting interest,
for whom the stakes are higher, and who can more readily identify and contact one another.
Typical examples are consumer or environmental interests shared by the broad public versus
342  Handbook on theories of governance

the interests of businesses. The outcome is often that the smaller group manages to organize
itself collectively and lobby for policy that is in its interests, whereas the larger group fails to
do so, and the result can be special interest politics that is not in the public interest.
Mancur Olson (1965) pointed out that there are lots of ways in which people can solve this
problem. A common strategy is to use coercion: contributions to a state’s common goods –
like infrastructure, a health or education system, defense, a police force and so on – constitute
a collective action problem of a similar kind to that of the union. Everyone prefers to have
these common goods, but everyone also prefers that others pay for them. But a state can – and
typically does – make paying taxes compulsory and sanctions those who fail to pay. That way,
contributions are ensured, and everyone is better off. Another common strategy is to ensure
that some benefits only can be enjoyed by those who contributed. For example, a union might
not be able to exclude non-contributors from the benefits of higher salaries and better working
conditions, but they can negotiate special benefits for members, such as insurance discounts.
Given the free-rider problem, it is not only ongoing contributions that are problematic but
also the initiative to create the organization in the first place. Why is it that some people do
take the initiative? Olson (1965) noted that, in most cases, people do not face exactly similar
incentives: some have more to gain from taking collective action than others. Those who take
the initiative to create a union might stand to gain paid employment by that union, or a polit-
ically important reputation, or be in a particularly vulnerable situation in the work place. In
fact, there are a whole host of related collective action problems, differing from each other
with respect to the exact distribution of incentives for the people involved. In some situations,
collective action might consequently be easier to achieve; in others it might be harder.
It is common to argue that it is harder to organize larger groups than small ones. This is
often true but not always. What makes large groups harder to organize is typically that, in
a large group, any single individual’s contribution is less important, and is perceived to be
less important, which increases the temptation to free-ride. But, if successful collective action
requires the contribution of each person involved, every contribution is crucial, regardless of
the size of the group in question. In game-theoretic terms, this is not a case of a Prisoner’s
Dilemma game; instead, it is an Assurance game: the problem is not to avoid free-riding
(because, if every person’s contribution is necessary, free-riding is impossible) but rather to
assure each person that the others are willing to contribute too. But, even if it is not absolutely
necessary that each person contributes (that is, the free-riding problem still exists), it is pos-
sible to achieve collective action in large groups, at least under some conditions. Interaction
with others in the group can create smaller sub-groups within which the temptation to free-ride
is smaller.
Public choice theorists, interested in incentive structures and their implications, have built
on Olson’s work, and there now exists a large body of work on the conditions under which
collective action is possible or even likely, investigating factors such as out-group mobiliza-
tion, whether the common good is a one-off good or requires continuous contributions, and
many others. Olson’s insights have also been applied to a large number of cases of collective
action not discussed by him, for example the American civil rights movement (Chong 2000),
and provide the basis for a lot of the work discussed below.
 Public choice theory  343

Political Control and the Bureaucracy

A significant part of public choice research on bureaucracies has stressed how the bureaucracy
can have its own goals, independently of those of politicians or voters. What, more exactly,
these goals are assumed to be has varied. Niskanen’s early work (1971) was the starting point
for a lot of this research, and he predicted that bureaucrats would try to maximize their budget,
since a higher budget gives them higher income, power and prestige. This prediction has been
disconfirmed by the evidence (see for example Johnson and Libecap 1989), and later theoret-
ical work in this area has used more sophisticated assumptions about what it is that bureau-
crats want, including that they try to maximize their discretionary budget (see for example
Migué and Bélanger 1974; Niskanen 1991; for a general discussion see Wintrobe 1997: 432).
Furthermore, Niskanen originally assumed that the bureaucratic head of the department has
significant influence over the budget, because of informational asymmetry: the bureaucratic
unit’s head knows the legislator’s preferences, but the legislator does not know the cost struc-
ture of the bureaucracy. Therefore, the bureaucracy can pretend that services are more costly
than they are or pretend that only expensive production of services is available. But as soon as
the legislator can exercise some control over the bureaucrat, for example by getting informa-
tion about the actual cost structure or by making bureaucratic units compete with each other,
the bureaucracy’s ability to exploit the asymmetry in information is reduced (see for example
Calvert et al. 1989; Banks and Weingast 1992). Others apply principal–agent theory, which
takes as its starting point the assumptions that the principal (the legislator, in this case) knows
the agent’s (the bureaucracy’s) utility function and can thereby devise an incentive system that
will make it in the agent’s interests to act in the way desired by the principal (see for example
Bendor et al. 1987; Epstein and O’Halloran 1999). It has been shown that Niskanen’s claim
that the government is too large and grossly inefficient only holds under certain conditions
(Moe 1997). But nevertheless, although Niskanen’s predictions about budget-maximizing
bureaucrats have been disconfirmed, his theory has been an important contribution, inspiring
a larger literature on political control over bureaucratic agencies. For example, Williamson
uses transaction costs economics to analyze the public bureaucracy and argues that, just as
with other modes of governance, it works well for some kinds of transactions but not for
others. Understanding the kinds of problems that affect different modes of governance (public
bureaucracies, regulations, markets, etc.) is essential for choosing the right mode for the right
task (Williamson 1999).
Another strand of public choice research on bureaucracies concerns how to provide incen-
tives that encourage efficiency and hard work. Public choice theorists have often advocated
performance-sensitive pay as a solution (both in the public and the private sector). Paying
people according to how well they perform the relevant task provides them with an incentive
to perform well. However, this requires that it is possible to find a good measure of perfor-
mance, that ensuring high performance is worth the cost of monitoring and that all aspects of
performance that are valuable to the principal can be monitored and compensated in a way that
provides the agent with incentives not to neglect one of them (see for example Prendergast
1999). The latter has been shown to be particularly problematic for many cases of governance:
for example, a teacher whose performance is measured on the basis of how well the students
do on a test will generally tend to focus efforts on raising students’ test performance but might
neglect other aspects of good teaching, because these are not measured and used for evaluation
of the teacher’s performance (Prendergast 1999).
344  Handbook on theories of governance

Another strategy for encouraging certain employee behaviors and discouraging others is the
use of performance evaluations at specified intervals and quotas or threshold rates. But evalu-
ations after specific time periods and quotas create non-linear incentive structures. Behavior at
the beginning of an evaluation period can be rather different than behavior at the end, because
people tend to discount future benefits and costs. And people behave very differently when
they are far away from their quota goal to when they are close to achieving it, or when they
have already achieved it, and this also applies to cases in which the quota is a threshold that
they should not pass. For example, in order to encourage good, careful medical practice by
doctors, principals can set a particular mortality quota; if the number of a doctor’s patients who
die is above a particular threshold, the doctor is penalized in some way. However, this can bias
the doctors’ willingness to take on difficult cases. Leventis (1998) has shown that, when such
incentives were given to New York cardiac surgeons, they tended to reject high-risk patients
when they got closer to the threshold. Another example is that of a job-training agency that
was compensated on the basis of how many of its trainees got jobs and how well paid these
jobs were. The agency chose to work with trainees who were more employable (Cragg 1997).

Centralization versus Decentralization

The insight that outcomes rarely are in the general interest when costs and benefits do not
accrue equally to all agents has led some public choice theorists to argue in favor of central-
ization. If a public good needs to be (or is most efficiently) provided at the national level,
but decisions are made at the local level, then local governments may attempt to free-ride on
other local governments, and the result is an under-provision of the public good. A centralized
government can solve that problem by enforcing contributions. A centralized government
would also solve the problem of externalities that arises when a decision by a local govern-
ment has negative or positive implications for other local governments. The decision-making
local government has no interest in taking these further costs or benefits into account; it only
considers the costs and benefits for its constituency. A socially optimal result is only achieved
when decisions are taken by an agent (the central government) that has incentives to take into
account the costs and benefits to all citizens. And finally, a common argument in favor of
centralized government is production efficiency (see Boyne 1996 for a discussion of public
choice arguments in favor of centralization).
But most public choice theorists have been wary of large bureaucracies and political author-
ities. The reasons are (at least) twofold: a problem of aggregation and a problem of incentives.
The problem of aggregation is that people have different preferences regarding the level of
public good provision and taxes and regarding the mix of goods and services that the taxes are
used for. Individuals have different needs and preferences, and sometimes these differences
follow geographical borders, depending on local industry and other factors. Different commu-
nities might thus have different problems and might also be able to contribute to the solution
of those problems in different ways, depending on their resources, knowledge and abilities.
Local governments can therefore make decisions that better satisfy the preferences of their
constituency.
The incentive problem is familiar by now: everyone pays taxes, but not everyone prefers
the same level of public good provision, and therefore, the public good is likely to be either
under- or over-supplied. And obviously, if the costs and benefits are geographically unequally
distributed, so that people in one area benefit much more than people in other areas from a high
 Public choice theory  345

provision of a particular public good, political decisions are unlikely to reflect the optimal
overall level.
The problem of over-supply of public goods becomes even more acute because of the phe-
nomenon of “log-rolling,” that is, when one group supports another’s high-provision proposal
in exchange for support for their own, which means that high-provision proposals can become
policy without even benefiting the majority. These arguments are often made in normatively
laden language: it is said that taxes are “too high” and government is “too big.” Such state-
ments refer to a normative view about an optimal level at which the marginal cost of the level
of provision of a public good equals the marginal utility derived from it.
One solution is to make decisions about different public goods at different levels of govern-
ment: the global level for carbon emission regulations, the national level for defense spending
and the local level for sport arenas and garbage collection. Which level is best for what public
good is of course not always obvious, and people disagree about the correct level for decisions
about, for example, education or health.
Tiebout (1956) argued that competition between local councils, together with decentraliza-
tion, could help solve the problem of how best to satisfy people’s preferences and ensure that
politicians and bureaucrats kept costs down and were responsive to the interests of the citi-
zens. He argued that, if local governments had control over taxes and public good provision,
people could vote “with their feet,” moving to the area where the level of taxes and public
good provision aligned with their preferences. Further, unpopular decisions would deprive
a local government of its tax base, which would create a push towards a different decision.
This way, local governments would be competing with each other for their tax base, ensuring
that politicians are responsive to the public’s preferences, and individuals can maximize their
satisfaction by moving to the area where the decisions reflect their preferences. This way,
overall satisfaction with political outcomes would increase. It is far from clear, however,
that people do vote with their feet in the way that this theory of fiscal migration predicts (see
for example Sharpe and Newton 1984; Dowding et al. 1994). But Bailey (1993) argues that,
regardless of whether horizontal competition actually does increase the welfare of the citizens,
the theory has had significant influence on, for example, the organization of American local
political authorities.

Competition and New Public Management

Another attempt to increase competition has been widespread privatization of goods and
service production. Local governments used to be both producers and providers of public
goods and services, but the push for privatization has meant that production has been con-
tracted out to the private sector. Politicians specify the output level, and the producers are
responsible for achieving that output at the agreed price but control how they do it. One of
the many examples of this argument’s influence over policy is the 1988 Local Government
Act in the UK, which required compulsory competitive tendering by local political author-
ities in order to increase competition between the private service producers (Bailey 1993).
Privatization is meant to solve the principal–agent problem by allowing the principal (the local
government) more control over the agent (the producer of the goods and services). Whereas
before, the production was in the hands of a bureaucratic monopoly that lacked incentives for
efficient production, competition between private producers for government contracts creates
incentives for producers to deliver the desired outcomes at the lowest cost.
346  Handbook on theories of governance

Privatization has also been seen as a solution to the problem that service production by the
bureaucracy tends to be quite rigid and uniform: many different possible producers allow for
more flexibility (Bailey 1993). However, the extent to which this has worked as intended is
unclear. Some claim that privatization has been a success, citing cases in which privatization
led to increased efficiency (e.g. Savas 2000); others claim that privatization has led to a wide
range of negative results, including corruption, increased costs, lower wages and worse
working conditions (see for example Sclar 2000). At most, the empirical support for privatiza-
tion is limited (Hirsch 1995; Hefetz and Warner 2004).
In cases where desired outcomes are easily specified and measured it works better, but, in
cases in which it is not easy to measure whether service producers have delivered the outcomes
they were meant to, the principal–agent problem resurfaces (for a discussion regarding health
care, see Folbre 2001: 53–82). Competition often plays a role in suggested solutions to the
problem, but competition for public contracts will not solve problems concerning aspects
that are not easily measured, since competition for contracts tends to focus efforts even more
on delivering as much measurable performance as possible for as low cost as possible, and
the increased pressure increases the risk that aspects that cannot easily be measured will be
neglected. Therefore, the principal–agent problem is often even worse when the production
of public goods is outsourced to private producers: private producers have a strong financial
incentive to deliver less, in particular to deliver less on those dimensions that are hard to
measure, whereas the bureaucracy seldom had quite such a strong incentive to do so. Indeed,
sometimes bureaucracies have returned to the production of services because private produc-
tion resulted in low-quality services and/or because it was difficult to specify the contracts and
monitor service delivery (Hefetz and Warner 2004).
On the one hand, the fact that market-based provision of services did not eliminate the inef-
ficiencies can be seen as a failure of public choice theory. But, on the other hand, the problems
of corner cutting and insufficient attention to aspects that are difficult to measure are them-
selves predicted by public choice theory: self-interested agents are going to use opportunities
to further their own interests, and we need to pay careful attention to the incentive structures
that agents act within in order to ensure that agents will act in ways that also are in the public
interest. Although many public choice theorists have argued in favor of privatization because
of the emphasis the Virginia School places on political failures, the theory itself can just as
well be used to analyze the principal–agent problem that arises between the government as the
buyer of goods and service production and the private sector as the seller.
Numerous other problems with privatizations have been noted in the literature. For
example, if the political institution that contracts out the production of social services or goods
does not have access to information about the costs that private firms face, it is also possible
for the private firms to charge a higher price than their costs really warrant. It might be hoped
that competition will solve this problem, but, as Dunleavy (1986) notes, competition will only
do this if:

[T]he functions in question are fairly simple, are already being carried out extensively in a com-
petitive part of the private sector, and can realistically be easily taken over by new firms entering
the market with relatively low levels of capital and expertise. These requirements might be met in
a market such as office-cleaning. However, there are also important and numerous cases where these
conditions are not met. (Dunleavy 1986: 29)
 Public choice theory  347

Others have also pointed out the common lack of competition even after privatization (Hirsch
1995; Warner and Hefetz 2003). Dunleavy further notes that public servants serve more social
goals than just service production and cost minimization, and that these goals drive up their
costs in comparison with private service producers, who do not invest any resources in such
socially beneficial practices: using regular salaried staff rather than casual labor, operating
good health and safety measures at work, ensuring fair treatment of staff and clients, properly
investigating complaints, encouraging good pension development and so on (Dunleavy 1986).
But it is worth noting that many of these criticisms employ public choice theory: although
many public choice theorists, especially of the Virginia School, have argued in favor of
privatizations, there is, as these critics prove, nothing about the use of economic tools for ana-
lyzing political institutions that precludes using those tools for criticizing inefficient incentive
structures and insufficient competition when these problems apply to the private production
of public services.
An increasing dissatisfaction with privatizations has, among other things, also led to an
increasing focus on civic engagement, ranging from deliberative processes (see Warner 2008)
to social enterprise governance. These theoretical and practical developments are not primarily
driven by public choice theory. However, it is worth noting that public choice theory neverthe-
less offers insights important for understanding such processes. For example, social enterprise
governance has sometimes relied on ethnic minority communities to become involved in the
regeneration of deprived neighborhoods (Sepulveda et al. 2011). However, as Evans (2012)
shows, old problems arise in new forms. In a case study of a Chinese community in Liverpool,
Evans uses theoretical insights from public choice theory to demonstrate that the incentives
created by the availability of regeneration funds changed the Chinese community into a special
interest group involved in rent-seeking behavior.

THE STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF PUBLIC CHOICE

THEORY ANALYSES OF GOVERNANCE

Incentive structures matter. People’s actions may not be completely determined by their
self-interest, but it is quite plausible that most people are at least sensitive to what incentives
they face, in the sense that it is one of the most important considerations for them – and in
some cases the most important consideration. Pointing out what would happen if people
involved in governance – be it as politicians, bureaucrats, non-governmental organizations and
so on – are acting in accordance with their self-interest can be crucial for our ability to estab-
lish governance institutions that achieve socially desirable results. And it is of course trivially
true that people do not become fundamentally different creatures just because they suddenly
play another role in governance, so we should avoid ascribing to politicians, bureaucrats and
all other agents involved in governance more selfless motives than we do to normal people.
In particular, we should avoid creating a governance system that relies on agents having such
selfless motives. For example, industry capture of regulatory agencies is a well-documented
problem. And, when we consider how to structure a system of governance that involves for
example, minority groups, one important consideration should be the extent to which we create
incentives that are likely to lead to a transformation of a community organization into a special
interest group competing with other special interest groups for benefits. However, it is also true
that public choice theorists, because of the assumption that agents are self-interested, fail to
348  Handbook on theories of governance

appreciate the way in which playing a role within a governance structure can change people’s
views about their individual interests, as well as increase their inclination towards identifying
with the governance institution and its goals. When we make policy recommendations on the
basis of a simplified motivational assumption, we should also keep in mind that these policies
themselves may affect people’s motivations. In particular, there are numerous examples where
the introduction of an incentive structure expected to encourage people to behave in a particu-
lar way instead crowds out their original motivation for behaving in that way, resulting in less
of the desired behavior (Bowles and Hwang 2008; Ariely et al. 2009).
As with all research programs, there can be a tendency to be blinded by the bright light
of one salient theoretical idea and ignore evidence, theoretical and empirical, that cautions
against the uncritical adoption of the idea. Many, although definitely not all, public choice
theorists, especially those influenced by the Virginia School, have advocated competition as
a general solution to inefficiencies. But a more sophisticated use of their own theory for the
analysis of incentives would – and does – reveal more nuanced insights about the conditions
under which privatization of local service production, for example, creates desirable effects.
In general, the analysis of incentive structures needs to be applied with the same care to all
governance alternatives, not just to the target of the current criticism. Further, simplifications
about bureaucratic independence from political control or idealized fully competitive markets
can blind us to the way actual incentive structures work. In reality, the relation between pol-
iticians and the bureaucracy is more complicated and affords the former many tools for con-
trolling the latter, and under-specified contracts and insufficient market competition are likely
to make contracting out the production of public services to private companies inefficient in
many cases.
It is worth noting that, although Virginia School public choice theorists have claimed that
political institutions are usually inefficient, not everyone is convinced. In a very influential
article, Donald Wittman argues that: “Behind every model of government failure is an assump-
tion of extreme voter stupidity, serious lack of competition, or excessively high negotiation/
transfer costs. Economists are very suspicious of similar assumptions regarding economic
markets. This skepticism should be carried over to models of government behavior” (Wittman
1989: 1421). Indeed, Wittman claims that, yes, markets can work but so can democracy.
If voters are well informed, there is significant political competition, and the negotiation
and transfer costs are relatively low, then self-interested agents will act so as to realize any
potential Pareto-optimal outcomes. The pressure on politicians to satisfy voters in order to get
re-elected and the activity of well-organized special interest groups will ensure that the system
is efficient, that is, no Pareto-optimal improvements could be made (Wittman 1989, 1995).
But notice also that the arguments Wittman produces are the same sort of arguments that
a public choice theorist could very well use: arguments about competition, transfer costs and
the pressure that voters can put on politicians to act in the interests of the voters rather than in
the interests of the politicians.
However, there are also areas in the field of governance where public choice theory is not
a natural choice even if used more carefully. Since this is a chapter about public choice theory,
rather than alternative theories, I will only mention one that has already been briefly discussed
here: the increasing emphasis on deliberation and civic engagement. This development in
the governance field is not driven by public choice theorists, but, as we have seen, a study of
incentive structures and their implications can nevertheless reveal aspects of these phenomena,
even if public choice theory is not the primary theoretical tool for understanding them.
 Public choice theory  349

FUTURE RESEARCH

Public choice theory is a very broad field, and it therefore inspires research in many dif-
ferent areas. Here I will only highlight four such areas that seem particularly relevant from
a governance perspective: those of New Public Management, of regulation agencies and of
involvement of citizen groups in governance, and collective action problems. It seems clear
that privatizations made in order to achieve more flexibility, lower costs and better respon-
siveness to citizen preferences have not always achieved those results. One pressing research
question, which has already received significant attention but needs even more, is under what
conditions privatizations will lead to better outcomes, and when public service producers will
be preferable. Partly this depends on what solutions to the principal–agent problem will work
under what circumstances, and an increasing interest in crowding-out phenomena has led to
recent interest in the conflict between external incentives and intrinsic motivation to provide
high-quality public service (see for example Gailmard 2010).
Another pressing research question is how to achieve effective regulatory agencies, which
are protected against capture by various strong special interest groups. There are many exam-
ples of regulatory agencies that have been captured in this way, but there are also examples
of regulatory agencies that have managed to avoid capture. Further research is needed on the
factors that determine capture, in particular since creating a regulatory agency is a common
solution to a wide range of governance problems.
A third research question is how to involve various citizen groups in governance in a way
that achieves the potential benefits of such civil society involvement in governance while
avoiding creating rent-seeking and potential capture problems. We need to be aware that
changing incentive structures can have unexpected, and sometimes undesirable, effects.
Further, even though there by now exists a huge literature on collective action problems,
we have a long way to go before we know how to deal even with the most common versions.
One that is of particular interest to governance theorists concerns governance in multi-level
systems, given that such systems suffer from various forms of free-riding peculiar to those
systems.

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32. The Advocacy Coalition Framework
Jonathan J. Pierce and Alex Osei-Kojo

INTRODUCTION
Described as a magical concept (Pollitt and Hupe 2011), the notion of governance can be
traced mainly to efforts to advance theory in response to socio-political developments since the
1970s. For scholars, there was the need to theorize the growing influence of non-governmental
actors within the policy process as well as policy implementation. The impact of these actors
on governmental activities grew stronger partly because of the expansion in the role of gov-
ernment in society, coupled with the acute need for mobilizing societal resources to perform
the functions of the state. Developing a theory to analyze this phenomenon was necessary in
order to facilitate valid and reliable measures for knowledge production. From the social and
political development standpoints, the apparent flaws in the welfare state model eroded public
trust in elected officials. This paved the way for private actors to be actively involved in the
business of government; something that was previously the exclusive preserve of the state.
While the concept of governance has multiple definitions and evokes different meanings
among scholars of public policy and administration, there are foundational ideas that help to
restrict how it is studied and understood. First, governance embraces the notion of multiplicity,
meaning that policy actors may come from government, the economy or civil society. Second,
the scope of governmental functions embraces the public, private and non-profit sectors. In this
context, these different sectors intersect and overlap in ways that can be difficult to exclude
from the functions of governance. Third, power is decentralized, and formal, state actors strug-
gle to make unilateral decisions. With this background, Ansell and Torfing (2016: 4) define
governance as “the interactive processes through which society and the economy are steered
towards collectively negotiated objectives.” The main highlights from this definition are that
governance involves interactions, processes and negotiations. At the same time, the activities
of policy actors in this domain are enhanced through collaboration rather than authorization.
The governance concepts of multiple actors, intersecting functions, and decentralized
power correspond to the policy process theoretical framework called the Advocacy Coalition
Framework (ACF). This framework was developed in the 1980s by Paul Sabatier and Hank
Jenkins-Smith, utilizing components from both the top-down and bottom-up implementation
literature of the 1970s and 1980s, thus sharing many of the foundational components of the
governance literature that were also being developed at the same time (Sabatier 1987, 1988;
Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993). Similar to governance, the ACF emphasizes the role of
multiple policy actors across various sectors forming coalitions to collaborate in their efforts,
including resources, with the goal of influencing the policy process. Hence, advocacy coa-
litions seek to translate their policy beliefs into public policy (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith
1993). What flows from this observation is that the power distribution in the policy arena is
not restricted to formal, governmental actors, but more broadly to those policy actors actively
engaged across various venues seeking either policy change or stasis.

353
354  Handbook on theories of governance

From this perspective, the ACF can be integrated with the concept of governance (Koebele
2019, 2020). The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to present the ACF by emphasizing its
interconnectedness to public governance. The chapter is organized as follows. It first gives an
overview of the ACF including its core concepts. Next, it explores the strengths and weak-
nesses of the ACF within the context of public governance. The chapter then synthesizes key
insights from a range of ACF applications to different types of governance challenges. The
chapter concludes by reflecting on the challenges, current developments and ways forward.

OVERVIEW OF THE ACF

The ACF was created by Paul Sabatier and Hank Jenkins-Smith in the 1980s (Sabatier 1987,
1988; Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993). It was in part a response to the limitations of current
research on the policy process that relied too heavily on either top-down or bottom-up per-
spectives, a lack of focus on scientific and technical information, the need to take a long-term
perspective on policy-making and to use models of the individual that were boundedly rational
(Jenkins-Smith et al. 2018). The framework compiled theoretical concepts from public policy
as well as political science and social psychology. These include issue networks (Heclo
1978), implementation (Sabatier and Mazmanian 1980), belief systems (Putnam 1976),
bounded rationality (Simon 1985), and scientific and technical information in policy debates
(Jenkins-Smith 1990). This resulted in a framework that focuses on the interactions of policy
actors within a policy subsystem competing to translate their beliefs into public policy.
The ACF has several assumptions (see Jenkins-Smith et al. 2018 for a list), but the basic
premise is that to understand the policy process, scholars should study policy actors who share
beliefs and coordinate their actions within a policy subsystem to either change or maintain
current public policy. Policy actors include a wide range of actors including officials from
all levels of government, interest groups, academics, the business sector and members of the
media. Policy subsystems are bound by a substantive topic and a territorial scope or author-
itative jurisdiction (Pierce and Hicks 2019). They can include multiple levels of government
both vertically and horizontally. The ACF also draws attention to the importance of scientific
and technical information that shape how policy actors understand public problems as well as
policy learning both within and between coalitions. Finally, policy change is a process that can
take over a decade to understand, so a long-term perspective is necessary.
The ACF has theories about three central concepts: advocacy coalitions, policy learning and
policy change (Jenkins-Smith et al. 2018). Advocacy coalitions are groups of policy actors
that share beliefs and coordinate their strategic behavior, utilizing resources to influence the
policy process. Coalition membership as well as policy beliefs can be fairly stable or change
over time. Policy learning is changes in beliefs or behavior that result from lived experiences
or updating beliefs based on new information that can occur within or between advocacy
coalitions. Policy learning is often influenced by external institutional factors such as the
availability of collaborative forums, level of conflict between coalitions, attributes of policy
actors as well as attributes of external stimuli. Policy change reflects the winning advocacy
coalition’s policy beliefs (Pierce and Weible 2016).
There are four primary pathways associated with bottom-up policy change in the ACF
as well as a fifth top-down pathway (Pierce et al. 2020b). The four bottom-up pathways to
policy change focus on how advocacy coalitions can skillfully utilize focusing events: either
 The Advocacy Coalition Framework  355

(1) internal; or (2) external to the policy subsystem to bring about change; or how advocacy
coalitions can come together and either: (3) learn from each other; or (4) produce a negotiated
agreement; or some combination thereof, to change public policy (Jenkins-Smith et al. 2018).
Focusing events internal to a policy subsystem include policy failures and scandals among
dominant coalitions, while external focusing events include changes in socio-economic condi-
tions, public opinion, and policy changes from other policy subsystems. Policy learning may
occur between or within advocacy coalitions and is often the result of new scientific or tech-
nical information. Negotiations are more likely to occur when the advocacy coalitions reach
a hurting stalemate and there is a policy broker who can moderate the process. One or more
of these pathways are necessary but are not sufficient to change public policy (Jenkins-Smith
et al. 2018).
The top-down pathway to policy change is when changes are imposed by a hierarchically
superior jurisdiction on a policy subsystem (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993). This is
a common occurrence in federalism. For example, in the United States the federal government
under the Obama administration expanded access to healthcare insurance including the expan-
sion of Medicaid in 2010. However, individual states had a great deal of discretion concerning
how Medicaid expansion would occur. This led to variation in how state governors initiated
and implemented Medicaid expansion (Fording and Patton 2019). Therefore, while most ACF
studies focus on bottom-up processes of policy change often initiated by competing advocacy
coalitions, the framework is elastic enough to allow for top-down policy changes as well
(Pierce et al. 2020b).

STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF THE ACF FOR

UNDERSTANDING GOVERNANCE

This section explores the strengths and weaknesses of the ACF within the context of public
governance. The main strengths of the ACF that are discussed include simplification of policy
processes by focusing on policy subsystems, advancement of causal analysis, and flexibility
and compatibility with other theories.
Students and scholars of public policy describe the policy process as complex (Jenkins-Smith
and Sabatier 1993; Baumgartner and Jones 2010). Such complexity emerges from several
sources, including the interaction of various elements such as actors, institutions, ideas and
events at different levels and scales of governance (Cairney et al. 2019). Given this complex-
ity, policy problems are often deficient in terms of both a clear definition and a solution (Cobb
and Elder 1971; Cohen et al. 1972). To reduce the complexity in analyzing policy processes,
the ACF draws on the concept of policy subsystems, which refers to a set of policy actors who
focus on addressing a specific policy problem (Sabatier 1987, 1988).
One of the key motivations for developing the ACF was to move beyond only descriptions
of the policy process and put forth hypotheses that could be tested in a causal manner. This
effort was deemed vital as it helped to minimize the weaknesses of the stages model (Brewer
and deLeon 1983) that dominated policy scholarship until the 1980s (Jenkins-Smith and
Sabatier 1993). As described above, the ACF has two general hypotheses about policy change:
bottom-up and top-down. The ACF also has several hypotheses regarding advocacy coalitions
and policy-oriented learning.
356  Handbook on theories of governance

Hypotheses about how policy actors from multiple sectors form and develop advocacy coa-
litions over time are congruent with concepts of multiple actors and horizontal networks from
governance. The ACF has five different hypotheses about advocacy coalitions (Jenkins-Smith
et al. 2018):
Coalition Hypothesis 1—Allies and Opponents: On major controversies within a policy sub-
system when policy core beliefs are in dispute, the line-up of allies and opponents tends to be
rather stable over periods of a decade or so.
Coalition Hypothesis 2—Policy Core Beliefs: Actors within an advocacy coalition will show
substantial consensus on issues pertaining to the policy core, although less so on secondary
aspects.
Coalition Hypothesis 3—Secondary Beliefs: An actor (or coalition) will give up secondary
aspects of their (its) belief system before acknowledging weaknesses in the policy core.
Coalition Hypothesis 4—Official Policy Actors: Within a coalition, administrative agencies
will usually advocate more moderate positions than their interest group allies.
Coalition Hypothesis 5—Unofficial Policy Actors: Actors within purposive groups are more
constrained in their expression of beliefs and policy positions than actors from material
groups.
By developing and testing these hypotheses through several empirical applications (Ingold
2011; Henry 2011; Pierce 2016), the ACF has provided robust explanations to better under-
stand how coalitions form and behave that can help us better understand governance.
The ACF also has five hypotheses about policy-oriented learning (Jenkins-Smith et al.
2018) that are complementary to governance:
Learning Hypothesis 1—Learning Across Coalitions: Policy-oriented learning across belief
systems is most likely when there is an intermediate level of informed conflict between the two
coalitions; this requires that: (1) each have the technical resources to engage in debate; and
(2) the conflict be between secondary aspects of one belief system and core elements of the
other or, alternatively, between important secondary aspects of the two belief systems.
Learning Hypothesis 2—Learning Professional Forums: Policy-oriented learning across
belief systems is most likely when there exists a forum that is: (1) prestigious enough to force
professionals from different coalitions to participate; and (2) dominated by professional
norms.
Learning Hypothesis 3—Quantitative Learning: Problems for which accepted quantitative
data and theory exist are more conducive to policy-oriented learning across belief systems
than those in which data and theory are generally qualitative, quite subjective, or altogether
lacking.
Learning Hypothesis 4—Normative Learning: Problems involving natural systems are more
conducive to policy-oriented learning across belief systems than those involving purely social
or political systems because, in the former, many of the critical variables are not themselves
active strategists and because controlled experimentation is more feasible.
 The Advocacy Coalition Framework  357

Learning Hypothesis 5—Technical Information: Even when the accumulation of technical

information does not change the views of the opposing coalition, it can have important impacts
on policy—at least in the short run—by altering the views of policy brokers.
How governance networks facilitate learning is a concept within public governance (Koppenjan
and Klijn 2004) and these ACF hypotheses can provide guidance about how it can be empiri-
cally tested. Furthermore, researchers have empirically tested these hypotheses and found that
learning widely occurs among and between advocacy coalitions; they have also determined
the roles of professional forums for bringing policy actors together, and that learning derives
from scientific, technical and normative sources (Leach et al. 2014; Montpetit 2009; Nohrstedt
2010).
Another key strength of the ACF is its flexibility and its compatibility with assorted theories
to explore diverse policy questions of interest. In terms of flexibility, the ACF supports the
usage of many different methods for studying advocacy coalitions, policy learning and policy
change (Pierce et al. 2020a). This means that there is no one best way of identifying advocacy
coalitions (Weible et al. 2019). Common methods are using content analysis of documents
from government sources (Nohrstedt 2008; Pierce 2011) or media sources (Leifeld 2013), or
documents from policy actors (Heikkila et al. 2014). Others use surveys (Ansell et al. 2009;
Henry 2011) or interviews (Ingold and Fisher 2014) with policy actors.
Also, the ACF can be combined with other theories to analyze a wide range of policy issues
(Pierce et al. 2020b). Current examples include integrating the ACF and cultural theory to
explore deep core beliefs (Jenkins-Smith et al. 2014), merging the ACF and policy feedback
theory to explore policy change (Schmid et al. 2019), and blending the ACF with the policy
conflict framework to study how coalitions frame policy conflicts in siting gas pipelines
(Yordy et al. 2019). By being flexible and compatible with other theories, the ACF can be
combined with several governance theories and concepts to explore public governance issues.

APPLYING THE ACF TO GOVERNANCE

Scholars using the ACF to better understand concepts of governance tend to either study the
comparative effects of governance on policy learning or analyze the opportunities for collab-
oration and conflict among policy actors. In terms of collaboration and conflict, the ACF is
adapted as a theoretical guide for utilizing stakeholder analysis as it can be used to identify
policy actors’ beliefs, interests, resources and collaborative networks (Weible 2007).
The governance literature tends to emphasize the benefits of utilizing horizontal networks
for governing (Sørensen and Torfing 2009). One of the benefits of horizontal networks for
governing is that it facilitates policy learning (Koppenjan and Klijn 2004). Scholars use
comparative contexts in order to better understand the effects of governance structures on
policy learning (Montpetit 2009; Huntjens et al. 2011; Cheng et al. 2011). These comparative
contexts include studying governance in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa.
Applied to the European Union (EU), scholars argue that consensus-oriented networks foster
deliberation and knowledge-based persuasion, thus facilitating policy learning (Kohler-Koch
1996; Pollack 2005). In fact, because of this structural advantage, Lijphart (1999) argues that
EU governance is superior to the adversarial American institutions for facilitating policy learn-
ing. Montpetit (2009) empirically investigates this claim by applying the ACF theory of policy
358  Handbook on theories of governance

learning to the scientific field of biotechnology policy, comparing European Union countries
(Brussels, France and the United Kingdom) with North American countries (Canada and the
United States). The author surveyed hundreds of policy elites in each of the countries, testing
learning intensity, reliance on policy transfers and consensus formation. The finding was
that policy learning is not more prevalent among policy elites in Europe compared to North
America. The author concludes that policy learning may be necessary for deliberative policy
processes in EU governance, but policy learning is also preferred over authority in hierarchical
government systems such as those in the US.
Huntjens et al. (2011) have applied the ACF in a comparative context to better under-
stand the effects of governance on policy learning. The authors compare the effects of two
categories of water management regimes, one characterized by hierarchical control and the
other horizontal adaptive on policy learning. They describe the hierarchical control regime as
centralized with narrow stakeholder participation, in contrast to the horizontal adaptive regime
being polycentric with broad stakeholder participation. Data were collected by surveying
policy elites in eight water management regimes in Europe, Africa and Asia. They found that
cooperation structures and information management led to double-loop policy learning in
multiple water management regimes; in contrast, where these conditions were less developed,
this resulted only in single-loop learning. Therefore, the authors conclude that governance
structures with advanced information management and cooperation facilitate policy learning.
In a similar study of the role of governance on natural resource management, Cheng et
al. (2011) use the ACF to better understand the conditions that promote policy learning in
community-based forest governance in the United States (US). The ACF was used to theoret-
ically guide the study of policy learning among and between advocacy coalitions. Data were
collected using interviews, focus groups, participant-observation and content analysis of doc-
uments. The authors found that learning primarily focuses on operational-level governance,
where management plans and strategies are altered to incorporate policy beliefs. They also
found that some advocacy coalitions are involved in policy learning at collective and consti-
tutional choice levels, changing rules and structures that subsequently affect operational-level
governance. Overall, they concluded that the ACF is an effective tool to understand long-term
processes of learning and policy change and the roles of advocacy coalitions in shaping forest
governance in the US.
This research by Montpetit (2009), Huntjens et al. (2011) and Cheng et al. (2011) show that
the ACF can be effectively used to guide research on the effects of governance on policy learn-
ing. One of the primary theories of the ACF is about the conditions that facilitate and inhibit
policy learning among and between advocacy coalitions. By using this theory to guide data
collection about policy actor beliefs and collaborative networks, scholars are able to compare
the effects of different governance regimes on policy learning. The key insights were that
horizontal networks do not necessarily promote policy learning, in comparison to authority
in hierarchical government (Montpetit 2009). Rather, cooperation structures and information
management may be necessary components to facilitate policy learning (Huntjens et al. 2011).
In addition, the ACF can be used to identify learning at multiple levels of governance at the
operational level as well as at the collective and constitutional choice level (Cheng et al. 2011).
The ACF provides a theoretical basis for conducting analysis similar to stakeholder analysis
in that it identifies policy actors from a wide range of sectors, including all levels of govern-
ment, non-profits or non-governmental organizations, academics, media, and the private sector
including industry and consultants. It focuses on the shared and competing policy beliefs of
 The Advocacy Coalition Framework  359

these actors, along with their resources and collaborative networks (Weible 2007). Thus, the
ACF can help governance scholars better understand conflict and collaboration among a broad
range of policy actors within governance systems.
Competing advocacy coalitions can utilize the instruments of governance to their advan-
tage. Winkel and Sotirov (2011) use the ACF to study conflicts between advocacy coalitions
applied to natural resources management of forests in Germany and Bulgaria. They argue
that these programs were supposed to promote governance principles of public participation,
intersectoral coordination, decentralization and long-term adaptive planning, but found that
the presence of competing advocacy coalitions diminished policy instruments that governance
was supposed to facilitate. They conclude that participatory models of governance should also
be perceived as instruments of leverage that one advocacy coalition can use to control and
exercise power over the other. Babon et al. (2014), studying natural resource management of
forests in Papua New Guinea, came to a similar conclusion about how competing advocacy
coalitions can use instruments of governance as leverage against competitors. Using network
analysis along with the ACF they identify multiple advocacy coalitions and estimated their
influence in forest governance. The authors found that the most influential advocacy coalition
supported the status quo and worked to prevent changes in forest governance. They conclude
that the ACF is a useful tool for understanding competing advocacy coalitions in governance
systems.
In contrast to these studies about competition, other scholars have found that the ACF is
an effective theoretical tool for understanding collaboration in governance. Fidelman et al.
(2014) used the ACF to better understand the policy beliefs of stakeholders working together
to support the Coral Triangle Initiative, a regional collaborative governance approach for
managing coastal and marine problems encompassing the seas of Indonesia, Malaysia, the
Philippines, Timor Leste, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. Based on survey data
from stakeholders the authors found that the ACF is an effective tool for identifying influential
stakeholders, their beliefs and interests, network connections, and capacity to use resources
and contribute to governance goals. Similarly, Lahat (2011) uses the ACF to study policy
actors’ beliefs about poverty in Israel. The author argues that one of the difficulties in the era of
governance is the legitimacy of the policy process and the necessity for building collaboration
and trust among policy actors. The author concludes that the ACF is an important tool to better
understand the challenges facing governance, including collaboration and legitimization.
Governance can promote collaboration and trust-building (Ansell and Gash 2008). Research
by Fidelman et al. (2014) and Lahat (2011) show that the ACF can be an effective theoretical
guide for conducting stakeholder analysis to better understand the opportunities and chal-
lenges for collaboration. Conversely, coalitions competing to translate their policy beliefs
into policy can and do use the instruments of governance to dominate competitors. Research
by Winkel and Sotirov (2011) and Babon et al. (2014) on natural resources management in
Europe and Oceania using the ACF found that participatory instruments of governance can be
taken advantage of by competing advocacy coalitions. Therefore, the ACF is a complementary
public policy theory for governance scholars to empirically understand the conditions that
facilitate policy learning, as well as the effects of policy actor competition and collaboration.
360  Handbook on theories of governance

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN ACF RESEARCH

This section briefly discusses five major recent developments in the ACF scholarship, namely:
establishing the theoretical emphases of the ACF, application to non-Western contexts, exten-
sion to “low-salience policy issues,” comparative research, and utilizing discourse network
analysis.
A recent development of the ACF is that scholars focus on one of three lines of scholarship:
advocacy coalitions, policy change or policy-oriented learning. Prior to introducing these
theoretical distinctions, scholars perceived the ACF as unwieldy and difficult to apply, and
often failed to specify which part of the framework they studied (Weible et al., 2009). The
development of more distinct theoretical emphases has improved the framework by allowing
scholars to select which aspect to focus on in their research, making the scope of research more
manageable (Weible et al. 2011).
Second, in recent times, ACF applications to non-Western contexts have increased sig-
nificantly (Weible et al. 2009; Pierce et al. 2017; Jang et al. 2016). In part, this development
responds to some of the previous criticisms about the ACF’s limited application to political
systems outside of the US (Sabatier 1998). Applying the ACF to other political contexts offers
the opportunity to enrich the policy process body of knowledge with insights from other
countries, while demonstrating the continued relevance of the framework. The key lesson from
this observation is that the ACF demonstrates promise in helping analyze public governance
dynamics outside of Western political jurisdictions, thereby bringing in new insights that will
enrich and bolster existing knowledge.
Third, empirical applications to low-salience policy issues is gaining interest among policy
scholars drawing on the ACF. Traditionally, the ACF has focused on high-salience topics,
meaning those issues that are characterized by high public attention and conflict. Notable
among these are public health (Cairney 2007), climate change (Ingold 2011), oil and gas
development using hydraulic fracturing (Heikkila et al. 2014), Israel‒Palestine conflict (Pierce
2011) and nuclear energy (Nohrstedt 2008; Gupta 2014). Yet, this trend is shifting to accom-
modate low-salience issues, which are topics that gain less public attention and often “operate
outside the public’s eye” (Sabatier and Weible 2007). Key examples of recent applications
include day habilitation and employment services in Pennsylvania and Washington (Giordono
2019), and biosafety and biotechnology in Kenya (Kingiri 2011, 2014). By extending applica-
tions to low-salience policy debates, the ACF continues to achieve theoretical refinement and
also accommodates scholars with diverse interests. From this perspective, public governance
issues such as administrative reforms and decentralization, which may not fit the traditional
classification of high-salience, high-conflict issues that typify past ACF research, can be ana-
lyzed using theoretical insights from the framework.
The rise in ACF comparative research constitutes another recent development. Here, schol-
ars from different countries leverage their skills and expertise to investigate critical questions
in public policy and administration (Tosun and Workman 2018). Relevant examples of these
comparative efforts include studies of policy debates on hydraulic fracturing in North America
and Europe (Wieble et al. 2016), and shale gas development politics in the United States,
Argentina and China (Heikkila et al. 2019). These comparative endeavors advance the ACF in
at least two ways. First, they provide the opportunity to integrate insights from different con-
texts to build a robust understanding of diverse public policies. Second, they offer a means for
scholars to gauge the weaknesses of the ACF in different political contexts, and subsequently
 The Advocacy Coalition Framework  361

to devise strategies to overcome them. As Henry et al. (2014) argue, there is a need for the
continued application of the ACF outside of Western Europe and North America to overcome
the challenges of the ACF in comparative research. Along these lines, the repertoire of gov-
ernance issues, particularly in the developing world, present a rich menu of questions that can
be explored using the ACF.
Lastly, the application of discourse network analysis for identifying and measuring advo-
cacy coalitions is another recent development (Weible et al. 2019). This technique identifies
advocacy coalitions by linking policy actors to their explicit statements on policy issues that
are usually contained in media and policy documents (Leifeld 2017; Ingold 2011). This anal-
ysis links content analysis with social network analysis. To advance this analytical technique,
Leifeld (2013) developed the Discourse Network Analyzer, which enables researchers to code
variables on policy actors such as name and organizational affiliation to perform more sophis-
ticated analysis on advocacy coalitions. Examples include German pension politics (Leifeld
2013) and climate change policy (Fisher et al. 2013). Altogether, these developments reflect
a firm commitment by scholars to continuously refine the framework and adapt it to the needs
of scholars, while shedding important light on contemporary governance dilemmas.

CONCLUSION

Traced to the works of Paul Sabatier and Hank Jenkins-Smith in the 1980s, the ACF is built on
the theoretical emphases of advocacy coalitions, policy change and policy-oriented learning.
Advocacy coalitions comprise policy actors who coalesce around shared beliefs to influence
policy. Policy change occurs when advocacy coalitions devise strategies to exploit subsystem
events such as external perturbations and internal shocks. Policy learning is when advocacy
coalitions revise their beliefs based on new information or experience.
Known for its strengths in simplifying analysis of policy processes by focusing on policy
subsystems, supporting causal analysis of policy processes, and being flexible and compati-
ble with other theories, the ACF also supports the analysis of governance. There are at least
three benefits for using the theory to study governance. First, the theory can help to identify
explicitly policy actors’ beliefs, interests, resources and network structures within collabora-
tive contexts. Second, the linkages between horizontal networks and policy learning can also
be explored, either comparatively or focusing on one country, as some studies cited in this
chapter demonstrate. Third, the ACF fosters stakeholder analysis of policy actors with diverse
backgrounds who participate in governance, usually drawn from all levels of government,
non-profits, academia, media and private sector. These observations should motivate scholars
to continue using the ACF for analyzing governance.
Along these lines we recommend that future research can explore linking the strategies
that policy actors use in influencing specific governance processes. This will help clarify or
establish the causal relationship between policy actors’ strategies and governance outcomes.
Additionally, as ACF discourse network analysis is based on data over time, future research
can leverage longitudinal data to better understand long-term governance processes.
362  Handbook on theories of governance

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33. Economic theory
Klaus Nielsen

GOVERNANCE AND COORDINATION IN ECONOMIC THEORY

The subject matter of economics is the study of how individuals, firms and governments make
choices. The overall purpose is to guide society in relation to the effective allocation of scarce
means of production toward the satisfaction of human wants. In other words, the underlying
normative rationale of economics is to provide guidance as to how a multitude of decisions
can be coordinated in a way that secures efficiency. Economists tend to give prominence to
the effectiveness of market processes in this respect, and the normative implication of an
economic analysis of a specific problem is often to set market processes free. However, the
effectiveness of the market is premised by a set of institutional preconditions such as freedom
of enterprise and ensured property rights. In addition, economic theory identifies situations
where the market mechanism does not function effectively. The normative implication is to
supplement or complement the market with other mechanisms of coordination.
In other words, economic theory is about coordination of decision-making. Markets, cor-
porate hierarchies and governments are seen as the most important governance mechanisms,
and economics is about the proper role and scope of each mechanism. Decision-making is
coordinated by means of a proper division of labour between each mechanism. Some tasks are
seen as best accomplished by the market, others by corporate hierarchies, and others again by
the government. Some economic theories also stress the importance of proper institutions for
effective coordination of the decision-making. In sum, coordination takes the form of institu-
tional framing and division of labour between governance mechanisms that are mostly seen as
functioning in isolation and according to their own respective rationales. On the other hand,
discursive framing of decentralized decision-making and mixture of governance mechanisms
as a result of direct interaction, joint decision-making and negotiations between actors are
beyond the theoretical perspective of economics.
Governance is seldom analysed explicitly in economics. It is even hard to find texts where
it is used explicitly as a concept. Actually, the concept does not figure at all in the list of
contents in the most-used handbooks, encyclopedias and dictionaries of economics. Even
so, economics has contributed theories which have been highly influential in the literature of
governance, if this is understood in a generic sense as coordination of social and economic
life. The Introduction to this Handbook outlines a generic and a more narrow definition of
governance. The generic definition understands governance as the process of steering society
and the economy through collective action and in accordance with common goals. This under-
standing of governance fits well with the focus of much economic theory on the coordination
of different modes of governance. Economic theories of markets, corporate hierarchies and the
role of the state provide much of the rationale behind the traditional way of understanding the
tasks and limits of government. Mainstream economics has contributed theories that underpin
the rationale of the predominant steering of society and the economy through collective action.

365
366  Handbook on theories of governance

However, this does not resonate with the overall approach of this volume as expressed in
the narrow definition of governance. This definition understands governance as the interactive
processes through which society and the economy are steered towards collectively negotiated
objectives. The narrow definition stresses horizontal interactive processes between private and
public actors in which objectives are negotiated collectively. Whereas such processes are in
focus in a few specific areas within economics and in contributions from heterodox economic
theories, they are largely ignored in mainstream economic theory.
One of the metaphors being used for such forms of governance is the handshake. In this
chapter the handshake will be used as a metaphor to represent contributions with important
common elements, even if only a few of them use the concept themselves. Instead of coordi-
nation directed by either the invisible hand of market forces or the visible hand of superiors in
hierarchies, handshakes represent coordination by agreement, bending of will and/or consen-
sus. Handshakes can be visible or invisible. Visible handshakes are formal, whereas invisible
handshakes are informal. Visible handshakes are fleshed out through direct interaction within
institutional frameworks established for formal coordination and aiming for compromise.
Invisible handshakes are informal coordination through means such as trust, social relation-
ships, affinity and a common frame of meaning aiming for consensus.
Because of the important role of mainstream economics in relation to the traditional forms
of coordination, this chapter starts off by specifying in more detail how mainstream economic
theory has contributed to this traditional understanding. First, the rationale of the invisible
hand with no need for interactive coordination is presented. The economic rationale of the
diametrically opposite approach in the form of central state planning ‒ the clenched fist ‒ is
presented next. Then follows an outline of micro- and macroeconomic theories that suggest the
need for supplementing the invisible hand with a helping hand in order to counteract market
failure, stabilize the macro economy and redistribute income. The failures of government
implementation of providing a helping hand in practice led to theories about the grabbing
hand of government, which is the focus of the next section. Then the focus shifts to the
governance of the firm, starting with the visible hand of managerial coordination followed
by economizing on transaction costs, and the trends of globalization and outsourcing, the
vanishing hand. Whereas the preceding sections concern theories with a focus on coordination
of governance mechanisms in accordance with the generic definition of governance, the con-
cluding sections give a more detailed account of economic theories that contribute important
insight into governance more narrowly understood as societal steering toward collectively
negotiated objectives though interactive processes. A review of contributions that provide an
economic theoretical rationale for formal interaction between market actors, governments and
associations (visible handshakes) is presented first, followed by an outline of contributions
about informal coordination in networks, by means of social capital and through discursive
interaction (invisible handshakes). Finally, economic theory of the governance of common
pool resources is presented as a combination of visible and invisible handshakes, followed by
a conclusion.

THE INVISIBLE HAND

Governance as it is understood in the more narrow definition in this book was out of focus in
mainstream economic theory from its very inception. Often, the contribution of Adam Smith
 Economic theory  367

is seen as the starting point of modern economics. He only used the phrase a few times, and in
more specific contexts (Slater and Tonkiss 2001), and the concept was not used in economic
theoretical discourse until a century later, and then in a more ‘selfish’ version than used by
Adam Smith himself (Kennedy 2014). Anyhow, the invisible, or hidden, hand has since been
generalized and interpreted as a powerful metaphor for his economic theory.
The idea that trade and market exchange automatically channel self-interest toward socially
desirable ends, as if led by an invisible hand, is the foundational idea of modern mainstream
economics. The invisible hand of the market coordinates the activities of atomistic actors
who are assumed to make decisions in splendid isolation. Even if everybody acts only in their
own interest, in total disregard of their fellow human beings and of the overall impact of their
behaviour, the wonders of the market will ensure the best possible societal outcome. This is
the classical rationale of economic theory: the best possible allocation of resources will be the
unintended outcome of a multitude of uncoordinated self-interested decisions by consumers
and producers. There is a direct line from Adam Smith through the marginal theory of value
and modern general equilibrium theory to current neoclassical orthodoxy. In spite of the
evidence of grand-scale market failure, development and poverty traps, and economic and
financial crises, the assumed superiority of the unregulated market as allocation mechanism is
a constant in mainstream economic theory. The ideal market with an effective invisible hand
provides a central justification for laissez-faire economics. There is no positive role for direct
interaction between actors which may interfere with the efficient functioning of the invisible
hand.
Adam Smith was a proponent of limited government, and his economic theory is closely
linked to classical political liberalism. However, he stressed that government provision of
the fundamental framework for free markets was crucial. He also pointed at the necessity of
other forms of intervention in the market, such as raising wages of the poor, supporting infant
industries, and tariffs under certain conditions. However, the most distinct divergence from
laissez-faire follows from his clear diagnosis of the failure of the invisible hand in cases of col-
lusion of market actors in order to manipulate prices and restrict supply. Smith’s (1776) epic
work The Wealth of Nations is a radical condemnation of business monopolies sustained and
protected by the state, which legitimizes countervailing action to secure an optimal outcome
for society in terms of allocation of resources.
The invisible hand has had a huge influence on the thinking of all mainstream economists
since Adam Smith. The central disagreement between economic ideologies can be viewed
as disagreement as far as the strength of the ‘invisible hand’ is concerned. Phenomena such
as large-scale industry, finance and advertising were only nascent when Smith was alive,
and some mainstream economists argue that this seriously decreases the effectiveness of the
invisible hand. Some economists even argue that the reason why the invisible hand often
seems invisible is that it is often not there (Stiglitz 2003). Such views provide a rationale for
coordination mechanisms different from the invisible hand.

THE CLENCHED FIST

Neoclassical economics has certainly been the predominant paradigm in the last century.
However, alternative competing paradigms have always co-existed with the dominant one.
Until the 1990s the one with the strongest following was Marxist economics, which provides
368  Handbook on theories of governance

an alternative approach which is totally incompatible with mainstream economics, with its
emphasis on accumulation, exploitation and class struggle. Marxist economics has various
strands and leads by no means to unified policy prescriptions. However, alternative modes of
coordination of economic and social life were definitely nurtured by its fundamental critique
of capitalism, and in communist regimes central planning was seen as the alternative.
In the conceptual context of this chapter, the mode of governing economic behaviour
and relations in communist regimes can be seen as a clenched fist. The power of the state is
unlimited as an instrument for the will of the people, or at least the proletariat, as represented
and defined by the Communist Party, in its efforts to allocate resources and distribute pro-
ceeds in accordance with socialist principles. In this context, central planning is as dominant
as the market in the ideal laissez-faire economy. Economic theories inspired by Marxism
guided the planners in their authoritative decisions about resource allocation and price-setting
(Kantorovich 1939). The decisions of the planners worked as a clenched fist. No alternatives
and no opposition were permitted.
The clenched fist worked well in periods when mobilization of resources for industriali-
zation, war or reconstruction was of the utmost importance. Later, when concerns shifted to
efficiency in production and satisfaction of varied consumer needs, the limits of the clenched
fist became obvious. Marxist economists developed proposals for market socialism (Lange
and Taylor 1936). The intention of the subsequent market socialist reforms was to establish
incentives for efficiency-improving economic behaviour within the framework of a planned
economy. However, the reforms did not achieve their objectives, and other Marxist economists
criticized the emergent bargaining structure where powerful state enterprises were able to
extract disproportional resources from the state. Consequently, a highly inefficient ‘economics
of shortage’ dominated by ‘soft budget constraints’ emerged (Kornai 1980). In other words,
the efforts to integrate markets in the planning model resulted in interactive processes of
steering toward collectively negotiated objectives; in effect, governance in accordance with
the narrow definition. However, the allocative outcome was highly inefficient and the policy
impact was a worsening of power inequality.

THE HELPING HAND

Economic theories stress both the wonders of the (ideal) market mechanism and the multitude
of market failures in practice. The failure of the market in allocating resources optimally, steer-
ing the macroeconomy and distributing income fairly, makes it necessary to help the invisible
hand by means of other governance mechanisms. Microeconomic theory points at a number of
market failures. Following in the footsteps of Adam Smith, monopoly or, more broadly, eco-
nomic power are seen to restrict supply and raise prices. In addition, externalities, public goods
and information problems also result in suboptimal allocation of resources, which all require
correction by a helping hand. Further, the contribution of Keynes established macroeconomics
as a separate field of study. He challenged the belief in the healing powers of the invisible hand
by stressing the inability of the market to create full employment, and the need for a helping
hand in the form of demand management by the state. In addition, the distributive outcome of
the market process is the blind spot in mainstream economic theory which addresses efficiency
concerns but has nothing to contribute in relation to fairness of distribution. If distribution is
considered to be unfairly unequal, a helping hand is needed here as well.
 Economic theory  369

The need for a helping hand to correct the failures of the invisible hand of the market
has traditionally resulted in a call for government intervention. Economic theory provides
prescriptive guidance extending to not only the need but also the form and scale of such inter-
vention. Microeconomic theories of industrial regulation (Sugden 1993) and macroeconomic
theories of income formation and economic policy (Snowdon and Vane 2002) show how the
state can counteract the inefficient and unjust outcome of the invisible hand. This is a way
of governing the economy by means of supplementing or complementing markets through
government intervention.
The increasing role of the helping hand resulted in the emergence of a mixed economy
(Schiller et al. 2012: 15), characterized by private ownership of the means of production
and the dominance of markets for economic coordination, but also indirect influence of the
government over the economy through regulatory oversight, governmental provision of public
goods and macroeconomic steering. Mostly, no need for direct interaction and coordination
was envisaged. Market processes and government activities were seen as two isolated domains
to be coordinated through a suitable division of labour. However, some mixed economies
expanded in scope to include a role for indicative economic planning (see later) and large
public enterprises which represent handshakes and direct government market interference,
respectively.

THE GRABBING HAND

The prevailing economic theories stressing the need for a helping hand led to state intervention
across the board and generally legitimized the growth of the state from the end of World War
II until the 1970s. However, this orthodoxy was not unchallenged. Friedrich Hayek (1944)
stressed the incapability and undesirability of what he called the collectivist rationalism of
government interventionism. Milton Friedman developed a thorough criticism of Keynesian
macroeconomics and recipes for alternative economic policies. From the 1970s onwards, such
heresy on the fringes was brought into the mainstream of economic theory as the prevailing
theories of the helping hand crumbled. The resulting neoliberal challenge questioned not only
the efficiency but also the necessity of government intervention (Nielsen 1991). To some
extent its role was rather perceived as a grabbing hand. In the grabbing hand model of Shleifer
and Vishny (1998), government is just as interventionist as in the helping hand model, but
much less organized. The government is seen as consisting of a large number of independent
bureaucrats and organizations pursuing their own agendas. While these bureaucrats adopt
a helping hand rhetoric, they are hardly guided or constrained by a unified public stance, and
in reality they are seen as following their own interests.
Microeconomic regulation of industry was seen as inefficient because of government
failure. Bureaucrats lack not only the capacity but also the incentives for regulating in accord-
ance with the prescriptions of the helping hand. Public choice theory shows how regulation
fails because of the self-interested behaviour of politicians and bureaucrats (Tullock 2008).
Economic theory was applied in an attempt to better understand policy-making and imple-
mentation, which had previously been assumed to be automatically efficient responses to the
need for microeconomic public intervention prescribed by economic theory. Macroeconomic
steering was seen as similarly inefficient as a result of inherent failures in relation to targeting,
implementing and timing of macroeconomic policies; in particular, fiscal policies, which were
370  Handbook on theories of governance

considered central in the Keynesian repertoire of policy intervention (Mankiw 2013). Further,
redistributive policies to counteract unwanted distributive outcomes were seen as having neg-
ative impacts on efficiency. Especially, the assumed neutrality of redistribution in relation to
allocative efficiency was questioned. In particular, the rising tax burden was seen as distorting
resource allocation and as a drag on the economy (Lind and Granquist 2010).
The grabbing hand model has also been applied in economic explanations of corruption and
the different trajectories of transition to market economies in the former communist countries.
For instance, Russia is seen as more susceptible to the grabbing hand than countries in Central
and Eastern Europe.
The negative critique of the theories of the helping hand was complemented by a positive
restatement of the wonders of the market. Market solutions were not only propagated as better
than inefficient government intervention. The inherent efficiency of market mechanisms was
reinstated. The need for wholesale macroeconomic policies was seen as limited because of
the self-correcting mechanisms of the market. In addition, market-led alternatives to microe-
conomic regulation by politicians and bureaucrats, such as trade in pollution permits instead
of administrative regulation, were developed. Neoliberal economic analysis also led to New
Public Management that resulted in delegation of public service production and delivery
to private contractors and special-purpose agencies, on the basis of contracts and incentive
governance. This represents a totalization of market competition as a universal steering prin-
ciple in the public sector. The neoliberal turn in economic theory led to re-establishing the
boundaries between the market and the state, and as such it implied new modes of coordinating
economic and social life.

THE GOVERNANCE OF THE FIRM: FROM THE VISIBLE HAND

TO THE VANISHING HAND

Above, only two forms of coordination have been mentioned. The economic theoretical
debates have concerned the boundaries and division of labour between the market and the
state. This is indeed the main focus of coordination or governance within economic theory.
However, the role of corporate hierarchies has also been covered in the economic theory of the
firm. In economic theory, firms have traditionally been seen as profit maximizers. Apart from
this function the firm was treated as a black box. What goes on inside the firm was perceived
as irrelevant. This has changed in the last 3‒4 decades.
The focus of economic theories on market relations between small producers and buyers
who cannot influence prices corresponded relatively well with the economic reality until the
late 19th century. However, it became increasingly obvious that this theoretical emphasis was
no longer a suitable representation of the emerging managerial capitalism dominated by big
corporations. Berle and Means (1932) identified the separation between ownership and control
as a crucial characteristic of managerial capitalism. Dispersed ownership associated with the
concentration of power in the hands of top management is a defining characteristic of the man-
agerial revolution. The most emphatic contribution to the literature on managerial capitalism
was Chandler (1977), who argued that the visible hand of the modern managerial enterprise
has replaced the invisible hand of the market in coordinating activities and allocating resources
of the United States economy. The modern multi-unit business has replaced small traditional
enterprise, because the volume of economic activities had reached a level that made admin-
 Economic theory  371

istrative coordination more efficient than market coordination He argued that an increasingly
powerful managerial hierarchy had been created for this multi-unit business enterprise. As the
business enterprise grew in size and diversity, and as its managers became more professional,
the management of the enterprise became separated from its ownership. Managerial capitalism
underscores the problem of controlling managers, who were shown to have a preference for
growth and stability rather than maximization of shareholder profit.
Managerial capitalism, dominated by big firms, prevailed until the 1970s. Since then, there
has been an opposite trend. Administrative coordination by managerial hierarchies have been
largely replaced by market relations, but also by mechanisms such as horizontal networking
and social capital akin to governance as defined in this book. Langlois (2002) has coined this
process the vanishing hand. A combination of technological and institutional changes has
the effect of increasing the benefits of specialization and the division of labour relative to the
costs of contracting, leading to vertical disintegration. Outsourcing and subcontracting have
supplanted the vanishing administrative coordination by managerial hierarchies.
The reasoning of Langlois is based on transaction cost theory which provides powerful
tools for the analysis of the governance structure of firm transactions. This branch of eco-
nomic theory is one of the few areas in economics where governance is explicitly analysed
(Williamson 1996). According to Williamson, governance is “an exercise in assessing the
efficacy of alternative modes (or means) of organization” (ibid.: 11). The transaction is seen
as the basic unit of analysis. Dependent on their attributes, transactions “are aligned with
governance structures that differ in their cost and competence so as to effect a discriminating –
mainly a transaction cost-economizing – result” (ibid.: 11). The most well-known application
of transaction cost economics is as a means to decide the boundaries of the firm, that is, which
transactions to internalize (‘make’) and which to acquire in the market (‘buy’). The shifting
boundaries of the firm over time reflect changes in the relative costs of performing a task
through the corporate hierarchy versus the market.
Transaction cost economics is explicitly about governance. However, there is an emphasis
on a rather limited choice of organizational forms. Williamson recognizes the existence of
other forms of governance, but most often narrows down the perspective to a choice between
market exchange and corporate hierarchy. He sees potential governance forms as being posi-
tioned on a spectrum with market and hierarchy at each end. However, he sees the spectrum
as ‘thick in the tails’. Intermediate hybrid forms are seen as inherently inferior and unstable.
For instance, Williamson (1975) explicitly dismisses the relevance of trust and networks as
governance mechanisms. Although the theory is explicitly about governance, it appears to
exclude the relevance of mechanisms of governance that correspond with the more narrow
definition of governance.

THE VISIBLE HANDSHAKE

Formal coordination through direct interaction between market actors, bureaucrats and poli-
ticians has been visible for a long time. However, it flourished, in particular, in the Golden
Age of post-war capitalism until the 1980s. The phenomenon was linked to Keynesianism
and, more broadly, the Fordist model of accumulation (Jessop 1992). Economic interests were
organized, and interest organizations sought and were granted formal influence on public
policy. Government‒business links have always flourished. Whereas business influence on
372  Handbook on theories of governance

government policy has mostly been informal and indirect, it has also occasionally been for-
malized, for instance in delegation of authority to set standards and allocate public subsidies.
Formal influence of organized business is stronger in coordinated market economies than in
liberal market economies (Hall and Soskice 2001).
In many developed countries interest representation, which was previously pluralist,
changed into corporatism, or neo-corporatism, where quasi-monopolies organizing major
labour market and sectoral interest groups are granted formal rights to represent and make
decisions on behalf of their members in joint decision-making with other interest groups.
Neo-corporatism favoured economic tripartism which involved strong labour unions, employ-
ers’ unions, and governments that cooperated as ‘social partners’ to negotiate and manage
the national economy. Corporatist systems instituted in Europe post World War II include
the ordoliberal system of the social market economy in Germany, the polder model in the
Netherlands, and the Nordic model in Scandinavia.
When Keynesianism ran into trouble with the emergence of stagflation in the 1970s, the
predominant responses in neo-corporatist countries were incomes policy and tripartist social
pacts which are basically attempts to control the development of macroeconomic aggregates
through agreements between organized interests. The failures of such policies and the ideolog-
ical assault of neoliberalism caused a gradual erosion of such grand-scale social engineering.
However, formalized joint decision-making still exists in many areas.
Indicative planning is another type of visible handshake (Nielsen 2008). Whereas central
planning is the authoritative economic decision-making by the state, other forms of planning
consist of interactive processes and collective negotiations with private actors. When planning
was popular in Western democracies in the 1960s and 1970s, this was the type of planning
that took place. Non-authoritative, non-directive planning by the state exists when it engages
in activities intended to reduce risk and uncertainty for private actors. This may take the form
of forecasting, investment planning and signalling intentions regarding future policies, and
may be particularly effective when state-owned enterprises constitute a significant share of the
economy and/or when government procurement constitutes a significant and growing part of
demand. It could even consist of comprehensive long-term (typically five-year) plans inspired
by the central planning tradition. Such planning provides a framework for formation of less
uncertain expectations about the future and does not necessarily include direct interaction.
However, it is often coupled with interactive processes between the government and the
major private economic actors with the purpose of informal coordination of public and private
decision-making. This is what happened in France and other European countries, where policy
signalling, investment planning and an institutionalized system of long-term planning was
supplemented by consultation with organized interests and other major economic actors. The
most iconic example of indicative planning is the post-World War II experience of Japan. Here
the guiding hand of the state was highly prominent and visible. The Ministry of International
Trade and Industry (MITI) effectively ran a comprehensive industrial policy, funding research,
directing investment and influencing corporate strategies in accordance with long-term plans
(Johnson 1982).
Most economists have struggled to make sense of visible handshakes, which go against
key assumptions in economic theory. Market exchange is supposed to guarantee appropriate
relative prices, which are at best simulated but typically distorted by organized interests.
And in case of market failure, the granting of formal influence to interested parties is seen
to result in vested-interest capture. However, some mainstream economists have contributed
 Economic theory  373

theories built on the rationale of visible handshakes. An example is the Rehn‒Meidner model
developed by two trade union economists, which provides the rationale for the use of selective
employment policy measures, a tight macroeconomic policy and a wage policy of solidarity to
combine full employment and equity with price stability and economic growth (Erixon 2008).
Outside of mainstream economics there have been major contributions theorizing the
rationale of visible handshakes. One of founders of the American tradition of institutional
economics, John R. Commons, developed an analysis of collective action by the state and
other institutions (Commons 1924). According to Commons, institutions were made up of
collective actions that, along with conflict of interests, defined the economy. A number of
theories exploring the economic and political rationale of policy networks, bargaining, the
negotiated economy and various hybrid forms of coordination were developed by political
economists and political scientists in the 1980s and 1990s (Kenis and Schneider 1996). The
most generic and influential contribution was by Streeck and Schmitter (1985), who develop
a typology with four models of social order. In addition to the market, the state (or the bureau-
cracy) and the community, they add interest governance, or the associative model of social
order, as a fourth model.
The associative order includes informal as well the formalized aspects of cooperation, and
most forms of formalized joint decision-making are not only visible handshakes but invisible
handshakes as well. Whereas the analytical distinction is clear, it is difficult in practice to
distinguish the formal and informal parts of interactive processes. What is called the guiding
hand in the previous section is an example of this, although it focuses on the ‘hand’ of the state
in orchestrating and guiding the interaction.

THE INVISIBLE HANDSHAKE

The identification of invisible handshakes is not a straightforward exercise. The concept is

seldom used explicitly, and the practices producing such agreements, social capital or con-
sensus are informal and accordingly not immediately visible; indeed, invisible. However, this
chapter will argue that such forms of governance are omnipresent and are becoming increas-
ingly applied in a variety of contexts. Only a few examples are mentioned below.
Okun (1980) pioneered the explicit use of the concept. He saw managerial decisions as
guided by both the invisible hand and the invisible handshake. Okun used wage-setting as an
example. He explained the rationale for paying higher wages than the short-term equilibrium
in the pursuit of long-term profit maximization as a result of the invisible handshake. He saw
this as an informal contract between employers and employees which is crucial for employee
commitment and motivation. The informal contract concerns wage-setting norms such as
maintenance of real wages and relative wages as well as work organization norms. The argu-
ment is broadly similar to efficiency wage theories (Akerlof and Yellen 1986).
In another explicit use of the concept, Smitka (1990) shows how the development of organic
relationships between producers and suppliers in the Japanese automotive parts industry are
formed partly by contractual means but mainly through social interaction. Networking built on
trust develops into long-term strategic relationships that facilitate mutually beneficial manage-
ment of interdependencies and strengthens incremental innovation. The argument has general
relevance in many contexts with networks, partnerships and alliances.
374  Handbook on theories of governance

Many economic transactions take the form of an informal or relational contract. The explicit
terms of such a contract are just an outline, as there are implicit terms and understanding which
determine the behaviour of the parties. Relational contracts are relations rather than discrete
transactions. Relational contract theory was originally developed by legal scholars (Macaulay
1963) but has been widely adopted in economic theory. The employment contract is the
archetypical relational contract, but the phenomenon exists in many markets and in a wide
range of economic relationships. Economic theory tends to focus on the incentive structure in
such relationships (Malcolmson 2012). However, the incompleteness of contracts necessitates
negotiation, and relational contracts are often based upon relationships of trust.
The burgeoning literature on trust (Nooteboom 2002) and social capital (Durlauf and
Fafchamps 2004) provides evidence that some forms and some dimensions of invisible
handshakes are analysed extensively by economists, although many mainstream economists
still have problems with the use and status of such concepts (Solow 1999). The analysis of
the non-profit social economy, or the third sector, is another field where economic theory has
been applied. However, the mainstream approach gives priority to only certain dimensions of
third-sector activity (Westall 2009).
Douglass North and other institutional economists have stressed the role of mental models
and ideologies in economic exchange (Denzau and North 1994; North 2005). Decision-making
is framed by social processes forming the mental models of the actors. However, apart from
a few such contributions, the discursive dimension of economic exchange is largely neglected
by economic theory. The presumption of given preferences still permeates economic theory.
It is in a sense peculiar that this dimension of visible handshakes is not given more attention
in economics, considering the fact that much application of economic theory is embedded
in efforts to influence the way major economic actors and the public at large understand and
interpret the economic reality.

COMMON POOL RESOURCES: A CASE OF VISIBLE AND

INVISIBLE HANDSHAKE
The invisible hand indicates the existence of hidden mechanisms that automatically translate
self-interested individual behaviour into socially optimal results. However, economic theory
identifies many situations where rational behaviour by individuals leads to irrational societal
outcomes. The classical market failures and macroeconomic imbalances represent only
some of those situations (Barry and Hardin 1982). Perhaps most significantly, game theory
addresses problems such as the prisoner’s dilemma, where isolated rational decisions by indi-
viduals lead to suboptimal outcomes. In such interaction contexts an appropriate institutional
framework for strategic interaction between isolated market actors is required according to
economic theory. In practice, interaction dilemmas are often solved through collective action
and social mechanisms such as trust, social norms, culture and tradition.
Economic theory identifies problems with collective action, in principle. Olson (1965)
shows that concentrated minor interests will be overrepresented, and diffuse major interests
neglected, in situations of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. He argues that free-riding is
a rational choice for individuals in cases where joint action is beneficial for the group as such,
which means that collective action is only possible in situations with significant benefits for
small groups, or fringe benefits unrelated to the purpose of the action itself. The consequence
 Economic theory  375

is that small producer interests will be overrepresented, whereas broad consumer or taxpayer
interests are underrepresented.
Collective-action problems are particularly acute in relation to common-pool resources
such as pastures, forests, water, fishing grounds, irrigation systems and the atmosphere, where
usage generally cannot be restricted. Such resources tend to degrade because of excessive use.
This is the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin 1968). As far as remedies are con-
cerned, economists have traditionally recommended either public ownership or the establish-
ment of individual property right to common-pool resources. This follows the usual practice
of solving interaction problems through either government intervention or market exchange.
However, this is often impractical and impossible. Based on in-depth empirical studies of the
management of common-pool resources in various contexts, Ostrom (1990, 2000) points to a
‘third way’ that relies neither on central planning nor on individual property and markets. Her
evidence suggests that many successful common-pool management systems are ‘rich mixtures
of “private-like” and “public-like” institutions defying classification into a sterile dichotomy’
(Ostrom 1990: 14). She emphasizes the crucial role of trust and culture, arguing that that the
assumption of ubiquitous opportunism leading to free-riding does not reflect the actual prac-
tices of managing common pool resources where trust and other social mechanisms substitute
or complement costly monitoring to ensure compliance with the collectively negotiated rules
of governance. Ostrom shows how collective-action problems are solved through various
forms of social interaction and negotiations. Through the conceptual prism of this chapter
these processes constitute a combination of visible and invisible handshakes.

CONCLUSION

Economic theory has much to contribute and is highly influential in relation to the overall
social coordination of different modes of governance. This has typically provided the rationale
for allocating specific tasks to either the market or (corporate or governmental) hierarchies.
The interaction processes in focus are the inherent processes of market competition and
exchange, and hierarchic decision-making in either firms or the state. It is still unusual among
mainstream economists to pay attention to interactive processes that go beyond the specific
modes of interaction characteristic of either markets (voluntary exchange) or hierarchies
(command). However, some contributions, in particular from outside the mainstream, provide
valuable insight about interactive governance. The emergence and growth of new forms of
governance characterized by interactive, negotiated processes of steering is a challenge for
economic theory. Some of the paradigmatic assumptions in mainstream economics make it
difficult to grasp the inherent rationality of this reality in full. Relaxation of the assumptions of
given preferences and given institutions is a necessary precondition for a profound understand-
ing of these phenomena. It is crucial to recognize fully how formal and informal institutions
(North 1990) shape decision-making. In addition, the importance of discourse and informal
forms of cooperation must be acknowledged, and it must be better understood how the inte-
gration of economic and social forms of interaction shape preferences and decisions. More
fundamentally, however, a proper understanding of the new forms of governance may require
a substitution of the assumption of maximization with balancing of interests and concerns in
an Aristotelian spirit (van Staveren 2001), but this would constitute a complete paradigm shift.
376  Handbook on theories of governance

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34. Governmentality
Peter Triantafillou

INTRODUCTION
The aim of this chapter is to give an account of the analytical term “governmentality” and its
distinctive usefulness in grasping and analyzing modern arts and practices of governing. Put
in the briefest of fashions, it is argued that the term “governmentality” enables us to address
often overlooked dimensions of power exercised under the heading of governance. It clears
a space for analyzing how various forms of knowledge and theories clustered under the broad
church of governance may more or less directly inform the exercise of power in political and
administrative reforms.
The term “governmentality” was first coined in 1978 by the French historian and philoso-
pher Michel Foucault in his lecture series at the Collège de France, focusing on how shifting
forms of (secular) thinking had informed the governing of states and their populations in
Western Europe since the Renaissance (Foucault 2007). Here he identified several historically
specific governmentalities, such as raison d’état, mercantilism, Polizeiwissenschaft, classical
liberalism and neoliberalism. Initially, the term received little attention in social and political
academic circles. It was only from the early 1990s that a number of Anglophone scholars
started to employ the term (e.g. Rose and Miller 1992; Dean 1994: 174–193; Barry et al.
1996), not least thanks to the edited volume The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality
(Burchell et al. 1991).
This “ugly word” or neologism, “governmentality,” is a contraction of two terms: “gov-
ernment” and “mentality” or “rationality” (Foucault 2007: 115). Government designates
the “conduct of conduct,” that is, the art of conducting the ways in which others conduct
themselves within a more or less open field of possibilities (Foucault 1982: 220–221). To
govern entails structuring the field of possibilities within which a person governs themself. By
implication, the term “government” refers not to an institution (the government) but to a form
of power that by definition assumes that the subject over whom power is exercised has a signif-
icant level of choice or liberty to conduct themself. Foucault was not very clear about whether
the second part of the term “governmentality” referred to mentality or rationality. However,
in the reflections that he and many of his followers have produced, the term “rationality” or
“rationalities” of government is the preferred one. If the term “rationality” seems most proper,
it is because Foucault went to great pains in arguing that he was alluding not to abstract prin-
ciples, ideologies or worldviews (or mentalities), but to the very concrete reflections, calcula-
tions, tactics and ways of reasoning about how best to govern a state territory and, not least, the
wealth and well-being of the population inhabiting this territory (Foucault 2007: 108; see also
Foucault 1991: 78–82). Governmentality, governmental rationality or political rationality is
thus a set of means–ends calculations about how best to govern a state. Such calculations draw
on various forms of knowledge or theories that seek to provide secular truth about how states
are, can be and, in many cases, ought to be governed, such as economics or political science.

378
 Governmentality  379

It is not immediately clear how the term “governmentality” would grasp governance. This
is not only because the term “governance” embraces a wide and quite diverse set of political
activities and academic disciplines. It is also because the analytical term “governmentality” is
linked—somewhat unclearly—to a wider analytical scheme (genealogy) developed by Michel
Foucault prior to his lectures on governmentality. This creates a wide space for using the term
“governmentality” to address the phenomenon of governance. I return to this below. Here, it is
suffice to say, at the most general level, that the term “governmentality” addresses governance
as a more or (often) less coherent set of calculations and reflections about how best to govern
a wide range of issues. At a more specific level, it has been argued that governance constitutes
a form of neoliberal or advanced liberal government, that is, a form of government that above
all seeks to govern through the facilitated and structured freedom of persons, groups and
organizations (Triantafillou 2007, 2012: 79–91; Bevir 2010, 2011). However, this is where the
disagreement starts. As already noted, Foucault coined the term to address a specific historical
phenomenon, that is, the calculations and reflections regarding how best to govern Western
European states and the welfare of their populations from the Renaissance until around the
1960s.

DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES AND ARGUMENTS WITHIN THE

GOVERNMENTALITY LITERATURE

While the origins of the term “governmentality” can be dated quite precisely to Foucault’s
lectures at the Collège de France in early 1978, the epistemological and methodological under-
pinnings of the term are more complex. Foucault’s lectures ran in parallel with his studies of
psychiatry, medical power, penal regimes and sexuality. These studies resulted in several now
quite famous and much-cited publications (Foucault 1965, 1970, 1973, 1977, 1979, 1985,
1986). However, the methodology of these publications generally differs importantly from
that of the lectures. They presented preliminary and less-developed ideas, and they rarely
went into depth when analyzing the practices of power. In contrast to Foucault’s books, which
contain detailed accounts of the techniques, methods and practices involved in the exercise
of power, Foucault’s lectures on governmentality focus almost exclusively on the discursive
level of power (see also Biebricher 2008). Thus, scholars only reading Foucault’s lectures on
governmentality would obviously assume that governmentality analyses take place mainly at
the discursive level.
Yet, in order to fully grasp and exploit the analytical potential of the term “governmental-
ity,” it is necessary to be acquainted with genealogy, that is, the analytical underpinnings of
Foucault’s published works. Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogies of Western science
and Christian morality, Foucault designed his own form of historical analysis that pertained
to the political concerns of the present (Foucault 1977: 31). Rather than analyzing history for
its own sake, a genealogical analysis aims at destabilizing contemporary ways in which our
freedom is limited by historically contingent norms and power relations. Foucault explained
at one point that his analysis of penal regimes aims at creating an “eventalization” in the sense
of exposing the historical singularity and contingency of the penal practices in modern France
(Foucault 1991: 76). By highlighting the historical specificity of penal thoughts and practices,
Foucault tried to show “that things ‘weren’t as necessary as all that’” (ibid.: 76). Foucault’s
point is that, by exposing this historical difference, we may start applying the same kind of
380  Handbook on theories of governance

sound skeptical distance to the norms and practices we take for granted today (Foucault 1988:
155; see also Kendall and Wickham 1999: 5–9). As explained by Koopman, Foucault’s gene-
alogical analyses not only make the point that present ways of governing are contingent and
could be very different, but also show how present practices came to take the form they do
(Koopman 2011).
While the topics of these genealogical analyses varied greatly, they all in some way exam-
ined how knowledge and power interrelated in ways that formed persons or groups as subjects.
Accordingly, the epistemological aim of these studies, including those on governmentality,
is not to create yet another theory about power and subjectivity, but to scrutinize how certain
forms of knowledge came to be regarded as truthful and enabled the exercise of power in new
ways. The kind of critique exercised in these analyses is not the critiques of ideology that we
find in Marxist theory, the Frankfurt School or recent French praxis theory, such as Bourdieu
(Lemke 2012: 62–66). The point is not to unmask the falsity of some forms of knowledge
based on the intellectual’s unique access to the truth. Instead, it is a perspectivist critique that
tries to illuminate how the kinds of knowledge that we take for granted as epistemologically
truthful or normatively desirable are excluding certain ways of enacting our freedom (Owen
2002).
We also find a growing literature discussing the utility of the concept of governmentality
in general, and neoliberal government in particular, for the understanding and study of new
forms of governing (Rabinow and Rose 2003; Donzelot 2008; Ferguson 2009; Brenner et al.
2010). Much of this debate coalesces around how to grasp and characterize contemporary
governmentalities. A strong trend is to view contemporary liberal democracies as permeated
by one or more neoliberal or advanced liberal governmentalities. These terms, which I use
interchangeably, require some explanation. In his lectures, Foucault distinguished between
classical liberalism and neoliberalism. Both these governmentalities operate with a clear
distinction between state and society, and both propagate a form of state power that works
as far as possible through the liberty of society and its citizens. Yet they also differ. Classical
liberal governmentality, by which Foucault was referring to the thinking espoused by the late
eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Scottish moral philosophers, is characterized
by the concern over the dangers implied by excessive state interventions. It is not that classical
liberalism regards the state as irrelevant or dispensable. In fact, the state is seen as indispen-
sable to ensure the functioning of civil society, including the market, by securing private
property rights, political liberties and, more generally, law and order. However, because the
state can never get to know society in its entirety, made up as it is by the preferences, customs
and rituals of a multitude of citizens and their different ways of interacting with each other and
with things, the state should as far as possible let civil society govern itself.
If the defining feature of classical liberalism is the attempt to answer the question of how
to exercise state power without governing too much, then advanced liberalism could be
defined by its attempt to tackle the problem of how to stimulate the self-governing capacities
of a variety of individuals, groups, organizations and even states. Like classical liberalism,
freedom is regarded as a fundamental element in the exercise of power. However, whereas
classical liberalism is characterized by an immanent critique of state power, the defining
problematization of advanced liberalism concerns how to facilitate and construct freedoms
in ways conducive to wider political and societal goals. Foucault himself used the term
“neoliberalism” to designate political rationalities evolving around the problem of how the
state can secure liberty by construing competitive markets and individuals able to participate
 Governmentality  381

in these markets. He pointed to the diversity of neoliberalism by exploring both the West
German Ordoliberalen’s importance for creating the social market economy after World War
II and the United States Chicago School’s role in recasting social policy in terms of individual
entrepreneurship (Foucault 2007). In both cases the state is seen to have a crucial role not as
the expression of a democratic will, but as the instance that, under strict constitutional restric-
tions, designs markets and institutions enabling citizens and companies to participate in these
markets and thereby improves the societal wealth and individual liberty. Since the 1980s,
we have seen states and international organizations all over the world increasingly involved
in construing institutions seeking to build markets and enhance competitiveness. These
include the World Bank and other aid organizations on good governance in the developing
countries from the mid-1990s (Abrahamsen 2000; Bøås and McNeill 2004), and not least the
many attempts in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
countries to reinvigorate the state according to ideals of entrepreneurship and performance
(Bouckaert and Pollitt 2011; Triantafillou 2012: 45–76).
Another important characteristic feature of contemporary neoliberal governmentality is its
reflexive dimension. Thus, neoliberal governmentality reflects not only on how the state may
govern others, be they societies, populations, persons or private companies, but also on how it
should govern itself. The widespread reform trend encapsulated under the heading New Public
Management (NPM), which seeks to improve the efficiency and quality of public services
through, for example, contracting out, establishing quasi-markets, performance measurement
and customer orientation, may be seen as a form of reflexive government or a governmental-
ization of government (Dean 1999: 188–197). If it is proper to regard NPM and some of the
governance literature as an instance of advanced liberalism, it is because it seeks to provide an
answer to the question of how to make public authorities and public service delivery agencies
freely conduct themselves in ways that may bring about better public services. Here it is rele-
vant to note that, while the market has come to function as a crucial benchmark for gauging the
efficiency and quality of public services, many contemporary public governance reforms are
clearly not guided by an understanding that the market is always better. Thus, over the last two
decades, we have seen the emergence of a wide range of governing practices including what
is variously dubbed network governance and new public governance (Osborne 2010). This
mode of governing presumes the systematic inclusion of citizens, non-governmental organi-
zations and voluntary organizations in policymaking, and public service delivery holds strong
democratic and problem-solving potentials, not because of their role as competitive market
actors but because of their knowledge, resources and personal interests in participating in the
production of public value. Is new public governance yet another instance of neoliberalism? If
by this term we refer only to governmentalities revolving around state interventions to secure
competitiveness and markets, then no. But if the term is used more broadly to refer to state
interventions seeking to stimulate the freedoms and self-governing practices of citizens and
organizations with a view to pursue a wider public good, then yes (Larsson 2019; Triantafillou
2019).
A key issue of debate in governmentality studies is whether it makes sense to compile a vast
set of power practices in completely different policy areas and in different states under one
single heading: neoliberalism. Most governmentality studies are not very clear about this. Still,
most scholars agree on the following. First of all, unlike Marxist-inspired uses of the term
“neoliberalism,” the Foucauldian term “governmentality” denotes neither an ideology—in
the sense of a politically tainted false picture of the world—nor a globalizing hegemonic
382  Handbook on theories of governance

discourse, which may appear in diverse national manifestations (e.g. Harvey 2005; Overbeek
and van Appeldoorn 2012). Instead, the term is used to identify how a certain problematization
of the exercise of state power with a view to augment societal wealth and freedom informs
a range of quite diverse and often contradictory interventions, schemes and techniques (cf.
Flew 2012; Triantafillou 2012). That is, the same kind of neoliberal governmentality may give
rise to very different political reforms. Secondly, even if it is useful to distinguish between
different neoliberal governmentalities, they operate together—often very uneasily—with
a number of other governmentalities, such as social welfarist, nationalist and, increasingly,
religious rationalities about how to govern society. In the context of authoritarian regimes, we
obviously find other governmentalities. For example, the political rationalities underpinning
post-Mao China evolve around the question of how the Communist Party can most effectively
direct a market economy and improve the wealth of its population (Hoffman 2006; Sigley
2006). Finally, most would agree that government (the conduct of conduct) is by no means
the only important form of power in contemporary liberal democracies. A range of other,
more direct forms of power, such as sovereignty, disciplinary techniques and social welfare
schemes, are all part and parcel of our societies.

METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES AND KEY EMPIRICAL STUDIES

The debate over what exactly the term “governmentality” demarcates must be seen in relation
to the purpose the term is supposed to serve. In an early article, Rose and Miller provided an
analytical definition inspiring many studies (Rose and Miller 1992: 178–179). According to
this definition, the analysis of governmental rationality may focus on the moral, epistemo-
logical and idiomatic characters of power; that is, the envisaged codes of desirable conduct
for a state and its citizens, the kind of knowledge purporting to tell the truth about its objects
(society, economy, population, etc.), and the intellectual vocabulary in which governmental
practices are argued. Others have proposed slightly different analytical definitions (Dean
1999: 23ff.). While analytical definitions are important, it should be stressed here that it was
never Foucault’s intention that the term “governmentality” was to serve as a comprehensive
descriptor of the manifold and often contradictory forms of thinking of government taking
place in Western societies. Rather, it was to serve as an analytical tool selectively applied to
very specific forms of thinking that might need critical attention. Such governmentalities may
deserve attention because they are particularly prominent in contemporary political thinking,
or because they contain some undesirable limitations on contemporary freedom. Like his other
concepts, the notion of governmentality is probably best taken as a tool to be tested to see just
how far it might bring us in critically addressing some, but hardly all, contemporary forms of
governing.
If the general purpose of the term “governmentality” is to provide critical accounts of
contemporary forms of power or governing, then how could it be employed? What methodo-
logical principles and devices does it provide? This is difficult to answer inasmuch as Foucault
deliberately avoided a fixed methodology because he found that would easily ossify into yet
another regime of truth informing yet another way of governing people. Instead, he argued
that his studies be taken as tools that should be attuned, modified and directed to the concrete
purpose and research object.
 Governmentality  383

Notwithstanding this qualification, we can find some guiding principles in the works of
Foucault and related scholars. These are: attention to historical shifts and specificity, focus on
the practices and thoughts of governing (the state), and addressing how governmentalities are
linked to other forms of power. Firstly, any analysis of governmentalities may benefit from
paying attention to their historical specificity for at least two reasons. Accounting for both the
continuities and the shifts in governing may help in pinpointing the specificity of contempo-
rary governance and help in avoiding simplistic generalizations of governance. Moreover, in
line with the genealogical analyses sketched above, historical accounts of governmentalities
may also be conducive to the aim of producing an estrangement effect, that is, a certain critical
distance from contemporary modes of reasoning about how best to govern in order to expose
and question the ways in which they limit our freedom. Notwithstanding these benefits, many
governmentality studies pay rather limited attention to historical specificity and still manage
to produce interesting and thought-provoking insights. Thus, “simply” exposing the modes of
reasoning, bodies of knowledge and normative assumptions of contemporary governmentali-
ties may be very fruitful.
Secondly, governmentality studies are characterized by paying attention not to the state per
se but to the interrelationship between rationalities and techniques of government. Thus, all
governmentality studies agree that the state should not be understood as an actor sui generis
but rather as a specific modern way of codifying and institutionalizing power relations
(Foucault 1980: 122; Rose and Miller 1992; Dean 1994: 156–158). Accordingly, in line with
Nicos Poulantzas’s understanding, the state is regarded less as the origin of power and more
as a product of power relations and their institutionalization (Mitchell 1991). This conception
of the state has informed several interesting ethnographic studies focusing on the everyday
practices, discourses and myths making up the state (e.g. Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2001;
Inda 2005; Ferguson and Gupta 2008). In these studies, the state tends to be regarded as a sec-
ondary effect of more fundamental micro-forces, including both discursive and non-discursive
practices. The strength of such studies lies in their detailed accounts of state power as concrete
practices, institutions and discourses. Unfortunately, not all these studies are successful in
accounting for the ways in which such micro-practices are strategically linked to wider politi-
cal rationalities, governmental problematizations and forms of expert knowledge (political and
economic sciences) that bring coherence and direction, however fragile and preliminary, to
state practices. Some studies that do manage to account particularly well for the interrelation-
ship between rationalities and techniques are Ferguson (1990) and Escobar (1995).
Third, addressing the contingent linkages between different forms of power, such as
government, discipline and sovereignty, has proven an important methodological challenge.
Currently, there are too many governmentality studies that focus rather narrowly on liberal
forms of government. The risk is that they lose their critical edge and end up producing an
image of liberal democracies in which benign (freedom-based) forms of rule prevail. Some of
the most insightful and well-argued analyses of neoliberal rule in the field may give just that
impression (Rose 1999; see also Rabinow and Rose 2003). As argued by Villadsen and Dean
(2012), even if we accept the postulate that freedom is a fundamental part of contemporary
rule in liberal democracies, we do not get a convincing understanding of how this kind of rule
works without accounting for the ways in which it is linked with a number of illiberal power
practices, such as sovereign power and disciplinary techniques, which in different ways are
backed by the threat of state sanctioned coercion. Examples of such mixtures of power tech-
niques are numerous, and include the unemployed who are not active jobseekers, immigrants
384  Handbook on theories of governance

who do not try to learn the native language and adopt native customs, young people who do
not attend educational activities or jobs, companies violating environmental regulations, or
states that do not govern themselves (their territory and population) in a manner acceptable to
the Washington consensus standards espoused by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and
World Bank.
While the notion of governmentality was slow to gain credence, the number of govern-
mentality studies has grown rapidly since the early 1990s. Today, the number of studies
using the term “governmentality” is quite overwhelming, which does make it difficult to
select key empirical studies. Even if we exclude the many historical studies that do not deal
with governance in its contemporary manifestations, we are still left with a quite impressive
number of studies. Accordingly, the following studies include what I find is just a minor
sample of the most interesting and sophisticated studies of contemporary forms of governing.
While the selection is clearly idiosyncratic, I have tried to identify studies that not only use
the term “governmentality,” but in fairly systematic ways employ Foucault’s wider analytics
of power-knowledge. They include studies of New Public Management (e.g. Power 1997;
Larner and Walters 2000; Miller and Fox 2007; Le Galès and Scott 2009), network gov-
ernance (Larsson 2019; Triantafillou 2019), citizen participation and community-building
(e.g. Cruikshank 1999; Rutland and Aylett 2008), the governing of poverty and employment
(Walters 2000; McDonald and Marston 2005; Villadsen 2007), schooling and higher learning
regimes (Hunter 1994; Shore 2008; Dahlstedt 2009), biopolitics and public health policies
(e.g. Lupton 1995; Dent 2006; Rose 2007), crime prevention (O’Malley 1999; Garland
2001), contractualism (e.g. Yeatman 1997; Henman 2006), the European Union (Haahr 2004;
Walters and Haahr 2005; Hansen and Triantafillou 2011), and international relations and the
governance of states (Abrahamsen 2004; Bigo and Walker 2007; Fougner 2008).

STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF THE NOTION OF

GOVERNMENTALITY AND THE NEED FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

A key strength of the term “governmentality” is that it enables us to address often-overlooked

dimensions of power exercised under the heading of governance. Firstly, its focus on the
calculations and forms of knowledge embedded in the practice of governing provides one of
the key contributions of the analytical term “governmentality.” It urges academics to reflect
on the ways in which the theories they often take as their own analytical starting point are
actually part and parcel of the political phenomena they study. More precisely, it allows us
to analyze how the theories we often tend to see as more or less neutral academic lenses are
informing and enabling the exercise of political power. Governance theories are an obvious
case in mind, inasmuch as they not only describe or explain political phenomena but also more
or less directly inform political and administrative reforms. More generally, the term allows us
to address the ways in which various forms of knowledge enable and partake in the exercise
of power.
Another important contribution of governmentality is that it allows us to critically address
“soft” forms of power that are often overlooked by political and social scientists, even those of
a critical bent. More precisely, it enables us to analyze the kinds of power that do not go against
the will of those subjected to power, but facilitate, nurture, create and—by the same token—
structure their desires, reflections and choices (Rose 1999). In brief, it allows us to expose the
 Governmentality  385

forms of power that work not (only) through coercion but (also) through freedom. The added
parentheses are to indicate that all forms of power, however benign and freedom-based, may
at some point change and link up with less benign and more coercive modes of intervention.
The term “governmentality” is not without its challenges and limitations. The following
three seem particularly pertinent, namely: unclear research objectives, neglect of non-liberal
forms of power, and inadequate attention to the practices of government. Firstly, the research
objectives of governmentality studies are often not very clear and even when they are, they
are quite diverse. The lack of clarity of the aim of many governmentality analyses is quite
remarkable. Thus, we find numerous descriptive accounts of governmental rationalities at play
in a variety of settings, such as car driving (Simon 1997; Sheller 2004; for a list of amusing
examples, see Flew 2012: 6–7). We are never really told why we need to see this account or
what it provides that other theoretical accounts would not. In particular, the critical potential
of these studies remains unclear, if not absent. Merely invoking the term “governmentality” or
the author Michel Foucault is obviously not enough to provide a new and critical edge. Thus,
governmentality studies need to be better at specifying the potential merits of their analyses
vis-à-vis existing political and social analyses of governance.
Another but related challenge lies with the fact that too few governmentality studies are
preoccupied with grasping coercive forms of power. Discipline and sovereignty are still
important, not just as isolated forms of power. Often, they work in tandem with liberal forms
of government (Rose 2000; Dean 2002). They may do so both as a framework to initiate and
launch liberal forms of governing by allocating resources, and securing the rules of the game
and eventual sanctions (Slobodian 2018), and as a framework that actually imposes (coercive)
sanctions on those actors who cannot or refuse to conduct their freedom within the field of
action stipulated in these schemes of power. In brief, there is a need for more studies of the
ways in which the soft forms of power that we term “government” are strategically linked up
with illiberal forms of power in more or less coherent assemblages of power.
Thirdly, many studies of governmentality pay limited attention to the actual practices
of government. Instead they seem happy to study the discursive level of government only
(O’Malley et al. 1997: 509). As already mentioned above, Foucault’s lectures on govern-
mentality differed significantly from his genealogical studies by focusing almost exclusively
on the discursive level of government, that is, its rationalities. This analytical focus has most
likely inspired many subsequent governmentality studies without caring too much about the
practices of governing. It is, however, not only his lectures on governmentality that have been
accused of neglecting practices. Foucault’s genealogies of medical power, penal regimes and
sexuality pay attention rarely to actual behavior, but instead to the interrelationship between
the production of knowledge and the exercise of power. When criticized for not demonstrat-
ing whether the panoptic design of prisons really affected the mind and bodily behavior of
the inmates, Foucault responded that, even if the panoptic design largely remained an ideal,
it persistently informed penal architectural designs, schemes of interventions, procedures
of examination and techniques of confinement (Foucault 1991: 81). When these programs
failed to rehabilitate criminals, this was only taken by the reformers as an indication of the
need to further refine the panoptic penal regime. Thus, the constellation of knowledge, norms
and power clearly had a significant political effect, though not necessarily the intended one.
Notwithstanding the merits of this methodological choice, governmentality studies may
benefit from paying more attention to the concrete unfolding manifestations and resistances in
order to get a better understanding of the working of power (Petersen 2003).
386  Handbook on theories of governance

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35. Complexity theory and systems analysis
Christopher Koliba, Lasse Gerrits, Mary Lee Rhodes and
Jack W. Meek

Government officials and other decision makers increasingly encounter a daunting class of problems
that involve systems composed of very large numbers of diverse interacting parts. These systems are
prone to surprising, large-scale, seemingly uncontrollable, behaviours. These traits are the hallmarks of
what scientists call complex systems.
(OECD Global Science Forum)

Many conventional theories of public administration struggle to explain and predict the ever
more complex nature of governance. At the same time, there is a growing body of knowledge
in the realm of complexity science that speaks to public administration as a scientific discipline
and as a field, so much so that many observers and stakeholders—including the Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) quoted above—have recognized an
opportunity in the application of complexity sciences to the most daunting problems associated
with contemporary governance. As we will note, this recognition is being fueled by the appli-
cation of computational methods and models to questions of governance, and will undoubtably
shape future governance theory and practice.
During the 1960s and early 1970s several important observations were made that paved
the way for the integration of complexity into mainstream public administration and contem-
porary governance studies, such as Herbert Simon’s work in the 1960s (e.g., Simon 1962 in
the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society; and his 1969 book) in which it was
demonstrated how limited human cognition could bring forth considerably complex organiza-
tions. Rittel and Webber’s (1973) introduction of the concept of “wicked problems” brought
the notion of complexity to the fore at the junctures of planning and policy. Arguably, their
assertion that public policy and planning problems often defy final definitions and solutions
codified a simmering concern regarding the limits of rational thought and decision-making
earlier raised by Herbert Simon and by Charles Lindblom (1959). Wicked problems suggest
that policy problems and solutions are characterized by nonlinear, seemingly chaotic dynamics
(Meek 2010).
Also during this time, Harlen Cleveland (1972) recognized that the field of public admin-
istration needed to readjust its focus from looking at the administration of governments to the
administration of governance processes. While examining the complexity of metropolitan
governance arrangements, Vincent Ostrom, Charles Tiebout and Robert Warren (1961) first
posited the notion “poly-centric” governance involving actors from multiple sectors, geo-
graphic jurisdiction and social scale in 1961.
Another significant observation on the complexity of public administration came from
Pressman and Wildavsky’s (1973) policy implementation study. They recognized that generic
policy programs fail to deliver because such programs are unable to cope with the specific
contingencies and path-dependencies of certain decisions. Thus, a certain policy program
may work in one area, but fail in another. Furthermore, their study pointed to the fact that

389
390  Handbook on theories of governance

each implementation requires a string of decisions that appear to be the best choices in given
circumstances, but turn out to be suboptimal overall. LaPorte (1975) recognized that the ten-
dency towards increasingly complex organized social systems had significant consequences
for politics and policy, both in the level of interdependence between actors and in the number
and intensity and “disturbing surprises” encountered by citizens and policy-makers.
In the early 21st century an increasing number of scholars have sought additional explan-
atory power in the concepts and tools associated with the complexity sciences. Research by
Gerrits and Marks (2015) shows that the deployment of complexity science to analyze issues
of public administration, public policy and public management has grown quickly since 2008.
Subsequent research by Ivanovic and Gerrits (2018: 18) suggests that complexity as an edu-
cational topic within public administration and policy programs is now being taught around
the globe, largely in Germany (with 14 related degree programs), the United Kingdom (ten
degree programs) the United States of America (ten degree programs), and the Netherlands
(six degree programs), but elsewhere as well.
The recognition that wicked problems persist across—and are to be resolved within—
polycentric governance arrangements, and that policies are a deeply contingent phenomenon,
serves as the foundation for contemporary applications of theories of complexity to the study
of contemporary governance. This chapter traces important foundations that contributed to
our understanding of social complexity, network and systems theories in addressing wicked
and persistent problems. In so doing, we emphasize important tasks of integrating complexity
theory with governance research, the focus on systems levels of governance, and the devel-
opment of complexity-informed methods in this developing field of research and education.

COMPLEXITY AS THEORY

Complexity emerged out of the study of some of the more wicked problems facing the
natural sciences. For example, problems associated with weather predictions inspired Edward
Lorenz’s work on “strange attractors” that grew out of his study of the Earth’s atmosphere
during the 1950s and 1960s. Complexity theory also has roots within the field of computer
science, pioneered by the research of John Holland. Holland was chiefly concerned with the
emergence of complex adaptive systems, defining them as “systems that have a large number
of components, often called agents, that interact and adapt or learn” (Holland 2006: 1).
Complexity attempts to capture the dynamic, adaptive and emergent properties of a system.
Time and variability of different “agent” behaviors combine, co-mingle and sometimes
compete to fuel adaptation and emergence.
A thesis central to complexity science is that all natural and social phenomena are systemic
by definition, and that those phenomena will likely adapt to changing conditions. A complex
adaptive system (CAS) is defined as, “one whose component parts interact with sufficient
intricacy that they cannot be predicted by standard linear equations; so many variables are
at work in the system that its overall behavior can only be understood as an emergent con-
 Complexity theory and systems analysis  391

Figure 35.1 Number of publications where concepts and tools from the complexity
sciences have been applied to issues in public administration, public policy
and public management by year, absolute numbers

sequence of the holistic sum of all the myriad behaviors embedded within” (Levy 1993: 34).
A CAS is marked by several features:

● Adaptation: Under pressure from feedback, changing conditions and from the behavior
of other parts, the component parts adapt their routines, behaviors, goals, and so on, to
achieve long-term survival (Kauffman 1993; Holland 1995).
● Emergence: As a result of those adaptive moves, the system displays emergent patterns,
that is, system characteristics that are not traceable to individual behaviors in a linear
fashion: “well-formulated aggregate behavior arises from localized, individual behavior.
Moreover, such aggregate patterns should be immune to reasonable variations in the indi-
vidual behavior” (Miller and Page 2007: 46).
● Self-organization: The emergence of system characteristics can be seen as self-organizing;
the emergence of structure or set of characteristics without superimposed design. “A defin-
ing feature of complexity is that self-organization is a natural consequence of interactions
between simple agents” (Anderson 1999: 222).
● Path-dependency: Outcomes predicated on “the result of certain combinations of activities
that take place over time” (Pierson 2004: 34). Path-dependency will privilege initial con-
tingent conditions (David 1985; Prigogine 1997; Mahoney et al. 2008) that can have “a sig-
nificant influence over the irreversible course of events followed later in the sequence”
(Howlett 2009: 248).
392  Handbook on theories of governance

Complexity science has been applied to the study of collective behavior (such as mob and
swarm behaviors) and nonlinear dynamics found in time series analysis and ordinary differen-
tial equations. Co-evolution and adaptation from evolutionary biology (cf. Ehrlich and Raven
1964) are also part of the canon, as evidenced in some of the organizational development
and artificial intelligence literatures. Time is a crucial element in explaining the development
and outcomes of the policy process and the way policy systems evolve. Time can be treated
as a variable or as a contextual factor that defines path-dependency (cf. Pierson 2000) and
time-irreversibility (Prigogine 1997).
The concepts cited above are applied to a wide array of disciplines including the natural
sciences, computer sciences and the social sciences at large. Complexity science has also
been used to inform the application of game theory such as the iterated prisoner’s dilemma,
and multi-criteria analysis, system theory (anchored in such features as feedback loops and
homeostasis), and network theory.
The work of Louise Comfort (1994) in identifying emergent properties in dynamic environ-
ments is noteworthy. Her work, along with that of others, has highlighted important manage-
ment practices that emerge in extreme conditions of crisis (Comfort and Kapucu 2006) and
the role of leadership in preparing for extreme events (Comfort et al. 2010). Charles Perrow’s
(1984 [1999]) work on normal accidents falls into the same category. The work of Innes and
Booher (1999) highlights how complex adaptive systems (CASs) can be utilized as a frame-
work for consensus building and collaboration in highly contested arenas.
CASs have been found to persist within natural, biological and social systems (Wilson
2002). This allows for a transfer of concepts between these domains. The most common theory
transfer is one where social systems are equated with biological ones. Consider Thompson’s
description of CASs as a feature of evolutionary biology. He describes them as follows:

multi-stranded clumped networks that form a kind of non-linear (rhizome-like) organizational

structure, containing different relational principles of connectivity and heterogeneity, are always
“pregnant” with the possibility of breakdown and breakup, leading to new trajectories and transfor-
mations in a self-organizing framework that overcomes the twin obstacles presented by “necessary
evolutionary advance” and “path-dependency” (Thompson 2003: 11)

Those who are interested in applying the complexity sciences to the study of governance
are drawn to consider the relationship between the kinds of social systems that comprise
contemporary governance arrangements. We believe that the conceptualization of govern-
ance arrangements as CASs allows for the deeper understanding of multi-agent, multi-scale
governance arrangements as extensions of human beings’ biological foundations. For a deeper
exploration of this theme we refer to E.O. Wilson’s (1998) theory of “consilience.”
The mechanism of self-organization within CASs brings forth the emergence of new
structures. Emergence within CASs has long been documented within the social sciences as
social movements and revolutions on the macro scale, reforms and new trends at the meso
scale, and the creation of new social ties at the micro scale (Gerrits and Pagliarin 2020). Social
systems have been said to be more complex than biological systems (Beckage et al. 2013;
Wilson 1998). This “hyper complexity” of social systems (cf. Rescher 1998) persists because
social systems are comprised of human beings who are imbued with agency: they have a free
will, or at least a freer will than the components constituting pure biological systems. This
ability of human beings to make autonomous decisions regarding how they interact with their
 Complexity theory and systems analysis  393

environments makes social systems stochastic and/or imbues them with an added element of
randomness which is unique when compared to other types of systems.
The nested qualities of social systems also add to their stochastic nature, as most clearly
seen in the composition of individual people forming groups, with groups forming organi-
zations, with organizations forming wider networks with other organizations. This feature of
social complexity can be found in federal systems (Wright 2000) and the macro and micro
levels of social organization in the social sciences (Collins 1988), and most recently in the
literature integrating complexity theory in public administration and policy (Morcol 2012).
The mix of regularities and irregularities in social systems is moderated, in part, through
the capacity of humans to create institutional forms that outlast and transcend any individual
human beings. In other words, social systems are more than a series of interactions between
humans and between humans and their environment. In addition to “the whole being more
than the sum of its parts,” wholes can form institutions that persist well beyond the lifetime
of any one individual or groups of individuals, as attested to in the continuity of religious,
governmental and other corporate entries.
In complex adaptive social systems, institutions, and in particular institutional rules (Ostrom
1990, 2005), provide a level of stability and predictability to social systems. The public
administration and management fields have studied this stability in such areas as “bureaucratic
inertia,” and more widely in the literature on institutionalism (Peters 2005). The relationship
between institutionalism and governance has been firmly established, while the relationship
between emergent structures and governance is still a work in progress.

GOVERNANCE ARRANGEMENTS AS COMPLEX ADAPTIVE

SYSTEMS

The social functions most often associated with “governance” pertain to the pursuit and
execution of public policy goals. As the chapters in this Handbook can attest, these functions
extend across all facets of the policy process and involve actors from the public, nonprofit and
for-profit sectors.
Contemporary governance arrangements have been described as operating based on a few
simple rules that can lead to complex systemic properties. R.A.W. Rhodes (1997) was the first
to define some of the simple rules inherent to contemporary governance arrangements, arguing
that the self-organizing features of contemporary governance may be predicated on three basic
characteristics:

1. Interdependence between organizations. Governance is broader than government, cover-

ing non-state actors.
2. Continuing interactions between network members, caused by the need to exchange
resources and negotiate shared purposes.
3. Game-like interactions, rooted in trust and regulated by the rules of the game negotiated
and agreed upon by network participants (Rhodes and Murray 2007; Koliba et al. 2019a:
65).

The simple rules of governance put forth by Rhodes and later picked up by others studying
governance are predicated on the assumption that contemporary governance arrangements
take the form of networks.
394  Handbook on theories of governance

Governance is a decidedly systems-level construct (Koliba et al. 2019a). A “governor” is

a regulating component part of a complicated mechanism designed to regulate the speed of
the gears within a machine. In this context, to govern is to guide, steer and shape the operating
functions of some whole, be it a machine or an entire society. When interpreted as a systems
construct, governance takes on a cybernetic quality. Within social systems, governance is
undertaken through complex networks of individuals, groups, organizations and institutions.
We believe it is possible to isolate those key individuals, groups, organizations and institu-
tional rule structures that influence the overall direction of a whole governance network. To
accomplish this, we need to explore how network and systems constructs are the essential
ingredients to describe governance arrangements as a complex adaptive system (cf. Koliba et
al. 2019a; Gerrits 2012).

DESCRIBING GOVERNANCE ARRANGEMENTS AS NETWORKS

AND SYSTEMS

Network analysis has been a staple of social science research for many decades. Anthropologist
Alfred Radcliffe-Brown was the first to make the case that any observation of social phenom-
ena needs to be anchored in “the patterns of behavior to which individuals and groups conform
in their dealings with one another” (Radcliffe-Brown 1940: 228). Network concepts have
a long and rich history of being used to study organizational form and the diffusion of infor-
mation across social structures. Social network analysis may be traced to the early Hawthorn
experiments of 1924 to 1932, marking the first use of “network configurations to analyze
social behavior” (Berry et al. 2004: 540). Social network analysis has been used to study the
diffusion of knowledge, beginning with Coleman, Katz and Mentzel’s study of information
diffusion in physician networks (Coleman et al. 1977). Stanley Milgram’s “small world”
research is often cited as an important breakthrough in social network analysis, demonstrating
the “six degrees of separation” that exist between any two people. Over the last few decades,
the progress of social network analysis has benefited from advances in statistical methods and
computer programs in much the same way as system dynamics modeling has (Wasserman and
Faust 1994).
The application of social network analysis explicitly to the study of governance can be
traced back to Heclo’s (1978) study of issue networks, Sabatier and colleagues’ advancement
of advocacy coalition theory (Sabatier 2007; Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993), and the more
recent discussions of policy and governance networks (Koliba et al. 2019a).
The nature of networks and their governance characteristics are discussed in more detail
elsewhere in this volume, but we would summarize the general view that a governance
network may be defined as: a relatively stable pattern of coordinated actions and resource
exchanges; involving policy actors crossing different social scales, drawn from the public,
private or nonprofit sectors and across geographic levels; who interact through a variety of
competitive, command-and-control, cooperative and negotiated arrangements; for purposes
anchored in one or more facets of the policy stream (Koliba et al. 2019a: 71‒72).
There is an obvious link between network theories and systems theories that have been
around for a long time. For example, general systems theory has its origins dating back to
the 1920s (von Bertalanffy 1950, 1968). Early system dynamics frameworks were used to
describe biological and—a little later—mechanical systems. These theories became more
 Complexity theory and systems analysis  395

readily applied to social systems beginning in the 1960s (Boulding 1956; Forrester 1961;
Simon 1966). The public administration field adopted system dynamics constructs in various
iterations of public budgeting reforms (Schick 1966) and policy analysis (Dror 1967; Etzioni
1967; Quade 1972). A little later, system dynamic frameworks began to be applied to explain
organizational dynamics. Organizational theorists such as Simon (1966), Perrow (1967), Katz
and Kahn (1978), Ackoff (1980), Mintzberg (1983), Scott (1987) and Weick (1976) began to
explain organizational behavior in terms of stocks and flows, the transmission of authority and
power, and the relationship between an organization and its external environment. “Systems
thinking” became popularized in the late 1980s and 1990s with Peter Senge’s (1990) work and
Flood’s (1999) response.
The building blocks of a dynamic system are the stocks and flows of resources, and the
translation of one form of resource into another. The most typical example of this can be found
in the utilization of financial resources to undertake an action, which in turn leads to tangible
results: projects, programs, tasks completed, and so on. In this sense, money is inputted into
the system, and usually nonmonetary results (for example children educated, clients served,
waterways cleaned, material goods provided) are outputted. The drivers that support these
dynamics can be described in terms of feedback loops. These feedback loops are themselves
driven by the structural and functional relationship that exists between two or more social
actors in a network.
To this day the organizational sciences apply system dynamics frameworks to describe how
organizations work, and use these descriptions to undertake strategic planning (Richardson
1991). The popularity of the “logic model,” predicated on charting the relationship between
inputs, processes, outputs and outcomes, is now widely used in program and performance
evaluation contexts (Poister 2003). Viewing governance through a systems lens can provide
the opportunity to understand how performance measures and management provide feedback
and, presumably, to govern more effectively (Koliba 2013).
One of the chief contributions of system dynamics frameworks in the application of com-
plexity theory to governance concerns the relationship between the concepts of governance
and feedback. Building on Baumgartner and Jones’s (1993) notion of punctuated equilibrium
and application of systems theory to public policy, we may view feedback occurring within
a governance network in several ways. As found in classical theories of interest group liber-
alism and theories of regulatory capture (Peltzman 1976), it is very clear that contemporary
governance practices are undertaken through extensive feedback between interest groups and
the governments, nonprofits and businesses of interest to them. In this vein, citizen participa-
tion is a foundational objective of form of democratic governance that may also be understood
in terms of feedback loops. The role of policy tools in shaping feedback has also been asserted
(Pierson 1993; Koliba et al. 2019b; Gerrits 2012). Other forms of systems-level feedback in
governance networks involve the range of tasks and practices taken on by elected officials and
public administrators, and the use of performance measures to steer and evaluate the success
of governance networks.
We argue here that capturing the behavior of complex adaptive governance networks
ultimately requires the integration of both system dynamics and network architecture. Whole
systems are comprised of networks of social agents that are bound together and influenced by
agent characteristics, ties between agents, feedback loops unfolding between individual social
agents and institutional rules. Classic social network analysis captures network structures at
one point in time, but cannot easily account for the drivers that shape this structure, nor can
396  Handbook on theories of governance

it predict how the structure may change over time, as yet. Likewise, system dynamic models
may provide some explanation for how components of a system relate to and influence one
another, but they can struggle to capture the material practices and relationships that lead to
collective action.

COMPLEXITY-INFORMED GOVERNANCE THEORIES

There continues to be an extensive debate within the literature regarding the extent to which
there can be an overarching “complexity theory of governance” (Morcol 2012; Gerrits 2012;
Koliba and Zia 2013; Eppel and Rhodes 2018). In time, as larger and longitudinal studies
and models of governance complexity are carried out, such meta questions will be resolved.
Although we do not reject outright the possibility for a unified theory of governance complex-
ity to emerge, we take a theoretically and methodologically pluralistic approach to applying
complexity theory to governance studies.
To ground both monolithic and pluralist approaches to studies of the complexity of govern-
ance, a common unit of analysis is needed. Considerations of units of analysis fall largely to
the setting of boundary conditions between a governance system and its environment (which
may include other related or even encompassing systems). A chief challenge lies in the shifting
of boundaries to provide the conceptual categories that facilitate analysis of boundaries of
importance to stakeholders over time.
The reality of policy issues encompassing multiple boundaries within governance and
administrative systems is a challenge for both practice and research. Given jurisdictional con-
straints of governance systems, the challenge is considerable and provides serious barriers in
addressing complicated and overlapping policy concerns. This challenge has recently received
considerable attention in the literature concerning boundary spanning. For instance, Ingmar
van Meerkerk examined the role of “boundary spanners” among governance networks and
their influence on democratic legitimacy (Van Meerkerk 2014). This initiative was followed
with an interdisciplinary symposium on boundary spanners in public administration (Van
Meerkerk and Edelebos 2018) and rightly identified the multiple perspectives that can inform
the complexity of administrative responses to social issues. Research on boundary-spanning
strategies highlights the significance of this area of research for practitioners operating in
complex systems (Nederhand et al. 2019).
We believe that a wide variety of “complexity-informed” theories (Koliba and Zia 2013)
can be useful in helping to formulate consistent and comparable units of analysis based on
their boundary conditions. These theories are compatible with complexity science’s focus
on matters of self-organization and emergence, nonlinearity, and evolution and co-evolution.
Complexity-informed theories of governance will:
● avoid reductionism and address complex systems in a holistic fashion;
● be aware of the process and results of emergence;
● include feedback, stocks and flows, inputs and outputs;
● permit self-organization as a driver of system change;
● allow for dynamic interactions that lack unambiguous cause-and-effect relationships; and
● accommodate time and path-dependencies. (Koliba and Zia 2013).
 Complexity theory and systems analysis  397

Several complexity-informed theories of governance studies include the IAD Framework

originating from Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues (Ostrom 1990, 2006); the Advocacy
Coalition Framework (ACF) of Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1993); policy subsystem and
punctuated equilibrium theory (Baumgartner and Jones 1993); the policy streams theory of
Kingdon (1984), policy and governance network analysis (Koliba et al. 2019a), Pierson’s
(2000) theory of path-dependency in public policy, and policy diffusion theory (Berry et al.
1993). To capture the game-like interactions that fuel governance processes and practices,
the growing body of literature applying game theory to economic, social, psychological and
managerial settings is important to consider. The link between game theory and complexity
theory has a long history, anchored in the work of Herbert Simon (see our discussion above)
and later Robert Axelrod (e.g. Axelrod and Cohen 1999). Contingency theory (Donaldson
2001), configuration theory (Scharpf 1978), structuration theory (Giddens 1983), and many
other theories common to the policy, organizational and political sciences, may be considered
complexity-informed theories.
The extent to which these theories complement or contradict each other is a matter that
deserves greater examination. Using some of the more advanced research and modeling
methods discussed in the next section, both theory-testing and theory-tuning may be under-
taken. By drawing on individual complexity-informed theories or combining them into
computational models, by treating governance networks as complex adaptive systems, it is
possible for researchers and modelers to identify the high leverage points in the system that
allow for the effective steering or guidance.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES FOR COMPLEX ADAPTIVE

GOVERNANCE SYSTEMS AND NETWORKS

The methodological terrain of the complexity sciences is rich, despite being dominated by
computational techniques. That complexity theory emerged during the same time as computer
science was born is not a coincidence. The capacity to find patterns across large numbers of
observations or the capacity to calculate nonlinear interactions require the use of advanced
techniques. Yet, distilling the full complexity of social interaction into simplified decision
heuristics, hyper-matrices, state charts and other models designed to capture networked and
systems-level dynamics, runs the risk of missing out on the contextual complexity of quali-
tatively different situations. Across the social sciences, a diverse array of methods have been
employed to capture social complexity. The methodological pluralism adopted by complexity
researchers in public administration and policy studies fields, thus, is appropriate for the study
of complex governance networks. Before briefly discussing the range of methods that are
employed to study the complexity of contemporary governance arrangements, we want to
highlight a few methodological considerations.
The need to capture spatial and temporality variance is highlighted by the tension between
case-specificity and more generalizable approaches that encompass larger-n studies that look
for recurring patterns. The risk with case specificity is that all factors under consideration
appear unique, as there is nothing to compare the case findings with; while the risk with
large-n studies is that a more general overview leaves out the higher resolution details that
provide additional layers of complexity. Ultimately, accommodating complexity in studies of
governance networks necessitates that this conundrum be negotiated.
398  Handbook on theories of governance

When considering methodological approaches to study the complexity of governance

we need to balance the desire for prediction against the heightened levels of uncertainty.
Researchers and modelers must consider the extent to which CAS approaches to governance
provides predictive power, that is, the question of whether research on complexity allows
for prediction, and whether prediction is even possible given the inherent uncertainty within
complex systems.
The research toolkit for the social sciences is extensive, with wide application across
public administration and policy studies. The chief question becomes: When does a method
qualify as being complexity-informed? Arguably, the same criteria to gauge a theory’s
complexity-friendliness (see previous section) are relevant to selecting suitable methodolo-
gies. Based on these criteria, a number of complexity-informed methods can be named:

● Single thick descriptive case study: Good at describing contextual complexity, but
extremely limited in capacity to generalize.
● Comparative case studies: Good at describing contextual complexity; can lead to building
deeper pattern recognition across embedded cases; effectiveness contingent upon the use
of a robust comparative framework.
● Concept mapping and visualization: Good for articulating complexity in a simplified
manner; can be constructed using robust data collected through other means; limited
capacity for generalization.
● System dynamics modeling: Good at capturing feedback loops, and stocks and flows; data
hungry; can be a challenge to capture emergence.
● Network analysis: Good at representing governance relations as nodes and ties; pro-
vides a consistent way to describe and compare network properties; limited capacity to
capture dynamic and emergent properties although improving through Dynamic Network
Analysis; as of now, difficult to render generalization.
● Qualitative comparative analysis: Good for studying the contingency of phenomena and
allows building representations of real complex systems; only as sound as the conceptual
framework backing it up.
● Process analysis, which contains a variety of similar subtools such as phasic analysis,
event time series analysis: Good for studying the dynamics through time instead of serial
statics.
● Agent-based modeling: Good for tracing the roots of complexity and emergence to simple
rules of behavior creating that emergent complexity; allows for bottom-up behavior; easy
to nest agents inside of one another; difficult to calibrate.
● Structural equation modeling: Good for combining qualitative and quantitative data in
exploring competing models of complex systems; only as effective as the conceptual
models underlying it.
● Neural network modeling: Good for understanding how social systems learn and evolve;
data hungry; computationally very complex.
● Machine learning: Good for developing novel theory; expanded capacity for pattern rec-
ognition; computationally very complex.
● Experimental design: Good for understanding how “simple rules” govern behavior; rela-
tively easy to construct experiments; only good at understanding the behaviors of discrete
elements of a wider complex system.
 Complexity theory and systems analysis  399

Mixing methods may allow for method triangulation to bridge the gap between contextual
specificity and generalizability. The deployment of these research and modeling methods can
be used to tune, test and generate new theories of governance. Despite the inherent dance with
uncertainty inevitably found in studies of complexity, these methods may be used to assess
and, in some cases, predict how complex governance networks will perform and under what
conditions (Voets et al. 2019). Presumably, coupling complexity-informed theories with
complexity-informed methods may also be of service to those actively engaged in the art and
science of governing. Rhodes et al. (2011) make a strong case in their conclusion to this effect.

ADVANCES IN COMPLEXITY OF GOVERNANCE THEORY AND

MODELING

The field of public administration continues to advance the study of complexity theory. Initial
treatments can be traced to the work of Douglas Kiel (1994), E.H. Klijn (1996) and Sam
Overman (1996a, 1996b). Continued observations on the value of complexity theory in the
study of public administration can be found in the symposia of Teisman and Klijn (2008),
Teisman et al. (2009), Meek (2010, 2014) and Eppel and Rhodes (2018). More recent publica-
tions that apply complexity theory to public administration include Gerrits and Marks’s (2017)
use of the fitness landscape model to analyze collective decision-making, and the works in the
edited volume by Eppel and Rhodes (2020). Each of these works outline several contributions
in examining the public sector governance issues through the complexity theory lens.
Several advances in the examination of specific policy fields have been undertaken with
a complex adaptive systems perspective. One area is water governance, where research efforts
seek the connection between complexity and governance regimes (Teisman and Edelenbos
2011; Meek and Marshall 2018; Pahl-Wostl et al. 2010; Bitterman and Koliba 2020; Eppel and
Dingfelder 2021). The work of Judith Innes and David Booher offers a systematic approach to
complex adaptive systems through what they call “collaborative rationality” (Innes and Booher
2018). This work is based on the case examination of cross-boundary water governance.
Recent focus on the role of “smart” and “hybrid” forms of governance has been posited
using the logic of complexity science (Koopenjan et al. 2019). The integration of smart tech-
nology systems has been aligned with this framing (Koliba 2019).
Specific policy domains have received interpretations from the complex adaptive systems
perspective, including the environment (Schoon and Cox 2018), watershed governance
(Bitterman and Koliba 2020) and disaster management (Comfort et al. 2004; Chen et al. 2020).
The expanding number of policy arenas where complex adaptive systems analysis is under-
taken contribute to our understanding of how governance systems can respond to different
kinds of complexity.
There is great potential in the areas of modeling complexity within governance networks
and systems. Of particular promise are those models that take into account features of network
governance (Keast, Chapter 42 in this volume), multi-level governance (Bache, Bartle and
Flinders, Chapter 46 this volume); metagovernance (Torfing, Chapter 49 in this volume),
adaptive governance (Steelman, Chapter 50 in this volume) and collaborative governance
(Gash, Chapter 43 in this volume).
Several agent-based models have been used to reproduce patterns of emerging in hypotheti-
cal collaborative governance networks using assumptions from game theory (Scott et al. 2018;
400  Handbook on theories of governance

Lubell et al. 2014). Empirically derived and calibrated agent-based models of collaborative
governance have been coupled with governance performance assessments in the areas of
watersheds (Schlutter and Pahl-Wostl 2007; Bitterman and Koliba 2020), transportation (Zia
and Koliba 2013), hazardous waste (Eckerd et al. 2013) and public education (Maroulis 2016)
governance. Such models have tied governance structures to simulated performance-related
outputs. For instance, recent modeling of Bitterman and Koliba (2020) tested alternative gov-
ernance design scenarios for stormwater management systems that tie the actions of modeled
governance arrangements to calibrated water quality outcomes (as measured in the volume of
metric tons of phosphorus reduced) for specific watersheds. Governance model components
are coupled with geospatially rendered hydrological and P load reduction model components.
Such “pattern-oriented” modeling approaches (Grimm 2005) hold great promise for better
understanding the relationship between governance structure, governance function and gov-
ernance outputs, and their impacts on their external environments, when specific public goods
or common pool resources are in play (Koliba et al. 2019b).

HARNESSING COMPLEXITY FOR GOOD GOVERNANCE?

Can the application of complexity science and theory to the study of contemporary governance
arrangements aid in bringing about good governance? Two of the leading social complexity
scientists, Robert Axelrod and Michael Cohen, have addressed the potential of such efforts
to facilitate learning in order to harness of complexity. In their classic book Harnessing
Complexity: Organizational Implications of a Science Frontier, they describe this process as:

deliberately changing the structure of a system in order to increase some measure of performance,
and to do so by exploiting an understanding that the system itself is complex. Putting it more simply,
the idea is to use our knowledge of complexity to do better. To harness complexity typically means
living with it, and even taking advantage of it, rather than trying to ignore or eliminate it. (Axelrod
and Cohen 1999: 9)

The value of the complexity sciences to those actively engaged in processes of governing must
be considered. At the heart of this concern lies the question: What is the relationship between
complexity-driven governance research and knowledge creation for the field? What is the
benefit to practitioners, individually and organizationally?
Rhodes et al. (2011), in their detailed study of 12 public management cases in Ireland, rec-
ognize that the practicing public manager is faced with an increasingly difficult challenge of
governing in a constantly shifting environment. “This complexity challenges the professional
to engage in prior and real-time analysis that is not always central to the traditional process
methods and assumptions of either the classical bureaucratic model or the rational-analytic,
rational choice models that underpin much of the new public management tradition” (ibid.:
205). In particular, they directed attention to the core dynamic properties of CASs identified in
the case studies: path-dependency, adaptation, emergence and bifurcation. For example, and
in relation to path-dependency, the authors observed:

A clear message from the research is that ignoring history is likely to be a recipe for ineffective action,
or even disaster. As public service systems become more diversified in the numbers and kinds of
agents involved, this is a matter of concern. In a more networked world, many of the agents are highly
specialized and have little interest in, or capacity to understand, the path-dependencies that set the
 Complexity theory and systems analysis  401

initial conditions. That some of the agents should undertake to understand the path-dependencies is
vital, and this seems to fall to core agents in policy-making and implementation roles.

An additional question to arise from the question of whether it is possible to harness com-
plexity concerns the matter of how best to communicate complexity concepts to and among
practitioners. Is the language adopted by the academic community suitable for promotion and
use of the concepts in action by practitioners?
We believe it possible to “harness complexity” by having researchers and modelers work
with practitioners to develop a “situational awareness” (Endsley 1995; Vennix 1996) of the
governance complexity around them. Situational awareness hinges on “on a combination of
systems thinking, the acquisition and filtering of information, and the application of descrip-
tive patterning that may only be developed through extensive experience built up over time”
(Endsley 1995; Koliba et al. 2019b: 276). Situational awareness “is the perception of the
elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their
meaning, [and] the projection of their status in the near future” (Endsley 1995). Situational
awareness will lead to a heightened attention to appropriate critical cues, expectancies regard-
ing future states of the situation, and the tie between situation awareness and typical actions
(Endsley 1995: 34).

CONCLUSION

We must use our growing number of theoretical and methodological tools to better understand
the relationship between complex governance network and systems, the persistence of wicked
problems, and the increasingly diffused and cross-sector and cross-jurisdictional nature of
governance arrangements. We argue that complexity theory and science have the potential to
ensure that effective governance arrangements are in place to enable democratic feedback and
effective management practices to be pursued.
To achieve effective practices, this chapter has highlighted three areas of opportunities to
achieve effective governance arrangements and effective management practices. First, the
integration of complexity theory and science with governance studies is a critical step towards
better understanding of the dynamic nature of modern governance arrangements. This pursuit
opens up the terrain of governance studies to new, transdisciplinary possibilities, leading to
what Eppel and Rhodes (2020) refer to as the adoption of “alternative perspectives” on public
management and governance.
Second, we have asserted that governance is a decidedly systems-level construct. Both
networks and systems lenses serve as important foundations on which to apply complexity
theory and science to the study of governance arrangements. We have noted the inherent
hyper-complexity of all social systems and given particular credence to the intricate dance
occurring between individuals, groups of individuals, organizations and networks of organi-
zations. We have noted that social systems, and especially governance systems, are shaped by
the prevailing institutions and their institutional rules structures.
Third, and in relation to methodology, there is a need to expand our capacities to visualize
complex adaptive systems. This visualization is best demonstrated when we examine complex
adaptive systems operating over time. Indeed, complexity reveals itself most vividly if viewed
as operating over time. Only then do we begin to better understand the dynamics of complex
402  Handbook on theories of governance

systems and the properties of emergence and self-organization. Visualizations are an excellent
way to communicate complexity in a comprehensible fashion to a lay audience
Finally, turning our attention to the relationship between the complexity sciences and
other theories in the governance studies field, we noted that a large and growing suite of
complexity-informed theories exist to be used to understand governance complexity. We
further demonstrated that there exists a robust suite of complexity-informed methods, sug-
gesting that mixed methods can be used to overcome what amounts to be a scoping problem:
the need to acknowledge context while looking for generalizable patterns. We concluded by
considering how a complexity lens can be used by practitioners to inform practice, pointing to
the concept of situational awareness as a guide.

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36. Narrative and interpretative theory
Nick Turnbull

Narrative and interpretive theories of governance are making a contribution of increasing sig-
nificance to scholarship. Interpretivist approaches have been integral to the rise of governance
as a concept, because the increasing pluralization of political and administrative systems has
encouraged researchers to seek new theories and methods to take in this more diverse reality.
The main findings of interpretive research have involved uncovering the place of meaning
and culture in governance. Interpretivists have unveiled a rich world of ideas and collective
cultures beneath the surface of state institutions, decentring analysis from institutions and
abstract models by theorizing governance and policymaking as a practice characterized by
the interpretation and generation of meaning through symbols. Instead of seeing bureaucrats
and politicians as actors fulfilling prescribed functions according to a plan imposed upon
them, interpretivists have found governance to be a much looser coordination of individuals
and organizations brought together through cultural practices, guided by narratives about
their roles and contributing to these stories through their own ideas and actions. This chapter
articulates the origins and main approaches in what is a diverse and still forming analytical
framework.

FOUNDATIONS OF INTERPRETIVE GOVERNANCE THEORY

Narrative and interpretive theories of governance arose as a reaction against mainstream anal-
yses. This reaction took place in quite disparate arenas of scholarship, including public admin-
istration, policy analysis and organization studies. Although important differences remain
between interpretive approaches, they now cross-fertilize one another and can be grouped
together as sharing a common orientation towards understanding governance. Interpretive
governance theory is a recent development, but it has a longer heritage. A precursor can be
found in the work of Sir Geoffrey Vickers (1965), who produced a major work of British
public administration scholarship to rival the theory of Herbert Simon. Vickers rejected the
idea that political behaviour is primarily goal-directed, presenting instead a theory of ‘appre-
ciative systems’, which explained the prominent role of interpretations and practical reasoning
in the decision-making of civil servants. Vickers saw that values were central to how individ-
uals interpreted reality, and that what counted as a fact depended, in part, upon those values.
He also recognized that the intellectual faculties of analytical and tacit knowledge are not in
conflict but complementary. The influence of Vickers’ ideas can be found in the contemporary
interpretive theory of Bevir and Rhodes.
Within policy studies, interpretivism arose out of the critique of the fact–value separation in
social science and the concern that public policy scholarship should be relevant for practice.
Interpretivists saw that abstract, formal models of decision-making were simply not part of
the toolkit of policy practitioners, so they attempted to get to grips with the situated reality of
these practitioners to produce theories and equip graduates to be relevant for policy analysis in

407
408  Handbook on theories of governance

the real world. With its origins in the practical reasoning aspects of American pragmatism (see
Chapter 37) – from the writing of philosopher John Dewey, which found its way into the work
of Harold Lasswell on policy sciences – interpretivists built upon the concern for a ‘problem
orientation’ in policy analysis, a concept designed with the imperative of giving a real-world
account. Interpretivists found that formal models failed due to the agency of the many players
in the policy process and their ability to interpret the language of policy very differently from
what was intended by decision-makers. This emerged, in part, from the findings of mainstream
public administration science that policy implementation very often threw up all kinds of
complexities, missteps and unintended consequences (Pressman and Wildavsky 1973). Even
the lowest level of the hierarchy of policymaking, officials on the ground, was found to be
populated by ‘street-level bureaucrats’ (Lipsky 1980) who reinterpreted what policy meant
and acted accordingly. Interpretivists seized on such complexities of policymaking in practice
to point out that these were more than simple command and control failures; governance is,
at base, an intersubjective world constituted by many different actors, meanings, and argu-
ments. In other words, interpretivists proposed a new ontological perspective on the world of
policymaking.
Looking towards interpretive theory to explain the incongruences of this world, they drew
from epistemological insights in the philosophy of social science. They noted that the social
world is made of language, which inherently generates multiple meanings, and therefore
necessitates interpretation (Dryzek 1982; Torgerson 1985; Healy and Torgerson 1986; Fischer
and Forester 1987). Interpretive analytical frameworks and methodologies were adopted
from elsewhere in the social sciences to apprehend the complexity of meaning-making. Also
important were interpretive approaches in the study of organizations, sadly often confined to
business schools without making their way to politics departments. Here, interpretivists in the
1970s and 1980s studied organizations as cultures and used metaphors and narratives to con-
ceptualize them. They argued that formal analyses of hierarchies were insufficient to explain
organizational behaviour. Instead, they reconceptualized organizations as systems of shared
symbols and meanings (Smircich 1983). Narrative analysis, in particular, aimed to show
how people working in politics tell stories as accounts of their organizations’ histories and
to legitimate their roles within them. With governance today extending to private sector and
non-government organizations, as well as across national boundaries, interpretive analyses are
well placed to reveal the complex exchanges of symbols and development of governance cul-
tures. Interpretivists have argued that interpretive analysis logically follows the contemporary
‘hollowing out’ of the state (Rhodes 1994; Hajer 2003), because the introduction of horizontal
networks and the lack of a unitary set of rules demarcating responsibility for problems neces-
sitate greater freedom for interpretations, and thus the need to understand how meaning is
generated across networks.
While interpretive theories of governance are of recent heritage in political science, all
originate in related social theories and philosophies of social science, developed since the
nineteenth century. Even though only a few interpretive governance theorists derive their
perspectives explicitly from specific philosophies, an appreciation of these sources helps in
understanding key concepts. Firstly, American pragmatist philosophy is a significant influence
(in policy analysis, see Schön 1996), along with its offspring, symbolic interactionism. These
approaches in twentieth-century social theory developed in reaction against Parsons’ systems
theory, its proponents arguing that individuals hold a significant degree of agency and that
society cannot be understood by looking from the level of social systems downwards. They
 Narrative and interpretative theory  409

argued that social groups develop their own complex and contingent systems of symbolic
meaning in unique cultures. Secondly, ethnomethodology has been a significant influence on
interpretive governance research. Originating in phenomenology with thinkers such as Husserl
and Schutz, it was developed by Harold Garfinkel as an explanation of how societies maintain
social order. It uses ethnography to examine the everyday experiences of individuals and their
own accounts of those experiences. Phenomenological accounts accord primary importance
to the subjective experiences of individuals (Moustakas 1994), hence their concern with the
meaning of governance practices, situated in context. Thirdly, and related to this field, there is
hermeneutics. Derived primarily from the foundational work of Gadamer (1975), hermeneu-
tics articulates an interpretive framework for studying the meaning of language across epis-
temically distinctive historical horizons. The hermeneutic approach has been applied to the
study of many contextually different communities of meaning, including governance systems.
Finally, originating from a different basis in post-analytic philosophy, the British ‘history
of ideas’ school has been highly influential through the work of Mark Bevir (1999), whose
research spans philosophy as well as governance (Bevir and Rhodes 2010; Bevir 2013). Here,
the focus moves away from the hermeneutic possibility of understanding towards explaining
individuals’ beliefs about the world, located within historical traditions of meaning and ideas.
For Bevir, ‘All of our knowledge arises in the context of our particular web of beliefs’ (1999:
5). These accounts differ again from constructivism, which originates in Weberian social
science – it is only sometimes labelled ‘interpretive’ – and emphasizes the links between
individual subjectivities and ideas or norms that govern social behaviour (Hay 2001). These
distinctions are discussed and compared in several good in-depth discussions of the epistemo-
logical varieties of interpretive perspectives on governance and public policy (Fischer 2003;
Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2006; Bevir 2010b; Bevir and Rhodes 2010; Wagenaar 2011).
Whatever the variety of interpretive approaches, they share many similarities when it comes
to methodology. The emphasis on subjectivity, situated knowledge, ideas and cultural specific-
ity directs researchers to use textual analyses and close interpretations of governance practices.
Here, the ‘thick description’ of Geertz’s (1973) ethnographic method is widely utilized. These
ethnographic methods see the researcher immersed in the culture of political actors, perhaps
even as a participant observer taking part in discussions and making detailed observations of
the minutiae of governance activity. This close examination of data also means case studies
tend to dominate the literature, as these are best able to reveal the variety found in different
locations. The analysis of language is also a common method; hence ‘discourse analysis’ is
a variant of interpretive approaches (see Griggs and Howarth, Chapter 29 in this Handbook).
Narrative analysis is frequently used as a methodological tool to understand the explanations
political actors give of their own activity, hence to understand the organizing principles of gov-
ernance cultures. Methodological differences often turn on conceptions of which is primary,
discourse or narratives. Those drawing on structuralist and post-structuralist analyses favour
discourse as a whole system of language and logic at the meta-level, which underpins a gov-
ernance or policy regime. Those prioritizing narrative analysis are more influenced by herme-
neutic, symbolic interactionist, or post-analytic interpretivist theory, which see narratives as
the practical creations of social actors. That is, narratives are influential but not overarching
epistemic logics. Some researchers use the narrative methods associated with interpretivism,
but not its theoretical perspective (Gains 2009). Hence, interpretivism-as-method has been
influential in governance research beyond its strictly theoretical dimensions.
410  Handbook on theories of governance

THE DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTION OF INTERPRETIVE

GOVERNANCE THEORY

The contributions of interpretivism stem from its reframing of governance analysis through its
alternative theoretical and methodological bases. In this section, I outline these general prop-
erties of interpretive social science and link them to their derived forms in governance theory
in the form of the concepts of framing, discourse politics, and deliberative practice. Firstly,
interpretivism is not just a theory of governance but a whole analytical approach, from its phil-
osophical bases through to methodologies. In a field characterized by empiricism and in which
theory has often been pitched at the mid-level, interpretive governance theory has brought
a new perspective of considerable sophistication and comprehensiveness. Interpretivists
emphasize subjectivity, building upon the view that social facts cannot be disentangled from
values. Therefore, governance and social scientific theories of it are value-laden (Fischer
and Forester 1987). Individual social actors are embedded within value-laden contexts, their
interpretations of the world refracted through their own value systems, which are presupposi-
tions internalized by socialization into a given culture and history. Understanding governance
requires understanding what it means for the political actors themselves. Furthermore, their
account of their role is not objective but a subjective construction, effected through ideas and
narratives, which give reality its particular characteristics and its history, and the actors their
identities in regard to others. The meaning of governance is, therefore, intersubjective – result-
ing from the exchange of subjective interpretations – and the product of many deliberations
over problems and their many possible interpretations. In this general sense, governance is
a deliberative exercise, such that the procedures by which deliberation is carried out influence
not only the outcomes of policymaking, but the very nature of the questions at stake (Bacchi
2009). Interpretive governance theory is centrally concerned with interpreting the production
and reception of meanings in governance and public policy.
Given this epistemological orientation, the second key feature of interpretive accounts
is to argue that policy problems are not pre-defined, but are in fact the result of actions to
render them as problems, to declare that a situation poses a question in need of a solution.
The concept of problem ‘framing’ is commonly used, with many works devoted to identifying
how problems are constructed and how this impacts on the range of possible solutions (Yanow
1996). Different stakeholders in a policy problem act to define it through their interpretations
which continue throughout the policy process (Rein and Schön 1977; Rein and White 1977;
Forester 1993; Turnbull 2006–07), whether as the intentional effort to shift political discourse
or following from the unintended consequences of implementation (Bevir and Rhodes 2003).
Given the inherent variability in the meaning of language and symbols, contingency is the key
feature of interpretive accounts. Interpretivists have therefore highlighted the argumentational
contest over meaning in governing activities (Fischer and Forester 1993; Fischer and Gottweis
2012). Framing concerns power, thereby producing political winners and losers at the most
basic level of the construction of problems. Political coalitions develop around alternative
discourses, their adherents endeavouring to skew the debate in their favour by promoting
their own interpretive frame over others. We can see how interpretive approaches are some-
times linked to normative positions supporting deeper, more robust deliberative governance
procedures aimed at recognizing and overcoming intractable differences in value systems.
Deliberative theorists have argued for more democratic governance practice, particularly for
 Narrative and interpretative theory  411

dealing with controversial issues in which normative conflicts must be explicated and treated
(Healey 1993; Forester 1999; Dryzek 2000; Newman et al. 2004; Fischer 2009; Bevir 2010a).
The third conceptual innovation of interpretive accounts is narrative analysis. Instead of
approaching the governance of problems by examining institutional structures and/or the
interests of relevant actors, interpretive research studies the narratives deployed by those
political actors. Narratives serve as lenses through which actors interpret policy problems
(Yanow 2000; Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2006), how they explain political reality by telling
one another stories with a plot, structure, meaning, and resolution (Fischer 2009). Narratives
are a combination of many different contributions, such that they are collective, social produc-
tions, which are both internalized and shared. They may be pre-existing stories in a cultural
history, which explain prior experiences and orient the interpretation of new ones (see, for
example, Schram and Neisser 1997). Narratives also situate actors relative to one another.
Stone shows that policy disputes are centred on disagreements about storylines, rather than
facts (1988). Narratives are powerful because they articulate a complex reality via simplified,
figurative means, through which people can reduce the complexity of the world. They can
also be used to explain historical patterns of governance. For example, Bevir and Rhodes’s
historical approach rejects the Westminster model of the British state in favour of identifying
long-term continuities in British governance via the discovery of four main traditions: Tory,
Liberal, Whig, and Socialist (Bevir and Rhodes 2006). They have also used ethnography to
reveal how, in the everyday life of the British executive, the Westminster model remains
crucial for civil servants as a legitimating narrative for their activities, socializing them into
a common culture with a common set of beliefs and practices (Bevir and Rhodes 2006; Rhodes
2011). Narratives are thus ‘structuring’ forces that support institutional and policy consistency
over time (see, for example, Boswell 2015). Related to narrative analysis is ‘dramaturgical’
analysis, derived from symbolic interactionism, in which policymaking controversies are
analysed as theatre, intended to articulate the nature of the participants’ emotional involvement
(Dillon 1976; Gottweis 2012). Analysis of the emotions in governance has been applied across
a range of subdisciplines, including international relations (Prior and van Hoef 2018), public
policy (Durnová and Hejzlarová 2017), public management (Fan and Zietsma 2016), and
corporate governance (Velayutham and Perera 2004).
The focus on meaning has, in some cases, produced a shift of attention to the level of
the individual in governance processes. The ability of individuals to interpret and generate
meanings endows them with more agency, even when their autonomy is restricted by law,
norms, and institutional office. For some interpretivists, this individual agency in govern-
ance necessitates the ‘decentring’ of political institutions (Bevir and Rhodes 2003, 2006),
dethroning them from their primary ontological position. Even when public officials interpret
a situation as requiring a response based on institutional rules, the decision to invoke a rule
nonetheless constitutes a choice (Colebatch 2002). Interpretivism has thus ‘repopulated’ the
state with subjects, its many actors no longer subsumed within reified institutions (Bevir and
Rhodes 2010). Instead, it is the practices of political actors which are ontologically central.
Interpretive research on state actors has been applied to many areas of governance activity,
including parliamentary committees (Geddes 2019), the judiciary (Annison 2014) and political
elites (Boswell et al. 2019).
This emphasis on practice constitutes the fourth main contribution of interpretivism to
governance theory. Interpretive theories conceive of governance as an activity or set of
practices, in which reference to rules of conduct is only one dimension. Rather than simple
412  Handbook on theories of governance

rule-following, policymakers engage in ‘practical reasoning’, approaching each task in a prag-

matic sense, drawing upon their experience and seeking innovative ways to deal with the
problems they encounter. Governance is thus both a practical and an interpretive process in
which individuals and collective organizations make sense of the world and respond, in regard
to their situated context. The conception of practice here refers to the idea of entrenched under-
standings enacted through intuitive or habitual responses. Hence, practice constitutes a form of
knowledge in itself. Policy practitioners deploy their intuitive sense in interpreting problems,
developed through experience, as much as they reason instrumentally and reflexively in regard
to outcomes. Thus, while individuals have the capacity to subjectively interpret events, they
are also not entirely free to make whatever interpretations they wish, because they are con-
strained by the many unseen presuppositions of their practice. This situatedness of individuals
embodies an emotional disposition as well, particularly in their identification with their roles
and the organizations which employ them. From this, one can appreciate the rationale for
ethnomethodology, because it explains cultures of governance through a close examination
and understanding of situated practices. Interpretive approaches can be distinguished, in part,
by how they conceive of practice: as based in traditions that constitute webs of belief (Bevir
and Rhodes 2006); as ‘appreciative systems’ (Vickers 1965); as phronesis (Flyvbjerg 2001;
Flyvbjerg et al. 2012); as ‘policy work’ (Colebatch 2006; Hoppe 2010); or as habitus (from
Bourdieu’s sociology; Wagenaar and Cook 2003). In each case, the theory of practice is the
conceptual link between the micro- and macro-level of governance, between the agency of
individual political actors and the structuring effects of cultural context. Hence, it cuts across
deliberation about problems and the framing of problems through practical or ‘everyday’
knowledge. Extending from practice theory by situating it within a larger relational epistemol-
ogy, recent research has argued that relationality is a key governing logic in policymaking,
occupying a central place in practice via the continuous work of negotiating relationships
between policy actors (Bartels and Turnbull 2019; Bartels et al. 2020; Lejano 2020).
But interpretive approaches also examine the aggregate dimension through the development
of macro-level interpretive concepts. It is here one finds interpretivism’s most extensive
and controversial re-imagining of governance in a new language to explain the constraining
effects of context upon governance activities. The contexts of interpretation are articulated
not as structural or causal forces but as contingent effects deriving from cultures, discourses,
ideas, traditions, and narratives. Interpretive analyses aim to uncover meaning at the aggregate
level by understanding the cultures generated by governance practices and the narratives that
become collectively adopted, and thus reference points for future deliberation. Discourse
theory – the analysis of logical systems of meaning lying within governance regimes – is
one set of approaches, found in perspectives such as political discourse analysis (Glynos and
Howarth 2007) and discursive institutionalism (Schmidt 2011). Constructivist theories focus
on epistemes, systems of ideas and ideologies that serve as reference points across different
areas of decision-making (Haas 1992; Hay 2008). For example, Blyth (2013) analyses policy
in regard to the 2008 global financial crisis by charting the history of austerity as an idea, one
which exerts a historical power that has led to ineffective responses to the crisis, leading to the
decline of the eurozone economy and the impoverishment of member states. Elsewhere, there
are a great many analyses of the generative effects of discourse, for instance in social policy
(see, for example, Marston 2000; Barbenhön and Haus 2015).
The attention to the play of political power through frames, ideas, and discourses has led
to the revival of rhetoric as an interpretive concern. Interpretivists pointed out that, emerging
 Narrative and interpretative theory  413

from the study of policy practice, scientific evidence was often used quite selectively in
decision-making (Weiss 1991). The ‘argumentative turn’ (Fischer and Forester 1993; Fischer
and Gottweis 2012) in policy analysis was thus a key aspect of the post-positivist interpretive
critique of the rationalist depiction of policymaking in favour of an argumentational logic
involving a contest of ideas and the effort to persuade. Accompanying argumentation has been
an interest in rhetoric, through which interpretivists have sought to move beyond normative
theories of deliberation to incorporate the analysis of symbolic distortion and manipulation in
governance debates. The use of rhetoric aims to better identify how power is sought through
language, in both its framing effects and its persuasive efforts. It has also been presented as
a theoretical framework for analysing policymaking by integrating three important interpre-
tive constructs in the Aristotelian categories of ethos (values), logos (arguments), and pathos
(emotions) (Gottweis 2006, 2012; Turnbull 2013). Rhetorical analysis also highlights power
in the form of political communications, particularly the widespread practice of using ‘spin’ to
reinterpret political decisions post hoc in either favourable or pejorative terms.

DEBATES AND CHALLENGES

Interpretive governance research has developed rapidly in recent years so that it should now
take on new challenges to extend its influence and provide more robust results. The first
main challenge is to deal with the critique from non-interpretivists about its methodological
basis, and therefore about the generalizability of its findings. Some interpretivists have been
reluctant to engage in such debates, insisting on the contextualized nature of social life, such
that the endeavour to develop generalizable theories is positivist and to be rejected (Yanow
and Schwartz-Shea 2012: 47). However, others do not see such a strong conflict between
contextual methodology and a macro-level theory of governance. Narrative accounts can be
robust, so there is no a priori reason why interpretive research findings cannot be used to
develop more general theories. After all, interpretive epistemology itself presumes a generally
applicable theory of knowledge, even if this also entails wide variability at the empirical level.
Nonetheless, the task of convincing non-interpretivists remains regarding the criteria by which
to determine what evidence to accept and what to reject when producing interpretive analyses.
An interesting hybrid has emerged from the other side of the epistemological ledger, in the
form of the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), which combines interest in policy narratives
with positivist methodology (Jones and McBeth 2010). Although it has been controversial,
critics have, perhaps surprisingly, argued that advocates of the NPF and interpretivists can
learn from one another (Jones and Radaelli 2015).
Concerns also arise in the scope of interpretive empirical research. Case studies have been
central for interpretivists because they have allowed them to reveal the richness of governance
practice and thereby develop a critique of institutionalist and behaviouralist perspectives,
which can explain little of this variety. However, the emphasis on case studies and in-depth
knowledge means systemic accounts are limited. To produce more robust research, inter-
pretivists must engage with the necessity of studying multiple cases, including comparative
analyses and even, perhaps, meta-analyses. While interpretivists’ insistence on contextualized
knowledge means that they reject causal laws, they do not reject the possibility of generaliza-
ble associations, so long as they are framed in terms that express contingency. There are many
observable empirical similarities in governance practices across different countries, including
414  Handbook on theories of governance

in the ordering properties of culture. Bevir and Rhodes’s interpretive framework clearly makes
possible the comparison of traditions and narratives across polities; it is the feasibility of the
in-depth ethnographic research required that is the difficulty to overcome. For now, the main
comparative analyses can be found in the constructivist, rather than strictly interpretivist, liter-
ature on the role of ideas in transforming government (see Hall 1997; Finnemore and Sikkink
2001; Blyth 2002). But the key epistemological differences with constructivism, which is
more holist, mean that many interpretivists may have to accept more scientific generalization
than they are comfortable with in order to develop more widely applicable research.
The status of narratives as explanations of governance is also up for debate. One can legit-
imately question whether narratives fully explain political action, or whether they are more
to do with how social actors explain social action to themselves. That is, narratives might
equally be rationalizations of actions, as much as explanations. They could thus be interpreted
rhetorically, with individuals locating themselves as characters in a story, thereby giving
themselves status and agency which may not be real. In other words, narrative analysis does
not do away with the question of whether structuring social forces operate through narratives.
Here, macro-sociology beckons as an explanation of broader social forces that exert influence
despite the interpretive capacities of individuals. This returns us squarely to the question of
power. Some interpretivists see in new modes of governance the positive aspect of democratic
agency and devolved power (Bevir 2010a), while others see them as giving rise to new modes
of hegemony and control (Bang 2004; Griggs and Howarth 2013). Interpretivists need to
develop an account of power that incorporates the symbolic power of meaning-making equally
with the power contained in the institutional force of law. Added to this is the central question
of economic power, which has been made particularly pertinent since the global financial crisis
and its aftermath, notably in the relationship between business and government. Research in
critical political economy has shown that interpretivists cannot ignore these debates (Jessop
2010; Davies 2011).
Linked with these debates is the fundamental question of the relationship of interpretivism
to varieties of institutionalism and the bottom-up emphasis in interpretive theory. In govern-
ance, institutions have long held centre stage, and rightly so. In the endeavour to establish
interpretive theory as making a distinctive contribution, critics have argued that interpretivists
have sought to emphasize meaning to such an extent that they have overlooked institutions.
Whereas interpretivism has aimed to ‘problematize’ the political world by questioning the
presuppositions of conventional accounts, institutions continue to achieve a significant degree
of ‘deproblematization’ by limiting the scope of political questions and what actions may be
taken in response to them.
Thus, institutions are also significant framing devices, and even serve as narratives.
Bang (2004) argues against the decentring trajectory of communicative accounts. Instead,
he emphasizes the power of knowledge systems and governance narratives, which exercise
a self-disciplining effect upon individuals as ‘culture governance’. Hence, any separation of
interpretivism from institutions should be rejected, and interpretivists may consider working
harder to develop syntheses of their own ideas with work on institutions. Constructivist theo-
ries of institutionalism have sought to incorporate a strong communicative perspective (Hay
2008; Schmidt 2011).
Finally, and perhaps the matter at the heart of debates surrounding interpretivism, there is
the question of structure versus agency in explanations of governance. In revealing the scope
for interpretation in theory, interpretivist accounts have expanded the degree of agency held by
 Narrative and interpretative theory  415

even minor players in governance systems. A corollary to this finding is that power relations
must be exercised in limiting the agency of these same actors, power that extends through
discourse and culture beyond the invocation and acceptance of rules and regulations that order
behaviour. Thus, critics have argued that interpretivists accord too much agency to individuals
(McAnulla 2006). Interpretivists have mounted robust defences against such criticism on the
grounds that it ignores their emphasis on the structuring effect of ideas and narratives (Bevir
2004; Hay 2011). What is at stake is the relationship between macro- and micro-levels; by
what mechanisms cultural norms and institutional rules are translated into practices, and
vice versa. This raises a social-theoretical question requiring adjudication upon the sources
of stability and change in society. Researchers have applied new theories of social practice
to address this fundamental issue within an interpretive framework (Bevir and Rhodes 2006;
Colebatch et al. 2010; Hoppe 2010; Flyvbjerg et al. 2012; Wagenaar 2012). Insights from
sociology will likely be of continuing use, because one of its main aims has been to explain
the interplay between individual practices and structuring social forces. Interpretivists are
right to insist on the contingency of the world; however, governance is essentially an organ-
izing activity, one which simplifies and manages political questions by creating patterns of
order. Therefore, attention to ‘structuring’ forces, even if one uses this term loosely, is vital in
explaining it. Along with methodological dilemmas, the wider influence of interpretivism will
likely hinge upon this question. There are some moves to synthesize interpretivism with other
frameworks that articulate a stronger notion of structure (Goodwin and Grix 2011; Hay 2011).
However, these efforts merely darn the holes rather than knit new socks. Instead, relational
theory and methods, mentioned above, is perhaps a better candidate for explaining the inter-
action between interpretive agency and macro-level social patterning, as well as potentially
bridging the divide between interpretive and non-interpretive methods. In this and other devel-
opments such as the NPF, a mood is developing towards an integrated view of governance,
one which permits a greater degree of theoretical generalization by according a role for ideas
and individual agency, while also accounting for the structuring forces of macro-level power,
exercised through institutional relations, negotiated bargaining between interests, and culture.

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37. Pragmatism
Christopher Ansell

Pragmatism developed as a distinct philosophy and political perspective in the nineteenth-century

U.S., though in constant interchange with European philosophical traditions and political
developments (Kloppenberg 1986; West 1989; Menand 2001). On a philosophical level, the
first generation of Pragmatist philosophers—notably Charles Peirce, William James, John
Dewey, and George Herbert Mead—took up the task of breaking down the dualisms they
saw as plaguing Cartesian and Kantian philosophical traditions. In response, they developed
a practical, experiential philosophical perspective that emphasized the dynamic process of
individual and societal development. Partly owing to this practical, experiential perspective,
the early Pragmatists engaged closely with the major political and social movements of their
era. Pragmatism both influenced and was influenced by the Progressive and Populist move-
ments in the U.S., which led them to develop important perspectives on democratic govern-
ance. Pragmatism also had an important influence on the early social sciences, and notably on
psychology, economics, and sociology.
The early period of Pragmatism left an enduring legacy across a range of fields as diverse as
psychology, education, social welfare, planning, and law. However, subsequent developments
in philosophy, the social sciences, and politics partially eclipsed the popularity of Pragmatism.
The rising dominance of analytical philosophy and positivism relegated Pragmatism to the role
of a less rigorous and objective progenitor. In the social sciences, behavioralism and structur-
alism seemed to offer a more scientific basis for explaining human behavior. Conflicts around
involvement in World War I divided Progressives, and fears of corruption, mass society, and
fascism led many Progressives to champion technocratic public administration and elitist
conceptions of democracy. The managerialism of large-scale corporate and government
organizations, sustained post-World War II economic growth, and the Cold War all tended to
reinforce these perspectives and added to the marginalization of Pragmatism.
Beginning in the 1970s, a number of intellectual and political developments came together
that eventually led to a major revival of Pragmatism. The formalism of analytical philosophy
was challenged by the “linguistic turn” initiated by the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein
and Roland Barthes, and basic precepts of scientific positivism were disputed. In the social
sciences, structuralism was rejected as lacking an adequate appreciation of human agency, and
behavioralism was attacked for its narrow individualism. The social movements that began in
the 1960s championed the role of active civic participation and challenged elitist conceptions
of democracy. Failures of technocratic planning led to a search for new forms of democratic
politics. Deindustrialization, recession, fiscal crisis, and rapid technological change spawned
an appreciation for smaller, more flexible, and more entrepreneurial organizations. It was in
this context that scholars in different fields began to rediscover Pragmatist ideas.
A number of key intellectual developments marked the beginning of what is some-
times referred to as “neo-pragmatism.” Inspired by the linguistic turn in philosophy, the
post-analytical American philosopher Richard Rorty wrote Philosophy and the Mirror
of Nature (1979)—a spirited attack on the conception of philosophy as the bedrock of all

419
420  Handbook on theories of governance

knowledge. Rorty counterposed this conception of philosophy with John Dewey’s apprecia-
tion of philosophy as a practical enterprise that rejected “the quest for certainty.” In Beyond
Objectivism and Relativism ([1983] 2011), American philosopher Richard Bernstein wrote
approvingly of the philosophical turn towards more practical notions of rationality and
highlighted important Pragmatist contributions to the understanding of practical rationality.
Finally, German philosopher Jürgen Habermas published The Theory of Communicative
Action (1989), which sought to redirect our basic understanding of rationality. Building on
George Herbert Mead’s understanding of the role of communication in social development,
his work sparked interest in “deliberative” forms of democracy. Democratic theorists sub-
sequently rediscovered John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems (1927), which outlined
a more deliberative and civic alternative to elitist conceptions of democracy. These and many
other works launched a philosophical revival of Pragmatism that began to seriously influence
how scholars thought about issues of democratic governance.
Several key works in the social sciences also laid the groundwork for a revival of
Pragmatism. One source of inspiration was Donald Schön, a professor of urban planning.
In The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (1983), Schön built on
Dewey’s model of inquiry to demonstrate how different professions used experience, reflec-
tion, and improvisation to solve problems. Another inspiration has come from the work of
political scientist Charles Sabel, who sought to take models of learning developed in high
performing private organizations and apply them to democratic governance. His model of
“democratic experimentalism” (Dorf and Sabel 1998) drew directly on Pragmatism’s empha-
sis on the value of experimentation. Finally, the work of sociologist Philip Selznick also
inspired those who were rediscovering Pragmatism. His work on institutions (1949, 1984),
leadership (1984), law (Nonet and Selznick 1978), and social theory (1994, 2008) analyzed the
development of organizations and communities from a Pragmatist perspective, emphasizing
the fate of values in legal, organizational, and political contexts.

PRAGMATISM AS A DISTINCTIVE THEORETICAL LENS ON

GOVERNANCE
Pragmatism is not an easy philosophy to summarize in a few short sentences. The interests of
the early Pragmatists ranged across logic, semiotics, aesthetics, psychology, learning, social
theory, and political theory, and contemporary Pragmatists have equally broad interests. I have
argued, however, that a common theme running through Pragmatism is a dynamic conception
of human development that I refer to as “evolutionary learning” (Ansell 2011). Pragmatists
emphasize that learning is an ongoing process of problem-solving, deliberation, and exper-
imentation, sedimented over time as experience, identity, habit, skill, and knowledge. This
sedimentation, in turn, affects our subsequent capacity for action, including our capacity
for practical reason, creativity, ethical behavior, and reflexivity. Envisioned as working at
the level both of individuals and of groups, evolutionary learning has many implications for
theories of governance.
Before addressing these implications, it is worth briefly considering whether Pragmatism is
an empirical or normative perspective. “Both–and” better characterizes Pragmatism’s stance
toward the fact–value dichotomy than “either–or.” However, a normative or empirical per-
spective may be weighted more depending on the context or the issues at stake. For example,
 Pragmatism  421

with respect to learning, Pragmatism may be read as saying “learning is good” (normative) or
“be attentive to the way that much behavior is learned” (empirical). In any case, Pragmatism’s
anti-foundationalism, its naturalization of ethics, and its pluralism led it to be more con-
cerned about the process of ethical action than its philosophical first principles. Even where
Pragmatism is being normative, it tends to shift attention from the “context of justification” to
the “context of discovery” (Caspary 2000). Yet Pragmatism does not preach an opportunistic
“whatever works” view of the world, as sometimes accused. It is vitally interested in human
values, and a Pragmatist ethics has been advanced for several governance-related fields—
environmental ethics (Pearson 2014), bioethics (Pamental 2013), and science and technology
ethics (Keulartz et al. 2004).
Without hoping to represent the full range of Pragmatist ideas, Pragmatism’s usefulness
lies in orienting us to three fundamental questions about any governance situation: What is
problematic? What values are at stake? And what is possible? In examining this govern-
ance situation, Pragmatism is normatively concerned about or empirically attentive to three
corresponding dimensions of the governance process: problem-solving, deliberation, and
experimentation. The recent shift in focus from the formal institutions of government to more
informal and interactive governing processes accentuates the relevance of Pragmatism to
governance theory, because this orienting logic is extremely useful for addressing the wicked
and unruly problems that lie at the heart of many governance processes.

What Is Problematic?

Whether as a normative lens or an empirical perspective, Pragmatism encourages us to orient

ourselves to the concrete situations in which governance issues arise, focusing in particular
on the opportunities or demands for action entailed by these situations. We must “start from
where we find ourselves” (Misak 2014: e12). An important feature of a Pragmatist conception
of democracy, for example, is that it takes the world as it is and then focuses on the concrete
challenges it presents. As Fung (2012) notes, this perspective differs from ideal conceptions
of democracy that tend to erect prescriptive standards for democratic institutions. In terms of
governance, the focus on the concrete situation orients us to the embeddedness of individuals
and groups in historically specific webs of activity and focuses on the problems that arise in
the course of this activity. While much activity is habitual, problems create distinctive choice
points that can trigger reflexivity and hence can become opportunities for learning and growth.
Therefore, Pragmatists are attentive to what is problematic about concrete governance situa-
tions and to how individuals or groups go about addressing what is problematic.
For a Pragmatist, problems are themselves problematic. The precise contours and full
meaning of a problem are often uncertain and contested, prompting inquiry into the problem
and deliberation about what it means and how to solve it. The definition of the problem (which
is a matter of social construction) is highly consequential for how the problem will ultimately
be addressed. Moreover, problem-solving is a skilled and creative endeavor, which means
that individuals and groups will vary in their capacity to address problems. Confronted with
constraint, novelty, and uncertainty, problem-solving often calls for experimentation or for
a reconstruction of the situation itself. Because problems trigger reflexivity and are oppor-
tunities for learning and growth and because they are problematic, a Pragmatist approach to
governance is vitally interested in the problem-solving strategies adopted by individuals and
groups (Ansell 2011).
422  Handbook on theories of governance

What Values Are at Stake?

Pragmatism’s focus on problem-solving is often read as a narrow instrumentalism. But a wider

reading suggests a more humanistic concern with the source and fate of values (Selznick
2008). Problems surface values, and problem-solving as a process leads to their elaboration
and reformulation. Pragmatism encourages us to see values as contextual and valuation as
a process, as opposed to understanding them as objective qualities of things or as embodied
in fixed moral rules (Klamer 2003; Stuhr 2003; Muniesa 2011; Stark 2011). As Klamer puts
it, “People do not have values written on their forehead” (2003: 197). Nor does Pragmatism
understand values as commensurable—that is, as capable of being represented on a common
scale of utility (Klamer 2003). Nevertheless, it assumes that values will often clash and that
problem-solving often requires adjudication or integration across values.
Selznick’s classic analysis of the Tennessee Valley Authority (1949) provides an example
of how a Pragmatist approach to governance might become concerned about the fate of values.
The book explores the fate of “grassroots democracy” as a value advocated by the creators
of this New Deal agency. Selznick shows that, as the agency encountered a challenge to its
political survival, it transformed the meaning of grassroots democracy from an active strategy
promoting broad public participation into a narrower strategy of engaging with powerful
interest groups. The struggle for survival leads to what Selznick, following Robert Merton,
called “goal displacement.” With values understood in both relational and processual terms,
Pragmatism stresses the role of communication and deliberation in surfacing, understanding,
and negotiating values. This emphasis arises, in part, from Pragmatism’s conceptualization of
human development, interaction, and cooperation as a communicative process. Pragmatism’s
interest in communication is quite broad and extends to the symbolic and dramaturgical char-
acter of social interaction (Ansell 2015). However, for the purposes of governance theory,
Pragmatism’s specific attention to the deliberative aspects of communication is particularly
important. For Pragmatism, deliberation is anything but a frictionless form of “information
processing” or simple “exchange of reasons.” Instead, it regards the success of deliberation—
starting with the capacity to adequately convey feelings, emotions, ideas, and experiences—as
highly contingent. Like problem-solving, deliberation is problematic.
A distinctive feature of the Pragmatist model of deliberation is that it is linked to inquiry
(Bohman 2004). For Dewey, inquiry is a practice used to “define the specific problem that the
situation presents and to re-establish in accordance with human purposes the provisional equi-
librium which held” (Festenstein 2001: 732). Inquiry involves the “elucidation of meaning”
(Festenstein 2001: 734) and requires self-reflection on one’s own beliefs, interests, and values.
Inquiry brings existing knowledge and prior experience to bear on the situation, while seeking
to avoid moralizing “position-taking,” on the one hand, or a narrow instrumentalism, on the
other. Reflection on existing values is a central part of inquiry, but values are also revisable
through inquiry. Pragmatist inquiry does not somehow magically dissolve political conflict,
but rather helps to illuminate and deepen our understanding of our own and others’ beliefs,
values, and interests. Scholars have argued that Pragmatist ideas about “deliberation as
inquiry” are useful for understanding governance (Evans 2000; Atkins et al. 2007).
Although deliberation may also be an internal, individual process, a distinctive feature of
Pragmatism’s deliberation-as-inquiry perspective is that inquiry is communal. Peirce referred
to “communities of inquiry” (Shields 2003), and Dewey used the term “public” to convey the
communal nature of inquiry (Dewey and Rogers 2012). From a Deweyian perspective, delib-
 Pragmatism  423

eration and community create one another. As A. Cohen notes, deliberation does not merely
bridge between the gaps in human minds; it is also an activity that “constitutes” individuals
and communities (Cohen, A. 2012: 147). For Dewey, this point had major implications for
democratic governance. He understood publics as groups of individuals bound together by the
direct and indirect consequences of their actions for one another (Dewey 1927; Dryzek 2004).
In terms of democratic governance, the problem such groups face is that they often remain
unorganized and hence unable to respond to or manage their interdependence. Deliberation,
he argued, was the key to transforming them from unorganized but interdependent groups into
self-conscious publics. A. Cohen (2012) distinguishes this constitutive view of deliberation
as creating shared communal experience with a narrower conflict management view of delib-
eration as a means of articulating and clarifying the terms of debate. Berk and Galvan make
a similar point about the constitutive character of deliberation when they argue that “delibera-
tion is narrative making” (2009: 555).
This conception of deliberation has encouraged democratic theorists and governance schol-
ars to investigate “publics” (Fung 2002, 2003; Goodin and Dryzek 2006). Recent research on
deliberation in “mini-publics” finds that deliberation allows groups to “emancipate” them-
selves to some degree from “symbolic politics,” opening up these publics to a wider discussion
of issues. Deliberation does not shift people away from their basic values, but does illuminate
latent values (Niemeyer 2011). It also enhances knowledge of issues at stake (Grönlund et
al. 2010). Scholars, however, have only just begun to explore the possibilities and limits of
deliberative strategies within governance contexts (Hoppe 2011).
One of the most important voices for understanding deliberation as a technique of gov-
ernance is that of planning scholar John Forester (1999, 2013). Forester argues for a “critical
pragmatism” that regards knowledge claims as not only fallible (the conventional Pragmatist
stance) but also systematically representing power relations (Wagenaar 2011; Forester 2013).
Forester’s critical pragmatism is attentive to issues of identity, and he argues that it is impor-
tant to acknowledge that, in intractable conflicts, opponents often “care in fact about more
than they say” (Forester 2013: 13). Hence, Forester stresses the importance of listening as
a critical element of deliberation, though he also argues that Pragmatist deliberation should
not be understood as therapeutic. Deliberation is not about moving people past their emo-
tions in order to reveal the rationality of the situation. Moreover, the character and quality of
deliberation matter a great deal. Constructing deliberation as a debate, for instance, is likely
only to entrench different positions. Effective deliberation will encourage mutual learning
without engaging in emotional therapy. Wagenaar describes Forester’s critical pragmatism
as a “modern, hard-nosed version of … Emerson’s moral optimism” (Wagenaar 2011: 295),
a theme that brings us to our final Pragmatist question.

What Is Possible?

After focusing on what is problematic and inquiring into the values at stake, Pragmatism
asks what can be done to advance the situation. This focus on what is possible is sometimes
described as meliorism—a belief that the world can be improved by human effort. However,
there is more to it than moral optimism. The “possible” draws together past, present, and
future. To any problem, people bring their past experience, which may include values,
emotions, relationships, skills, resources, and power. A focus on the problem, however, is
a focus on the present—on the problematic features of the current situation. Asking “What
424  Handbook on theories of governance

is possible?” inflects the problem with an orientation toward the future. What can be done
in the present situation, given what we bring from the past, to productively move us into the
future? This problem-solving triangulation between past, present, and future leads to at least
three important consequences for governance—an emphasis on the creativity of action, a focus
on the value of experimentation, and an active search for governance forms that improve the
quality of democratic governance.
Pragmatism leads to a focus on the creativity of action (Joas 1996). When people confront
challenging situations they often use the material at hand to refashion their circumstances—
they act creatively. Berk and Galvan (2009) have fashioned this focus on creativity into
a useful framework for understanding governance that they call creative syncretism. It is worth
quoting them on the basic concept:

We draw on the work of John Dewey to argue that action always takes place in relation to prior rules
and practices, which serve not as guides or constraints, but as mutable raw material for new action.
What we call the experience of living under rules is really an experience of living through rules, of
not just playing by the rules, but actually playing the rules as if they were instruments. That play is
a form of ongoing potential improvisation with regard to the rules themselves. (Berk and Galvan
2009: 544–545)

In their own respective books, Berk and Galvan each demonstrate how this creative syncretism
can work in the context of governance. In a study of rural Senegal, Galvan (2004) shows how
the Serer people responded creatively to Colonial land tenure rules by creating an informal
land exchange system that preserved their control over the land. And, in a study of the devel-
opment of competition regulation in the U.S., Berk (2009) shows how a skillful political
entrepreneur, Louis Brandeis, was able to creatively fashion the Federal Trade Commission as
an experiment in distinguishing “predatory” and “productive” competition.
Experimentation is an important Pragmatist motif (Ansell 2012), and Pragmatism often
adopts an experimentalist approach to governance (Dorf and Sabel 1998; Sabel and Zeitlin
2008; Sanderson 2009; Overdevest et al. 2010; Ansell 2011; de Búrca et al. 2014). The value
that Pragmatism places on experimentation reflects several underlying ideas—an acknowl-
edgement of the fundamental uncertainty of the world, an emphasis on learning-by-doing,
and an openness to creative discovery. As a cautionary note, however, I have argued (Ansell
2012) that Pragmatism does not (or should not) narrowly associate experimentation with con-
trolled laboratory experimentation (e.g., randomized controlled trials). Although controlled
experimentation should be part of the tool kit of experimentation, governance needs a range
of experimental tools. For example, Pragmatist governance should also include the concept
of “design experiments,” which allow iterative adaptation as an experiment unfolds (Stoker
and John 2009). The Pragmatist conception of experimentation has strong affinities with the
conception of “adaptive governance” (Brunner 2010; Steelman, Chapter 50 in this Handbook).
As mentioned earlier, Charles Sabel and associates have developed a model of “democratic
experimentalism” that they have applied to local, national, EU, and global governance (Dorf
and Sabel 1998; Sabel and Zeitlin 2008; de Búrca et al. 2014). In applying the idea to global
governance, de Búrca et al. identify five “deliberation-fostering” elements:

First, initial reflection and discussion among stakeholders with a broadly shared perception of
a common problem, resulting in second, the articulation of a framework understanding with
open-ended goals. Third, implementation of these broadly framed goals is left to “lower-level” or
contextually situated actors who have knowledge of local conditions and considerable discretion
 Pragmatism  425

to adapt the framework norms to these different contexts. Fourth, continuous feedback is provided
from local contexts, allowing for reporting and monitoring across a range of contexts, with outcomes
subject to peer review. Fifth, goals and practices should be periodically and routinely re-evaluated
and, where appropriate, revised in light of the results of the peer review and the shared purposes. (de
Búrca et al. 2014: 478)

Democratic experimentalism is a distributed learning architecture in which a community (of

firms, of governments, etc.) utilizes deliberation and experimentation to iteratively refine indi-
vidual and collective goals and practices. As a mode of governance, democratic experimen-
talism draws on all the Pragmatist themes called out earlier—evolutionary learning, creative
problem-solving, deliberation, a community of inquiry, and experimentation.
By asking “What is possible?” Pragmatists tend to dedicate themselves to a certain kind of
analysis of governance. As suggested by the work on creative syncretism or democratic exper-
imentalism, Pragmatism encourages us to explore potentials for human action—potentials that
may be weakly perceived, fragile, or poorly consolidated, but nevertheless offer real possibil-
ities for human growth and socio-political improvement through learning, problem-solving,
deliberation, inquiry, creativity, or experimentation. At the same time, Pragmatism avoids
abstract ideals, especially when taken out of context, and therefore wants to discover these
potentials for human action in the concrete experience of governance.

CONCLUSION

At the heart of Pragmatism is a distinctive conception of human action. Since it is this concep-
tion of action that inspires Pragmatist approaches to governance, it is worth concluding this
chapter by describing how the Pragmatist conception is similar to and different from another
very prominent conception of action—rational choice. Knight and Johnson (1999) have
argued that Pragmatism is compatible with a rational choice conception of action, and they
are correct in the sense that both stress that actors are purposive and both are concerned about
the consequences of action. However, a Pragmatist conception of action also diverges from
rational choice by emphasizing that: (1) much of behavior is habitual, reflecting sedimented
experience and learned skills; (2) values arise in the process of problem-solving and are often
incommensurable; (3) actors confront specific contextual challenges creatively, often using
imagination to rehearse possible courses of action; (4) communication is central not only
for social coordination, but also in the constitution of identity; (5) emotion is intertwined
(often positively) with cognition; and (6) means and ends continuously influence each other
(for support for these claims, see Joas 1996; Whitford 2002; Beckert 2003; Kilpinen 2003;
Mousavi and Garrison 2003; Cohen 2007; Hodgson 2010). This attention to learning, habit,
experience, skill, creativity, communication, and iterative action is what makes Pragmatism
a distinctive approach to governance.
We can conclude this chapter by emphasizing that there is still much unrealized potential
for Pragmatism to contribute to our understanding of governance, and particularly to our
understanding of collaborative and interactive governance. While much of the recent govern-
ance literature has drawn attention to the structures of governance that bring together public
and private actors in the formulation and realization of joint goals, Pragmatism helps us to
understand the practical processes that unfold within these structures and how they can foster
mutual learning and creative problem-solving.
426  Handbook on theories of governance

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38. Normative considerations of interactive
governance: effectiveness, efficiency,
legitimacy and innovation
Jurian Edelenbos and Ingmar van Meerkerk

INTRODUCTION

Nowadays in public administration theory it is recognized that complex decision-making takes

place within interdependent sets of actors (e.g. Marsh and Rhodes 1992; Pierre 2000; Sørensen
and Torfing 2007). This has led to a growing body of research on so-called governance
networks. Governance networks emerge around boundary-crossing policy problems which
cannot be solved by one actor alone but require collective actions of more actors from various
public, private and societal organizations, sectors and levels (Sørensen and Torfing 2007).
The policy issues cross different governmental, jurisdictional, geographical, societal and/or
functional boundaries and have a multi-value character (Koppenjan and Klijn 2004).
This development to governance networks indicates a shift from hierarchical and
well-institutionalized forms of government towards less formalized, bottom-up forms of
governance in which state authority makes way for an appreciation of mutual interdependence
between different stakeholders (Kickert et al. 1997; Hajer and Wagenaar 2003; Edelenbos
2005). Public authorities more and more recognize this interdependence as a basic governing
principle in a continuous process of coordinating, negotiating and collaborating (Scharpf 1999).
Stakeholders are in this view approached as knowledgeable actors in the decision-making
process. Therefore, some authors (e.g. Kooiman 1993; Edelenbos 2005; Sørensen and Torfing
2007) explicitly stress the interactive nature of governance networks. They speak of interac-
tive governance to emphasize the involvement of stakeholders in decision-making processes
(Edelenbos 2005; Torfing et al. 2012; Edelenbos and van Meerkerk 2016).
Interactive governance is initiated, developed and applied to meet several goals and
ambitions. Interactive governance can enhance legitimacy in public governance, improve
efficiency in decision-making processes and lead to better results and outcomes (higher impact
and effectiveness). In this view interactive governance almost becomes a normative goal that
has to be strived for if we want to conduct and implement proper and sound public governance.
We have high expectations for how interactive governance can contribute to the realization
of normative goals. But do expectations and normative goals actually meet in real-life gov-
ernance processes? How does interactive governance work in theory and in practice? We deal
with these questions in this chapter. We explicitly deal with dilemmas, trade-offs and tensions
between the different objectives of interactive governance.
We have structured this chapter in the following way. We start by positioning and defining
interactive governance. We explain the reasons why interactive governance has become
important in complex decision-making processes. We also elaborate different viewpoints and
normative expectations. We go on to deal with the relationships between these expectations

429
430  Handbook on theories of governance

and objectives. To what extent do we witness certain tensions between the expectations and
objectives? Then we offer a way of handling these tensions so that a positive interplay between
the supposed added values of interactive governance can become a reality. We aspire to for-
mulate a research agenda and approach for this.

DEFINING INTERACTIVE GOVERNANCE

Governance networks can be defined as more or less stable patterns of social relations between
mutually dependent actors, which form around policy programs, policy decisions or policy
implementation (or service delivery) and which are formed, maintained and changed through
constant interactions between the actors involved (Koppenjan and Klijn 2004). Interactive
governance as a concept specifically focuses on the way societal and private actors are
engaged in complex decision-making processes and networks, and how this engagement
relates to (inter)governmental processes and procedures (Edelenbos 2005).
Many governments in numerous countries have been under the spell of interactive
governance, often using different labels such as participatory policy-making, interactive
decision-making, community governance, and so on (Durning 1993; DeLeon 1994; Renn
et al. 1995; Healey 1997; Fischer 2000; Dobbs and Moore 2002; Murray and Greer 2002;
Koppenjan and Klijn 2004; Edelenbos and Klijn 2006; Peters 2010). In the relevant academic
literature, many descriptions of interactive governance can be found (Renn et al. 1995; Healey
1997; Verweij and Josling 2003; Edelenbos 2005; Torfing et al. 2012). A general element
in these definitions is that government develops policy in consultation and cooperation with
stakeholders, either professional organizations or individual citizens. Interactive governance
can therefore be approached as a way of conducting policies whereby a government involves
its citizens, social organizations, enterprises and other stakeholders in the early stages of
public policy-making (Edelenbos 2005).
Regarding interactive governance, one can make a distinction between government-induced
and citizen-induced interactive governance (Edelenbos and van Meerkerk, 2016). In the first,
government sets rules and conditions for citizen engagement, while in the latter, citizens are
more in control and set their own rules, procedures and conditions to develop community-based
initiatives (CBIs). In both forms, various normative issues can arise, which we discuss in the
next section.

DEVELOPMENTS EVOKING INTERACTIVE GOVERNANCE AND

NORMATIVE OBJECTIVES

Interactive Governance as a Remedy for Fragmentation: Enhancing Effectiveness

Several developments in society and government make interactive governance necessary in

effectively coping with wicked issues (i.e. the effect of policy solutions in terms of solving
problems). First, today it is generally accepted that Western societies can be characterized by
individualization, and value pluralism (Rittel and Webber 1973; Castells 2000; Torfing et al.
2012). Moreover, some speak of an increasing fragmentation during the twentieth century
when public organization became more functionally organized in different layers, sectors
 Normative considerations of interactive governance  431

and domains, causing problems for the traditional central steering paradigm (Edelenbos and
Teisman 2011; Torfing et al. 2012). The span of control was becoming too big. Interactive
forms of governance are needed to reach effective and integrative policy-making. Citizens,
social and private organizations, and non-governmental organizations can no longer be
passive objects of central steering activities but have to be treated as empowered actors who
have a stake and say in the outcomes of decision-making processes (Kooiman 1993). They
have increasing capacities to challenge governmental action (e.g. Dalton 2008). Achieving
interesting outcomes often depends on finding attractive solutions, which encourage actors to
activate their resources and knowledge for the problem and/or policy process at stake. Given
the increased fragmentation, interactive forms of governance are often justified to improve
the effectiveness of public governance. Theoretically, network approaches of governance
(e.g. Kickert et al. 1997; Rhodes 1997) specifically stress this increased fragmentation and
accompanying interdependency between actors as the driving force of interactive governance.
In the contemporary network society, resources (financial means, human resources, informa-
tion, knowledge, competences and support) are increasingly dispersed among various actors
(Pierre and Peters 2000; Koppenjan and Klijn 2004). This mutual interdependency held actors
together, and interactive governance has – at least partly – the potential to meet the goals of
different network actors if actors are willing to play the game of negotiation and compromise
and if they are willing to invest in joint learning. When actors acknowledge their interdepend-
ent relationships to other actors in the governance network, they are more inclined to join
forces and to combine and bundle their resources (financial assets, knowledge, etc.), leading to
increased effectiveness and synergies.

Interactive Governance as an Instrument for Reducing Costs: Striving for Efficiency

Other literature, specifically based on the work of Kooiman (1993) and Scharpf (1999),
stresses the potential of interactive governance for improving coordination between auton-
omous actors and thereby efficiency in governing society. Sørensen and Torfing (2007)
refer to the authors of this stream of literature as “governability theorists”; in this literature,
interactive governance “is seen as a functional response to the increasing societal complexity,
dynamics and diversification that undermine the ability to govern society efficiently through
the traditional means of hierarchy and market” (Sørensen and Torfing 2007: 18). Interactive
governance could stimulate resource pooling and joint action. In this reasoning interactive
governance has the potential to reduce the costs of solutions and the decision-making process.
The potential of interactive governance for mobilizing societal resources for contributing
to public goals is also stressed by governmental approaches (Foucault 1991) which take
the stance that interactive forms of governance are actually new forms of “state domination
operationalized via discursive practices that shape citizens’ behaviour, drawing them ‘freely’
into responsibilities that they may have previously resisted” (Lowndes and Sullivan 2008:
55). Policy discourses in the last decade, such as the Big Society in the United Kingdom
and, for instance, the Participation Society in the Netherlands, fuel such a critical stance, as
they explicitly stress the need for interactive forms of governance, partly as a way to deal
with budget deficits. State retrenchment is often used as an argument to provide room for
community-based initiatives to take responsibility to develop and implement service delivery
instead of or alongside existing services (Edelenbos et al. 2021).
432  Handbook on theories of governance

In the literature it is stressed that in governance networks many actors are involved, and
that these actors not only possess vital resources to realize policy goals and outcomes, but also
have different perceptions of the problem definition and have different information and ideas
on solutions (Agranoff and McGuire 2001; Torfing et al. 2012). So, stakeholders’ interests
often collide in complex decision-making; there is much danger that stakeholders will block
decision-making, because decisions are not in line with their interests. There is substantial
veto power in decision-making processes because of the dependency of many actors who have
the means to influence the outcome of decision-making. By involving these actors at an early
stage, it is hoped that the use of veto power by the involved actors will decrease, and support
for decisions will increase. This stimulates ongoing interaction among actors in the govern-
ance network, and as a result accelerates the processes of decision-making. It is argued that the
extra (time) investment necessary for interactive decision-making can be “profitable,” because
it will avert lengthy legal and litigation procedures (Edelenbos and Klijn 2006). Furthermore,
the development of mutual trust and institutional rules in interactive governance could
decrease transaction costs between actors, enhancing the efficiency of governance processes.

Interactive Governance as Added Value to Representative Democracy: Enhancing

Legitimacy

A third development is that in Western countries the legitimacy of liberal and representative
democracy is under pressure. Some speak of a widening of the gap between citizens and
elected politicians (Hirst 2000; Young 2000; Lowndes et al. 2001; Sørensen and Torfing
2007). For instance, Dalton (2008) argues that there is substantial evidence for an increasing
distrust of citizens in political authorities (politicians, political parties, office holders) in many
Western democracies. People no longer strongly identify with the existing political system
(the regime and its institutions, norms and principles) based on representative democracy.
“Citizens no longer primarily get their political identity from their identification with political
parties” (Bang 2009: 126). As a consequence, they turn away from government and politics.
A number of problems confronting society, such as indifference to rule enforcement, abuse
of collective service, overriding norms and political non-participation, are ascribed to this gap
(Klijn and Koppenjan 2000).
Various scholars argue that interactive forms of governance have democratic potential
because a diversity of (affected) stakeholders, such as citizens, civil society organizations and
businesses, have more room for direct engagement (e.g. Hajer and Wagenaar 2003; Sørensen
and Torfing 2007). By involving more actors (and certainly citizens) in a direct manner,
decision-making acquires a less closed character. Interactive governance is therefore often
advocated as providing an opportunity to bridge the gap between governmental actors and cit-
izens, which could enhance the democratic legitimacy of policy-making and decision-making
processes.
We can also see that citizens are becoming more empowered. The education levels,
socio-economic resources, access to political information and other “resources of citizenship”
have increased substantially over the past several decades (Dalton 2008). Because they seem
more reluctant to engage in the “traditional institutions” or “participation procedures” of rep-
resentative democracy, they develop new forms of civic engagement in most liberal democra-
cies, which can be coined as private self-organization in which communities and private actors
are involved (Stolle and Hooghe 2005; Dalton 2008; Edelenbos and van Meerkerk 2016;
 Normative considerations of interactive governance  433

Table 38.1 Overview and tensions in the three normative aspects

Effectiveness Efficiency Legitimacy Innovation

Goals Enhancing problem-solving Preventing conflicts among Creating acceptance, Producing a qualitative
capacity and finding actors and stagnations in support and tolerance change in public service
durable solutions for process (minimizing veto for output coming from delivery or governance
wicked problems power in networks) governance networks to improve public sector
performance
Means Generating and connecting Including relevant and Connecting various actors, Exchanging and generating
various resources from affected stakeholders; creating openness in the knowledge among
different stakeholders in the conflict resolution, process for input and stakeholders, facilitating
network mediation and informing careful throughput mutual learning
techniques
Tensions Needs much capacity and Danger of symbolic and Neglecting valuable input; Lack of support and
investment; costly and instrumental involvement, imbalanced involvement; commitment, lack of
time-consuming and no real dialogue, issues with vertical shared understanding
empowerment, interaction accountability and involvement of
and debate stakeholders

van Meerkerk 2014). An additional objective of interactive forms of governance related to

this discourse of self-organization is the potential for association, self-development, learning
and local ownership, as is stressed by developmental models of democracy (see also the next
section), inspired by the work of John Stuart Mill and de Tocqueville. The rising literature on
community-based initiatives stresses ownership, direct accountability and responsibility for
the development and implementation of service delivery (Edelenbos et al. 2021).
Whether these new forms of stakeholder engagement by means of participation and
self-organization conflict with the classical representative institutions or not is a debate
between scholars (Klijn and Skelcher 2007). As will be elaborated in the following section,
interactive governance is also criticized for not being democratic, as it delivers issues of
accountability and inclusion.
The tensions in the last row of Table 38.1 illustrate that there can be tensions and trade-offs
between the three aspects: effectiveness, efficiency and legitimacy. For example, great efforts
to involve many affected stakeholders (legitimacy) can result in time-consuming processes
(efficiency) and difficulties in realizing decision-making and implementation (effectiveness).
On the other hand a very efficient interactive governance process may lead to less legitimized
results, as not all relevant stakeholders are involved or certain resources are not mobilized,
leading to less problem-solving capacity. In the next section we explore the normative prob-
lems and tensions in more detail.

Interactive Governance as Response to Gaps in Public Service Delivery: Enhancing

Innovation

Interactive governance also emerges as a response to government retrenchment, sometimes

claimed as a result of long-term neoliberalist policies, in various areas such as welfare, neigh-
borhood management and regeneration and healthcare delivery. In addition, bottom-up forms
of interactive governance may arise in case of citizens’ dissatisfaction with existing ways
and quality of public service delivery (Gofen 2012). For instance, in the fields of sustainable
energy, healthcare, education, green initiatives and livability we have seen the emergence of
434  Handbook on theories of governance

community-based initiatives and community-led co-production (Igalla et al. 2019). Driven by

the self-organizing community capacities, citizens may develop alternative forms of public
service delivery. Depending on government responsiveness and linking capacities, such
initiatives can lead to governance and product innovation in which new coalitions between
government, market and civil society are created in order to improve or alter public service
delivery and at the same time enhancing civic engagement (Edelenbos et al. 2021). Also,
government-induced forms of interactive governance might be explicitly aimed at innova-
tion. Illustrative examples are local governments which are increasingly experimenting with
so-called urban living labs (ULLs) aimed at accelerating the transition towards more sustain-
able and climate-resilient cities (Kronsell and Mukhtar-Landgren 2018). In these ULLs, local
governments play a key role in facilitating knowledge-building and learning among various
stakeholders aiming to develop new technologies and ways of living (ibid.). In this respect,
the combination of increasing social challenges, rising demands and budget austerity have
also contributed to reforms strategies aimed at so-called collaborative innovation (Sørensen
and Torfing 2011), in order to “fundamentally changing the relationship, positions and rules
between involved stakeholders, through an open process of participation, exchange and col-
laboration with relevant stakeholders, including end-users, thereby crossing organizational
boundaries and jurisdictions” (Voorberg et al. 2015: 1334).
By enhancing collaboration in network-based forms between public, private and societal
actors, interactive forms of governance can be an important source of public sector innovation.
When interactive governance leads to effective collaboration between these different types of
actors, it enables mutual learning, by which different ideas and experiences are “circulated,
challenged, transformed, and expanded” (Sørensen and Torfing 2011: 852). Literature on
innovation stresses that new ideas, knowledge, and actors that share their resources and risks,
need to become connected in order to generate innovation (Gieske et al. 2019). Interactive
governance may help in generating joint ownership and support of various stakeholders for the
implementation and dissemination of new practices (Sørensen and Torfing 2011).
The literature on innovation describes various barriers and tensions in relation to different
phases of innovation processes and innovation adoption (see, e.g., for review, Cinar et al.
2019). In relation to interactive forms of governance aimed at innovation, barriers in relation
to the interaction between and constellation of stakeholders are relevant to discuss here,
while we cannot be all-encompassing. In particular, a lack of support of key stakeholders
may prevent successful innovation. In the context of government-induced interactive gov-
ernance, a common barrier is a lack of involvement and support of key stakeholders (such
as end-users, citizens) in the innovation process (Meijer 2015). Another tension, particularly
related to citizen-induced interactive governance, is a lack of responsiveness, commitment and
support of governments for innovations developed in these networks (Edelenbos et al. 2021).
Moreover, a lack of mutual understanding among public organizations, citizens and/or private
actors of the goals and interest of the innovation can be an important tension in public sector
innovation (Cinar et al. 2019). Innovation has a positive connotation, but it is obviously not
a neutral goal, and includes important power and resource allocation issues.
 Normative considerations of interactive governance  435

NORMATIVE ISSUES AND TENSIONS IN INTERACTIVE

GOVERNANCE NETWORKS

Interactive governance has important potentials but also includes several pitfalls. Expectations
and objectives are not that straightforward. Arguments in favor of interactive governance
also meet some counterarguments. In this section we discuss some tensions and trade-offs in
reaching the objectives of interactive governance.

The Issue of Accountability

In the research literature attention is paid to the tensions between the horizontal accountability
structure of networks and the vertical accountability structure of representative democratic
institutions (Hirst 2000; Klijn and Koppenjan 2000; Pierre 2000). Decision-making processes
in governance networks show different patterns of decision-making and accountability than
those which are solely or mainly evolving within the institutions of representative democracy
(Klijn and Skelcher 2007; Wagenaar 2007). The latter are characterized by the primacy
of politics: political elected officeholders make decisions about collective goals, leaving
implementation to administrators, to decentralized or privatized actors, or to networks of
public and private actors (e.g. Wagenaar 2007). The primacy of politics is challenged by the
network character of implementation, as is shown in much public administration literature
(e.g. Agranoff and McGuire 2001). Because governance networks are structured and evolve
at the boundaries of different public, private and societal organizations, they have multiple
“principals” (Skelcher 2007). This may create a situation of everyone feeling ownership and
authority, but no one taking responsibility and being accountable. In governance networks
various societal actors are involved in the formulation of policy goals, and the primacy of
politics is challenged in one way or another (Klijn and Skelcher 2007). Governance networks
often transcend existing jurisdictional borders of governments. This delivers challenges for
analyzing the democratic legitimacy of these networks, at least in terms of traditional models
of democracy (Dryzek 2007: 262).
Legitimacy generated by electoral democracy does not carry over to (issue-segmented)
governance networks (Warren 2009). Again, in the words of Dryzek (2007: 269), “Clearly,
electoral democracy is in trouble when networked governance dominates. Networks do not
hold elections; they do not have an electorate, an opposition, or any obvious alternative set of
power holders.” This makes it difficult for political actors to control interactive governance
processes, and as a result traditional institutions of checks and balances on power and account-
ability become less effective in interactive forms of governance (van Kersbergen and van
Waarden 2004). In interactive governance, accountability often gets diffused among different
actors, governmental and non-governmental.
We can, however, measure the democratic legitimacy of networks with different yardsticks.
The way in which elected bodies control the developments that take place within governance
networks is only one of the measurements (Klijn and Edelenbos 2013). From a delibera-
tive democracy point of view (see Dryzek 2000, 2007; Hirst 2000; Held 2006), different
democratic values are stressed, such as open debate among involved stakeholders, and due
deliberation about the problem perceptions and preferred solutions: “[t]he transformation
of private preferences via a process of deliberation into positions that can withstand public
scrutiny and test” (Held 2006: 237). Models of deliberative democracy stress that, besides the
436  Handbook on theories of governance

fact that office holders are accountable and can be replaced (the core of the protective models
of democracy), and that democracy is about participation in decision-making (the core of the
developmental models of democracy), democratic legitimacy to a large extent can be created
from the characteristics of the process (openness, inclusiveness) and when it is character-
ized by genuine deliberation and argumentation processes (Klijn and Edelenbos 2013; van
Meerkerk et al. 2015).
Liberal and competitive models of democracy (Held 2006) emphasize the accountability
of elected office holders to others. More idealistic models of democracy tend to emphasize
the participation and self-organizing aspects of democracy: decisions are democratic if they
have been achieved in and through processes of active citizen participation (Dryzek 2007).
Deliberative models of democracy add to this the importance of deliberation and the rules of
open and free debate (see Dryzek 2000). In a sense, they are emphasizing traditional rules,
such as openness and fairness (Sørensen and Torfing 2005). However, deliberative models
of democracy are also more pragmatic, in that they are concerned with achieving practical
outcomes that are relevant for and supported by the involved stakeholders (Dryzek 2000; Held
2006).
A key challenge for politicians and public servants is how to harness interactive governance
initiatives in order to safeguard democratic norms and values, such as accountability, without
undermining the experience-based problem-solving capacity of community action (Sørensen
and Torfing, 2016).
In a traditional and narrow sense, accountability can be defined as a relationship between an
actor and a forum in which the actor has an obligation to explain and to justify their conduct,
the forum can pose questions and pass judgment, and the actor may face consequences
(Bovens 2007). While public organizations have more or less clear and formal mechanisms
for establishing accountability, community-based initiatives fundamentally have different and
more informal democratic lines of accountability (Swyngedouw 2005). This not only exposes
community-based initiatives operating in informal and networked spaces to democratic ques-
tions, but also forces us to rethink the very notion of democratic representation and accounta-
bility in a more inclusive and participatory form of governance.
There is relevant research on accountability management and the processes of non-profit
organizations (e.g. Ospina et al. 2002), and its impacts on mission and strategies (Christensen
and Ebrahim 2006). However, there is little empirical research on how and why accountabil-
ity to different types of stakeholders might crowd each other out. Research in this field has
argued that “upward accountability” to funders, donors and oversight agencies can impinge on
“downward” and “lateral” accountability to communities, volunteers and staff (Knutsen and
Brower 2010). Knutsen and Brower for example argue that instrumental accountability, under-
pinned by principal–agent relationships, mutual benefits, resource dependence and measurable
outcomes, can impinge on expressive accountability, based on values and beliefs and a sense
of shared ownership.
To conclude, interactive governance is often approached as being a tension between polit-
ical accountability on the one hand, stressed by liberal and representative models of democ-
racy, and fair and open argumentation on the other hand, emphasized by deliberative models
of democracy. In practice these two models are difficult to reconcile, largely depending on
which normative standpoint one takes in approaching and appreciating democracy ideals
(Mayer et al. 2005; Dryzek 2007). So, it is difficult to judge which side of the coin should
be preferred. Some authors stress that serious attempts can be made to reconcile the two by
 Normative considerations of interactive governance  437

transforming politicians into meta-governors of interactive governance processes (Edelenbos

2005; Sørensen and Torfing 2007). Furthermore, the boundary-spanning activities of public
managers and community leaders could contribute to the democratic anchorage of interactive
governance both within local governmental institutions linked to representative democracy,
and within the local community via community-based organizations and initiatives (van
Meerkerk 2014; Edelenbos et al. 2017, 2021).

The Issue of Inclusiveness

Klijn and Skelcher (2007: 588) argue that governance networks offer “new ways of connecting
policy-making to citizens and stakeholders, overcoming the constraints and limitations of
representative democracy and party politics.” An important question, then, is to what extent
interactive governance is inclusive. In liberal models of democracy this is achieved through
regular elections: the people get the opportunity to vote and choose their representatives, who
make and implement important decisions for the people. Braybrooke (1974) calls this the
instrumental view of democracy. Democracy is an efficient means of reaching decisions, while
protecting the individual freedom of the citizen (MacPherson 1979). Considerable emphasis
is placed on the formal procedures for the election of representatives, who duly translate the
preferences of the electorate into policy. The wishes of the public are expressed by the leaders
of organized groups or by elected representatives, who can be removed following elections.
The essence of this view is that it sees democracy as converting the “will of the people” into
policy as efficiently as possible.
In the participatory and deliberative view of democracy the open and inclusive debate is
valued. Advocates of these models see more substantial merits and approach democracy more
as a social ideal than a decision-making procedure. Since public involvement in public policy
is integral to this ideal, an active and vocal citizenship is to be encouraged (Held 2006; Dryzek
2007). This model coincides with the development and utopian models as distinguished by
MacPherson (1979). In these models it is emphasized that democracy is a value in itself and
that active participation enhances democracy and the “education” of citizens. They stress
citizen participation as a good way to organize democracy and to develop citizens and actively
enhance their freedom. These models therefore stress the importance of openness and accessi-
bility of policy-making and decision-making processes (Dryzek 2007).
Ideally, within interactive governance the actors who are activated and involved are
those affected by the governance issue at stake, and who have resources, perspectives and
values relevant to the decision-making process (Edelenbos 2005). In this way, interactive
governance can raise the quality of decisions. In governance, better-informed assessment
and decision-making are achieved (de Jong 2004). “No single actor, public or private, has
all knowledge and information required to solve complex dynamic and diversified problems;
no actor has sufficient overview to make the application of needed instruments effective”
(Kooiman 1993: 4). Through the mobilization and use of a broad array of values, knowledge
and resources, problem-solving capacity is enlarged. Since with interactive governance not
only are different perspectives on and ideas about problems and solutions brought to the table,
but also multiple types of knowledge, information, skill and experience are employed, a better
analysis of the problem area is possible and better solutions can be created. Through inter-
active governance processes a broader and better assessment can take place of the different
perspectives on the problem at hand, and of policy alternatives that may solve it (Young 2000).
438  Handbook on theories of governance

Empirical research shows that accessible and inclusive participation is important for gov-
ernance networks. The research results show that stakeholder involvement in governance
networks in the field of environmental projects and programs has positive, significant effects
on the perceived process and substantial outcomes of complex decision-making processes
(Edelenbos et al. 2010).
However, there is an important premise for reaping the fruits of interactive governance,
which is that inclusiveness has to be arranged well. In many processes of interactive gov-
ernance, inclusiveness is a problematic issue. Mayer et al. (2005), for instance, indicate that
interactive governance often leads to the concentration of power in the hands of those who
oppose development (NIMBYs: “not in my back yard”), shout loudest and have the time to
campaign. Ordinary citizens contribute very little. Good solutions may even perish in the
process. The nature of group dynamics is such that some participants are able to overrule
others by virtue of their superior skills or greater assertiveness, leading to the formation of
a “democracy of the loudmouths” (Hartman 2000; Mayer et al. 2005). Under such circum-
stances, there is a danger that the silent majority will be ignored. Group dynamics can also
lead to a narrowing of horizons or pressures that result in technically preferable solutions
being rejected in favor of watered-down compromises. In other words, one cannot depend on
interactive policy development to deliver good outcomes. In their research, Uitermark and
Duyvendak (2008) show that participation and self-organizing processes have tendencies of
closeness and homogeneity, leading to exclusion, concentration of power and bureaucracy (see
also Dietz et al. 2003; Sampson et al. 2005). In fact, interactive governance through partici-
pation and self-organization may be approached as a countermovement to highly inaccessible
governmental procedures, but this “cure” can easily get the same diseases (closedness, inward
character). It is therefore important that interactive governance processes are carefully organ-
ized by broadly involving all the relevant actors. Moreover, self-organizing processes must
have reflexive capacity in order to prevent them from becoming new centers of power that are
not accessible to newcomers.

The Issue of Throughput Legitimacy

The previous tension showed us the importance of good inclusive input in interactive govern-
ance processes. This also touches upon the issue of throughput legitimacy. In the governance
literature the legitimacy debate generally focuses on the conflicts between a democratic (input)
focus versus a performance (output) emphasis (Dahl 1994; Scharpf 1999; Peters and Pierre
2010). Input legitimacy relates to gaining the consent of affected actors through including
their preferences in decision-making via participation channels (Scharpf 1999; Benz and
Papadopoulos 2006). In contrast, output legitimacy rests on utilitarian thought in terms of
getting results (Scharpf 1999; Risse and Kleine 2007; Lieberherr 2012). In fact, two dimen-
sions of output legitimacy can be distinguished in the literature. The first dimension is about
the problem-solving capacity of policy outputs generated by governance networks. Political
choices and public policies are legitimate if they generally represent effective solutions to
common problems of the governed (Scharpf 1999). The second dimension of output legiti-
macy is about the acceptance of decision-making outputs by citizens and stakeholders (e.g.
Edelenbos et al. 2010). Some scholars argue that legitimacy comes from pragmatic consider-
ations when stakeholders (citizens, etc.) believe that decision-making outcomes are relevant
and in their own interests (Kooiman 1993; Dryzek 2000; Held 2006).
 Normative considerations of interactive governance  439

In contrast to the input–output debate, a third dimension of legitimacy – namely, through-

put – remains largely undertheorized in relation to interactive governance (Lieberherr 2012;
Schmidt 2013). Throughput legitimacy typically relates to the justification of governance
modes based on the quality of procedures (Bekkers and Edwards 2007). Lieberherr (2012)
argues that the throughput dimension has often been subsumed under input legitimacy (cf.
Scharpf 1999; Mayntz 2006). Within the focus on results, the criterion of efficiency has
often been linked with output legitimacy in the political sciences (Scharpf 1999; Bekkers and
Edwards 2007). However, efficiency arguably also relates to processes rather than outputs.
Throughput legitimacy is about the democratic quality of the decision-making process
(Dryzek 2000; van Meerkerk et al. 2015). Openness, accessibility and transparency are
often-mentioned aspects of this kind of legitimacy (Young 2000; Held 2006). By involving
more actors (and certainly citizens), decision-making acquires a more open character, leading
to more transparency, deliberative quality and mutual understanding (Dryzek 2000; Risse and
Kleine 2007). Thus, the issue of legitimacy is about the democratic qualities of the process
unfolding in the governance network itself, which is about the interaction between the actors in
the network and the transparency of the decision-making process (van Meerkerk et al. 2015).
The study by van Meerkerk et al. (2015) on Dutch water governance networks shows that
throughput legitimacy is the link between input and output legitimacy, and that this form of
legitimacy is critical for achieving good and legitimate outcomes in interactive governance
processes. A high level of throughput legitimacy reflects a relatively high level of communi-
cation, transparency, deliberation and debate among actors in the network in order to achieve
legitimized results. In other words, the quality of the processing of input is important for
reaching output legitimacy in governance networks. Van Meerkerk et al. (2015) found a strong
positive effect of throughput legitimacy on accepted and positively evaluated outputs. Public
managers as meta-governors are important for creating conditions for throughput legitimacy
to develop, and they thereby can play a key role in unleashing the democratic potential of
governance networks (van Meerkerk et al. 2015). Comparable results are found by Doberstein
and Millar (2014: 276) in the Canadian context of homelessness governance networks. They
also found that a high level of throughput legitimacy could provide an “amplifying quality to
a governance network, catalyzing a virtuous cycle that bolsters existing levels of input and
output legitimacy.” They even state that, “whereas input legitimacy can be exchanged, or
traded-off, with output legitimacy to reinforce the overall legitimacy of a network governance
institution, ‘throughput legitimacy’ functions as a necessary condition that sustains legitimacy
over time” (Doberstein and Millar 2014: 262). Interactive governance approaches, which
aim to involve stakeholders at early stages in the decision-making process, are expected to
decrease stakeholders’ use of veto power and to increase stakeholders’ level of support for
decisions (Edelenbos and Klijn 2006). When actors are included in the process, they are
expected to be more willing to accept both the process and the decisions reached. However, we
see that inclusion is not enough to realize support. Stakeholders want to recognize themselves
in the decision reached. Their input must be traceable in the results (Monnikhof and Edelenbos
2001; Edelenbos 2005).
440  Handbook on theories of governance

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH AGENDA

In this chapter we have discussed the potential benefits but also the drawbacks of interactive
governance approaches. In general, there are high hopes for interactive governance; but can it
fulfill its expectations? Interactive governance is often approached as a response to the limita-
tions of representative democracy and hierarchical-instrumental policy-making. In response to
increasing fragmentation, the decreasing legitimacy of representative systems, the increasing
ability of citizens and the pressure of empowered citizens, interactive governance is seen and
used as a proper answer to realize effective, efficient, legitimate and innovative governance
and societal developments.
Many potential benefits can be described, but limitations and problems are also visible,
as discussed in this chapter. An example of a clear trade-off is that striving for efficiency
can easily lead to problems of legitimacy as, for example, stakeholders might be excluded
from interactive governance processes. In general, interactive governance can run in paral-
lel to existing governmental systems based on representative democracy and instrumental
policy-making, without clear embedding in those systems. However, interactive governance
processes do not need to imply a zero-sum game with this existing system, but can be com-
plementary to the system, specifically in dealing with wicked issues. Interactive governance is
initiated by both state actors and societal actors. Interactive governance is increasingly seen as
the legitimate governance mode, thereby increasingly coming out of the shadow of hierarchy.
This development could mean that interactive governance is increasingly taking over (cf. the
transformative stance of Klijn and Skelcher 2007).
According to the literature, the extent to which interactive governance is complementary to
the traditional system strongly depends on how interfaces between the two worlds are organ-
ized and managed, and how they evolve. In managing these interfaces more attention needs
to be paid to the previously discussed trade-offs of inclusion, accountability and throughput
legitimacy. In these interfaces so-called boundary-spanners are important persons to establish
communication and coordination (van Meerkerk and Edelenbos 2018). There is a lack of sys-
tematic comparative research (in different fields and sectors) on the co-existence of different
modes of governance (for one of the few exceptions, see Meuleman 2008). How does the
co-existence of interactive governance and formal governmental institutions manifest itself in
practice? How do governance processes, influenced by these different modes of governance,
evolve? To what extent do these different modes conflict, mutually adapt or try to take a domi-
nant position towards the other in actual governance processes? And how do public managers,
political leaders and community leaders in their roles as boundary-spanners deal with this
co-existence, and co-evolving processes shaped by these different modes? This could shed
further light on how the trade-offs manifest themselves in practice, and when these trade-offs
are dealt with in a more legitimate or effective way than others.
Moreover, more sophisticated research approaches to interactive governance are needed,
considering the different shapes these processes can take. In future research the differences
between government-induced interactive governance (participation) on the one hand, and
community-induced interactive governance (self-organization) on the other hand, should be
taken into account in exploring and explaining the course and results of interactive governance
processes (Edelenbos and van Meerkerk 2016).
In examining the co-existence and interaction of different governance modes, interactive
governance theory could learn from complexity theory (Teisman et al. 2009). Specifically,
 Normative considerations of interactive governance  441

the concept of co-evolution is promising for advancing the theoretical toolbox of interactive
governance studies in this respect (cf. Klijn 2008); for example, studying the co-existence
and evolution of various and parallel operating accountability structures and processes. With
its focus on positive and negative feedback relations between two evolving systems, it could
provide a useful lens for describing and analyzing the interaction between different modes of
governance. Next, when focusing on how key actors cope with different modes of governance,
boundary-spanning theory could be helpful for examining the way in which public managers,
political leaders and community leaders span the boundaries of these different subsystems (cf.
Williams 2002; van Meerkerk 2014), and how they cope with different tensions related to the
trade-offs discussed.

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 PART IV

FORMS OF GOVERNANCE
39. Co-production: theoretical roots and
conceptual frameworks
Tony Bovaird and Elke Loeffler

THE CONCEPT OF CO-PRODUCTION

The concept of co-production is basically very simple; but, of course, in the academic liter-
ature and in practice we have found many ways to make it appear very complicated. Indeed,
so many different variations have been suggested on the basic idea of ‘co-production’, and so
many co-labels have been invented for these variations, that it has recently been suggested that
we are suffering from ‘co-ubiquity’ (Robert et al. 2021).
So, a basically simple idea? Yes, it is essentially about citizens contributing to the work
of organisations in ways which add value to both parties and, often, to wider groups in the
community. This clearly contrasts with the centuries-long tradition in economics of seeing
production as being the product of land, labour and capital, with citizens simply as consumers
of the ensuing products or services. It contrasts just as dramatically with the century-long
tradition in management studies of seeing citizens as objects of the marketing function, both
to convince them to become consumers, and to stop them being a nuisance through making
complaints, or undermining trust in the company by ‘muckraking’ (and even boycotting its
products or services).
Of course, this level of simplicity quickly evaporates once we start asking: What kind of
contribution do citizens make? What do we mean by ‘adding value’? And how do citizen
contributions add value?
It is these questions which are answered rather differently by various writers in the field,
both academics and practitioners. In the next section, we will explore how subtle differences
in the meaning ascribed to ‘co-production’ have arisen, both because people using the term
come from different disciplines, with widely differing theoretical roots, and because over time
the simple idea behind co-production (the valuable contributions of citizens to organizations)
has been discovered to have application to more and more aspects of organizational behaviour.
We particularly want to examine critically the concept of co-production in terms of its
role in different types of citizen‒government interaction; essentially, we want to suggest
that citizens can add valuable inputs to the four main stages of the ‘policy cycle’, so that
commissioning of public services and outcomes becomes co-commissioning, design becomes
co-design, delivery becomes co-delivery, and evaluation becomes co-assessment, giving us
the ‘Four Co’s’ (Bovaird and Loeffler 2013). This immediately makes clear that co-production
has a strong political as well as ‘technical’ element: citizens may be involved in key political
decisions about what are the priorities in commissioning, not simply in managerial decisions
about how services should be delivered.
However, at this early stage we must make three clarifications about what we do not cover
in this chapter. First, we do not cover interorganisational ‘co-production’, even though there
is a page in Wikipedia which focuses specifically on the type of co-production typified by

446
 Co-production: theoretical roots and conceptual frameworks  447

Hollywood film and TV companies making ‘co-productions’. We prefer to label this kind of
activity as organisational collaboration or partnership working, rather than co-production, so
it does not feature here.
Second, in answer to the question, ‘co-production of what?’, we answer: co-production
of public services or outcomes. This makes it clear that we are exploring the relevance of
co-production to public governance, rather than to ‘governance’ in general. Furthermore, by
‘public outcomes’ we mean more specifically publicly desired outcomes, where it is ultimately
government (responding to the electorate which has voted for that government) which decides
what is ‘publicly desirable’.
Third, in answer to the question ‘citizen co-production with what kind of organisations?’,
we answer: organisations which are involved in providing public services or helping to achieve
publicly desired outcomes; for convenience, we will refer to these organisations through this
chapter as public service organisations. As a corollary of this approach, where citizens are
working together without contributions to and from public service organisations, we will not
consider this as co-production, but rather as community self-organisation, which lies outside
our purview (although it will often have similar implications for public policy).

DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ON CO-PRODUCTION AS AN

ASPECT OF PUBLIC GOVERNANCE

In this section, we explore how co-production can be viewed from a range of different aca-
demic disciplines. The members of the Workshop on Political Economy of the Bloomington
School were mainly political scientists (such as Vincent Ostrom) or economists (such as
Elinor Ostrom). However, since that time, interest in co-production has widened to other
disciplines. Our argument will be that different facets of the contribution of co-production
to theories of governance emerge from each of these disciplinary perspectives. More than
that, we can learn from the ways in which each discipline has traditionally downplayed the
role of co-production; this provides insights into how theorists and practitioners in the field
of public governance have been able systematically to ignore the actual and potential role of
co-production. However, it is also likely that further insights will be gleaned as co-production
continues to be analysed and understood from a multidisciplinary and even interdisciplinary
rather than a purely disciplinary perspective.

Economics

The early work of the scholars in the Workshop on Political Economy of the Bloomington
School was based mainly on economics, using indifference curve analysis and budget lines
based on the optimisation concepts of microeconomic theory, but expanding traditional
production theory to encompass not only ‘regular producers’ but also ‘consumer producers’,
in line with the analysis of services by Garn et al. (1976). Later, Elinor Ostrom (1996) also
marshalled the concepts of public goods analysis, based on the Samuelson and Musgrave
approaches, in her analysis of co-production and the commons. As Alford (2014) has argued,
a key insight from her approach was that it was not necessary to have government regulation to
ensure provision of public goods in spite of the ‘free-rider’ problem (whether these are goods
which are non-rival in consumption or non-excludable): citizens could voluntarily co-produce
448  Handbook on theories of governance

such goods (or even self-organise the production of such goods, without any government
contribution).
As Brudney (2021) reminds us, the Bloomington School on Political Economy was from
the outset multidisciplinary, and its approach quickly developed into a public governance
model (featuring ‘multiple public and private actors, groups, and organizations at different
levels involved in multiple stages of the service cycle’). Yet orthodox economics was very
slow to absorb the lessons from this rapidly growing corpus of academic work, and continued
to view customers as external to value production. Meanwhile, the economics-influenced
governance paradigm of New Public Management (NPM), emerging at very much the same
time as co-production, largely neglected the economic insights already emerging from the
co-production literature. This raises the question as to whether economics simply cannot deal
with the issues which co-production covers.
Peter Jackson (2021) demonstrates that this need not be the case. Although the public eco-
nomics analysis of individual and collective welfare maximisation through individual choice
and public goods does tend to ‘wash out’ all consideration of strategic agents, particularly
active consumers, Jackson (2021: 84) develops an alternative conceptualisation of collective
co-production as an arrangement which arises from voluntary cooperation, in which ‘individ-
uals acting privately and voluntarily as citizens contribute to services that have been provided
collectively’. This constitutes a significant departure from the sharp distinction between public
and private goods which characterises standard (Samuelson‒Musgrave) neoclassical welfare
economics (Jackson 2021).
Jackson creatively takes further the original diagrammatic analysis of the Bloomington
School, showing how the allocative inefficiencies created by the fixed ‘public good’ nature
of public services can be minimised when consumers complement public service offers with
their own resources in order to create their own personalised experience and value. In this way,
Jackson demonstrates that individual and collective co-production can be clearly explained
using the same tools which microeconomists have long used to pretend that consumers and
producers are entirely separate.
Jackson highlights how vulnerable consumers may be less able to engage directly in value
co-creation, so that co-production may be inequitable in its consequences, thus locating his
analysis within the tradition of welfare economics which balances ‘social efficiency gains’ and
‘distributional effects’. Moreover, he suggests it could give government ‘a licence to dump on
users’, so reducing their welfare, while simultaneously claiming to improve effectiveness, as
measured by governmental performance indicators.
In the tradition of Williamson (1985), Jackson argues that collective co-production is based
on the norm of reciprocity – cooperating now with someone who will reciprocate in the future
– so that it requires long-term relationships, which allow relational contracts which are tacit
and implicit (quite different from the tight specifications characterising most public service
contracts). This implies that long-run, stable, collective co-production is likely to be associated
with small, homogenous groups rather than large, diverse groups, in line with the much earlier
conclusions of Olsen (1965).
Interestingly, other elements of economic theory were ignored by earlier writers on
co-production; in particular, the welfare economics approach to collectively shared outcomes
from citizen inputs, and the analysis of citizen inputs contributing to household outcomes
through the mechanism of ‘household production functions’.
 Co-production: theoretical roots and conceptual frameworks  449

Welfare economics has long recognised the concept of positive externalities in both pro-
duction and consumption, the latter occurring where improved outcomes for one service user
can, in addition, bring a series of benefits (for others, e.g. benefits to those who are close to
and care about welfare of the user: care-givers, friends, volunteers, etc.), or benefits to other
users who can learn how to make better use of the service from the example set by the service
co-producer (e.g. from the ‘expert patient’ who has learnt to cope with chronic diabetes or
self-administered dialysis). This possibility of positive externalities arising from service
users making use of a public service could have quickly been adapted to provide a welfare
economics model of user co-production. However, most attention in policy studies has focused
on negative externalities; moreover, when positive externalities have been considered, the
policy implications have often been analysed in terms of the need to provide subsidies or
other incentives to the service users generating these benefits, rather than the possibilities
of co-designing and co-delivering joint inputs with the organisations producing the services
concerned. A factor in this neglect by economists may have been the unquestioning acceptance
of ‘exit, voice and loyalty’ as the only options to tackle market failures, such as externalities
(Hirschman 1970), which focuses mainly on negative externalities and, even if extended to
‘exit, subsidy, voice and loyalty’ in terms of collective decision-making, does not allow for
direct inputs to co-delivery by citizens to correct, at least partly, the suboptimalities caused by
externalities (Ackerman 2004; Loeffler 2021). The possibility of co-delivery means that we
must extend Hirschman’s options to ‘Exit, Voice, Individual Joint Action or Loyalty’ in the
case of service users and ‘Exit, Voice, Subsidy, Community Action or Loyalty’ in the case of
communities.
From a different standpoint, the treatment of joint inputs in the ‘characteristics’ approach
to goods and services (Lancaster 1966) foreshadowed the ‘service-dominant logic’ approach
(see below). This, in turn, together with Gary Becker’s work on the theory of time allocation
(Becker 1965) gave rise to a literature on the ‘household production function’ (Gronau 1980,
2008), which already contained the elements necessary to develop a more full-blooded anal-
ysis of service user co-production. One very highly cited paper in this tradition (Rosenzweig
and Schultz 1983) even came up with important results on the effect of household inputs on
outcomes for children. As this approach could not be modelled mathematically to yield fully
determined ‘optima’ (Pollak and Wachter 1975), it was not taken further by an economics
profession fixated on abstract optimisation rather than exploration of potentially useful public
policy interventions.

Public Choice

Coming from backrounds of political science, public administration and political economy,
the Ostroms naturally grounded their early work in the public choice literature represented by
Buchanan and Tullock. However, as Aligica and Tarko (2013: 740) point out, there are two
quite different schools of public choice. They ignored the more traditional approach, in which
the logic of individual decision-making is applied to collective deliberations and choices in
respect of both public goods and social issues, and co-production appears simply as one of
the available mechanisms for collective problem-solving to achieve a ‘social optimum’, along
with government and market production.
However, in the Ostroms’ approach, public choice is about the ways in which individual
preferences, values and decisions are shaped by ‘ecological rationality’ principles, and inter-
450  Handbook on theories of governance

twine and co-evolve with the institutionally constructed environment and governance system.
In this way, the ‘public’ is not an ex ante ‘given’, but rather emerges as a result of an ongoing,
collective process of adjustment, inquiry, negotiation, discovery, learning and coordination,
so that co-production is intrinsic to all public action, and public choice becomes endogenised
(Aligica and Tarko 2013: 740). There is therefore no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution, and even
where co-production is the most efficient mechanism, the structure of the most effective
co-production process can vary (Aligica and Tarko 2013: 736), a result which clashes with the
fixation of earlier public-choice economists on deterministic optimisation solutions.
Moreover, the Ostroms’ focus on polycentricity meant (as in many other varieties of the
governance perspective, see later) a stress upon the variety of mechanisms, not just ‘services’,
through which publicly desired outcomes can be achieved by multiple organisations which
work with multiple stakeholders. For example, many public outcomes are now conceptualised
as responding more to ‘influence’ (including so-called ‘nudges’) or ‘demand management’
mechanisms, which seek to change the behaviour of the public sector’s priority groups, rather
than direct provision of services.

Political Science

The political science conceptualisation of co-production clearly builds upon the literature on
citizen participation in government. This approach actually constituted the early formulation
of public administration in the 19th century (Frederickson 1982), although later overshadowed
by the institutional paradigm, dominated by Max Weber’s work. More recently, this original
perspective has resurfaced in ‘the participatory turn’ (Tholen 2015: 587), in which ‘arrange-
ments should be developed in which citizens can be directly involved in policymaking’, with
the idea of bringing citizens back into the policy-making process (Fischer 1993: 36). However,
a closer look through a Weberian lens gives a number of reasons to be cautious (Tholen 2015:
600): decision-making under the participatory turn may diminish the predictability of policies
and regulations, while also decreasing the likelihood that electoral manifestos will subse-
quently be implemented (Tholen 2015: 595). Moreover, the new participatory arrangements
may become overly structured, regular but routinised, and may therefore lose popular cred-
ibility, especially if the interests of bureaucrats rather than citizens are seen to dominate the
process. Citizen participation could even weaken the legitimacy of parliament, undermining
the countervailing forces to overbureaucratised policy-making (ibid.: 597). Tholen therefore
suggests that additional efforts are needed to balance these potential negative effects with the
potential gains from deliberative democracy.
Different political science approaches have suggested different ways of overcoming these
potential pitfalls of ‘the participatory turn’. Joshi and Moore (2004: 40), from a perspective
closely aligned to that of the Ostroms, propose the value of the concept of ‘institutionalised
co-production’: ‘the provision of public services (broadly defined, to include regulation)
through regular, long-term relationships between state agencies and organised groups of citi-
zens, where both make substantial resource contributions’. While accepting that this form of
co-production does indeed raise both efficiency and governance questions, for example over
accountability, they nevertheless argue (ibid.: 45–46) that it may be valuable in second-best
(or worse) circumstances, especially where public authority is weak; and indeed such arrange-
ments are may be widespread in the Global South for this reason.
 Co-production: theoretical roots and conceptual frameworks  451

Although ‘new institutionalism’ has become a major conceptual framework in political

science, it has not so far been invoked very often in co-production research. Indeed, Fledderus
et al. (2015) have suggested that institutional theory tends to assume that co-production with
citizens will be avoided by public service organisations which receive their legitimacy mainly
from government, since ‘mimetic isophormism’ will push them to become more bureaucratic
in their practices and, as a result, ‘there may be less space, time, and resources for users to fulfil
their co-producer role’ (ibid.: 158), a tendency potentially reinforced by the uncertainty which
co-production can bring. However, they go on to argue that if citizens, rather than government
bodies, were to become perceived as the most important stakeholders, whose involvement is
key to legitimacy of public service organisations, then those organisations would indeed be
likely to provide structures for co-production, even if this is only symbolic.
In a rather different theoretical tradition, social movement theorists see the key to
co-production, and participation more generally, as social mobilisation pressing for fairer
resource distribution. Although social movements often confront the state antagonistically,
Mitlin (2008) points to the slow and deliberate occupation by social movements of space typ-
ically filled by the state, and highlights the use of co-production strategies by the urban poor
in the South, usually through struggles for improved livelihoods within neighbourhoods (often
focusing on co-delivery as citizen action), and for city-wide political inclusion (focusing on
citizen voice). In relation to the concerns expressed by Tholen, Mitlin (2008: 358) argues that:
‘Rather than looking back at a romantic idea of how things used to be, co-production offers
a chance to address systemic weaknesses in a “Weberian” model of service delivery to identify
new solutions that support local democratic practice as well as improved services’; which
counters the concerns expressed by Tholen.
In Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, a parallel
social movement for more co-production can be seen in the disability rights movement, which
has promoted the social model of disability to insist that people should be active participants
in decisions about their own lives (Oliver 1990); an approach which Cahn (2004) suggests
has also provided a template for the empowerment of people with other social and economic
disadvantages. This very strong movement, represented at international, national and, par-
ticularly, at local levels, has insisted that the knowledge of ‘people with lived experience’,
particularly service users and carers, is at least as legitimate as that of organisation-based con-
tributors to service commissioning, design, delivery and assessment (Smith-Merry 2020), so
co-production not only promotes ‘citizen rights’ but also makes public services more effective.
The warnings of Tholen about co-production in policy-making mainly apply to the ‘citizen
voice’ aspect of co-production, not to citizen action. Indeed, citizen action, in the sense of
co-delivery of public services and outcomes, was largely neglected in political science before
the Bloomington School. One exception was Lipsky (1980), who highlighted the frequently
interdependent relationship between relatively autonomous ‘street-level bureaucrats’ and the
citizens with whom they interface. Indeed, Elinor Ostrom (1996: 1079) acknowledged Lipsky’s
contribution to her thinking through his observation that police, teachers, and so on, are often
only able to operate effectively when they can negotiate the active engagement of clients in
service delivery. This accords with recent empirical research suggesting that ‘co-production
between volunteers and professionals [“street level bureaucrats”] increases accountability ties
… especially in horizontal accountability relations’ (Tuurnas et al. 2016: 145).
452  Handbook on theories of governance

Sociology

Beresford (2019), exploring the sociology of co-production, highlights that the current
significant and widespread interest in public and patient involvement in public services,
policy and research (with specific reference to health and social care) should not be confused
with progress or consensus, since it is compounded by inequalities and competing interests
between key stakeholders, including government, research institutions, researchers and family
carers, service users, organizations and movements. He identifies a lack of progress in the
development of public and patient involvement in health and social care, and a tendency to
institutionalise it as a separate entity and to abstract it from its ideological connections. A soci-
ological approach, such as that of Giddens (1994), does not see deliberative democracy as
necessarily participatory; rather, its distinguishing mark is that wider publics can discuss and
come to their own conclusions about policies and politics. However, Beresford points out that
‘conversations and debates do not happen in isolation and people bring to such discussions all
the influences they have been subject to and their own socialization’. In this way, Beresford’s
analysis suggests that even poor-quality public involvement can potentially make available
valuable citizen knowledge and experience, resulting in policy decisions which can be seen as
co-produced.
Beresford argues that particularly important co-produced lessons emerged from the strug-
gles first of feminists and then disabled people to challenge the ‘epistemic violence’ and
exclusion exhibited in traditional research, and to regain control over the knowledge gained
from their individual and collective lived experience. These movements questioned the values
of distance, neutrality and objectivity of conventional positivist research, arguing that these
devalued lived or subjective experience and represented a further layer of discrimination
imposed upon them, especially as conventional research was seen as frequently accepting gov-
ernment or commercial values and priorities. Particularly powerful was the move to ‘eman-
cipatory disability research’ espoused by the United Kingdom disabled people’s movement
and the ‘survivor’ movement, which succeeded eventually in interesting existing research
structures in involving research subjects in the research process.
From a rather different perspective, co-production may spring from social motivations:
‘Over and above the focus on enhanced individual support, classic co-production relates to
the generation of social capital – the reciprocal relationships that build trust, peer support and
social activism with communities’ (Pearson et al. 2014). Here, a co-producing service user or
citizen may be motivated in large part by a desire to participate in a collective social endeavour
(Voorberg et al. 2015), and this social capital, as it accumulates, may encourage other commu-
nity members (either place-based or interest-based) also to join in (Putnam 2000). Similarly,
the sociology of philanthropy highlights how co-production may arise from a desire to help
others, so that its collective benefits may be underestimated through assumptions which over-
emphasize selfish motivations.
Olesen and Nordentoft (2013: 71) take a ‘micro-sociological’ approach to co-production,
focusing on ways in which participants make power relevant in their interactions. They
splice this approach to a Foucauldian macro-sociological perspective, which conceives
power as potentials which play a vital and productive role in how society unfolds. In this
micro-sociological approach, they emphasise that the action research ideal of ‘co-production
of knowledge’ can be ‘filled with tensions, contradictions, dilemmas and power imbalances
which seem to be inherent in all forms of knowledge production and communication’ (ibid.:
 Co-production: theoretical roots and conceptual frameworks  453

73). They assert (ibid.: 89) that this micro-perspective ‘uncovers how power and knowledge
are produced in interaction’ and conclude, unsurprisingly, that different understandings of, and
interests in, knowledge appear to challenge the knowledge co-production process, a conflict of
interest which facilitators should articulate during the action research process.
Finally, the sociology of science seeks to understand how technology and society
‘co-produce’ each other. Jasanoff (2004: 72) suggests that the idiom of co-production most
readily aligns with the interpretive and post-structuralist turn in the social sciences, avoiding
deterministic causal explanations of how knowledge influences society, or vice versa, but
rather supporting systematic thought about the processes of sensemaking through which
people make use of scientific knowledge and technology as knowing agents rather than
simply as calculative actors choosing ‘rationally’ (often ahistorically and aculturally) among
taken-for-granted preferences.
However, Daly (2016: 19‒20) argues that remitting full decision-making authority to local
actors, often seen as key to empowerment, is overly simplistic, because of its hierarchical,
apolitical and linear view of empowerment. She suggests that decentralised governance, which
links local knowledge to devolved decision-making by local actors, needs to be accompanied
by downward accountability, with more appropriate decision-making powers allocated to
various actors, giving rise in some cases to ‘co-management’ to overcome unidirectional con-
ceptualisations of participation and empowerment (Daly 2016: 20). She warns, however, that
because of the relations of power caught up in knowledge production, ‘integrating’, ‘combin-
ing’ or ‘linking’ knowledges may only result in efforts to try and make indigenous knowledge
more ‘scientific’ (Daly 2016: 231‒232).

Social and Consumer Psychology

Social and consumer psychology approaches explore in much more depth the effects of
embedding users’ preferences in services through giving them a role in service design and
operation. This may bring both a better ‘fit’ of services to users’ perceptions of what they need,
and also more commitment from users to enter fully into the service process. Etgar (2008:
98) links co-production to customisation ‒ a key recent trend in public services, particularly
in social care ‒ citing Pralahad and Ramaswamy (2004: 5) who proposed that, in co-creating
values, ‘the co-creation experience depends highly on individuals. Each person’s uniqueness
affects the co-creation process as well as the co-creation experience.’ From this perspective,
co-production helps to fragment (and therefore ‘personalise’) overall market offers, assists
one-to-one marketing and therefore expands the choices facing consumers. This approach
therefore embeds as a key factor the ‘lived experience’ of the service user in both what out-
comes are co-created and how they are co-created, which undermines the ‘given’ nature of
preferences in traditional economics. The ‘lived experiences’ of different identity groups, such
as women, people from black and ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, and so on, while
unique to each person, nevertheless share some commonalities, which means that personali-
sation has been a constant demand of many of the social movements which have pressed for
a greater co-production role in their relationships with public service organisations.
Moreover, psychology underpins another fundamental attack on the traditional narrow
economic and political science analyses of public service decision-making. Tinna Nielsen
(2021) discusses how the behavioural psychology approach does not assume that the human
mind operates in a purely ‘rational’ manner. Rather, most behaviour is controlled by the
454  Handbook on theories of governance

unconscious, instinctive, emotional and associative part of the brain. However, those very
mental shortcuts (heuristics), whereby people make judgements and decisions quickly and
efficiently, also lead to cognitive biases, so that there is a large gap between explicit inten-
tions and actual behaviour. Co-production practices, involving interaction and dialogue with
other stakeholders offering counter-perspectives, can partly address this. Unfortunately, these
cognitive biases can also partly undermine co-production, leading to underuse of the diversity
of perspectives, knowledge and which people bring into co-production. Nielsen consequently
recommends active involvement of multiple stakeholders with diverse perspectives, facilitated
by a ‘change-maker’, empowering as many people as possible to co-design new inclusive
solutions; an analysis which aligns with recommendations from design sciences.
At the same time, Nielsen acknowledges that rationality does indeed play a role; for
example, it can help co-production facilitators to design ‘inclusion nudges’, non-intrusive
behavioural interventions to influence the unconscious mind to act more inclusively, change
perceptions, and mitigate unconscious bias and stereotypes. Moreover, she highlights that suc-
cessful co-production can happen even without conscious, willing and effortful contributions,
since ‘the people it’s about’ have something to contribute, even though they might not know it.
These lessons from cognitive psychology are not new but have often been ignored. Douglass
North (1993: Section IV) in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech insisted that economic theory
had long used the wrong methods: ‘The rational choice framework assumes that individuals
know what is in their self-interest and act accordingly. That … is patently false in making
choices under conditions of uncertainty ‒ the conditions that have characterized the political
and economic choices that shaped (and continue to shape) historical change.’ Since this caveat
applies to all stakeholders, scholars since have explored how the kinds of collaboration which
constitute co-production can help social systems to approach towards the optima potentially
available to them. Moreover, this core insight is relevant to other disciplines, such as sociology
(Nee 1998).

Design Sciences

Design thinking is intended to ‘counteract human biases that thwart creativity while address-
ing the challenges typically faced in reaching superior solutions, lowered costs and risks, and
employee buy-in’ (Liedtka 2018: 79). It incorporates knowledge from ergonomics, cyber-
netics, marketing and management science (Archer 1965), It also draws on insights from the
design professions, such as architecture, and computer, product and graphic design, which are
based on ‘making the users integral to the design process itself and focusing on the experience
“inside out” of their moving through the service and interacting with its various parts’ (Bate
and Robert 2006: 4). This makes it clear that co-production is inherent in design thinking (see
also Bason 2010). More recently, it has been incorporated in public services, including health
care (Robert et al. 2021), environmental sustainability (Wever et al. 2008) and affordable
housing (Athavankar n.d.).
Bjögvinsson et al. (2012: 101) summarise the main elements of design thinking as:

(1) that designers should be more involved in the big picture of socially innovative design, beyond
the economic bottom line; (2) that design is a collaborative effort where the design process is spread
among diverse participating stakeholders and competences; and (3) that ideas have to be envisioned,
‘prototyped’, and explored in a hands-on way, tried out early in the design process in ways character-
ized by human-centeredness, empathy, and optimism.
 Co-production: theoretical roots and conceptual frameworks  455

Participatory design takes the stance that those affected by design should have a say in
that design process; that controversy rather than consensus should be expected around an
emerging object of design; and that design should empower ‘resource-weak’ stakeholders,
ensuring that existing skills and tacit knowledge of participants become embedded in the
design process. Consequently, not only should service users be involved in the design process
(‘use-before-use’), bringing in experience from their lifeworlds, but also some design activities
should be deferred until use is actually happening (‘use as design’, or ‘design-after-design’).
From this perspective, co-design is also fundamental to co-delivery.
Bjögvinsson et al. (2012: 116) conclude that: ‘The really demanding challenge is to design
where no such consensus [around common social objectives] seems to be within view, where
no social community exists. Such political communities … [need] platforms … not neces-
sarily to solve conflict, but to constructively deal with disagreements.’ Consequently, design
thinking, as with all other approaches to co-production, eventually has to confront, rather than
providing a solution to, the differences inherent in multi-stakeholder decision-making and
action-taking.
Of course, not all design has to be co-productive or even participatory. Finding the dividing
line beyond which it is better to design alone or in a small ‘expert team’ is challenging. Di
Russo (2017) writes about the potential frustrations:

If everyone across an organisation is familiar with the process and approach, then each project can
operate in a less rigid and more organic manner. It is this intuitive flow that is lost when you need to
design and facilitate capability uplift through collaboration with a large set of stakeholders. … [when]
I ask myself if I am actually designing, or if I am reduced to merely … a passive facilitator ‒ at best
‒ an active integrator … It is, however, in this situation that I know a small, engaged design team
working intensely and consistently performs far better and with greater understanding than large,
sequenced and structured workshops.

This illustrates a typical professional concern about the co-production process.

Services Management

Co-production became a theme in private sector services management from the 1970s, ini-
tially emerging from marketing research. A key author in this literature, Normann (1984),
distilling ideas from marketing, organisation studies and strategic management (and later
social innovation), distinguished the ‘enabling logic’ in services, which depends critically on
mobilising those contributions that users can uniquely provide to enable service outcomes,
from the ‘relieving logic’, in which providers do the service to, or for, the user. In a world of
increasingly competent service users, Normann predicted that enabling service relationships
would become more prominent and that ‘relievers’ would experience tough competition from
‘enablers’.
In fact, the roots of Normann’s approach go much deeper. One of his co-workers, Ramirez
(1999), has analysed the evolution of the concept of value co-production, locating the first
reference in the literature as de Boisguilbert (1707 [1966]), who proposed an economic model
based on interdependence. Ramirez also drew attention to the work of Storch (1823), who
recognised that services require cooperation between producer and consumer, and of Fuchs
(1965, 1968), identified by Ramirez as the first person explicitly to consider the consumer as
a factor of production. Clearly, these roots of the service management literature are based in
456  Handbook on theories of governance

the economics discipline, once again raising the question as to why mainstream economics
was so slow to recognise the limitations of its traditional hard split between production and
consumption.
A parallel to Normann’s approach was the ‘service-dominant logic’ approach (Grönroos
2000; Lusch and Vargo 2006), in which co-production is seen as an inherent characteristic
of services, a concept which was quickly embedded in analysis of public services, since
they ‘simply cannot function without client co-production’ (Alford 2002: 33). This approach
was taken further as the ‘public services dominant logic’ by Osborne et al. (2013). More
recently still, Strokosch and Osborne (2021) argue for a ‘public service logic’, which draws
particularly on the work of Grönroos (2019). Here, citizens are seen as having a fundamental
role to play in value creation and co-creation for themselves and wider society through four
distinct processes of participation: two intrinsic participation processes (co-experience and
co-construction), which are inherent to public service delivery, and two extrinsic participa-
tion processes (co-production and co-design), in which the parties involved in public service
delivery can choose whether to engage or not. Each of these has different policy implications
for public service organisations, and different implications for how citizens allocate their own
resources to increase the value they create for themselves and others.

ROLE OF CO-PRODUCTION IN THEORIES OF INTERACTIVE

GOVERNANCE

This chapter has made it clear that co-production has its roots in many, if not all, of the social
sciences. However, this relationship has been reciprocal. In the 40 years since it has become
an established concept in public administration, co-production has, to a greater or lesser extent,
forced its way into each of the disciplines discussed above. In this final section, we discuss its
specific significance for the theories and practice of public governance, which we define, in
line with the approach in this Handbook, as ‘the process of steering society and the economy
through collective action and in accordance with common goals’ (Torfing et al. 2012).
Over the past four decades, it has become increasingly clear that co-production has a direct
impact on public governance. As Elinor Ostrom (1998) stated: ‘It is ordinary persons and citi-
zens who craft and sustain the workability of the institutions of everyday life.’ Consequently,
the potential benefits of co-production by citizens apply also to the governance system which
seeks to shape and steer these everyday institutions, as well as to the service decisions which
emerge from these institutions. Indeed, Pestoff (2009) argues that ‘only co-production and
greater welfare pluralism can promote democratic governance of welfare services and the
welfare state’.
We therefore see co-production as having an effect on public governance on three differ-
ent dimensions: first, on the dimension of democratic governance (where it is a key part of
activities such as citizen assemblies and participatory budgeting); second, on the dimension
of improving citizen quality-of-life outcomes, partly but not only through public services; and
third, on the dimension of helping to shape, support and achieve public governance principles,
which underlie normative concepts of ‘good governance’. This influence of co-production on
these different dimensions of public governance applies across both national and local levels
of public governance, (and potentially also at international level).
 Co-production: theoretical roots and conceptual frameworks  457

Co-production and democratic governance: The mode of co-production which relates

most directly to democratic governance is co-commissioning (Loeffler and Bovaird 2019),
where citizens (both users and communities) have the opportunity to influence the priorities
of public decision-makers, not only on public services and public governance principles but
also on the overall values which are given weight in the political system. Citizen assemblies
are one example (OECD 2020; Innovation in Democracy 2019), but perhaps the most vivid
example is participatory budgeting (PB), where where citizens participate directly in making
collective decisions on public spending. PB now occurs in neighbourhoods, towns and cities,
in communities of interest and identity, as well as in decision-making at regional and national
level, so that the Participatory Budgeting World Atlas includes 11 690 cases (Escobar 2021).
Co-production and governance of public services and quality-of-life outcomes: All ‘Four
Co’s’ (co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery and co-assessment) give citizens a role in the
governance of public services and quality-of-life outcomes. Many varieties of the governance
perspective stress that the government and public sector institutions are not simply about
‘services’, and that publicly desired outcomes are achieved by a wide variety of influence
mechanisms (Stoker 2006; Dickinson and Sullivan 2014), of which user and community
co-production are often key components. By involving appropriate service users and members
of the community in each of the ‘Four Co’s’, the choice of public interventions and the method
of their delivery can incorporate both the values and the knowledge of citizens and respond
better to their needs. What is ‘appropriate’ is, of course, context-specific, so that there is also
scope for value destruction if such decisions are inappropriate.
Co-production and public governance principles: While it is increasingly recognised
that co-production plays an important role in shaping public governance, it is clear that the
popularity of co-production owes much to its normative resonance with many involved in
public policy and services. All ‘Four Co’s’, by bringing in service users and other citizens,
can potentially increase adherence to public governance principles, such as accountability,
transparency, fairness, the equalities agenda and sustainability. Of course, it again has to be
recognised that, as well as potential benefits, there is scope for public value to be destroyed if
this is not done appropriately, for example if it leads to prolonged and vituperative differences
between stakeholders. For advocates of normative concepts of co-production, however, it
is key that co-production is not just a means to an end (‘outcomes’) but that, inherently, it
embeds specific public governance principles or social values in order to improve outcomes,
typically with a strong emphasis on achieving greater social justice and social equality. From
this perspective, co-production strengthens citizenship as a collective value in society, not just
the achievement of quality-of-life outcomes for individuals.
While the co-producing citizen is often conceptualised as seeking achievement of purely
individual motives and behaviours ‒ for example, a service user seeking to improve services
received personally ‒ this neglects four key aspects of co-production which lead to its col-
lective dimension being underestimated (Bovaird and Loeffler 2016). First, a co-producing
citizen may be motivated largely to participate socially in a collective endeavour with others;
that is, co-production as solidarity, for example with third-sector organisations. Second,
co-production of better outcomes for oneself can create ‘externalities in consumption’, for
example by reducing the need for carer support, or by extending ‘non-rival public goods’,
for example through improving a service available to all. Fourth, citizens may be engaged in
co-production simply as a philanthropic rather than a selfish act.
458  Handbook on theories of governance

So, finally, we would suggest that, just as co-production theory can still be significantly
strengthened by tending more thoroughly its disciplinary roots, these disciplines themselves
can more fully explore the implications of co-production. In particular, user and community
co-production may well give rise to major positive synergies ‒ that is, non-linear benefits
‒ which are not captured in the many approaches to interactive governance which focus on
‘individualised’ values and behaviours. This reciprocal learning between social science disci-
plines and cross-cutting behaviours such as user and community co-production is, as yet, in its
infancy and promises to yield many more valuable insights for interactive public governance
as it further develops in the future.

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40. Democratic network governance
Eva Sørensen

INTRODUCTION
In recently developed theories of governance, there has been a growing interest in govern-
ance networks that provide a truly interactive form of governance, both when it comes to
the relationship between the participants, and in terms of the interplay between the networks
and those who seek to regulate them. Governance networks have two constitutive features:
interdependency between the network actors, and a certain amount of autonomy vis-à-vis
external actors. Accordingly, the internal governance processes within networks as well as
the attempt of external actors to influence them are interactive rather than driven by detailed
and one-directional command and control (Kooiman 1993; Kickert et al. 1997; Torfing et
al. 2019). The interactive character of governance networks makes them a highly relevant
showcase for clarifying and discussing a number of pressing theoretical as well as practical
questions regarding the fate and future of democracy in the current age of governance, in
which interactive forms of governance are flourishing (Sørensen 2020). Governance networks
flourish at all levels of government and in most policy areas, which makes them an interesting
starting point for a discussion of the forms and functioning of democracy. As widely docu-
mented by social science, the role of networks between public actors and private stakeholders
in governing public affairs is not new (Schmitter 1974; Heclo 1978). What is new is that
decision-makers no longer perceive governance networks as a more or less regrettable, but
unavoidable, reality in modern governance. Instead, Western governments increasingly per-
ceive and prescribe governance networks as a means of increasing the efficiency, effectiveness
and legitimacy of public governance (EU Commission 2001; British Government 2010; US
Government 2012). This remarkable change in the perspective of public decision-makers is
not only well documented but is also to a great extent seconded by social science theorists in
a wide range of disciplines, ranging from public administration research to political science,
sociology, economics and planning, to international relations and development studies (Klijn
and Koppenjan 2015; Torfing et al. 2019).
The theoretical challenges related to the systematic and deliberate efforts of Western gov-
ernments to expand the use of governance networks as a means to govern society and solve
complex and wicked problems have triggered an intense and heated debate among governance
theorists. Political scientists and public administration researchers have been particularly
concerned about what the widespread use of governance networks in governing society means
for Western liberal democracy (Klijn and Skelcher 2007; Edelenbos and van Meerkerk 2016).
While some theorists view governance networks as a threat to classical forms of democracy,
others see them as a valuable supplement to the traditional democratic institutions, or even as
a key element in bringing liberal democracy to a new stage that corresponds with an emerging
reality. Amongst other things, the heated debate about the impact of governance networks on
democracy involves a discussion of the extent to which it is possible for public authorities to
govern the more or less self-regulating governance networks (Jessop 2002; Kooiman 2003;

462
 Democratic network governance  463

Sørensen and Torfing 2007; van der Heiden et al. 2013). As we shall see, the discussion about
the democratic impact and quality of networked governance has great relevance for students
of public governance, because it reopens classical theoretical reflections about the relationship
between democracy and efficiency, and about the role of and relationship between citizens,
political elites and organized interests in the governance of democratic societies. In addition,
the debates trigger important considerations about the different forms that democracy can take
at different levels as well as between levels of governance in an increasingly multi-level and
globalized system of governance (Wejnert 2014).
The chapter begins by clarifying a number of conceptual and definitional issues regarding
what counts as governance networks, and what is meant by the term “liberal democracy.” Then
follows a presentation of the three main positions of governance researchers with regard to the
impact of governance networks on democracy, and a brief account of the empirical findings
in support of these positions. The chapter then discusses the main conflicts and complemen-
tarities between the three positions, and concludes by listing a number of theoretical concerns
that need further consideration and identifying some pressing issues regarding the future of
democracy in a world of interactive governance.

DEFINING GOVERNANCE NETWORKS AND LIBERAL

DEMOCRACY

The term “network” is widely used in the social sciences to describe relatively stable horizon-
tal interactions between a number of actors from different formal organizations or informal
groups. Some network theories, such as the increasingly popular social network analysis,
take a predominantly descriptive approach to the study of networks. They aim to identify and
describe the patterned interactions by mapping the relations and non-relations between the
actors, analyzing the density of contacts between them, measuring the centrality of particular
actors and looking at the links between sub-networks (Granovetter 1973; Freeman, L. 2006).
This sociometric analysis of the linkages between network nodes is most widely used in soci-
ology, but it has also gained some prominence in political science and public administration
research (Considine et al. 2009; Ball and Junemann 2012). Governance theorists, and in par-
ticular those with a political science and public administration background, tend to define net-
works in more theoretical terms, as relatively stable horizontal articulations of interdependent
public and/or private actors who collaborate in an attempt to realize jointly negotiated goals
(Scharpf 1994; Kickert et al. 1997). Moreover, governance researchers tend to be particularly
interested in governance networks, referring to networks between social and political actors
who contribute to the promotion of what is at a given point in time defined as public purpose
(Sørensen and Torfing 2007; Klijn and Koppenjan 2015). Governance networks are particu-
larly interesting for the discussion of democracy, because they are involved in the formulation
and implementation of public governance tasks and thus partake in the authoritative allocation
of values. In contrast to networks that merely pursue social and economic objectives, govern-
ance networks collide with the patterns of political participation and the relationship between
public authorities and civil society actors prescribed in traditional models of liberal democracy
(Held 1987). Therefore, it is highly relevant to discuss the implications of governance net-
works for liberal democracy.
464  Handbook on theories of governance

The key characteristic of traditional models of liberal democracy is the idea that the indi-
vidual members of the political community must have equal access to influencing collective
political decisions that affect them either through participation in elections and referendums
or through direct involvement in local political decision-making processes. The equal right to
political participation presupposes freedom of speech, the right to organize, and a private space
where one can act freely and without government interference (Held 1987: 41). Although there
are profound differences between representative and participatory models of democracy,
they share this constitutive idea that democracy stands on two legs: a democratically elected
government and a self-governing civil society (Pateman 1970; Sartori 1987; Kane and Patapan
2012).
Moreover, the traditional models of liberal democracy stipulate that it is important to
maintain a sharp institutional separation between the political sphere of government and the
private sphere of civil society. Elected politicians should be protected from untimely pressure
and influence from pressure groups and organized stakeholders that could undermine politi-
cal equality in society as well as the integrity of elected politicians. Moreover, institutional
boundaries between the political and the private sphere serve to protect the liberty and privacy
of the individual citizens and the autonomy of local communities from untimely political
interference. An important question in debates regarding the fate of liberal democracy in the
age of interactive governance is thus whether liberal democracy can survive without a sharp
institutional separation of representative democracy and a self-governing civil society. This
question is the implicit dispute in the heated theoretical debates on governance and democracy
that I will summarize in the next section.

THREE PERSPECTIVES ON HOW GOVERNANCE NETWORKS

AFFECT DEMOCRACY

There is general agreement among governance researchers that the surge of governance
networks can contribute to enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of public governance
owing to the exchange and pooling of knowledge, resources and competences, the possibility
for mutual learning, and the ability to coordinate the actions of social and political actors in
the process of implementation. Moreover, most governance researchers agree that, in the
process, governance networks transgress the institutional boundaries separating representative
government from the self-governing civil society (Pierre 2000; Sørensen and Torfing 2005;
Papadopoulos 2007). There are huge disagreements, however, regarding what this transgres-
sion of boundaries means for democracy (Klijn and Skelcher 2007). There are three basic
positions in the debate: the worried, the hopeful and the enthusiastic.
The worried governance researchers argue that the price paid for enhancing the efficiency
and effectiveness of public governance by relying on interactive forms of network govern-
ance is a loss of democratic legitimacy and accountability, the defeat of equality in political
participation, and the relinquishment of individual liberty and civil society autonomy. Some
claim that the informality and opaqueness of governance networks undercut the democratic
legitimacy and accountability of public governance, because it becomes difficult for the public
to determine who decided what, where, when and why (Papadopoulos 2007). A number
of empirical studies of transnational, national and local governance processes involving
governance networks tend to confirm that governance networks often escape traditional
 Democratic network governance  465

democratic control mechanisms (Bekkers et al. 2007; Dubnick and Frederickson 2010; Klijn
and Koppenjan 2014). Nevertheless, other studies point out that the same problems in terms
of accountability and democratic legitimacy haunt the traditional models of liberal democracy
(Lindblom 1977). Other governance researchers fear that the selective and somewhat arbitrary
involvement of societal actors in networked governance processes may result in systematic
inequalities in political influence among the citizens (Davis 2011). Such systematic inequal-
ities occur because governance networks tend to include strong and resourceful stakeholders
rather than those with limited resources (Young 2000). The claim that governance networks
lead to political inequality finds empirical support (Grote and Gbikpi 2002; Marcussen and
Torfing 2007; Bouteligier 2013); however, other studies show that such inequalities are also
seen in traditional institutions of liberal democracy (Leighley and Nagler 1992; Freeman,
R. 2004). Finally, some governance researchers are worried that public authorities will use
governance networks as a medium for subordinating civil society under a systemic logic of
power and control that focuses on regulating behavior and getting things done in an efficient
and effective manner (Bang 2003; Bevir 2011). This problematization of interactive forms of
governance stipulates that, rather than serving as a means by which strong civil society actors
seek to influence and infiltrate democratically appointed governments, they provide a tool
for political and administrative authorities to enroll all members of society as foot soldiers in
providing efficient and effective governance. Empirical research shows that this enrollment
is indeed an aspect of what happens in governance networks. However, it also shows that
networks often serve as a means by which civil society actors recruit public authorities for
their own particular purposes, and in order to facilitate joint problem-solving in cases where
neither public nor private actors can govern alone (Bogason and Zølner 2007; Baker et al.
2009; Nowell et al. 2018).
There are also hopeful governance theorists, who envisage governance networks as a posi-
tive supplement to the traditional institutions of liberal democracy. Rather than proclaiming an
inherent trade-off between efficient and effective governance on the one hand, and democracy
on the other, they insist that governance networks can potentially both mobilize the resources
and ideas of civil society actors in and through collaborative processes, and enhance the polit-
ical influence of intensely affected actors (Skelcher and Torfing 2010). Governance networks
hold a democratic potential because they can strengthen the weak institutional links between
the political elites and the citizens. Hence, they can serve as flexible, context-dependent arenas
in which politicians and relevant and affected stakeholders can communicate, deliberate and
collaborate in a shared effort to clarify and solve governance tasks. Both parties stand to
benefit from stronger institutional linkages. Today, citizens in Western liberal democracies
expect to have a considerable degree of influence on social and economic matters that affect
their lives (Norris 2011; Dalton and Welzel 2014), and participation in governance networks
grants them an opportunity to engage directly in formulating and implementing policy deci-
sions and governance initiatives (Hirst 2000; Rhodes 2000; Dryzek 2007). Political elites,
on their side, get a direct and unmediated opportunity to explain and account for decisions
they make and actions they take to citizens and other relevant and affected stakeholders, and
thereby strengthen their democratic legitimacy and public support. Moreover, political elites
can qualify their political ideas and strategies in light of the views and opinions brought to the
table by relevant and affected stakeholders (Bogason and Musso 2006; Bekkers et al. 2007).
Governance networks that serve these purposes strengthen the connection between the two
legs in liberal democracy: representative government and a self-governing civil society.
466  Handbook on theories of governance

However, studies show that governance networks do not always manage to do so in practice,
either because they become sites of antagonistic conflict or because they fail to recruit the
right actors (Sørensen and Torfing 2007). Recognizing the likelihood of governance network
failure, it is argued that governance networks must be regulated if their democratic potentials
are to be realized. What is called for is a specific kind of regulation that does not disrupt the
self-regulating capacity and horizontal patterns of interaction that are defining traits of gov-
ernance networks. Some governance researchers use the term “metagovernance” to describe
the governance of self-governing networks, while others talk of “collaborative management,”
“integrative leadership” or “network management” (Kooiman 1993, 2003; Jessop 2002; Ansell
and Gash 2008; van der Heiden et al. 2013). Despite the terminological differences, these con-
cepts all point to ways in which governance networks and other relatively autonomous gov-
ernance arenas are influenced without reverting too much to traditional hierarchical forms of
command and control. Among the suggested forms of regulation are: political, economic, legal
and discursive framing of networks; institutional network design; facilitation and mediation of
network processes; and direct participation in networks. Although the main focus has been on
how to regulate governance networks in ways that promote efficient and effective governance,
some efforts have been made to clarify how governance networks can be regulated in ways that
promote democracy (Sørensen and Torfing 2009). Studies suggest that governance networks
that are regulated can make a positive contribution to democracy. Studies also show, however,
that this metagovernance is difficult, and that public authorities and others that aim to regu-
late governance networks tend to focus more on making them efficient and effective than on
making them democratic (Skelcher et al. 2011; Koppenjan et al. 2013). The theoretical debate
on metagovernance and other forms of regulated self-regulation is path-breaking, because it
relinquishes the traditional idea in liberal thought that self-regulation and autonomy are con-
ditioned on the absence of regulation, and redefine it as a product of regulation (Sørensen and
Triantafillou 2013). Seen in this light, it makes little sense to view the two legs of democracy
as separate entities: a sphere of authoritative collective rule and a sphere of freedom that
escapes regulation. The two spheres condition each other, and democratic governance involves
an ongoing effort to align the activities in the two sectors, and governance networks can be
valuable instruments in accommodating this alignment.
While metagovernance of governance networks can contribute to a democratization of
policy-making and public governance, it also helps to ensure the “democratic anchorage” of
governance networks. The notion of democratic anchorage was developed in order to be able
to assess the democratic quality of governance networks (Sørensen and Torfing 2009). The
argument is that governance networks are democratically anchored if: they are metagoverned
by elected politicians; the participants are held to account by those who they claim to rep-
resent; the outputs and outcomes are critically scrutinized by the affected citizenry; and the
internal processes are governed by a democratic grammar of conduct. The four democratic
anchorage points have been further operationalized in order to facilitate empirical evaluations
of the democratic quality of governance networks (Torfing et al. 2019).
Finally, there is a third group of enthusiastic governance researchers, who view the prolif-
eration of governance networks as a catalyst for the development of a new model of liberal
democracy that is better suited to meeting the current realities, challenges and governance
ambitions. Mark E. Warren (2009) perceives the development of interactive forms of net-
worked governance as a governance-driven democratization. The surge of governance net-
works is resulting from efforts of public managers to cope with a mounting number of wicked
 Democratic network governance  467

and unruly problems in an increasingly multi-level and globalized political system. As a more
or less unintended consequence of the complex problems they are trying to solve, public
managers invite citizens and other relevant and affected stakeholders to participate in public
governance processes, and thereby pave the way for the development of a new form of liberal
democracy that empowers ordinary citizens and commits elites and sub-elites to collaborate
in a shared effort to define and solve governance tasks (Fung and Wright 2003; Fung 2009;
Ansell 2011; Sørensen and Torfing 2019). What is at stake here is not only institutional reform
(Held and McGrew 2002; Smith 2009; Keane 2009) but also a reconceptualization of some of
the key concepts in liberal democracy, such as political equality (Dryzek 2007), democratic
representation (Saward 2010), participation (Warren 2002, 2017), deliberation (Ansell 2011)
and democratic accountability (Fung 2004, 2011).
Interesting debates about the prospect of democratic transformation in light of the prolifer-
ation of governance networks are also focusing on what goes on at the transnational as well
as national and local levels of governance. Researchers interested in the role of governance
networks at the transnational level tend to view the sustained interaction between national
governments, private corporations, non-governmental organizations and international organ-
izations as a tool for democratizing global governance, and for allowing non-state actors to
have a stronger voice while sharing the responsibility for implementation of new solutions
(Slaughter 2001). However, they also point to the fact that there is no world government that
can take on the role as metagovernor and thus help to ensure that transnational governance net-
works are democratic (Nye and Donahue 2000; Archibugi et al. 2012; Stevenson and Dryzek
2014). Those researchers who study national levels of governance are particularly interested
in the interaction between government agencies and organized interests, as well as between
political parties and different branches of government, in order to clarify how multi-actor col-
laboration affects government policies and policy implementation (Marsh and Rhodes 1992;
Römmele et al. 2005). Studies of local governance networks seem particularly interested in
whether and how governance networks affect patterns of political participation and contes-
tations among the citizens and civil society organizations, in Western liberal democracies as
well as in developing countries (Shah 2006; Baud and Wit 2008; Skelcher et al. 2011).

FUTURE DEBATES

Each of the three theoretical positions listed above raises important issues regarding the fate
of democracy in the age of interactive governance. There is indeed cause for concern, owing
to the fact that governance networks challenge the traditional models of liberal democracy. It
is important to consider how the challenges can be met through new forms of metagovernance
which aim to ensure that governance networks become a positive supplement rather than
a threat to representative and participatory forms of liberal democracy (Sørensen and Torfing
2009). Thus the defense of liberal democracy should be seen as a never-ending endeavor and
as an unfinished “work in process” rather than as a battle against new concepts and ideas and
institutional transformations and innovations (Barber 1984; Dahl 1989). Indeed, the three
perspectives on governance networks and democracy seem to be complementary rather than
conflicting.
One issue that has not been sufficiently addressed is the role of elected politicians and
political leadership in metagoverning democratic governance. The tendency to leave metagov-
468  Handbook on theories of governance

ernance to public administrators tends to be strong (Warren 2009), but since metagovernance
is political in kind, the democratic character of governance networks hinges on securing dem-
ocratic influence on the way they are regulated and the democratic legitimacy of those who
regulate them (Sørensen and Torfing 2016; Sørensen, 2020).
Another important question that has not been fully clarified, however, is whether the notion
of liberal democracy stands or falls with the existence of a strict institutional separation of
representative government and a self-governing civil society, or whether continued interaction
between the two realms can help to strengthen both the capacity to govern and the capacity
of social actors to do things on their own. The answer to this question is important if we are
to determine whether governance networks contribute to developing or transgressing liberal
democracy.
A third question that needs further consideration is what it means for different strands of
social science theory if temporal, cross-sectoral and problem-driven forms of governing such
as governance networks are no longer to be regarded as exceptional and marginal, but rather as
part of the constitutive backbone of modern governance (Ansell 2011). What does this mean
for international relations theories, political sociology, public management research, European
Union studies, state theory and, in particular, theories of democracy (Sørensen 2012)? These
debates have only just begun and will have to be taken further than the pages of this Handbook.
Finally, there has been very limited discussion about the democratic implications of other
interactive forms of governance, such as quasi-markets based on relational contracts and
public–private partnerships. What does it mean for the distribution of political power and
influence in society that policy tasks are defined and implemented through contracted or nego-
tiated forms of collaboration between public authorities and private for-profit or non-profit
organizations? There is just as much reason to be worried, hopeful and enthusiastic when it
comes to these forms of interactive governance. The fact that quasi-markets and partnerships
are embedded in a managerial rhetoric should not overshadow the fact that private actors are
involved in defining and solving governance tasks in much the same way as those involved in
governance networks (Torfing et al. 2019).

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41. Regulatory governance
John Yasuda

In the last two decades, a string of catastrophic governance failures has prompted a re-evaluation
of regulatory schemes across a range of sectors. The Enron accounting scandals in 2001, the
2008 global financial crisis, the BP Horizon disaster in 2010, dangerous Chinese food and
pharmaceutical imports, the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown in 2011 and, more recently,
a series of major aviation accidents have led scholars and practitioners to question and re-think
regulatory designs, incentive structures and oversight mechanisms (Coglianese et al. 2009;
Moss and Cisternino 2009; Balleisen and Moss 2009). Are we certain we understand the
incentive structures that motivate the behavior of both regulator and regulated? Can firms
really be trusted to self-regulate? Should social and political movements be incorporated into
the regulatory process? To what extent should regulatory authority be entrusted to third-party
actors, who themselves may be subject to capture?
Soul searching prompted by these and other spectacular failures has led to a burgeoning
literature on what is commonly referred to as “regulatory governance.” Regulatory governance
is a framework of governance in which non-state actors play an active role in regulatory stand-
ards setting, monitoring and enforcement in partnership with or in parallel to state agencies.
The diverse arrangements between state and non-state actors are not one-off commitments
but are increasingly codified in law, which provides a statutory basis for collaboration. Under
regulatory governance, previous dichotomies between regulator and regulated, public and
private, and market and state become blurred, as regulators, firms, third-party certifiers and
NGOs partner to achieve regulatory goals. This is not to say that state-centric forms of regu-
lation, such as command-and-control, have no place in this mode of governance but only that
these state-led efforts now operate as part of a broader web of policies that are implemented
by a more diverse range of actors.
Scholarship has focused on: new mixes of private and public regulation (Balleisen and
Eisner 2009); innovations in self-regulatory practices that leverage state resources (Carrigan
and Coglianese 2011); and the broadening base of regulatory participants, which now includes
consumers, NGOs and industry associations (Fung and O’Rourke 2000; Büthe and Mattli
2011). Studies on meta-regulation or management-based regulation examine how state
authorities can better collaborate with firms to develop enforceable self-regulatory programs
(Coglianese and Lazer 2003; Gilad 2010). Other studies have examined how to make state
regulation more effective. “Responsive regulation” encourages regulatory dialogue between
the regulators and firms, with the state taking punitive action only if a firm continues in
non-compliance (Ayres and Braithwaite 1992; Parker 2013). “Risk management” strategies
have been employed to efficiently allocate limited resources to high risk producers or firms
(Vogel 2001; Black and Baldwin 2010). Increasingly, governments have begun to implement
“experimentalist” regimes in which information on best practices and policy innovations is
shared between firms and regulators, and localities, to enable collaborative problem solving
on a dynamic basis (Sabel and Zeitlin 2008). Finally, voluntary, self-regulatory practices
have proliferated across the globe (Potoski and Prakash 2004a, 2004b). Together, innovative

472
 Regulatory governance  473

mixes of private and public regulation, improved state regulation and the development of new
voluntary regulatory schemes provide regulators with a set of tools to manage an increasingly
complex governance context.
Yet, despite the promise of these new regulatory practices, scholars and practitioners have
found that the purported effectiveness and ease of implementation of these solutions remain
in question.1 Successful regulatory strategies in one context have failed miserably in others.
Ossified, slow-moving and fragmented political institutions can serve as significant obsta-
cles to the implementation of new regulatory policies. When regulations have developed in
response to long-entrenched political coalitions of firms, politicians and bureaucrats, they
can be difficult to change. Regulatory cultures may conflict with new understandings about
public–private collaboration, risk and expertise. The structure of markets can also matter;
private regulation may be unfeasible in markets with different types of firms, sectoral concen-
trations and technical expertise. Scholars still must do more to understand how and under what
conditions these new regulatory innovations are likely to succeed.
The character of regulatory problems has also evolved. The proliferation of standards, the
increase in the number and types of regulatory participants, and the interconnectedness of reg-
ulatory systems have created significant challenges for the coordination of unified regulatory
action. The proliferation of private standards has also led to incoherence and conflicts over
harmonization. Some might suggest that complexity has, to some degree, given way to chaos
(Alter and Meunier 2009). The emergence of regulatory problems on the global scale, such
as climate change, in particular poses a significant regulatory challenge, requiring a degree
of international regulatory coordination that does not yet exist (Büthe and Mattli 2011; Levin
et al. 2012; Overdevest and Zeitlin 2014). Some have argued that many of the world’s most
serious regulatory challenges are quickly becoming “wicked” problems, which are character-
ized by high degrees of uncertainty and complexity (Levin et al. 2012). These are problems in
which the root causes of a problem are unknown, experts cannot agree upon a solution, and the
parameters of the problem are constantly changing.
In this chapter, I will first provide an overview of innovations in regulatory governance.
I will then examine the limits of new regulatory tools. Challenges to effective regulatory gov-
ernance posed by conditions of uncertainty and complexity will then be explored. And, finally,
the chapter will make suggestions for new avenues of research.

NEW MODES OF REGULATORY GOVERNANCE

The shift from regulation to governance is well documented (Jordana and Levi-Faur 2004;
Scott, C. 2004; Bevir 2007a; Braithwaite et al. 2007) and can be broadly characterized by
three trends: (1) the decentering and re-fashioning of the state in governance; (2) the active
participation of firms, NGOs and consumers in a broadening range of regulatory activities; and
(3) the rise of voluntary regulatory schemes among private actors.
The decentering logic of regulatory governance should not be interpreted as the retreat
of the state in regulatory affairs but a reinterpretation of the state’s role in regulation (Black
2001; Scott, C. 2004). While the state is less likely to direct regulation unilaterally, within the
framework of regulatory governance it still provides private schemes with much needed legit-
imacy, ensures accountability through monitoring and auditing firm compliance, and serves as
474  Handbook on theories of governance

the primary arbiter of conflicting approaches to private and public regulation (see Short and
Toffel 2010).
The state has also re-fashioned itself to support flexibility, adapt to heterogeneous circum-
stances and build technical competency. Malloy (2010) shows that these characteristics are not
the sole province of private regulatory initiatives, and that state agencies are well positioned to
use pre-existing networks to actively track industry needs, and adapt regulations accordingly.
Moreover, scholars contend that command-and-control and market-based instruments are not
fundamentally different in terms of administrative cost, effectiveness and innovation, because
most instruments blend elements of both approaches (Harrington and Morgenstern 2007). For
example, to improve the allocation of state resources, regulatory agencies can also employ risk
management techniques in which high and low risk sites are identified for monitoring, and
preventative measures are taken to mitigate risks (Zach and Bier 2009).
Traditional command-and-control approaches have not completely exited the stage.
Appraisals of command-and-control regulation highlight that, while costly, it is still the most
effective way to ensure a change in firm behavior. Particularly, when monitoring costs are too
high for private actors, command-and-control regulation is far more efficient than market-based
mechanisms (Cole and Grossman 1999). Practitioners also argue that command-and-control
policies are still sometimes preferable to a decentralized monitoring system that can become
overly dependent on “fire alarms,” which are contingent on the strength of watchdog groups
and the trustworthiness of firms (Claeys 2004). But, under regulatory governance, the key
is for how these more traditional approaches to regulation can work in conjunction with
non-state actors.
As the state adapts to new regulatory challenges, the private sector has also been leveraged
to achieve desired regulatory outcomes. Management-based regulation, sometimes referred
to as meta-based regulation or co-regulation, entails collaborative regulatory efforts between
the state and industry in which the state sets broad standards for production quality and enlists
industry to self-regulate (Martinez et al. 2007; Gilad 2010; Carrigan and Coglianese 2011).
Firms develop “internal control systems that assure product quality where the system partici-
pants set, monitor, and self-certify the control parameters” (Henson and Caswell 1999: 594).
These risk management plans are then submitted to state regulators for approval, and agencies
audit firm compliance according to their self-designed plans.
By including state authorities, business and civic groups in regulation, co-regulation better
aligns incentives and lowers the surveillance costs of the state (Martinez et al. 2007). In theory,
co-regulation combines the strengths of self-regulation with the benefits of state oversight.
Direct participation of stakeholders in the regulatory process helps to create responsive rules
that reflect producer concerns (Eijlander 2005). And these practices also lead to the devel-
opment of systems that are flexible (Coglianese and Lazer 2003) and better utilize expert
knowledge (Provost 2010). State backing for these codes of practice provides the necessary
predictability and the threat of sanction for non-compliance (Martinez et al. 2007).
A plethora of voluntary forms of regulation have also emerged to complement, or some-
times substitute for, the state’s regulatory regime (Timmermans and Epstein 2010; Büthe
and Mattli 2011; Carrigan and Coglianese 2011). Voluntary regulatory schemes are those
in which the state incentivizes firms to develop their own socially desirable regulation by
inducement. Firms are in no way obligated to adopt any of these standards. But firms that
choose to innovate are granted financial assistance, awards and certifications, and exemptions
from other formal requirements. Voluntary standards have expanded rapidly across a number
 Regulatory governance  475

of areas, including: forestry (Gulbrandsen 2014); labor standards (Fransen 2011); food safety
and quality (Lockie et al. 2013); production standards (Timmermans and Epstein 2010); and
environmental protection (Potoski and Prakash 2004a, 2004b). Actors adopt these practices
because they seek to acquire greater market share by improving their reputation, others may
succumb to political pressures to improve safety, and still others adopt these practices out of
a genuine concern for improving the general welfare of society.

NO PANACEAS IN REGULATORY GOVERNANCE

Despite these innovations, scholars should heed Ostrom et al.’s (2007) warning that effec-
tive solutions in one context should not be viewed as a panacea for governance problems.
Regulatory solutions that have been touted as “best practices” in some cases have only exacer-
bated failures. The preference for private regulatory initiatives over national standards setting,
for example, has sometimes contributed to regulatory incoherence. Some scholars maintain
that the proliferation of regulatory experiments has led to forum shopping and strategic incon-
sistency on the part of firms (Alter and Meunier 2009). In some cases, the enthusiasm with
which self-regulation was embraced has also led to a “hollowing out of the state,” weakening
a central state’s ability to coordinate policy, standardize regulation and maintain public over-
sight of private actors (Klijn 2002; Bevir 2007b).
The vexing reality in regulatory governance is that context often matters more than a pol-
icy’s design. The empirical record highlights highly inconsistent patterns of effectiveness
for certain regulatory tools, owing to differences in the underlying governance framework,
firm type, market environment or global connectedness. In terms of the effects of underlying
governance frameworks on regulatory reform, Radaelli and Meuwese (2012) show that even
instituting new rulemaking procedures for mandatory oversight usually hinges on addressing
far deeper constitutional debates about participation and representation in governance. Thus
the process of institutionalizing new rulemaking procedures is dependent on constitutional
values, the careful balancing of institutions and negotiating the role of the executive. Others
have shown how the effectiveness of formal, coercive regulations, as opposed to informal,
flexible ones, depends on the baseline level of bureaucratic autonomy and state capacity of
regulatory agencies (McAllister 2010). Scholars must also consider the broader community’s
reception of new regulatory measures. For example, even a move towards risk-based regula-
tion is contingent on the broader political community’s tolerance for risk (Black and Baldwin
2012). The UK has been receptive to the risk regulation discourse, but in France and Germany,
where regulators are still weary of the acceptance of any degree of risk, risk regulatory prac-
tices have been less popular (Rothstein et al. 2013).
Regulatory systems may also be unable to assimilate new governance techniques owing to
differences in bureaucratic culture and regulatory politics. First, even if new mechanisms are
developed to facilitate the exchange of information, institutions may not always be able to
assimilate that information as a result of entrenched interests. Blais and Wagner (2008) show
that agencies have little incentive to revise pollution control standards in accordance with
advances in science and technology if it threatens existing arrangements between powerful
stakeholders. Second, even if new actors can participate in regulatory systems, agencies
must also be able to adapt to new processes and learn how to operate effectively with them.
Successful co-regulation requires as much a change in practice for the regulatory agency as
476  Handbook on theories of governance

for the firm, as it requires agencies to shift from punishment to prevention by using incentives
and information programs (Rouvière and Caswell 2012). Third, failing to take into account
regulatory infrastructure such as data collection capabilities, pre-existing accounting rules, and
reporting and auditing procedures can undermine the establishment of an incentive-based reg-
ulatory system, as was the case in electricity regulation in the United Kingdom (Joskow 2014).
Differences across firm type can also influence the effectiveness of regulatory innovations.
Scholars have found that the type of production in which firms are engaged has important
consequences for regulatory effectiveness: firms that produce commoditized goods are subject
to greater market pressures, which result in increased compliance with labor regulations,
than those firms that produce specialized goods (Locke et al. 2012). The size of a firm also
matters – in Sweden, large scale versus small scale forestry producers were affected by forest
certification schemes in different ways (Johansson and Lidestav 2011). Compliance with
codes of conduct is also linked to how production is organized – firms operating according to
a Fordist form of production had worse outcomes in terms of wages and working conditions
(Locke and Romis 2007). Regulators must also be careful to distinguish between weak and
strong performers when advancing self-regulatory strategies among firms. Struggling firms,
for example, are less likely to self-correct even after a warning is issued to them (Short and
Toffel 2010).
The broader firm environment must also be considered. Many of the voluntary governance
programs, such as the ISO 14001, are strongly associated with external audiences that help
induce companies to take on costly environmental action (Potoski and Prakash 2005). Thus,
in order for such voluntary programs to operate effectively, these firms must exist in environ-
ments with well-developed corporate and product brand identities and stringent environmental
regulations. In other cases, Yue et al. (2013) show that when elites dominate private regulatory
associations it can destroy market order, as they take actions to promote their own interests that
work to the disadvantage of rival groups that are not members.
Scholars have also shown that the way in which firms interface with the global economy
can affect the success of regulatory initiatives. The successful adoption of ISO 14001 is highly
associated with countries that have trading partners that have endorsed the ISO system and are
embedded in international networks of NGOs (Potoski and Prakash 2004a). However, while
entry into globalized production networks serves as a strong incentive for firms to comply
with international standards (Nadvi 2008), regulators must consider whether firms have the
capacity to maintain these standards in the long term. For example, Vogel (2010) notes that the
corporate social responsibility requirements that Western firms place on firms in developing
countries can be excessively burdensome and may not provide adequate revenue offsets for
firms that acquire certification.
In many ways, “responsive regulation,” a regulatory concept that became immensely
popular among scholars and practitioners in the 2000s, is a classic example of how scholars
have had to re-evaluate the applicability and feasibility of a regulatory innovation as it has
been applied to new contexts. Regulation is “responsive” when regulator and regulated seek
to address issues of non-compliance through dialogue and facilitated learning (Ayers and
Braithwaite 1992). The defining feature of responsive regulation is an enforcement pyramid,
in which enforcement becomes more stringent if non-compliance continues. The regulatory
innovation was championed for its flexibility, emphasis on mutual accommodation, and effi-
cient allocation of resources.
 Regulatory governance  477

However, owing to a lack of clarity in terms of implementation, responsive regulation has

not always facilitated the change in behavior for which many scholars had hoped (Parker
2013). In practical terms, the implementation of responsive regulation was ill defined. For
example, both tit-for-tat regulation and restorative justice solutions fall under the framework
of responsive regulation, but these two methods have different effects on attitudes and com-
pliance behavior (Nielsen and Parker 2009). Regulators have been found to be highly incon-
sistent in their application of responsive regulatory principles, which undermines the shared
understanding of rules among regulated parties and the development of shared expectations
(May and Wood 2003). Another problem is that responsive regulation was premised on civic
republican elements of governance, which has not always been considered, as it was diffused
to other governing contexts (Braithwaite 2013). Other scholars question the “scalability” of the
concept beyond national business regulatory regimes to a transnational context (Ford 2013).
The proliferation of regulatory tools under the new governance model has provided a host of
solutions. But scholars must still examine when and under what conditions these tools are most
likely to succeed. There is no panacea to regulatory problems, and regulatory agendas must be
carefully crafted to account for the heterogeneity of circumstances.

WICKED PROBLEMS AND REGULATORY GOVERNANCE

Although the regulator’s toolkit has expanded, governance problems have become increasingly
complex. Some contend that most regulatory challenges can be arguably defined as “wicked
problems” (Levin et al. 2012). The original formulation of a wicked problem provided ten
aspects, which focused on the complexity of regulatory problems, and the high degree of
uncertainty regarding potential solutions (Rittel and Webber 1973). For the purposes of
examining challenges in regulatory governance that have become particularly acute in recent
years, I focus on two aspects: (1) every wicked problem is a symptom of another problem;
and (2) each regulatory problem is unique.2 The interconnectedness of problems (i.e. every
wicked problem is a symptom of another wicked problem) points to the extreme complexity
of the new governance context. The effects of globalization have linked together disparate
actors, events and broader phenomena. Solving one problem in one arena may unintentionally
lead to problems in other areas. Feedback loops and unintended consequences quickly turn
regulatory challenges into “whack-a-mole” problems. In addition, the political implication of
the interconnected nature of regulatory policy necessitates the formation of large coalitions
to support regulatory reform. This degree of complexity presents significant challenges to
addressing issues, because it implies that a single regulatory solution must be approached in
a comprehensive manner that targets multiple issues simultaneously (Webster 2008; Lazarus
2009). Simply focusing on one aspect of a problem will ultimately fail, because the root causes
of that problem are tied to other major challenges.
And, because each wicked problem is unique, the notion of “best practice” quickly becomes
meaningless. Under such a state of fundamental uncertainty, it becomes highly challenging to
develop a growing body of knowledge regarding how to address certain types of problems.
Solutions successfully deployed in other scenarios are found to be ineffective, or may even
exacerbate the regulatory challenge. Significant resources must be deployed to collect infor-
mation on a problem, conduct tests and develop a comprehensive solution. Problems are also
dynamic. Thus, even successful policies in one period can quickly become obsolete.
478  Handbook on theories of governance

In my own research on China’s food safety crisis, these twin elements of uncertainty and
complexity feature prominently. In China, regulatory best practices have been stretched to
their limit in a system that must govern over 1.3 billion people across provinces that are as
large as countries. Chinese regulators, foreign experts and academics are at a loss regarding
how to develop effective and comprehensive solutions to solve China’s growing food safety
problems. Tested regulatory best practices have produced only lackluster results; European
and American technical assistance programs have had limited success; and global third-party
food safety auditors have failed to coax producers into compliance. The crux of the food safety
governance problem is a daunting one: designing a food safety framework for a system that
integrates over 240 million farmers and millions of processors and distributors with vastly
different capacities to provide safe food. There is no clear template for regulators to follow to
solve this crisis.
Complicating matters further is that, in trying to develop a solution to China’s food safety
problem, scholars and practitioners must simultaneously address problems related to food
security and social welfare. China’s food safety problems stem from the state’s need to feed
over 1 billion people. As food production and markets were expanded rapidly, millions of
producers were linked into massive supply chains without sufficient monitoring controls,
leading to mass food contaminations. The state thus faced an unpalatable choice: reduce pro-
duction to improve safety or continue down the path of industrialized food production but risk
mass contamination. Some contend that the easiest solution would be to aggregate millions
of farms into better monitored production sites. But a majority of these farmers rely on their
land as a means of providing for their family during periods of economic difficulty, or when
urban labor markets force migrants to return home. Developing modernized agriculture thus
necessitates a welfare solution for China’s millions of farmers. Crosscutting pressures for food
security, safety and welfare pose significant challenges for any solution to China’s food safety
crisis. Even as producers, regulators and consumers seek to work with one another to create an
integrated, coherent regulatory system, the lack of a clear solution to address China’s embed-
ded wicked problem poses a serious impediment to effective governance.
In many ways, China’s food safety crisis is prototypical of the type of problems that are
emerging in a variety of contexts, including fishery and forestry management, climate change,
product safety and issues of public health at both the national and the global scales. A single
regulatory problem encompasses multiple populations and regulatory systems, and is linked
to a number of policy domains. As markets expand, supply chains lengthen and globalization
continues down its course, complexity and uncertainty will quickly become the defining char-
acteristics of many large scale governance problems.
Particularly, in climate control, scholars suggest that: we must now contend with the emer-
gence of “super” wicked problems (wicked problems in which time is running out); the actors
who can solve the problem are also the cause of the problem; the central authority required
to coordinate regulatory activity is non-existent; and actors irrationally discount the future)
(Levin et al. 2012). These problems present significant challenges to practitioners and scholars
as they attempt to craft regulatory solutions.
“Polycentric” and multilevel governance and the establishment of experimentalist regimes
may serve as useful frameworks to address wicked problems in regulatory governance,
because they embrace both complexity and uncertainty. Pioneered by Elinor Ostrom (2006),
a polycentric governance framework emphasizes multiple centers of authority, highlighting
the multilevel, nested nature of a polity. Multilevel governance similarly envisions a disper-
 Regulatory governance  479

sion of power across multiple levels of government (Hooghe and Marks 2003). This logic of
governance emphasizes multiple centers of authority that can respond to emerging conditions
and leverage appropriate resources throughout a system. When one level of governance fails,
a higher level can intervene to provide the necessary support to solve a problem. Jurisdictions
can be reconstituted and dissolved to address new problems as they emerge. The exclusivity
of focus of either central or local government action fails to view regulatory activity as part
of a multilevel whole (Hooghe and Marks 2003; Andersson and Ostrom 2008). Scholars have
shown how polycentric or multilevel approaches to governance have been effective in forestry
management systems in Latin America (Andersson and Ostrom 2008) and coastal fishery
management solutions in Canada (Dietz et al. 2003). In effect, multilevel and polycentric
governance attempts to map itself onto the complexity of regulatory challenges through
decentered governance.
Experimentalist governance might also be able to address the problems of complexity and
uncertainty in regulatory governance by promoting regulatory learning through a decentralized
implementation process (Overdevest and Zeitlin 2014). The key is to develop an overarching
architecture to link actors together, disseminate information rapidly and adapt to changing
circumstances. The major pillars of experimentalist regimes are as follows (Sabel and Zeitlin
2008). First, broad goals must be set with clear metrics that are mutually established by central
and local units. Second, local authorities must be permitted latitude to experiment and pursue
these goals in their own way. Third, local authorities must report on achievements on a regular
basis. In addition, policy experiments must be subject to peer review by other parallel units.
Finally, new information resulting from decentralized policy making must then lead to a rene-
gotiation of the broader goals for the system and the fine-tuning of metrics.
The strength of an experimentalist approach is that it is better at integrating diversity
within a common framework of governance. Thus these regimes avoid the worst of uniform,
one-size-fits-all policies that lead to significant mismatches between law and regulated reality.
These systems are better suited to dynamic environments, because periodic review and amend-
ments are legally mandated by the regime.
Transaction costs can be high, decentralized policymaking can lead to incoherence, and
debilitating loopholes can emerge under multilevel and experimentalist regimes (see Alter
and Meunier 2009 on the challenges of complex regimes; McGinnis 2005 on the costs of
polycentric governance; Gualini 2003 on conflicts in multilevel governance). But, in the midst
of complexity and heightened uncertainty, multilevel and experimentalist governance can
provide guidance to practitioners and scholars.

AN AGENDA FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Studies on regulatory governance have examined state-led regulatory innovations, new

private–public collaborations and voluntary regulatory schemes as potential solutions to
vexing governance challenges. Importantly, scholarship has also focused on understanding the
effectiveness of these new proposals on regulatory attitudes and behavior across a variety of
contexts. In addition, scholarship has been directed towards addressing regulatory problems
that are characterized by high degrees of complexity and uncertainty through experimentalist
and polycentric governance.
480  Handbook on theories of governance

To further our understanding of regulatory governance, this chapter seeks to close with
a few suggestions for future research. First, as regulatory problems now extend beyond any
single nation state, involve multiple stakeholders and are dynamic in nature, scholars must
consider the implications of the interconnectedness of systems. More specifically, we must
understand the mechanisms that can harmonize differences across regulatory systems. In this
era of regulatory capitalism, the growing influence of regional integration and new transna-
tional linkages between producer associations have encouraged the development of common
international standards and practices (Jordana and Levi-Faur 2004; Gilardi 2005). Yet part
of this regulatory turn also involves notable tensions over regulatory practices as inspectors
contest risk assessments, governments struggle to unify standards and national authorities
debate whether a trading partner’s regulatory system provides an equivalent nature of protec-
tion (Yasuda and Ansell 2015). How can global systems of governance be better designed to
avoid regulatory conflicts? Can transnational private regulatory associations provide a better
template for a global regulatory order? How can regulatory standard setting bodies, scientific
communities and NGOs operate in concert to develop regulatory knowledge on the global
scale?
A question in my own research concerns to what extent we are developing effective mecha-
nisms that link governing systems operating at multiple scales or levels. James Scott’s (1999)
path-breaking work on “seeing like a state” highlighted how those governing at a national
scale view the world very differently from local officials. The critical necessity in effective
governance is to develop the mechanisms and institutions to align the interests of regulators,
producers and consumer interests across a range of dimensions at different levels of scale.
Thus, rather than speak of the challenge of managing scale, it is more appropriate to highlight
the difficulty of managing a host of scales – nesting smaller scale systems within larger scale
systems.
Another important area of research concerns the importance of technology in addressing
questions of complexity. As technology has enabled us to link producers across greater
distances, transmit information faster and reduce monitoring costs, it has also created new
regulatory problems. In the financial services sector, questions about the legality of “high fre-
quency trading” are being debated – as firms use faster technology to give them an advantage
in placing trades (Henning 2014). New advances in shipping, storage and distribution have
enabled more producers to be linked into advanced supply chains, but are new technologies
available to effectively monitor this growing base of producers? In addition, new advances in
material science and genetics present hidden risks that as yet cannot be scientifically assessed.
Are risk averse policies, such as the EU’s precautionary principle, an acceptable regulatory
solution for unknown risks?
Technology can also potentially solve vexing regulatory challenges. Cheaper monitoring
equipment, advances in data science and processing and improved logistics can aid regulators
in mitigating risk in more cost-effective ways through forecasting and risk analysis (Berk
2009; Zach and Bier 2009). Advances in technology have also made it possible for consumers
to monitor firm performance across a number of indicators in real time, such as sustainability
indexes, ratings and certification data, providing an additional conduit of information in this
new complex environment (O’Rourke 2014). What is the exact role of technology and reg-
ulatory governance? To what extent are technological innovations adequately integrated in
monitoring and auditing protocols? Will advances in technology supplant the need for tedious
regulatory protocols?3
 Regulatory governance  481

Questions of regulatory governance pertain to the most central issues in modern life: safety,
welfare and economic stability. New models of regulatory governance present potential solu-
tions to serious questions involving food safety, environmental pollution, climate change and
resource management. But there are no panaceas in regulatory governance. Given the pressing
nature of these challenges and the significant human cost when regulation fails, scholars and
practitioners must delve even deeper to further our knowledge of how, when and why regula-
tory governance works.

NOTES
1. On the challenges of responsive risk management see Black and Baldwin (2010, 2012); on the
implementation of enforcement pyramids and responsive regulation see Mascini (2013); on the
uneven record of voluntary regulation on account of different program designs see Potoski and
Prakash (2005); and on the challenges of evaluation and assessment in meta-regulation see Gilad
(2010).
2. They are marked by ten characteristics: (1) there is no definitive diagnosis; (2) there is no stopping
rule; (3) there are only better or worse solutions to wicked problems; (4) one cannot test a potential
solution; (5) each wicked problem is novel and unique; (6) there is no trial and error; (7) there exists
no exhaustive list of potential solutions; (8) wicked problems are a symptoms of other problems;
(9) the choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution (and there are often
multiple possible explanations); and (10) planners are held responsible for their actions.
3. For a theoretical discussion of the relationship between technological advances and regulatory
governance see Nissenbaum (2011).

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42. Network governance
Robyn Keast

INTRODUCTION
Over the past few decades, in response to an array of ongoing societal challenges and changes,
network governance has become a cornerstone of the institutional architecture across many
fields of endeavor, jurisdictions and sectors. As this Handbook attests, conceptualizations and
theories of governance encompass a broad framework that continues to grow. This chapter
examines network governance as one of the foundational governance modes. It defines
network governance, distills its defining characteristics and discusses theoretical concepts and
related theories. It also elucidates some of the types, forms and functions of network govern-
ance. Finally, the chapter highlights ongoing and emergent challenges and their implications.
It concludes by forecasting a continuing but increasingly complex and hybrid future in which
network governance and theorizing will retain a central position.

NETWORK GOVERNANCE: BASIC ELEMENTS

As Castells (2000) contends, we live in a networked society. The turn to networks is

evident in the numerous derivations that have emerged, including for example “networked
organizations” (Miles and Snow 1986), “networked forms of organization” (Larson 1992),
“inter-organizational networks” (Alter and Hage 1993), “global or virtual networks” (Holton
2008), “policy networks” (Rhodes 1990) and “service delivery networks” (Provan and
Milward 1995).
Despite their differences (level, location and foci), these networked forms have in common
a set of ideological assumptions and organizing principles based on ongoing social exchanges
as the glue that binds individuals to collective action (Powell 1990). Network governance thus
represents a social or communal form of social organization in which interpersonal relational
aspects such as trust, reciprocity and the pursuit of mutual benefit interact to forge jointly
agreed and achieved outcomes. As Powell (1990: 300) explains, “certain forms of exchange
are more social, that is, more dependent on relationships, mutual interests and reputation – as
well as less guided by a formal structure of authority.”
These characteristics and their benefits compete and contrast with, and sometimes comple-
ment, the other core governance modes of hierarchy and market, characterized by command,
authority and price competition, respectively (Bradach and Eccles 1989; Powell 1990).
Thompson et al. (1991: 15) expand: “If it is price coordination that is the central coordinating
mechanism of the market and administrative orders that of hierarchy, then it is trust and coop-
eration that centrally articulates networks.”
A sharper analytical differentiation of network governance is provided by comparing it
against the state and market governance modes. See Table 42.1, which extends Powell’s 1990
classification.

485
486  Handbook on theories of governance

Table 42.1 Governance modes compared

Governance mode State Market Network

Service focus Public good Private good Social good
Locale Hierarchy, bureaucracy Firm Community
Decision-making Vertical, top down Horizontal (internal) Horizontal (broader)
Relationship focus Dependent Independent Interdependent
Integration mechanisms Legal authority, formal rules, Arm’s length contractual Social exchange, relationships,
regulations, policies and transactions, price structures, common vision or purpose,
procedures supply and demand  mutuality, reciprocity 
Negotiation style Rule-based, procedural Bargaining, competitive, Win–win, interest-based,
self-interested and short-term longer-term focus
focus

Note: This table extends Powell’s (1990) governance mode comparison.

Despite the differences, there is rarely a clear-cut choice of state, market or network modes.
Instead, social organization often comprises a mix of these modes (Borys and Jemison 1989;
Bradach and Eccles 1989), leading to hybrid configurations and reconfigurations, the network
implications of which are discussed later in this chapter.
Fundamentally, network governance represents horizontal over vertical approaches to
decision-making and is characterized by systems of affect, communication, knowledge
exchange and dialogue. It is argued that these characteristics enable greater adaptability and
lower transaction costs, making network governance particularly viable in conditions of
uncertainty, complexity and crisis (Kickert et al. 1997), as well as when there are unique issues
which “require input from various experts, and must be solved creatively” (Baker 1992).
While providing some insights into network governance, such a general description does not
fully explain how these cooperative arrangements are formed and organized to deliver their
outcomes.

NETWORK GOVERNANCE UNPACKED

Networks are based on the relational. As Church et al. (2002) and others (Bradach and Eccles
1989; Powell 1990) stress, it is relationships that give networks their strength and their edge
over other governance forms. In networked arrangements members do not exist as independent
operators, but rather exist in relation to other entities (Bartels and Turnbull 2020). Through
ongoing social and resource exchanges a relatively stable pattern of relationship is formed
between previously separate bodies (Mitchell 1969). Interpersonal relationships based on
trust, reciprocity and mutuality evolve and are strengthened through persistent interactions and
become a powerful social lubricant to help overcome conflicts and difficulties (Powell 1990),
helping to push past difficulties to achieve mutually derived results (Keast 2011). The network
approach, therefore, is premised on notions of mutual goals and the realization of the need for
interdependence between members to achieve these goals (Mandell 1994; Kickert et al. 1997;
Sørensen and Torfing 2007); in other words, actors achieve their objectives with assistance
from and in coordination with others.
To facilitate repeated and sustained exchanges, rules or “agreed ways of working” are
established, coupled with processes to guide actors’ behavior and ensure an ongoing flow of
 Network governance  487

resources as well as the level of cohesion necessary to work together (Klijn and Koppenjan
2000). Network management strategies (Agranoff and McGuire 2003) are also applied
to leverage relationships for mutual outcomes. A shared orientation is achieved in which
members come to know and appreciate each other and are better able and more willing to
engage in “thicker” flows of information, share previously withheld resources and develop
joint goals. Importantly, these network relationships possess the internal flexibility needed
to handle and overcome difficult transactions, instead of resorting to the costs of monitoring
work or legal contracts as for market and hierarchy forms (Powell 1990); that is, the coop-
erative give-and-take afforded by networks helps to overcome the incomplete and imperfect
documents such as regulations and contracts (Macneil 1985). While trust, obligation and
reputation become powerful conduits for compliance they are not always sufficient, and other
re-enforcing norms, such as a culture for cooperative working and/or rituals, may be needed to
enhance accountability and achieve outcomes (Koppenjan and Klijn 2004).

TYPES, FORMS AND FUNCTIONS

The array of purposes for network governance—including, for example, policy formation
and implication, service delivery and innovation development—has resulted in a diversity
of types and forms with different operating functions, drawing upon different network ele-
ments. Network governance varies in whether it has goal-directed or serendipitous intentions
(Kilduff and Tsai 2003), employs formal or informal arrangements (Agranoff 2006; Provan
and Kenis 2008), or is tightly or loosely structured, with differentiated relationship strengths
and dependency levels (Marcussen and Torfing 2003; Keast et al. 2007). Different types
of governance arrangements can also be employed as integration mechanisms, including
participant-governed, lead organization or network administrative organization (Provan and
Kenis 2008; Vandeventer and Mandell 2011). Several typologies have been introduced,
particularly in relation to policy (Marsh and Rhodes 1992) and service delivery networks
(Agranoff 2006; Keast et al. 2007; Ferlie et al. 2010), categorizing the various network gov-
ernance elements and aligning them with purpose and effectiveness (Kilduff and Tsai 2003;
Provan and Kenis 2008). Network governance is not static, and as has been suggested it can
evolve from one form to another owing to the effects of life-cycle and goal changes and chang-
ing contexts (Lowndes and Skelcher 1998; Kilduff and Tsai 2003), as well as the actions of
individual actors (Provan and Kenis 2008; Keast and Mandell 2013).
As the above elucidates, network governance is a complex undertaking, where optimal
performance rests not just on the presence of network elements, but rather on the dynamic
interactions that occur between them and network actors (Stout and Love 2019; Kapucu and
Hu 2020).

DEFINITIONS AND THEORIES

The central characteristics or elements identified above led to a broad array of different con-
ceptualizations and definitions of network governance (see e.g. Miles and Snow 1986; Larson
1992; Alter and Hage 1993). However, Jones et al. (1997), in their review of network govern-
ance definitions, find two points of coalescence: the patterns of interaction in exchange and
488  Handbook on theories of governance

relationships, and flows of resources between independent units. Building from this finding,
Jones et al. (1997: 914) developed the following definition: “Network governance involves
a select, persistent, and structured set of autonomous firms engaged in creating products or ser-
vices based on implicit and open-ended contracts to adapt to environmental contingencies and
to coordinate and safeguard exchanges. These exchanges are socially—not legally—binding.”
Such a definition gives primacy to economic performance over relationships (Borgatti
and Foster 2003), making it more attuned to a business transaction. Nonetheless, the authors
considered that the dual emphasis on social exchange and efficiency, as outlined in the above
definition, also applied to the non-profit sector. Others, however, argue that while the instru-
mental factors of exchange and efficiencies are important in shaping the decision to move
to a networked mode, they are often accompanied by altruistic motivations, particularly the
notion of “doing the right thing” (Woolcock and Boorman 2003; Keast 2011). In this domain
the relationship focus shifts from predominantly an individual mechanism for exchange, to
more of a shared property of the network members to facilitate collective outcomes, highlight-
ing a subtle point of differentiation in conceptualization and application of network govern-
ance for the non-profit arena.
The public sector also capitalized on the advantages of network governance. The first
efforts arose with the move away from the notion of narrow sets of “rational actors” shaping
policy-making to the realization of the existence of a wider array of actors contributing to
public decision-making (Heclo and Wildavsky 1974; Rhodes 1990) and implementation pro-
cesses (Hjern and Porter 1981). Later, in response to heightened social, economic and political
challenges, governments also turned to network principles to bring together diverse actors to
enhance governing capacity and public outcomes (Goldsmith and Eggers 2004). Within this
application there is a realization that policy development and service delivery are no longer the
sole responsibility of government, but occur through the interaction of different actors from
different levels of operation, as well as across sectors (Kooiman 1993; Kickert et al. 1997;
Osborne 2006).
Thus, in the public context, network governance represents a shift from government to gov-
ernance via decentralized social organization where society is no longer exclusively controlled
by central units but is distributed among a broader set of participants (Kenis and Schneider
1991: 26). Also known as governance networks, these entities generally comprise multi-level
and often multi-sectoral parties involved in public policy deliberations, and are alternative
ways for connecting public policy-making to citizens and relevant stakeholders (Kickert et al.
1997; Provan and Kenis 2008; Sørensen and Torfing 2007; Stout and Love 2019).

RELATED GOVERNANCE CONCEPTS

Building on the relational foundations offered by the network governance mode, several
other allied governance forms (and associated theories) have evolved, including New Public
Governance (NPG) and relational and collaborative governance (discussed in more detail
throughout this Handbook).
NPG (Osborne 2006; Koppenjan 2012) extends governance networks and acknowledges
the “plural and pluralist complexities” of governing (Osborne 2006), particularly the multiple
sets of people and processes shaping policy development and service provision. In this new
governance reality, hybrid mixes are the norm, with networks combined with other modes in
 Network governance  489

assorted ways to leverage the best aspects of individual governance modes, while minimizing
less functional ones. As Koppenjan (2012: 32) noted, “Network governance does not function
independently of hierarchical and NPM-like arrangements. Rather, it acts in concert with
these arrangements, as a necessary and decisive component of a more encompassing, hybrid
assembly.”
As well as better capturing the plurality of governance actors, NPG acknowledges the
growing hybridity of governance modes, their tools and their processes, as well as the
ongoing processes of deliberation and negotiation applied in the governance reconfigurations
(Sørensen and Torfing 2007). ‘Smart hybridity’ (see Koopenjan et al. 2019) will combine
existing governance instruments with more substantial data and information technology to
develop the nuanced governance mixes needed for contexts predicted to be increasingly
complex and dynamic.
Relational governance (Zaheer and Venkatraman 2007), relational contracting (Macneil
1985) and relational capital (McLaughlin et al. 2009) also have some similarity with the
network governance mode. Although in different degrees, these forms rely on relationships
as the mechanism to coordinate social and economic activities. Contracting based on building
and sustaining longer-term exchange relationships over competition and adversarial contract-
ing not only reduces costs but also allows for risk and rewards to be shared equally (Walker
and Hampson 2003). Within the longer-term exchanges, relational capital is built up, which
can be leveraged for subsequent interactions and projects.
Extending this focus Gittell (2011) developed a theory of relational coordination, referring
to “a mutually reinforcing process of communication and relating for the purpose of task
integration.” Specifically, it is argued that highly interdependent work is most effectively
coordinated through relationships of shared goals and mutual respect, and enacted through
structured tools such as committees and taskforces.
Collaborative governance (discussed in greater detail in Chapter 43) is a related concept,
which pushes beyond task integration to deliver breakthrough change. It draws upon stronger
relational tools such as consensus, deliberation and interest-based negotiation (see e.g. Booher
2004; Emerson et al. 2011). Building on these distinctions, Ansell and Gash (2007: 544) define
collaborative governance as: “A governing arrangement where one or more public agencies
directly engage non-state stakeholders in a collective decision-making process that is formal,
consensus-oriented, and deliberative and that aims to make or implement public policy or
manage public programs or assets.”
Collaborative governance therefore presents as a higher-order form of network governance;
one that moves beyond task integration to the synthesis of people and their resources for the
broader good.
Such an array of definitions and conceptualizations can be both positive and negative:
positive in that they can lead to new or deeper understandings of how network governance is
operationalized in different contexts and disciplines; and negative, as the jumble of definitions
can impede the isolation and distillation of key analytical features, making it difficult for anal-
ysis and theory development. Nonetheless, there has been considerable theorizing undertaken
on network governance and networks generally.
490  Handbook on theories of governance

UNDERPINNING THEORIES

Several theories have been used to explain why network governance has emerged and thrives,
as well as how and under what conditions it functions to deliver efficiency and innovative out-
comes (for reviews see Berry et al. 2004; Sørensen and Torfing 2007; Lewis 2011; Klijn and
Koppenjan 2012; Kapucu and Hu 2020). In general these reviews cluster network governance
research and theorizing into three broad traditions.
The sociology–anthropology standpoint adopts a structuralist approach to explaining
network governance, positing that the nature and pattern of interactions and the position of
actors enable or constrain outcomes (Borgatti and Foster 2003). Re-enforcing the findings
of an earlier study (Borgatti and Foster 2003), Borgatti and Halgin (2011) note that network
analysis theory continues to focus on issues of flow (exchanges) and bonding (cohesion), and
point to the latter as an area requiring expanded theoretical and research attention.
The inter-organizational relations approach points to the importance of the external
environment in shaping organizational behavior and highlights the exchanges that occur as
organizations seek to overcome uncertainty in resource flows (see e.g. Benson 1975). In this
approach attention is directed to the nature of the flows (exchanges) and the relationships
between entities, especially power and dependency, as well as the types of strategies adopted.
The political science–public management view holds that the policy process is more effec-
tive when the key actors are involved in policy development and the focus is on policy change
and implementation (Rhodes 1990). Two key research questions are addressed: how the
growing plurality of policy actors achieve the policies they desire, focusing on the behaviors
and interactions; and how roles and network structures themselves influence policy outcomes
(Berry et al. 2004). Because of the public good concern, public management theorists adopt
a practice orientation and direct their attention toward questions of how network structures
and management affect performance (Agranoff and McGuire 2003; Agranoff 2006; Bryson
et al. 2017).
Thus, despite early criticisms (Salancik 1995; Börzel 1998), network theorizing has pro-
gressed through individual discipline development as well as from cross-fertilization and
synthesis across disciplines and fields (Oliver and Ebers 1998). As Agranoff (2014: 205)
concludes, over time there has emerged “a distinctive program of public sector research and
theorizing, with a core set of ideas or principles that are not directly borrowed or tacked on
from inter-organisational relations or other foci.”

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

It has been argued that networks are merely metaphors that describe generalized connections
between entities (Börzel 1998) or, as Kenis and Schneider (1991: 25) stated, are used to
“capture the architecture of complexity.” Shaping these criticisms were difficulties in iden-
tifying key analytical network concepts (Uzzi 1996)—and therefore measurements (Stout
and Love 2019; Voets et al. 2020)—coupled with an overreliance on the single case study
approach (Isett et al. 2011). Public sector research has responded to these criticisms. In their
seminal study, Provan and Milward (1995) undertook a comparative case study of mental
health networks and found that an integrated structure through network centralization and
direct mechanisms of external control has a positive effect on network performance, and
 Network governance  491

further that system stability and resource munificence have a moderating effect (Provan and
Milward 1995: 23).
Building from this early work a significant body of empirical research has been amassed
that confirms the operation of networks as different forms of governance, and the central role
of relationships as the conduit to improved outcomes. For example, Agranoff (2006) used
grounded theory to examine 14 networks, confirming the relational contribution necessary to
secure collective outcomes. Purdy’s (2012) and Yoshikawa et al.’s (2007) multi-level studies
analysed power relations and hybrid governance, respectively, leading to a richer understand-
ing of processes and outcomes. Klijn et al. (2010) assessed network management strategies
and their relation to outcomes; while and Keast and Mandel’s (2013) interrogation of six cases
highlighted the highly dynamic nature of network properties and the impact of individual
agency in shaping action and outcomes.
As new research tools and methodologies emerged it became possible to undertake
large-scale studies of networks in order to unravel the relationships between structures, pro-
cesses and outcomes (Turrini et al. 2010; Raab et. al. 2015).
Studies using social network analysis (SNA) and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA)
have led to a more nuanced knowledge of the relationship between network governance
features and performance. Using SNA, Considine et al. (2009) studied the link between
network governance properties, leadership positions and public sector innovation outcomes,
while service delivery scholars identify factors including density, centralization, governance
and configurations as related to integrated outcomes (see Lemaire and Raab, 2020). QCA
proponents such as Cristofoli and Markovic (2016) showed how different combinations of
governance elements (for example, context, structure, mechanisms and management) could
equally produce positive results, re-enforcing network governance hybridity.
While current studies have contributed valuable insights into network governance char-
acteristics, antecedents, functioning mechanisms and performance, ongoing empirical work
remains a priority to address prevailing and emergent gaps (Agranoff 2014; Kapucu and Hu
2020; Voets et al. 2020). This will be aided by ongoing advances in computational capacity
and technologies able to interrogate and analyse massive data sets to uncover and represent
the hybrid and dynamic nature of network governance (Chamberlain and Farr-Wharton 2020).

CHALLENGES AND IMPLICATIONS

Despite the advantages, network governance is not suitable for all problems or conditions, nor
is it without its own problems or points of fallibility. People join networks to pursue particular
interests, which can lead to exclusivity over inclusivity, limiting the range of expertise and
resources that can be accessed and directed toward joint outcomes. Networks can create their
own norms, becoming a “law unto themselves” (Granovetter 1992: 45), with relationships,
decision-making and actions not always made visible or in the public good (Milward and
Raab 2006; Lauchs et al. 2011; Bakker et al. 2012), leading to transparency and accountability
concerns.
Network relationships also require a considerable investment of time and effort to build
and sustain the interactions that are central to their functioning (Church et al. 2002), and can
therefore incur hidden relationship development transaction costs (Keast 2011) which are
difficult to capture and measure. Furthermore, the social investment and embedded social
492  Handbook on theories of governance

relations can constrain members’ actions and increase coordination requirements, and there-
fore it can take considerable time to achieve mutually agreeable directions and thus outcomes
(Koppenjan 2012). Complexity is a feature of network governance and is evident in the nature
of the problems to be addressed, the diversity of actors and their expectations, and the mix of
institutional arrangements and procedures in place (Vandeventer and Mandell 2011; Klijn and
Koppenjan 2014; Koppenjan et al. 2019). Sørensen (2005) and Sørensen and Torfing (2007,
2009) also question the ability of governance networks to adequately perform as a democratic
structure, and prescribe the use of meta-governance as an overarching form of monitoring
and self-management. Accordingly, network governance can generate problems, such as goal
incongruence, loss of oversight and direction, asymmetric information flows, opportunistic
behaviors, increased and dispersed coordination points, and hidden accountabilities (Teubner
2009). Thus, as Taylor and Hoggett (1994: 138) caution, network governance can be “ineffi-
cient, inequitable and even unethical.”
The problems and challenges identified above are neither inevitable nor unresolvable.
Instead they highlight the need for strategic relationship-building and monitoring, as well
as judicious network leadership and management, to navigate the complex sets of relation-
ships and agendas and to bypass or overcome blockages to ensure public value is delivered
(Agranoff and McGuire 2003; Klijn and Koppenjan 2014).

CONCLUSION

Network governance remains a central approach to organizing and mobilizing for the develop-
ment of policy, the provision of services and the generation of innovative ideas.
There is little doubt that the future will continue to rely on networks and networked govern-
ance; less certain is the form they will take. The inherent complexity of network governance
and the growing hybrid experimentation taking place in response to this complexity are an
ongoing challenge to the practice and management of network governance at multiple levels.
New insights, mechanisms and tools are assisting those charged with the responsibility for
designing, governing and managing public sector networks. Researchers also must remain vig-
ilant and open in their pursuit of greater knowledge of network governance and, as Agranoff
(2014: 205) concluded, “establish a facilitating context that enables this new thinking and
practice to flourish and grow.”

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43. Collaborative governance
Alison Gash

In 1993 the U.S. federal government issued a request for proposals inviting housing
developers, workforce educators, social service providers and community members to
join forces in an unprecedented initiative to solve both the shortage and the instability of
urban affordable housing. HOPE VI promised to transform the afflictions of affordable
housing—the geographic, income and structural isolation fostered by superblock public
housing developments—by combining the talents, expertise and resources of all the regional
stakeholders with an interest in both the structure and the consumers of affordable housing.
By employing a cross-sector (and multi-pronged) collaborative governance model their hope
was to both anticipate and address each of the root causes and offshoots of a growing housing
crisis. HOPE VI is one of countless public and private initiatives to view collaboration as their
best source of policy innovation—especially for handling intractable policy pathologies.
Collaborative governance has come to represent for many policy-makers, managers and
community members an elixir to the “business-as-usual” approach to policy-making which
privileges hierarchy and order over inclusion and innovation. Believers in and proponents of
collaborative governance tout its flexibility, creativity and demand-driven orientation towards
policy and program development, as well as its adherence to the values of deliberation and
transparency.
Despite a widespread belief in the power of collaboration to solve society’s ills, however,
we know little about what collaborative governance is, how it works and whether it lives up
to its promise. This chapter provides a summary of the salient questions and theories that
frame both the study and the practice of collaborative governance. Through this review we
can identify areas of agreement, contention and confusion about the use, risks and benefits of
collaborative governance.

DEFINING COLLABORATIVE GOVERNANCE

Although scores of public and private sector entities employ what is often referred to as “col-
laborative governance” to develop and implement policy initiatives, there is little consensus
about what it is or how it differs from other instances of stakeholder participation. In general,
however, we can categorize conceptual approaches into two broad camps. In the first camp,
scholars attempt to determine “what is collaborative governance” by identifying its overar-
ching, yet distinct, qualities or principles and its overriding purpose. In the second, scholars
shy away from asserting a single definition or purpose and instead describe a set of critical
procedures or components that, combined, produce collaborative governance.

497
498  Handbook on theories of governance

What Is Collaborative Governance?

Recent trends suggest that collaborative governance is gaining popularity as a superior method
of policy redress. This growing focus on and affinity toward alternative modes of policy devel-
opment and implementation have prompted scholars to formally define the parameters of col-
laborative governance in order to both evaluate its potential and tout its importance. Still, there
is wide variation in how scholars concretize both its role and its methods. On the one hand
the term is used to capture a range of collaborative decision-making activities in which policy
approaches are developed through conversations with multiple partners representing diverse
interests (Conley and Moote 2003). Here, collaborative governance is conceived of broadly to
include any “method of collective decision-making where public agencies and non-state stake-
holders engage each other in a consensus-oriented deliberative process” (Johnston et al. 2010:
699; Ansell and Gash 2008). This model of interest aggregation “combine[s] the perspectives,
resources, and skills of a group of people and organizations” (Lasker et al. 2001: 183) in order
to “resolve shared dilemmas” (Gerlak and Heikkila 2006: 658).
On the other hand, collaborative governance is confined to a more narrow set of actors or
functions. Collaborative governance, in some accounts, includes only those partnerships that
involve public agencies in service of public aims (Ansell and Gash 2008). Or, rather than
being generously construed to include a wide variety of decision-making approaches, collab-
orative governance, in these more tailored versions, connotes a specific set of joint activities
in which partners “co-produce goals and strategies and share responsibilities and resources”
(Davies and White 2012: 161; see also Koontz 2006). These more confined definitions imply
that, in collaborative governance, collaboration marks all aspects of decision-making and
implementation—from goal-setting to outcome evaluation. Unlike other forms of collabora-
tion or stakeholder engagement, where outside organizations and individuals are consulted or
used to address one piece of a multi-pronged policy strategy (i.e. advisory boards or steering
committees), collaborative governance suggests that all aspects of policy design must stem
from joint decision-making efforts or “shared power” (Taylor and de Loë 2012). At no point
in the process should any single individual or organization carry more sway.
Others reject altogether the notion that collaborative governance has any defining character-
istics. Here, the concept centers on the absence of formal governing procedures or boundaries
(Page 2010). In these narratives, policy decision-making and project management are achieved
through flexible, adaptive and emergent mechanisms rather than through standard operating
procedures (Bidwell and Ryan 2006; Reynoso 2006; Fish et al. 2010; Everingham et al. 2012).
By relying on multiple rather than a select few stakeholders, policy-making entities are better
able to craft and employ strategies that meet their case-specific needs, and then match the
resources to fit the problem. Additionally, building the foundation for problem definition and
policy response on the shoulders of a diverse set of vested interests—rather than one organ-
ization or individual—gives collaborative entities more programmatic and fiscal flexibility
(Everingham et al. 2012). Overall, the demand-driven approach to policy problems requires
that collaborative governance is marked more by procedural elasticity, or ethos and orienta-
tion, than by fixed policy structures or procedures. The primary goal is, through a unified front
of diverse interests that collectively diagnose and address policy shortfalls, to develop a set of
problem-driven solutions with sustainable benefits.
One confounding factor for defining collaborative governance is its frequent conflation
with “governance” more generally. When governance is posited as a reaction or solution to
 Collaborative governance  499

government the defining features of collaborative governance become fuzzy. For instance,
here, one group of scholars references the “shift from government to governance” in which
“community institutions and actors from multiple sectors” address a range of social and fiscal
ills (Everingham et al. 2012: 162). Some define governance as the “joint realization and
implementation of a plan” (Kallis et al. 2009: 635) or as “the means for achieving direction,
control and coordination of individuals and organizations with varying degrees of autonomy”
(Imperial 2005: 282). Mitchell and Shortell (2000) assert that governance is focused on rela-
tionships external to the partnership. Accordingly, this raises the question as to whether there
are “non-collaborative” forms of governance.

How Does Collaborative Governance Operate?

Many collaborative governance studies sidestep concept definition altogether and instead
attempt to establish a set of characteristics or functions shared by “collaborative governance
regimes” (Fish et al. 2010). First, collaborative governance exists at multiple levels of gov-
ernment, across the public and private sectors, and in service of multiple policy responses
(Ghose 2005; Davies and White 2012; Emerson et al. 2012). Thus collaborative governance
has a deeper bench of potential policy actors than traditional policy structures. Local and com-
munity groups are perceived as viable locations of policy innovation—and communities who
are often disenfranchised or isolated from policy debates are encouraged to participate and
are valued for their critical diagnostic and treatment insights (Plummer and Fitzgibbon 2004;
Ghose 2005; Davies and White 2012).
Second, in order for a policy entity engaging in collaborative governance to become more
than just a hodgepodge of diverse interests and ideas its members must, together, develop and
adopt a collective consciousness apart from their own identities, preferences and motivations
(Emerson et al. 2012). However, individuals will only sacrifice their self-interests if they
perceive the collaborative as having procedural and substantive legitimacy. To that end the
entity must develop decision-making mechanisms that are believed to be credible and “free
from behind-the-scenes manipulation” (Hicks et al. 2008: 457). Procedural fairness alone,
though, will not guarantee participant satisfaction and investment. The collaborative must also
enlist the help of “facilitative leaders”—individuals who manage the relationships within the
collaborative and establish a context for “deliberative dialogue” (Bidwell and Ryan 2006),
mutual understanding and joint decision-making (Chrislip and Larson 1994; Hicks et al. 2008;
Ansell and Gash 2012).
Unlike traditional policy institutions, where the ability to enter and exit freely is constrained
by employment pressures, participation in a collaborative is largely voluntary. Individuals
(and their organizational homes) have significant autonomy over the manner, intensity and
duration of their participation. Their only incentive to stay the course is the quality of their
experience as members of the collaborative. Promoting transparency and legitimacy, then, is
the bread and butter of collaborative governance, if the goal is to foster synergies that inspire,
create and innovate.

The Commonalities

In all, though, despite the variation, some patterns emerge in these accounts that permit us
to narrow the space that collaborative governance occupies. First, and most obviously, the
500  Handbook on theories of governance

key ingredient for any such endeavor is to create a network of partners that represent diverse
interests. The individuals who constitute the collaborative must vary in ways that will create
institutional, geographic, cultural, political or substantive pluralism among the stakeholders.
That is, after all, one of the driving goals of collaborative governance—to analyze problems
through multiple lenses and to employ multi-pronged attacks. Second, the collaborative as
a unit must have the authority and autonomy to decide and to act—in other words, to govern.
Where advisory boards or committees may provide a forum for collaborative planning they
may fall short of permitting collaborative entities to implement their ideas.
A third and essential component of collaborative governance is its problem-driven approach
to identifying and addressing policy shortfalls. Within each of these scholarly accounts lurks
an underlying assumption that—regardless of the organizational features selected—collabora-
tive governance must remain demand-driven. To that end, entities must integrate and prioritize
flexibility and innovation into any decision-making structures they develop in order to identify,
diagnose and address unanticipated obstacles. What distinguishes collaborative governance
from other stakeholder partnerships is the synergy that evolves from joint decision-making in
which “stakeholders invent new ways of seeing and responding to social problems” (Hicks et
al. 2008: 456; see also Lasker et al. 2001).
Finally, one strong, but less obvious, assumption undergirding the scholarship on collab-
orative governance is the importance of learning and evaluation. Where more traditional,
actor-centered forms of policy development focus on encouraging stakeholder buy-in and
adherence to a set of policy proposals, the aim for collaborative governance is to promote
mutual understanding and consensus (Mitchell and Shortell 2000; Gerlak and Heikkila 2006;
Hicks et al. 2008). While many partner-based initiatives satisfy their collaborative goals
through information-sharing, collaborative governance requires stakeholders to work together
in all aspects of policy development and management—from problem definition and plan-
ning to implementation and assessment (Gerlak and Heikkila 2006). If practitioners expect
the shared-action model of collaborative governance to be better equipped than top-down
approaches to attack the thicket of hindrances that characterizes most modern policy struggles,
these models must integrate mechanisms for learning and reflection to assess (in real time) the
policy environment and respond accordingly. Stakeholder participants do not simply acquire
data; through shared learning, analysis and design, they engage in an act of “transformative”
program development (Chrislip and Larson 1994; Fish et al. 2010).

THE CONTEXT FOR COLLABORATIVE GOVERNANCE

Despite its popularity there is a growing belief that collaborative governance does not offer
a one-size-fits-all answer to society’s most vexing problems (Brown 2002; Weber 2009;
Bussu and Bartels 2011). According to most accounts, the most essential characteristics of
collaborative governance rest on the quality and strength of the relationship between each
stakeholder partner. As stated above, collaborative governance is a “communicative activity”
that relies not simply on information exchange but on joint learning and discovery (Reynoso
2006; Ansell 2011). These joint endeavors—problem definition, analysis, brainstorming and
implementation—require mutual respect and interdependence among participants. And this,
of course, rests on the perceived credibility, legitimacy and potential of the collaborative by
its members.
 Collaborative governance  501

To a large degree the context for collaboration will determine its efficacy. Defined here as
the environment within which the collaborative is established, its procedural landscape and
its capacity for deliberation and facilitative leadership, context sets the stage for collaborative
governance. Context plays a crucial role in helping conveners—those who were initially
driven to explore collaborative governance as an answer to their regional policy needs—to
evaluate whether, in their case, it is a viable option.
Scholars point to a number of conditions that should be present at the outset in order for
policy communities to consider collaborative governance as a plausible forum for policy or
program design. First, because relationships are the sustenance of collaborative governance,
time must be spent assessing the degree of trust and mutual respect that exists among potential
partners before the collaborative governing structure is convened (Ansell and Gash 2008;
Matthews and Missingham 2009; Emerson et al. 2012). Any animosity or ill-will among
potential members may doom the effort from the start. That said, under certain circumstances,
even the most ardent enemies can be convinced to join forces. Specifically, if there is a shared
and intense dissatisfaction with the status quo among all stakeholders, adversaries may want
to table their disagreements and join forces. Under conditions of shared dismay and urgency—
because of an impending crisis, a policy impasse or lackluster policy options—stakeholders
can set aside their individual differences in service of the mutually beneficial desires of the
collective (Booher 2004; Bryson et al. 2006; Fish et al. 2010; Page 2010).
The institutional setting for policy reform also plays an important role in setting the stage for
collaboration. After all, collaborative governance complements, rather than supplants, existing
policy structures. Very rarely are the traditional institutions that constitute a policy community
dismantled in order to accommodate more collaborative entities. Instead, these governance
approaches operate side by side or are “overlaid,” sometimes within the same organizations
(Newman et al. 2004; Kallis et al. 2009). Consequently, organizational stakeholders who are
asked to participate in collaborative governance must be prepared to alter their internal pro-
tocols to allow for more than one type of policy-making modality (Reynoso 2006). Just as an
organization that traditionally relies on litigation as its mode of policy reform must nourish its
lobbying skills if it wants to participate in the legislative realm, so too must an ordinarily cen-
tralized and hierarchical organization create space for partner-based decision-making cultures
and protocols if it wants to establish a presence in collaborative regimes. Organizations must
be prepared to contend with the struggles that accompany any joint effort—especially when,
as is recommended, the actors represent diverse interests and perspectives.
Once it has been decided that collaborative governance provides the best policy forum
in which to address a particular problem, conveners must begin to build its foundation. The
methods or procedures used to launch the collaborative establish its landscape—and will
determine, in large part, whether it will falter or flourish. This landscape is formed to achieve
two distinct yet mutually reinforcing goals: shared learning and interdependence. From initial
agenda-setting and problem definition to program design and implementation, each element
of a collaborative’s workplan must be addressed through shared learning and exploration.
Collaborative fact-finding and self-organizing are typically the most immediate duties to
tackle. Each stakeholder must develop a comprehensive picture of the policy landscape and,
to some degree, understand (if not adopt) the perspective of the partners. It is for this reason
that, as stated above, information exchanges are insufficient approaches for problem defini-
tion. Stakeholders must be able to walk in each other’s shoes—or at least have the capacity to
502  Handbook on theories of governance

accurately imagine the other’s vantage point—in order to arrive at a joint perspective on the
problem (and its potential solutions) (Taylor and de Loë 2012).
Shared learning, however, cannot be achieved without a concomitant focus on developing
tools and opportunities that foster interdependence. While partners work to understand and
respond to the problems that prompted the development of the collaborative (and establish an
organizational framework for policy or program implementation) they must simultaneously
develop, strengthen and deepen their personal bonds with other members. Stakeholders will
need to create effective methods for contending with their differences and, through joint
understanding and mutual need, become interconnected (Booher 2004; Bidwell and Ryan
2006; Hodges et al. 2013). If relationships sour, the collaborative’s foundation will crumble.
The procedural landscape, then, must be fortified with both programmatic and relational goals
in mind.
Relatedly, collaborative entities must develop the capacity to foster deliberation and debate
and, in so doing, promote credibility and legitimacy among members (Chrislip and Larson
1994; Page 2010). As stated above, unlike in traditional organizational structures, where the
incentives to stay the course are vast, there are few barriers to exit in collaborative governance.
Legitimacy is a necessary binding agent to sustain member commitment. To even consider
surrendering their individual interests for the sake of the collaborative’s goals, stakeholders
must believe and observe, early on, that benefits and costs are equitably determined and
dispersed (Page 2010). The degree to which partners and participants are willing to remain
invested, even when their personal goals are sacrificed, hinges on their perception that they
have been given a fair shot to argue their position and convince their colleagues. If there is any
hint of impropriety, inequality or bias, stakeholders will withdraw and the collaborative will
destabilize.
None of these conditions would be possible without strong leadership (Weber 2009). But,
here too, not just any leadership style will do. Those at the helm must possess a far different and
(in many ways) more complex array of talents and skills than those who preside over top-down
entities (Page 2010). “Facilitative leadership” entails different duties and obligations (Bussu
and Bartels 2011). Rather than focusing on program development, project management and
implementation—as do many “command and control” leaders—facilitative leaders are primar-
ily concerned with building and maintaining relationships. Leaders in a collaborative context
focus on recruiting the appropriate representatives, helping to massage any tensions that may
exist between partners, promoting an effective and respectful dialogue among stakeholders
and safeguarding the reputations of the collaborative among its participants and supporters.
It is the job of the facilitative leader, in essence, to preserve the legitimacy and credibility of
the collaborative among partners and allies. To that end, facilitative leaders must help partners
not only to devise strategies for achieving substantive consensus but also to identify how to
manage the collaborative. Items like role clarification, establishing transparency and devising
ongoing strategies for both evaluating and resolving stakeholder mismatch are each aided by
strong facilitative leadership (Johnston et al. 2010; Page 2010). Early and exacting leadership
selection, then, helps steer the collaborative in ways that will preserve its horizontal governing
structure while encouraging relationship building and idea generation.
 Collaborative governance  503

CHALLENGES TO COLLABORATION

Given the high bar for even considering collaborative governance, it is not surprising that its
challenges are significant. We know that collaborative governance is often pursued as a way
to solve society’s more intractable problems (Fish et al. 2010). Right out of the gate, then,
organizational and procedural complexities aside, the stakes and standards are high—and
the likelihood of success middling at best (Chapman et al. 2010). When you supplement the
complicated policy environment that often invites collaborative governance with the tentative
administrative structure used to secure relationships and promote credibility, the obstacles
multiply. Scholars have only recently begun to chart the challenges of collaborative govern-
ance. In part because there is little consensus about what constitutes collaborative governance
and in part because evaluation has yet to be seriously examined and integrated into the
collaborative framework, few projects focus on the setbacks that accompany collaborative
governance. Even fewer have addressed the implicit tradeoffs.
There are numerous hurdles and conflicts that arise at all levels of the collaborative—
membership, managerial and programmatic—as participants and conveners attempt to meet
infrastructural and substantive demands. First, although stakeholder diversity can inspire
policy innovations, increased tension and dissatisfaction can follow. For one thing, although
enhanced participation is thought to resolve, or at least more accurately address, issue com-
plexity, it can also decrease the degree to which leaders and organizations can control inter-
personal dynamics. While the siloed approach of “old governance” may produce fragmented
(and exclusionary) responses to complicated and cross-cutting problems, these drawbacks are
balanced by a more manageable relational environment (Bryson et al. 2006).
With increased numeric and qualitative representation of interests comes more variation
in vantage points, role expectations, attitudes and commitment along with heightened disa-
greement about how best to share policy-making and implementation responsibilities. These
tensions can be paralyzing (Takahashi and Smutny 2002; Matthews and Missingham 2009;
Davies and White 2012; Hodges et al. 2013).
Stakeholders come to the table with their home organization’s fiscal, political and admin-
istrative baggage. Any resource or power asymmetries that existed prior to the collaboration
will extend into its structure and must be continually addressed (Hodges et al. 2013). But
stakeholders must do more than overcome their differences. They must create a shared identity
that is distinct from their individual organizational personas. To that end, they must develop
a shared language, a common policy or programmatic shorthand, and shed, or at least expand,
particularistic reference points (Hodges et al. 2013).
However, as they strive for shared understanding and consensus, members may, in the
process, alienate those in the collaborative who share a less popular view. In many instances,
in order to truly engage with relevant stakeholders, collaborative facilitators will need to reach
out to communities who are often isolated and disenfranchised from “business-as-usual”
politics. In order for the collaborative to be perceived as a truly welcoming policy forum,
facilitators will need to make sure that any inequalities inherent in the policy domain are not
reified within the collaborative (Ghose 2005). However, attempts to achieve shared under-
standing and consensus may undermine efforts to enhance inclusivity. If those in the minority
are required to sacrifice their vision for the greater good of the collaborative they may choose
to withdraw their support. Inclusion may need to take a backseat (Taylor and de Loë 2012).
504  Handbook on theories of governance

Second, the twin goals of flexibility and inclusion may also conflict. Scholars concerned
about accessibility and transparency—especially those examining whether collaborative gov-
ernance rectifies the inequalities inherent in top-down organizational frameworks—remain
skeptical that this new form of policy-making offers a cure to large-scale or deep-seeded
disenfranchisement. These scholars argue that collaborative governance can create obsta-
cles to participation among individuals and communities who have no other connections to
resource-rich stakeholders. While collaborative governance places a premium on flexible
governing procedures and open-door membership, this may come at a cost to those who are
not typically invited to the policy table but whose interests are paramount to resolving policy
conflicts. Both the “scale dilemmas” that arise when attempting to manage a complex and
multi-pronged policy environment and the blurred lines that form when silos are replaced with
networks and webs may serve to decrease the accessibility of the policy process—privileging
only those who have been privy to its procedures all along (Gerlak and Heikkila 2006; Shilling
et al. 2009).
Third, in order to be effective, most argue that participation within collaborative governance
must be voluntary. This requires (1) porous entry and exit policies; (2) leaders and participants
who are attuned to stakeholder dissatisfaction; and (3) at-the-ready recruitment strategies to
counteract the damaging effects of the revolving door (Bidwell and Ryan 2006). Fourth and
finally, collaborative governance may also crumble under the weight of high or differing
member expectations. Often stakeholders enter into the collaborative framework with over-
blown hopes about what collaborative governance can achieve or specific notions about the
dynamics of collaboration (Davies and White 2012). This may be an unintended by-product
of its popularity among practitioners and scholars. These amplified or misplaced expectations
may deepen stakeholder despair if things within the collaborative go awry, minimizing oppor-
tunities for future partnership (Davies and White 2012).
Creating new forms of governance in the midst of a structurally and politically fragmented
policy system, especially a governance model in which the overwhelming purpose is to
promote innovation through diverse partner-based decision-making, presents a number of
managerial complications (Ghose 2005). First, and perhaps most significant, the elements
of collaborative governance must be tailored to suit the specific needs and conditions of the
policy environment. It is difficult for leaders, facilitators and participants to import a model or
structure to get the ball rolling. Although there are clear conditions, characteristics and steps
that stakeholders and facilitators should consider, the “how-to” component of collaborative
governance rests largely on the unique attributes of the stakeholders and their political, social
and fiscal environment. Start-up, then, is time-consuming. Attempting to build a new way
of doing business—one that addresses the procedural or structural deficiencies of traditional
governance while simultaneously substantively responding to an increasingly complex policy
problem—is difficult, to say the least, especially when these new forms of governance are
built to sit alongside or comingle with (rather than replace) traditional top-down arrangements
(Lasker et al. 2001; Fish et al. 2010).
Second, if collaborative arrangements are to meet their diversity and consensus goals,
facilitators must develop strategies for identifying, collecting, introducing and utilizing
different forms of knowledge (Fish et al. 2010; Taylor and de Loë 2012). Where traditional
policy-making structures typically privilege only a narrow set of knowledge authorities, one of
the virtues of collaborative governance, according to its adherents, is its willingness to engage
with all types of knowledge (scientific, local, experiential, multi-cultural) and to develop
 Collaborative governance  505

strategies that incorporate the best that these knowledge forms have to offer. While some of
this will, ideally, be achieved through stakeholder representation and communication, it does
not passively occur through information exchange. Rather it requires a concerted effort to both
seek out and engage with forms of knowledge that are often ignored or misunderstood (Ghose
2005).
Third, we know that the viability of a collaborative rests on stakeholder perceptions that it
is a workable and worthwhile policy approach. In attempting to project an image that inspires
confidence and commitment among its stakeholders the collaborative will need to overcome
a range of obstacles that may muddy any reservoirs of goodwill that stakeholders have toward
the concept of collaboration and its participants. For one thing, most enter a collaborative
because they feel it offers a potent alternative to state-centered hierarchical forms of traditional
governance. In order for collaborative governance to capture and maintain the commitment
of its participants and supporters it must avoid reifying state control or privilege and being
perceived as a merely superficial or symbolic exercise in participatory governance (Lasker et
al. 2001; Newman et al. 2004; Chapman et al. 2010). However, neither can the efforts of a col-
laborative be marginalized from a policy’s powerbase. Although the collaborative cannot be
a puppet of the state, it cannot ignore the state. In fact, it must receive not only the blessing of
policy elites but their active support and, in some instances, investment (Newman et al. 2004;
Ansell and Gash 2008; Kallis et al. 2009).
Finally, in addition to erecting hurdles to inclusion, the fluid procedural landscape for col-
laborative governance also makes it difficult to engage in meaningful evaluation and assess-
ment. As stated above, despite its implied commitment to the virtues of continual learning,
one glaring shortfall in the practice of collaborative governance is evaluation and assessment
(Mitchell and Shortell 2000; Conley and Moote 2003; Kallis et al. 2009; Everingham et al.
2012). For one thing, because few agree on the nature of collaborative governance and its spec-
ified components, few have been able to agree on the elements of assessment. Where there is
disagreement about the goals of collaborative governance there is paralysis over its evaluative
components (Conley and Moote 2003; Everingham et al. 2012). Some argue that collaborative
governance should be evaluated for its adherence to the principles of collaboration instead of
its ability to achieve any substantive benchmarks. How would stakeholders rate the level of
inclusion? Would they view it as a fair and open system of policy development? How satisfied
were stakeholders in their role and the dissemination of benefits? Others suggest that collabo-
rative governance should be reviewed based on substantive goals—just as for other forms of
policy development. This, they argue, would allow researchers to test whether, and in what
area, collaborative governance does outperform traditional forms of policy development and
management. Furthermore, beyond specifying which elements to measure, there is similarly
little uniformity over whom to hire to conduct an evaluation (Conley and Moote 2003). Some
argue that, because of its relationship-based foundations, only individual members and stake-
holders should be permitted to evaluate collaborative governance. Others prefer a third-party
assessment. In short, one of the most significant gaps in our knowledge of collaborative gov-
ernance concerns its performance. We have yet to agree on what we want from collaborative
governance. In turn we have few studies that offer any evidence that collaborative governance
provides an elixir to top-down governance regimes.
Lastly, collaborative governance may be uniquely vulnerable to programmatic changes and
shifts that stem from its policy environment. Just as legitimacy and trust drive stakeholder
commitments, so too are funding and political support based on the perceived value of the
506  Handbook on theories of governance

collaborative effort. With little knowledge about the goals of collaborative governance and
even less evidence to demonstrate its capacity to solve the wicked problems that plague many
top-down policy struggles, collaborative governance may be, paradoxically, more prone to
injury based on changes in economic, social and political climates—despite assertions to the
contrary (Gerlak and Heikkila 2006). The degree to which a collaborative can sustain itself
across projects hinges on the economic, political and social climate within which it is situated.
First, the value of collaborative governance—the ability of its efforts to continue to affect the
policy climate—is largely contingent on political support. Collaborative efforts exist largely
outside of the traditional governing structures that dominate policy-making communities.
They need to prove their worth in order to sustain support. Second, and similarly, collaborative
governance is vulnerable to funding shortfalls. One of the virtues of collaborative governance
is that—by combining risk and resources across all stakeholders—it can shore up enough
economic reserves to withstand shocks to its policy climate. However, this combined risk can
be its undoing. If one stakeholder member suffers an economic setback, that member may back
out of the collaborative altogether—which, in turn, could cause the collaborative to collapse.
Similarly, if external funds dry up, collaborative efforts may be taxed beyond repair. This may
be especially true during moments of peak economic distress, when collaborative governance
could be the most valuable (Gerlak and Heikkila 2006; Kallis et al. 2009).

A COMMITMENT TO COLLABORATIVE GOVERNANCE

Despite these risks and obstacles, however, the idea of collaborative governance maintains
steady and growing admiration among scholars and policy-makers who are increasingly dis-
enchanted by traditional governance structures. The potential for collaborative governance is
vast. Even in the absence of evidence to support the notion that collaborative governance can
resolve complex problems, policy-makers and community organizers continue to place their
hope in the power of partnership.
As mentioned above, by gathering at one table a range of experts who can speak to the
various prongs of a policy problem, the hope is that, through collaborative rather than
top-down efforts, policy struggles will be both understood and addressed more comprehen-
sively (Taylor and de Loë 2012). Where top-down siloed policy responses fragment problems
and apply narrow treatments, collaborative approaches view problems in their entirety from
all angles. The expectation is that, by seeing the problem in all of its complexity, stakehold-
ers can devise solutions that mirror these characteristics. In this sense then, collaborative
governance produces substantive benefits that are truly more than the sum of its parts. By
gathering together a range of skills and expertise, collaboration can leverage each individual
organization’s talents and contributions (Booher 2004; Fish et al. 2010; Emerson et al. 2012)
to produce “synergies” that prompt innovative and equitable solutions to vexing problems
(Brown 2002; Gerlak and Heikkila 2006; Kallis et al. 2009; Fish et al. 2010; Davies and White
2012). Membership diversity also provides a frame for increasing the scope of service delivery
and benefit distribution beyond that which each individual organization, in the aggregate,
could provide on its own (Brown 2002; Booher 2004; Gerlak and Heikkila 2006; Chapman
et al. 2010). Finally, by pooling talents, collaborative governance also pools risk, providing
a more cost-effective and more stabilizing response to increasing economic, political and
social uncertainty (Booher 2004; Fish et al. 2010; Davies and White 2012).
 Collaborative governance  507

When organized and structured correctly, however, collaborative governance delivers more
than an effective policy response. It also produces a number of civic and redistributive bene-
fits that have implications far beyond its policy-specific substantive outcomes. Collaboration
development is one critical step towards community building (Lasker et al. 2001). When
champions of collaboration attempt to diminish the existence of silos, they are speaking not
only to organizational silos but to community isolation as well. When stakeholders come
together in a collaborative they bring with them the interests of their communities as well
as their organizations. Ideally, by presenting a united organizational front, each community
can begin to carve out a path for community-wide collaboration. Similarly, by demonstrating
a capacity for deliberation and inclusion (Ghose 2005; Gerlak and Heikkila 2006), successful
collaboration can inspire increased trust in government and policy-makers and empower
others—particularly those who are typically disenfranchised from the policy process—to
engage in the political process (Ghose 2005; Page 2010). This may have spillover effects into
other governance settings.

CONCLUSION

Collaborative governance is a high-risk, high-reward policy endeavor. In many ways, it offers

a commonsense approach to addressing and attacking a complex web of societal afflictions.
Just as policy problems are not caused by a narrow set of actors, neither can the solutions be
proposed or implemented by a disparate collection of policy actors. Inequality, environmental
degradation, health care crises, affordable housing shortages—these vexing policy dilemmas
germinated from multiple seeds and will, likewise, require multiple modes of attack. If housing
shortages, for instance, originate from disinvestments in housing infrastructure, employment
training for low-income individuals, social services and education, then surely the only real
solution requires not just a meeting but a melding of the minds of representatives from each of
these fields. And, as an idea, this holds great promise.
In practice, however, the verdict is unclear. Significant groundwork must be conducted not
only to launch or manage the collaborative, but to assess its viability well before it has been
adopted as a possible policy approach. Conveners must pay special attention to the premise
and pitfalls of collaborative governance—namely its reliance on relationships rather than on
fear or rewards to engage participants and maintain their support. Almost every aspect of the
work of collaborative governance, from participant recruitment and agenda-setting to program
design or implementation, must be the product of shared agreement and understanding about
the underpinnings of policy conflict and the appropriate course of action. Member stakehold-
ers must also carry the terms and the goals of the collaborative to their home organizations and,
in many instances, alter or modify any cultural or procedural obstacles to partnership that may
exist. And it means marshaling evidence to maintain organizational and political investment in
the collaborative, especially amidst budget shortfalls when “outside-the-box” policy develop-
ment approaches often lose their funding and meet their demise. Take HOPE VI, for example.
Despite its admirable goals and local successes, Congress withdrew funding for the program
amidst criticisms that it lacked “clear standards” or “hard data on program results” and, more
generally, failed “to provide comprehensive and accurate information,” which “created an
environment in which misimpressions about the program and its basic purposes and outcomes
have flourished” (National Housing Law Project 2002: ii).
508  Handbook on theories of governance

For scholars interested in collaborative governance, however, the research opportunities are
vast and the potential for influence significant. How can one evaluate collaborative govern-
ance? What are the markers of success? What methods of evaluation should be utilized and at
what point should they be implemented? Should evaluators use the same performance markers
to assess collaborative governance entities, which were created to promote partner-based inno-
vations and experiments, as they do to examine traditional institutions where implementation
and maintenance take up the lion’s share of their resources? In what way does collaborative
governance offer long-term benefits to policy communities that cannot be captured in snapshot
numeric evaluations like wage gain or housing unit increase? Popular and scholarly accounts
suggest that collaborative approaches, if implemented well, can produce significant substan-
tive and participatory rewards. However, in the absence of established characteristics, goals,
markers or standards, collaborative governance practitioners risk flying blindly, undercutting
the promise of collaboration in the process.

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44. Private governance1
Marija Isailovic and Philipp Pattberg

INTRODUCTION: DEFINITIONS AND CONCEPTS

Global governance is characterized by a combination of international and transnational insti-
tutions, competing norms at various levels, a multiplicity of actors and a number of underlying
discursive frameworks. One central factor that has led to an increasingly complex institutional
landscape is the proliferation of so-called private governance arrangements, which are often
cited as evidence for a fundamental transformation of world politics. Although private gov-
ernance is also apparent at the domestic level and in fact has a long history (e.g. Schneiberg
1999), the most notable expansion of private governance in the last few decades has occurred
at the global level. Against this background, the emergence of private governance reflects
a more complex world in which states are no longer the exclusive source of global regulatory
authority, but authority instead is dispersed across many different settings (Pattberg 2005).
As noted by Rosenau (1995: 16), “global governance is the sum of myriad – literally millions
of – control mechanisms driven by different histories, goals, structures, and processes.” This
emerging governance system has been variously conceptualized as a fragmented governance
architecture (Biermann et al. 2009), a regime complex (Raustiala and Victor 2004), polycen-
tric (Ostrom 2010) and multilevel governance (Bache and Flinders 2004), a global brico-
lage (Mittelman 2013), an assemblage (Porter 2009) or, alternatively, “new medievalism”
(Friedrichs 2001).
In the context of transforming word politics, special attention has been given to private
governance and the pivotal role private actors hold in terms of rule-making authority without
the involvements of governments, governmental agencies or intergovernmental organizations
(Cutler et al. 1999; Hall and Biersteker 2002; Falkner 2003; Pattberg 2005; Vogel 2006). In
such governance arrangements, authority is exercised through global market forces rather than
by political delegation (Hall and Biersteker 2002). The legitimacy, management and imple-
mentation of private forms of governance are not rooted in public authority, but instead their
authority is often granted through a supply chain, external audiences and customer preferences
(Cashore 2002).
Accordingly, private governance “emerges at the global level where the interaction among
the private actors, or between private actors on one hand and civil society and state actors on
the other, give rise to institutional arrangements that structure and direct actors’ behavior in
an issue specific area” (Falkner 2003: 72). Private systems of governance operate alongside
formal regulatory systems by engaging in rule-making, promotion and implementation of
norms, monitoring and verification, adjudication of compliance, and the imposition of sanc-
tions. While not legally binding in the strict sense, as so-called “soft law,” they are mandatory
for those who agree to conform to them (Abbott and Snidal 2000). Such parallel development
of cooperative rule-making by private actors resembles the public governing functions of
governments and intergovernmental institutions, and therefore the concepts of governance and
authority have been applied to private actors (Cutler et al. 1999).

510
 Private governance  511

However, in contrast to research on coordination or cooperation among private actors,

which involves the adjustment of individual behavior to achieve mutually beneficial objectives
(Keohane 1984), it is important to acknowledge that cooperation must be institutionalized in
order to be considered as authoritative (Cutler et al. 1999). In this sense, governance “emerges
out of a context of interaction that is institutionalized … and where individual actors do not
constantly decide to be bound by the institutional norms based on a calculation of their inter-
est, but adjust their behavior out of recognition of the legitimacy of the governance system”
(Falkner 2003: 73).
Private arrangements include different sets of actors: (1) firms and industry groups whose
own practices or those of supplier firms are the target of regulation; (2) NGOs and other civil
society groups; and (3) a combination of actors from these two categories (Abbott and Snidal
2009). Moreover, the participation of different clusters of non-state actors also indicates a shift
in the form of regulations, with private forms of governance ranging from self-regulation and
co-regulation to management-based regulation among others (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000).
Research on inter-firm cooperation as a source of private authority in global governance
moved into focus in the late 1990s (Cutler et al. 1999; Braithwaite and Drahos 2000; Hall
and Biersteker 2002). Firms may engage in strategic alliances and develop informal industry
norms and practices, regulating the behavior of a wide range of businesses (Cutler et al. 1999).
Such private regimes are a form of self-regulation and occur when companies, on a voluntary
basis, design and enforce the rules of good conduct themselves (Haufler 2013: 8). Industry
self-regulation usually takes the form of corporate codes of conduct, but can also appear in the
form of internal management systems, such as auditing, accounting, monitoring and reporting
requirements, as well as standards for promoting good design practices or emerging technol-
ogies (Haufler 2013). Examples include the evolution of self-regulatory standards in different
sectors, such as in global labor governance (Hassel 2008; Fransen 2011), the internet (Spar
1999), agri-food governance (Henson and Reardon 2005; Fulponi 2006), accounting (Mattli
and Büthe 2005) and chemicals (King and Lenox 2000), among others.
Contrary to traditional business self-regulation, civil regulations employ “private, non-state,
or market-based regulatory frameworks to govern multinational firms and global supply
networks” from the outside (Vogel 2010: 69). They are governed by a wide variety of
actors belonging to what is conceptualized as “global civil society,” usually composed of
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (Lipschutz and Fogel 2002). In this case, NGOs are
private actors that participate in the regulation of other private actors, that is, global firms and
markets for addressing labor practices, environmental performance and human rights policies
or pressing for particular public concerns (Vogel 2006). Moreover, besides targeting firms,
they serve a number of important normative and functional roles, ranging from observers of
elections, to advisors to United Nations (UN) projects, to writers and implementers of rules
and regulations in a range of global forums (Lipschutz and Fogel 2002: 117). Usually NGOs
exercise their authority through agenda-setting, expertise or their “emancipatory or norma-
tively progressive social agendas” (Hall and Biersteker 2002: 14). Examples include both
domestic and international NGOs such as the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, Amnesty
International and Oxfam, trade associations for coffee, electronics and toys, and trade unions
like the International Textile Workers Association.
In addition to agenda-setting, NGOs have chosen to cooperate with firms and become
active players in co-regulation. Consequently, we can observe the institutionalization of gov-
ernance among a wide variety of business and non-profit actors, and without the involvement
512  Handbook on theories of governance

of governments (Pattberg 2005). In the case of co-regulation, business and NGOs engage in
“partnership” programs and projects, promote and design improved standards and their imple-
mentation, carry out monitoring and auditing and raise awareness of corporate responsibility
issues (Utting 2005). Some prominent examples of co-regulation between profit and non-profit
private actors are the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) in the forest sector (Cashore 2002;
Pattberg 2005), the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) in fisheries (Kalfagianni and Pattberg
2013a), the Fair Labor Association (FLA) and Fair Wear Foundation (FWF) in the apparel
sector (O’Rourke 2003; Marx 2008), the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) in the field of
climate change governance (Kolk et al. 2008), and a number of initiatives in the food and
agriculture domain (Fuchs et al. 2011).
However, the rise of private forms of governance among different types of actors as well
as their interactions and consequences raises a number of questions for the study of global
governance. First, what explains the emergence and proliferation of private governance
(including variation across and within issue areas and groups of actors)? Second, what are the
consequences of private governance on the effectiveness and legitimacy of global governance?
Accordingly, after introducing private governance as an emerging concept in scholarly debates
on transforming world politics as well as elaborating on different sets of actors engaged
in private regulation, the following section summarizes key insights into the emergence of
private governance and its consequences for the effectiveness and legitimacy of global govern-
ance. We conclude with the lessons learned and avenues for further research.

KEY FINDINGS

The question of the emergence of private governance has attracted scholars from both inter-
national law and political science, with each discipline providing valuable insight based on
different conceptual perspectives. Considering the theoretical limitations of regime theory
that derive from its ontological focus on states as actors, many scholars utilized alternative
concepts borrowed from the fields of international political economy and organizational
studies in order to explain the emergence of private governance. The dominant explanation
for the emergence of private governance is derived from the literature on globalization, while
the concepts of organizational fields and firm-level choice can serve as important explanatory
variables for explaining the emergence of private governance at a micro level. By combining
these two categories – one focusing on the conditions at the macro level and the other at the
micro level – it is possible to gain an integrated insight into the emergence of private govern-
ance (Pattberg 2005).
Although the involvement of private actors in global governance is not new, it is argued that
the re-emergence of private governance is closely associated with the process of economic
globalization and the corresponding restructuring of state functions of the late twentieth
century (Falkner 2003). Globalization studies provide various claims about the relationship
between globalization and the rise of private forms of global governance. The first concerns
the relationship between globalization and the perceived decline of the nation state. Authors
working in this tradition emphasize the long-term shift from state-centric governance to new
forms of authority increasingly oriented toward private actors. As Susan Strange has argued,
“the power of most states has declined still further, so that their authority over the people and
their activities inside their territorial boundaries has weakened” (1996: 11). On this account,
 Private governance  513

the significance of private governance lies in closing “the governance deficit” by pointing out
the opportunity to overcome regulatory failure to address negative social and political impacts
by extending regulation to a wide range of business and civil society practices for which the
scope and effectiveness of the nation state are either weak or non-existent (Koenig-Archibugi
2004; Abbott and Snidal 2009).
A number of studies, however, indicate that firms proactively engage in private governance
to forestall binding state-led regulation. The emergence of the chemical industry’s Responsible
Care initiative (today a global mechanism but developed by the US industry) is a case in point
(King and Lenox 2000). The second perspective emphasizes transnationalism and growth in
global civil society, where private governance is a direct result of pressure exerted by activist
groups on corporations (Wapner 1997). From this perspective, NGOs and global civil society
play an important role in shaping private governance by targeting firms to address social and
environmental concerns through, for example, “naming and shaming,” or by directly engaging
with business actors in creating and implementing standards of good practice (Vogel 2006).
Finally, the third perspective emphasizes the ideological shift in the governance system
towards market-oriented and deregulatory systems of governance, which leads to the total
“privatization” of governance and privileging a business-friendly, market-oriented approach
in world politics (Falkner 2003: 75). Neo-Gramscian frameworks of analysis gained particular
prominence in the analysis of corporate engagement with international regimes, structural
relations of power, and strategies adopted in bargaining over complex regimes (Levy and
Newell 2002).
Next to studies that emphasize large-scale transformations in the structure of global gov-
ernance, thereby taking a macro-perspective on the emergence of private governance, an alter-
native is based on internal perceptions and motives that give rise to the emergence of private
governance. Explanatory leverage seems to lie in accounts that theorize the issue-specific
process of resource exchange in combination with field-level explanations, although we
note the need to further integrate macro- and micro-explanations. In this context, scholars
have observed the increasing similarities among private governance arrangements in terms
of decision-making procedures, organizational structure, and communication. Dingwerth
and Pattberg (2009) have scrutinized a standard model of private governance organizations
focusing on rule-making, arguing that the costly features of decision-making along with highly
institutionalized organizational structures and communications focusing on process rather than
outcome can be explained by an organizational field logic, wherein the density of interactions
over time predicts the similarity among organizations.
In addition to field-level explanations, the concept of firm-level choice proves to be useful,
as it examines firm-level motives for participating in competing regulatory schemes. For
example, in studying the factors that cause firms to choose between competing forest certifi-
cation standards, namely those of the FSC and the International Standardization Organization
(ISO) respectively, researchers found that firms opt for the former scheme as it confers envi-
ronmental benefits, while those that chose ISO 14001 do so on economic grounds (Cashore et
al. 2005).
Beyond providing insight into various explanations for the emergence of private govern-
ance, a number of studies have evaluated the extent to which private forms of governance
contribute to the increased effectiveness and legitimacy of global governance, which is the
focus of the second part of this section. There are numerous definitions of effectiveness.
In its basic form, effectiveness can be understood as the degree of success of institutional
514  Handbook on theories of governance

performance towards some objective that motivated its establishment, such as its ability to
solve economic, social or ecological problems (Young 1999). Debates about the effectiveness
of private governance are quite polarized, as some scholars perceive private governance as
an opportunity to address global governance deficits (Haas 2004), while others warn against
negative consequences, such as failure to address the underlying causes of social and environ-
mental problems and a tendency to privilege business-as-usual practices and powerful actors,
while at the same time weakening the representation of the less privileged actors (Clapp 1998;
Nanz and Steffek 2004; Pattberg 2006). Empirical research presents rather mixed conclusions
when it comes to the effectiveness of private governance. For example, research on forest
certification has shown that, owing to the lack of ownership and the cost of complying with its
stringent standards, many producers opt for industry-dominated programs, especially when it
comes to operations in developing countries (Gulbrandsen 2004). When exploring conditions
for effective private governance in the fisheries and aquaculture domain, researchers found
their ability to deliver effective governance solutions to be limited (Kalfagianni and Pattberg
2013a). Finally, in the case of private governance of climate change the promise of such forms
of governance to increase effectiveness has been found to be highly compromised by the
profit-seeking behavior of private actors (Hickmann 2013).
Next to debates about the effectiveness of private governance, legitimacy has emerged
as a key research interest (Hurd 1999; Cutler 2001). The legitimacy requirements of private
arrangements, by and large, are particularly high, as they seek to trigger a motivational
response from those whose behavior they attempt to change (Black 2008; Schouten and
Glasbergen 2011). As the dominant answer to what legitimacy requires in global governance
is democracy, many scholars claim that the inclusion of private actors in global governance
has led to a loss of democratic oversight and parliamentary control of checks and balances
on power and accountability (Dryzek and Stevenson 2011; Keohane 2011; Scholte 2011).
A democratic deficit surrounding private forms of governance has been documented in
many cases, including private retail food governance (Fuchs et al. 2011), climate governance
(Bäckstrand 2008), fisheries (Kalfagianni and Pattberg 2014) and global monetary and finan-
cial governance (Underhill and Zhang 2008). Besides assessing democratic legitimacy from
a normative perspective, other scholars engage in discussions on how private governance
(with its more complex actor-constellations) is redefining normative standards of legitimacy
that have been developed in the context of relatively stable state-based authority (Steffek
2009; Brassett and Tsingou 2011). Such studies focus more on legitimacy dynamics, the way
different arrangements gain legitimacy, how they respond to particular legitimacy demands
and by which claims to legitimacy (Suchman 1995; Cashore 2002; Black 2008). For example,
the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), a private standard-setting body in the
field of financial accounting standards, employed due process norms in addition to basing
their legitimacy on technical competence and independence (Richardson and Eberlein 2011).
Moreover, it is argued that the Forest Stewardship Council draws its legitimacy from NGOs
in exchange for the potential behavioral change of wood retailers, while these retailers give
others a say in their corporate behavior in exchange for increased social acceptance and repu-
tation (Dingwerth and Pattberg 2009).
 Private governance  515

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

In this concluding section, we explore some of the limitations related to the conceptualization
of private governance by pointing out the importance of recognizing the changing role of both
state and non-state actors and the implications it has for how the public and the private have
been conceptualized.
In our understanding, public and private authority should not be interpreted as a zero-sum
game whereby power is shifted from state to non-state actors, indicating a replacement and
decline of sovereign authority (Sending and Neumann 2006; Bäckstrand 2008). Rather,
research in global governance is increasingly drawing attention to networked, hybrid or
shared forms of authority (Pattberg and Stripple 2008; Bulkeley and Schroeder 2012), high-
lighting the blurred nature of the state/non-state divide. In this context, scholars have pro-
posed re-conceptualizations of the public/private divide, arguing that the current conception
obscures the continuous shaping and reshaping of these boundaries in the process of governing
(Bulkeley and Schroeder 2012). In the words of Green (2013: 9), “Private authority does not
exist in a vacuum. Rather, it is linked to public authority in different and complex ways.” As
a consequence, the sharp dichotomy between public and private may be better viewed as the
two ends of a continuum (Vogel 2008). A number of studies have started to explore the inter-
action between private governance and the public regulatory arena in more detail (Pattberg
2006; Overdevest and Zeitlin 2012; Kalfagianni and Pattberg 2013b), highlighting the syn-
ergistic rather than conflictive interactions. However, more comparative empirical research
is needed to shed light on the question of how governing takes place within and between the
public and the private sphere across different issue areas and geographical spaces, creating
novel spheres of authority that are neither fully private nor fully public.
Based on such recognitions, authors aim to distinguish between two types of private author-
ity, namely “delegated” and “entrepreneurial” private authority (Green 2013: 7). In the first
case, states may have delegated problem-solving authority to non-state actors, which serve as
agents of state interests. For example, it has been shown that some governance arrangements
operate in the “shadow of hierarchy” as states and international organizations attempt to
delegate some of their primary functions to non-state actors (Pattberg 2010). This trend is
increasingly discussed under the heading of “orchestration” (Abbott and Snidal 2009). In the
case of the latter, authority does not originate within the state apparatus, but is based on the
expertise of private actors and their ability to cultivate legitimacy, persuasion and market pres-
sure. Based on this distinction, future research needs to better scrutinize the scope conditions
for effective and legitimate private governance.

NOTE
1. This chapter builds on P. Pattberg and M. Isailovic (2015), ‘Private environmental governance’, in
P.H. Pattberg and F. Zelli (eds), Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Governance and Politics,
Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, pp. 281–288.
516  Handbook on theories of governance

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45. Urban and regional governance
Jon Pierre

This chapter provides an overview of the main theories and approaches in the field of urban
and regional governance. The chapter makes no claim to provide an exhaustive account of
these theories, something which would require substantively more space than a Handbook
chapter provides.
The chapter argues that in both urban and regional governance research there has been
a development from a rather stale, institutional and constitutional perspective towards greater
attention to issues such as institutional embeddedness, contingencies and interactivity.
A slightly different way of describing this development would be to say that there has been
a gradual shift from government to governance or that the role of government in governance at
these levels has become more focused on providing interaction and territorial mobilization of
financial and other resources. This reflects changes in practice; governance in various guises
has emerged as a strategy to harness resources from all corners of the territory as the chal-
lenges facing cities and regions often exceed the capabilities which these institutions harbor.
Urban politics, at least in American political science, has experienced predominance as well
as marginalization. In the 1950s and 1960s, issues related to democracy and elitism which
were high on the political science agenda were urban politics issues (Hunter 1953; Dahl 1961).
This was a time when urban politics was “hot” and held a central position in mainstream polit-
ical science (Orr and Johnson 2008). More recently, urban politics—again, primarily in the
U.S.—has been assigned a much less prominent standing. Why that is the case is not the main
issue for the present chapter; suffice it to say that urban politics is a multi-disciplinary subject
which political science cohabitates with sociology, economics and geography. Sustaining
prominence in any discipline is a major challenge for a multi-disciplinary research field.
Unlike political institutions and governing processes on the national level, the practice and
analysis of urban and regional politics depart from the discrepancy between the challenges
facing a city or a region on the one hand and the governing capacity of the local or regional
state on the other. This is partly related to the size and scope of the challenges that cities and
regions face. These are the levels of government that are most immediately exposed to global
economic pressures, economic restructuring and the provision of social accommodation.
Also, cities and regions are institutionally constrained by rules and policy which place them
in subordination to central government. These institutional constraints place bounds on what
the city or region can do.
The combined result of these circumstances is that cities, and up until rather recently also
regions, seek to build coalitions with strategic societal actors in the local community and
to harness resources from across the community towards collective projects more broadly.
This encompassing and mobilizing strategy makes urban politics an ideal field for govern-
ance research, conceptualizing the political economy of coalitions between city hall and the
downtown elite as well as the intricacies of working vertically across institutional boundaries.
Ironically, however, while European urbanists have largely embraced the governance para-

519
520  Handbook on theories of governance

digm, their American colleagues have been more tentative towards governance theory. We
will return to that issue later in the chapter.

FROM LOCAL GOVERNMENT TO URBAN GOVERNANCE

With significant simplification, we can roughly divide the study of local politics and adminis-
tration into three different subfields. These subfields are not mutually exclusive and, although
there is some degree of sequence between them, none has disappeared completely. Also, this
account of the development of urban governance research plays out somewhat differently in
Europe than in the United States (see Pierre 2014).
The first wave of research in this area defined its area of inquiry as “local government.”
In this approach, city politics and administration are portrayed first and foremost in fairly
formal, institutional terms, akin to what Guy Peters calls “old institutionalism” (Peters 2005).
There is little attention to agency or the behavior which institutional arrangements incentivize.
Local government is typically seen as fulfilling two major functions: to provide an arena for
democratic discourse and to deliver public service. This rather formal perspective on cities
and urban politics and service is manifested not least in most of the comparative handbooks
on local government.
The local government approach is thus still employed by many scholars. Its emphasis on
formal, legal structures and functions makes this approach useful for comparisons of local
institutional systems and their roles. However, along with a growing interest among urbanists
in the behavioral and sociological aspects of the exercise of democracy and politics at the local
level, a new paradigm emerged.
This new (at least in Europe) paradigm was urban politics (Davies and Imbroscio 2008).
This was the heading under which local government had been taught in the United States for
many years, but it was now gradually picked up by European urbanists as well. The emergence
of urban politics as a paradigm meant less attention to formal political and institutional struc-
tures and relationships and more focus on the policies pursued by cities and the politics that
came with those policies. There was also growing interest in the capacity of cities to accom-
modate social cleavages in the city, between different constituencies on the political spectrum
as well as between the political establishment, NGOs and marginalized groups.
As a research field, urban politics covers the entire range of formal political decision-making
processes, social involvement (and exclusion), sustainability, elite or pluralist models of urban
democracy, voting behavior and political theory. Also, if local government was first and fore-
most reserved for political science, urban politics is a distinctly multi-disciplinary research
area, combining political science with sociology, geography, history and economics (see for
instance Peterson 1981; Magnusson 1996; Rae 2003; Gleeson 2014).
The 1990s witnessed a gradual shift towards issues related to governance in Europe among
practitioners as well as academics (see Rhodes 1997; Stoker 1998a; Pierre and Peters 2000). In
a vernacular that raises few eyebrows in contemporary politics, Tony Blair and other political
leaders signaled a new role for government, emphasizing its coordinating and regulatory role
while downplaying its conventional providing and funding role. The buzzword for this new
role of the government in governing was governance. “Government” was seen as tainted with
decreasingly popular elective office, high taxes and backroom politics (Stoker 1998b, 2000).
 Urban and regional governance  521

Governance, and not least urban governance, on the other hand, implied transparency and
broader societal involvement and was believed to be more palatable to society (Stoker 1998b).
The emergence of the urban governance research paradigm in Europe concurred with the
regime theory “turn” in the United States, following Clarence Stone’s seminal work Regime
Politics, published in 1989 (see also Orr and Johnson 2008). There are no fundamental differ-
ences between urban regime theory and urban governance other than that urban governance
theory does not stipulate any particular societal actor that can team up with the local political
leadership in order to increase the city’s institutional capacity. Urban governance is thus
a theoretical approach that shares many features with urban regime theory; Stone’s political
economy model of the urban regime is in many ways a classical model of urban governance
(see Stoker 1995; Pierre 2014). Indeed, Clarence Stone (2008: 300) more recently discussed
“alternative lenses” in the study of urban politics and believed the governance approach to be
one of those “lenses.”
The urban governance approach is primarily concerned with the steering and coordination
of the local state. Not unlike urban regime theory, urban governance departs from a notion
of an insufficient institutional capacity of the local state to address the challenges it faces
(Stoker 2000). And, again as with urban regime theory, urban governance scholars observe
how the city’s leadership seeks to mobilize strategic resources across its jurisdiction to pursue
collective goals. This is also where the urban regime theory and urban governance part ways,
however; in the former theory, private capital is the designated partner to the local political
elite, where the latter theory makes no prejudgments about which type of actors possess such
strategic resources. Some issues clearly require the involvement of the corporate sector,
whereas other issues—welfare and service provision, climate change issues, accommodating
migration and so on—require other types of resources, or indeed even the exclusion of corpo-
rate interests. This approach to urban politics harks back to the previous attention to formal
institutions and decision making.
Thus, although urban governance as a research field builds logically on the previous per-
spectives on local government and politics, it provides a framework which is more timely
and geared to accommodate new modes of governance, social partnerships, complex and
negotiated arrangements of vertical institutional coordination, and the managerial “turn” in
public service delivery. It also appears as if the urban governance framework provides a more
promising theoretical foundation for comparative research than does urban regime theory
(John 2001; Denters and Rose 2005; Pierre 2005, 2014). Although urban regime theory and
urban governance theory, in its emergent form, thus disagree on the cast of actors that appear
in the process of governing a city, they share the insight that the city’s political, economic
and administrative capabilities prevent public institutions from delivering governance on their
own. If anything, the discrepancy between the challenges facing cities and regions and their
capacity to address those challenges appears to have grown along with neo-liberal politics
cutting back public resources and increasing immigration and social exclusion.
Many of the challenges that face the contemporary city can directly or indirectly be related
to globalization. Indeed, globalization is often said to be localized in cities and regions more
than nation states (Alger 1988, 2010; Sassen 1991, 1996, 2000; Goetz and Clarke 1993; Knox
and Taylor 1995; Keil 1998; Brenner 1999). The ramifications of global market competition
are most clearly seen at the local level in terms of unemployment and a disappearing tax base.
Partly in response to these challenges, urban and regional elites have become what Susan
Clarke (2006: 56) calls the “key architects of globalization”; it has become their responsibility
522  Handbook on theories of governance

both to address the downfall of global competition and to exploit the opportunities that globali-
zation offers (Hambleton and Simone Gross 2007; Pierre 2013).
Globalization has highlighted once again the embedded nature of urban governance.
As a political science research field it substantiates perhaps more than any other areas the
constraints exercised by institutional and economic embeddedness on policy choice and the
pursuit of collective interests. This is precisely why governance as an emergent theory has so
much analytical leverage to offer to the understanding of urban politics and urban democracy;
if it is anywhere that elites have to reach out and mobilize resources across their jurisdiction
in order to successfully pursue collective goals it is at the local level of the political system.
At the same time, it is easy to note the disjuncture between the issues on the urban politics
agenda—both among practitioners and among scholars—and the theories in vogue at different
points in time. For instance, it is rather amazing to see how urban political economy—once
a dominant theoretical field in urban politics (see for example Fainstein et al. 1986; Vogel
1992; Swanstrom 1993; Savitch and Kantor 2004)—all but disappeared just as globalization
exposed cities and regions to global competition. Alongside this new exposure to a global
market, cities and regions were now increasingly pitted in competition with each other in
the domestic scene; notions of “uneven development,” which embraces rather than seeks to
prevent differences among cities in terms of wealth and public service (Brotchie et al. 1995;
Buck et al. 2005), signify this idea about the benefits of inter-city competition.
Also, while urban politics as a broad, encompassing theoretical area was flourishing there
was growing evidence that urban policy choice was severely constrained. Given the increasing
focus on interaction between the local state and social networks, the delicate dependency on
economic developments which lie largely outside the domain of what the city can control,
and the growing importance of external issues and challenges on the urban political agenda, it
should not surprise anyone to learn that the significance (or indeed existence) of local policy
choice has always been questioned. Some have long argued that from a neo-Marxist perspec-
tive the city is invariably subordinate to the developments of the economic system (Cockburn
1977). Also approaching these issues in a neo-Marxist view, Mark Gottdiener (1987: 13)
argues that “the very heart and soul of local politics has died. A form without content remains.
The present shell of politics surrounds a progressively empty center. The democratic life
of the polis sucks out through a vacuum at the very core of the city.” Paul Peterson (1981),
by contrast, applied a public choice perspective on urban politics but arrived at conclusions
that are rather similar to those presented by Cockburn. Furthermore, studies on these issues
deeply rooted in empirical inquiry (Sharpe and Newton 1984), too, arrive at a fairly similar
conclusion; local political majority constellations do not seem to have a decisive input on local
policy choice.
These observations left urban politics scholars in a defensive position; while studies on local
democracy, interest representation and so on remained central to the field, the argument that
local policy choice was of very minor consequence raised serious questions about the rationale
of the research field. For the urban governance scholars who would enter the field later this
was however not a deal breaker in any way; on the contrary, it substantiated the importance
of understanding how the local state conducts its exchanges with external actors rather than
focusing on the formal decision making in city hall.
 Urban and regional governance  523

REGIONAL GOVERNANCE

If urban politics and governance has a history as a multi-disciplinary research field, this is even
more the case with regional governance. Political scientists tend to have problems with spa-
tially defined concepts; this is rather the geographers’ strong suit. At the same time, however,
theories related to geography are of rather little help in understanding the role of agency in
societal change (Hägerstrand 1970). One might conclude from this that these differences
between two disciplines would induce the two constituencies to join forces in order to better
understand regional governance. Certainly, some work in that respect has been done, but still
regional governance remains to a large extent an elusive phenomenon.
As a result, studies on regional governance have faced the difficult issue of either using juris-
diction as a definition of region, in which case processes of regionalization which transcend
jurisdictional and institutional borders are ignored, or focusing on such processes, in which
case the role of formal institutions and public organizations becomes difficult to conceptualize.
In addition, regionalization often has ethnic or identity-related drivers—consider for instance
the case of Scotland, Catalonia or Quebec—which means that issues related to administrative
boundaries or regional economic development become secondary to other reasons for stronger
and more autonomous regional government.
In terms of their significance as an arena for democratic governance, regions in many
unitary states are seen as “the forgotten level” of government. Institutions at this level lack the
proximity to citizens and clients that local authorities have, yet they rarely deal with issues of
the same importance as national politics. Regional institutions also tend to have a jurisdiction
dominated by only a few policy areas, predominantly economic development or health care,
which means that there is often very limited media coverage of what happens at the regional
level.
This pattern gradually changed in the EU member states along with the growing financial
strength of the EU structural funds. Since its early days the EU has promoted itself as the
“Europe of the Regions” (Le Galès and Lequesne 1998). The structural funds added finan-
cial muscle, and incentives, to that slogan. As a result, member states embark on projects to
strengthen regional institutions in order to better qualify for financial support from the funds.
In some cases, such as the U.K., “economic regions” were created for that purpose. Countries
where regional government had a stronger standing also reformed their regions to boost their
competitiveness for EU funds. As we will discuss later, this created tensions between the role
of regions in economic development and their role as arenas and instruments for regional
governance.
We can broadly distinguish between three different theoretical approaches to regional gov-
ernance. One approach perceives “regions” as a cluster of local authorities and investigates
incentives and collective action problems in inter-local cooperation. Here, regional govern-
ance becomes primarily a matter of coordinating local actors and institutions towards some
collective goal. Some of this work has a distinct rational choice foundation (Feiock 2007),
while others apply an institutional theoretical perspective on these issues (Andersen and Pierre
2010).
The second approach to regional governance views institutional change at the regional
level in a top-down perspective. Central government has attempted to strengthen regions and
move jurisdictional borders closer to the demarcations of functional regions. Here, incentives
524  Handbook on theories of governance

to change related to the EU have been a key driver of reform, although changes in domestic
intergovernmental relations have also played an important role.
The third approach, finally, has been to focus on the “rescaling of statehood” and its conse-
quences for governance at different institutional levels (see Pierre 2013). “Rescaling” theory,
as developed by Neil Brenner (see Brenner 2004), argues that globalization relaxes domestic
institutional hierarchies. Subnational government becomes more dependent on its capacity to
mobilize resources as state grants to cities and regions are cut back. Partly as a result of these
changes, subnational governments increasingly embark on internationalization projects, thus
bypassing central government. The previous hierarchical order is gradually replaced by a more
negotiated arrangement, with each institutional level more autonomous in relationship to other
levels but also more self-reliant.
In some ways, these rather fundamental changes in subnational government drive the
search for new forms of governance as a mobilization of resources across the local or regional
territory becomes more important. At the same time, however, rescaling places a premium
on economic development goals. Such objectives and internationalization projects tend to be
pursued with a high degree of executive autonomy with little room for democratic discourse
and deliberation (van der Heiden 2010).
These three perspectives on regional governance are not mutually exclusive in any way;
they all have merit and validity; regions are changing both bottom-up and top-down, and
rescaling is consistent with both of these developments. The basic question remains, however:
should reform primarily be conducted to promote economic development goals or should
it aim at strengthening democratic governance at the regional level (Newman 2000)? As
Newman (2000: 897) argues, regionalization in Europe has been driven by: territorial mobili-
zation of regional identities; changing national (political and institutional) contexts; and “the
Europeanisation of regional policy.” If regions, as suggested earlier, are the “forgotten tier of
government,” recent changes have not helped make them any more attractive or significant in
the context of governance.
We have not mentioned the United States in this context. The reason is that there is not very
much to say. Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, Americans tend to look rather skeptically at
concepts like “regions” and “regionalism” (see for instance Pastor et al. 2009). There is some
interest in inter-municipal coordination in metropolitan areas (Katz 2000; Feiock 2004), but
overall the interest in regional governance among practitioners and scholars is not high in the
U.S.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Governance at the subnational level has suffered from a disjuncture between theory and
empirical research. Certainly in many European countries, government-sponsored research
programs studying local and regional government have generated impressive data sets. The
key purpose of these exercises was to provide government with information about the state of
subnational government and advice on reform. Even so, however, it is unfortunate that theory
played a negligible role in designing empirical research and that empirical findings to a very
limited extent informed theoretical development. As a result, theory and empirical studies of
subnational government and governance have to some extent come to live in separate worlds,
an arrangement which benefits neither.
 Urban and regional governance  525

At both the local and the regional level we see signs of growing attention to democratic gov-
ernance, although these objectives are weighed against those related to economic development
and internationalization. Regional reform attempts to cater to both these partially conflicting
goals. The result of these efforts has in some cases been that neither objective has benefited
from reform.
The increasing self-reliance of subnational government which is a result of central govern-
ment’s cutting back on grants and subsidies has fostered interaction between public and private
actors at these levels. There seems to be some understanding that these actors will swim or
sink together and therefore engage with each other more closely than earlier. While urban gov-
ernance has a long tradition in institutionalized forms of public–private cooperation, regions
have just recently begun to form such forums for exchange. At the same time, the “rescaling of
statehood” means that cities and regions as joint public–private entities explore international
arenas. These projects are likely to further promote interaction and mutual accommodation.

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Swanstrom, T. (1993), ‘Beyond economism: Urban political economy and the postmodern challenge’,
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46. Multi-level governance
Ian Bache, Ian Bartle and Matthew Flinders

INTRODUCTION
Originally seeking to capture the dynamics of EU cohesion policy, multi-level governance
(MLG) emerged as ‘the most omnipresent and acceptable label one can stick on the con-
temporary EU’ (Schmitter 2004: 49). It is a label that has been widely adopted by European
Union (EU) actors, illustrated by its use in the European Commission’s White Paper on EU
Governance in 2001 (COM 91) and by the publication of the Committee of the Regions’ White
Paper on Multi-level Governance in 2009 (CoR 89/2009). Moreover, MLG has moved beyond
its EU setting to become an established concept applied to a wide range of political and policy
settings across the world. This chapter considers the origins, development and key debates
in MLG. It argues that despite evolving as a core concept within and beyond academe, MLG
remains an underdeveloped and ‘fuzzy’ concept. To some degree this reflects the increasingly
fluid and ‘fuzzy governance’ processes it seeks to acknowledge and interrogate, but also points
to the need perhaps for greater precision and rigour in the different types of multi-level gov-
ernance that combine in complex webs to form the architecture of (post)modern governance.

ORIGINS

MLG has its intellectual origins in the neofunctionalist theory developed to analyse the
process of European integration (Haas 1958; Lindberg 1963). This body of work argued that
national governments were losing control of the process in an increasingly complex web of
interdependence in which supranational and non-state actors were becoming more important.
However, MLG was part of a wave of theorizing that sought to move beyond understanding
the process of integration to understanding the nature of the EU as a political system (see
Hix 1994); theorizing that transcended established debates between neofunctionalists and
intergovernmentalists.
MLG brought the observation that, in the wake of the single market programme, subna-
tional authorities were also becoming important players in EU policy-making, particularly
in the sphere of structural policy (now generally known as ‘cohesion policy’). Indeed, the
term ‘multi-level governance’ was first used by Gary Marks (1993) to refer to developments
in structural policy. In particular, from 1989 the reformed policy gave subnational authori-
ties their first formal role in EU policy-making through the introduction of the partnership
principle, which required supranational, national and subnational actors to decide jointly on
spending EU regional funds within member states. Marks and his collaborators subsequently
developed the MLG concept to apply to EU decision-making more broadly (Marks et al. 1996;
Hooghe and Marks 2001). In addition to resembling aspects of neofunctionalism (although
MLG is explicitly not a theory of integration), it also drew insights from the work by Fritz
Scharpf (1988) on German federalism and is replete with network metaphors.

528
 Multi-level governance  529

CONCEPTUAL AND DEFINITIONAL ISSUES

In its early manifestation, multi-level governance referred to ‘continuous negotiation among

nested governments at several territorial tiers’ and described how ‘supranational, national,
regional and local governments are enmeshed in territorially overarching policy networks’
(Marks 1993: 392, 402–403). Yet, despite its reference to networks, multi-level governance
at this stage focused on (vertical) intergovernmental relations, highlighting in particular the
role of subnational governments as an important ‘third level’ in EU politics. MLG theorists
claimed that competencies had ‘slipped away from central states both up to the supranational
level and down to the subnational level’ (Marks et al. 1998: 42).
Yet this conceptualization ignored the increasing role in EU policy-making of non-state
actors, which were central to the concept of governance for scholars in the public policy tra-
dition. Without this dimension, what it described was multi-level government, not multi-level
governance (Jordan 2001). This highlighted a tension in the debate on governance that remains
central between those who use the term ‘governance’ to describe the activity of governing (e.g.
Zürn 2010) and those who use the term to connote changes in the actor constellations involved
in public decision-making (e.g. Rhodes 2012). However, it became increasingly commonplace
for the ‘multi-level’ part of the concept to be taken to refer to the increased vertical interactions
between governments operating at different territorial levels, while ‘governance’ signalled
intensified (horizontal) interactions between governments and non-governmental actors
(Bache and Flinders 2004). Yet critics argued that MLG did not clearly distinguish its claims
about governance from those of participation (Bache 1999), mobilization (Jeffery 2000) or
dialogue (Wilson 2003). These concepts also highlighted the proliferation of non-state actors
in public policy-making, but questioned the substantive effect of this engagement on out-
comes. In particular, evidence of control slipping away from states was not as clear as MLG
initially inferred, and the role of subnational actors was seen to have been overstated.
In terms of further elucidating these vertical and horizontal dimensions, as well as respond-
ing to criticisms that MLG was little more than a proto-concept or governing metaphor, Hooghe
and Marks (2003) offered a twofold typology of MLG arrangements that pulled together
a number of previously disconnected ‘islands of theorizing’. Type I MLG in this framework
has echoes of federalism. It describes system-wide governing arrangements in which the
dispersion of authority is restricted to a limited number of clearly defined, non-overlapping
jurisdictions at a limited number of territorial levels, each of which has responsibility for a
‘bundle’ of functions. By contrast, Type II MLG describes governing arrangements in which
the jurisdiction of authority is task-specific, where jurisdictions operate at numerous territorial
levels and may be overlapping. Type II MLG therefore resonates with an extensive literature
on the ‘unbundling’ of the state to a broad range of arm’s-length bodies, quangos, agencies,
boards and commissions (see Pollitt and Talbot 2004). Yet while this contribution has emerged
as central to most subsequent work on MLG, it has not satisfied those who see the concept as
still lacking conceptual precision. Jessop (2004: 61), for example, has highlighted the ‘marked
ambiguity in the referents of multi-level governance’, whereas Benz (2010: 215) suggested
that, ‘Although they rightly emphasized the dynamics and flexibility of the European political
structure, they did not clearly carve out mechanisms which may explain these dynamics and
the outcomes of policy-making.’
530  Handbook on theories of governance

CENTRAL RESEARCH QUESTIONS

As MLG has become more widely adopted it has been understood and applied in quite dif-
ferent ways, with the consequence that ‘there is no single definition of MLG that is currently
broadly accepted by the academic community’ (Stein and Turkewitsch 2010: 197). However,
a broad distinction can be made between those who emphasize the focus on ‘levels’ and Type
I relations (i.e. generally more state-focused) and those more interested in the ‘governance as
networks’ and Type II dimensions.
The first category includes scholars interested in questions about intergovernmental
relations, generally relating to shifts in power and authority between different levels of gov-
ernment. This includes scholars of the EU, often in the federalist tradition, who are trying to
understand the ‘simultaneous empowerment of supranational and subnational institutions’
(Hooghe and Marks 2010: 22). Similarly, some domestic politics scholars employ MLG to
highlight the ‘relevance of additional authority levels’, either international or (in Europe)
supranational (Braun 2010: 168), as do scholars of global governance seeking to bring a focus
on ‘the interplay of different levels’ in the context of ‘the rise of political authority beyond the
nation state’ (Zürn 2010).
The second category of scholars employs the Type I and II distinction, which generates
questions about the relationship between territorial and functional governance (Schmitter
2000; Slaughter and Hale 2010) and/or the changing dynamics of the state–society relation-
ships embedded in ‘territorially overarching’ or ‘transgovernmental’ networks (Stein and
Turkewitsch 2010; Wälti 2010). Indeed, Sbragia (2010: 267) speaks of the appeal of MLG to
EU scholars being ‘that it seemed to capture the lack of “stateness” that characterizes the EU’.
A third set of research questions relates to normative issues. Marks and Hooghe (2004: 16)
made the case for MLG as a ‘normatively superior’ way of organizing public decision-making,
compared to national state dominance. The core argument here is that governance should
operate at multiple territorial levels to capture variations in the reach of policy externalities
from global to local levels; thus, only through scale flexibility in governance can such exter-
nalities be effectively internalized. Other advantages identified are that more decentralized
jurisdictions can better reflect heterogeneity of preferences among citizens, and that multiple
jurisdictions can facilitate credible policy commitments, allow for jurisdictional competition,
and facilitate innovation and experimentation (Marks and Hooghe 2004: 16). A more critical
take on the normative features of MLG raises questions about democratic accountability.
Peters and Pierre (2004) suggested that MLG might be viewed as a ‘Faustian bargain’ in
which purported advantages of MLG in terms of functional efficiency were in exchange for
democratic values, as authority seeps away from the more publicly accountable institutions or
where more complex processes allow public actors to avoid accountability (see also Olsson
2003; Bache and Chapman 2008). Indeed, with only one or two exceptions (see Papadopoulos
2010), what is striking about the existing scholarship on multi-level governance is how little it
focuses on the democratic implications of a shift towards both more complex and de-coupled
governance processes. This gap in the existing research base leads into a broader discussion of
the debates, dilemmas and lacunae that demand scholarly attention.
 Multi-level governance  531

DEBATES, DILEMMAS AND LACUNAE

Much contemporary MLG scholarship has been undertaken in the shadow of the ‘two types’
distinction. And yet there is surprisingly little work that attempts to put empirical flesh on
the conceptual bones of the Type I–Type II distinction, let alone studies that focus on the
intersection or nexus between types of MLG. Despite this gap in the literature, a number of
important issues emerge from a review of the literature that has employed this distinction.
Here we explain the binary distinction between types of governance, consider its internal
coherence, and suggest potential for enhancing the analytical capacity of MLG that draws on
complementary strands of the governance literature.
As noted above, the basic feature defining the two types of MLG is governing purpose
or function. Type I MLG refers to general-purpose jurisdictions in which a wide range of
governing functions are undertaken. This contrasts with the task-specific jurisdictions of Type
II, which are set up for a specific function or goal. A number of other characteristics follow.
First, Type I jurisdictions have non-intersecting memberships that are defined by durable
features, most often territory, but also community; while Type II memberships are formed by
contingent functional factors and are intersecting. Second, Type I jurisdictions have a durable
and system-wide architecture, in contrast to the flexible and changeable designs of Type II
jurisdictions. Third, with their durable architectures Type I jurisdictions have limited numbers
of levels, normally between three and six. In contrast, with their functional designs and flexi-
bility, Type II jurisdictions can have many different jurisdictional levels.
The two MLG types are also defined by Hooghe and Marks (2003) in terms of governing
locations and biases. Type I jurisdictions are prevalent at the established national and subna-
tional levels. At the international level and the national–international frontier Type II jurisdic-
tions tend to predominate, though the Type I EU institutions are a notable exception, and Type
II bodies are also common within cross-border regions and at the local level. In addition, Type
I jurisdictions are biased towards ‘intrinsic community’ based on durable identities, such as
territory, and governance is characterized by ‘voice’, that is, political deliberation and conflict
articulation. In contrast, Type II are biased towards ‘extrinsic community’ based on more fluid
and specialized characteristics; governance is characterized by ‘exit’, choice and competition,
that is, membership is voluntary and the focus is on problem-solving and conflict avoidance.
While community, durability and voice characterize the provision of collective and public
goods in Type I, in Type II it is competition, choice and exit. Barriers to entry are high in Type
I and low in Type II, the latter in effect enabling a market of jurisdictions for the provision
of a public good (Hooghe and Marks 2003: 240). At local level a particular contrast has been
made between ‘consolidated’ government (Type I) with voice, deliberation and a singular
institutional structure, versus ‘fragmented’ government (Type II) with choice, exit and mul-
tiple institutional structures. These two types of governance (summarized in Table 46.1) are
seen as ‘logically coherent’ and ‘alternative responses to fundamental problems of coordina-
tion’ (Hooghe and Marks 2003: 234).
Undoubtedly this formulation has become widely established as a means of conceptualizing
variants of MLG, and Type I and Type II forms of governance have been identified in many
empirical settings. For example, a number of studies have engaged with the typology in rela-
tion to cities and the governance of sustainability and climate change mitigation (Bulkeley and
Betshill 2005; Betshill and Bulkeley 2006; Gustavsson et al. 2009). Significant instances of
Type II governance are identified at both the local level with networks of public and private
532  Handbook on theories of governance

Table 46.1 Multi-level governance: the Type I–Type II binary divide

Type I Type II
Basic features General-purpose Task-specific
Non-intersecting membership Intersecting
Durable, system-wide design Flexible, changeable design
Limited levels Unlimited levels
Location National and subnational levels EU International–national border
Cross-border regions
Local
Biases Intrinsic community Extrinsic community
Deliberation and voice Choice and exit
Conflict articulation Conflict avoidance
Consolidation Fragmentation

Source: Based on Hooghe and Marks (2003, 2010).

actors, and at the transnational level with networks of city-based public and private actors
(Bulkeley and Betshill 2005; Betshill and Bulkeley 2006). Variety has also been observed, for
example in two Swedish cities, Sundsvall and Vaxjo. In relation to climate change mitigation
Sundsvall is shown to be more dependent on ‘vertical’ and ‘intergovernmental’ structures
(Type I), while Vaxjo is more characterized by ‘independent action and self governance’
(Type II) (Gustavsson et al. 2009: 71–72).
Other studies show a tendency for an increase in the Type II forms of governance. For
example, in relation to Hong Kong–mainland China cross-boundary governance, Yang
(2005) shows a significant increase in task-specific, flexible forms of governance since the
early 2000s. In relation to science policy in France, Crespy et al. (2007) detail the increasing
involvement of a range of regional public and private actors in science policy strategy at the
regional level. In another quite different policy area a ‘looser type II pluralistic scenario’ is
increasingly observed in tandem with ‘rule based type I governance’ in clinical appraisal
schemes to select health technologies to be deployed in the United Kingdom (UK) health
sector (Milewa and Barry 2005). In a study of the development of renewable energy in the
English regions, Smith (2007) shows the attempts to shift towards ‘problem-focused’ govern-
ance (Type II) involving an engagement of private, civil society and public partners working
with local and devolved administrations. This discussion could go on to review the edited
works of Thomas Conzelmann and Randall Smith (2008) or Henrik Enderlein et al. (2010), but
the simple argument being made is that Hooghe and Marks’s ‘two types’ dichotomy has been
very influential within the political and social sciences.
And yet, notwithstanding this argument it is equally valid to offer two counterarguments
that each in their own ways help to further both the conceptual and the empirical debate regard-
ing multi-level governance, while also serving to underpin this chapter’s main idea about the
need to go beyond the ‘two types’ approach. The first might be seen as less of an argument
and more of an observation, and refers to the manner in which a large amount of the existing
scholarship that employs Hooghe and Marks’s binary approach does so without any critical
reflection on the internal or external consistency of the distinction. The second argument may
well reflect some unwritten concerns about the utility of the ‘two types’ approach, in the sense
that a substantial seam of governance literature does not reference the approach and instead
conceptualizes governance in a more pluralistic manner. Indeed, there was little reference to
 Multi-level governance  533

the Type I–Type II formulation in the substantial literature on the ‘governance turn’, particu-
larly that related to the EU (e.g. Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2006; Héritier and Lehmkuhl
2008; Kohler-Koch and Larat 2009; Schout et al. 2010; Bartoloni 2011; Bevir 2011). In work
with the stated aim of taking stock of the wealth of research on MLG in the EU and the govern-
ance turn, many of the classic features of MLG are analysed, such as the multiple interacting
tiers of government and greater involvement of non-state actors in networks of governance,
but none of the contributors mention the Type I–Type II formulation (Kohler-Koch and Larat
2009). In the conclusion of Kohler-Koch and Larat’s volume, Olsen (2009) warned against
‘simple dichotomies’ (specifically in relation to ‘old’ and ‘new’ modes of governance) and
stressed the interconnected complexity of governance. All this suggests that the binary for-
mulation is worthy of further scrutiny to tease out its value and limitations. Here we consider
and stress-test the internal consistency of two central aspects of the binary divide: (1) the
distinction between general-purpose and task-specific bodies; and (2) the contrast between the
emphasis on voice and deliberation in relation to Type I bodies, and the stated emphasis on
exit and choice in relation to Type II bodies.

Breadth of Role

The general-purpose versus task-specific division is perhaps the primary feature that defines
the divide. A particular feature of modern governance – ‘unbundled government’ and the
rise of governmental regulatory agencies, executive agencies and other quangos undertak-
ing a wide range of tasks (Pollitt and Talbot 2004) – appears consistent with the divide.
These ‘arm’s-length bodies’ are clearly task-specific and contrast with central government
general-purpose bodies. However, close scrutiny of unbundled governance shows a great
variety in the extent of autonomy from central government (see IfG 2010), and a difficulty
in capturing just what and where the divide is. Two examples can be cited from the UK
transport sector: the Highways Agency and the Office of Rail Regulation. The former, an
executive agency forming the central focus of the governance of highways in the UK, is
clearly a task-specific arrangement (Type II-like), yet it is an agency located within the
Department for Transport, a major government department, and has no policy-making auton-
omy vis-à-vis the department (Type I-like). The latter is a regulatory agency with an element
of policy-making independence from the department (in specific areas of regulation) (Type
II-like), but nevertheless it is durable and closely allied to the department (Type I-like). This
inconsistency is evident in the MLG literature. As task-specific functional organizations
the various state agencies are sometimes referred to as Type II organizations, but as public
bodies highly embedded within governmental institutions they appear more like examples of
Type I. Task-specific agencies also vary financially, with some highly dependent on central
government finance while others are financed by fees paid by users and have more autonomy.
Unbundled government – to paraphrase Pollitt and Talbot (2004) – thus seems to have blurred
the divide between general-purpose and task-specific governance.

Voice and Exit

The voice and deliberation (Type I) versus exit and choice (Type II) division is also problem-
atic, especially in relation to the nature of choice in Type II jurisdictions. How much choice is
there, and who has it? Is it the consumers of a service? Is it citizens or organizations subject
534  Handbook on theories of governance

to regulations? Or is it those public and private actors who create and supply the regulations?
There is, for example, a vast difference between governing arrangements that supply local
services and those international regimes in which international policies and regulations are
agreed. Hooghe and Marks (2003) describe examples of both. In the former it is relatively easy
to see that both citizens and consumers who are subject to policies or who receive services can
have choice, though often the choice is not made by individual consumers in a market but by
the local or regional authorities responsible for the service supply. There is also the question of
when choice and competition in service provision reduce to the privatization and commercial-
ization of the service; if so, it appears to have been removed from the realm of public govern-
ance. In the domain of international regimes the nature of choice and competition is, however,
very different. In areas such as environmental protection, where there are more than 150 trea-
ties (Hooghe and Marks 2003: 239), there are significant intersecting jurisdictions, indicating
an element of choice, but choice is limited primarily to the governments, intergovernmental
organizations and key private actors involved in establishing the regime and supplying the
policies and regulations. It is difficult to see what choice of exit individual citizens or smaller
private organizations have in relation to international regulation.
There is also a problem with the extent to which Type II as a system of governance with exit,
choice and competition is consistent with public policy decisions and their potentially binding
nature. Marks and Hooghe (2004: 15) define governance as ‘binding decision-making in the
public sphere’. Yet, with respect to Type II, there seems to be a choice of whether to be subject
to those decisions. Later literature on MLG underplays the possibility of choice within Type II
governance. Piattoni (2010), for example describes how societal groups have been involved in
policy-making, such as EU environmental policy, which produces directives to which all EU
citizens are subject; that is, it is non-voluntary. Similarly, in illustrating the nature of Type II
MLG, Hassel (2010, 156) notes that ‘environmental policy which is dealt with at all govern-
ance levels would be a good example for how different private actors have formed coalitions to
influence governance on this specific policy issue’: that is, governance that produces binding
public policy decisions.
All this suggests difficulties in sustaining a clear and distinct divide, and this is empha-
sized in other empirical studies (e.g. Bulkeley and Betshill 2005; Milewa and Barry 2005;
Gustavsson et al. 2009). The ways in which public institutions and private actors are connected
can be a key factor in defining whether governance forms are seen as Type I or Type II (Hassel
2010; Stein and Turkewitsch 2010: 197). Rather than two distinctly different governing
arrangements determined by type of actor, or type of government, there are a range of private
actor types and many different ways in which they interconnect to governmental organizations.

MOVING FORWARD

One of the key features of the binary typology is that they are ‘contrasting visions of multi-level
governance’ (Marks and Hooghe 2004). Although it is noted that ‘Type II multi-level govern-
ance tends to be embedded in legal frameworks determined by Type I jurisdictions’ (Marks
and Hooghe 2004: 24), and significant diversity within Type II is recognized, the main idea is
that they are separate entities and jurisdictions: ‘Type I and Type II governance arise – under
different guises and with different labels – as fundamental alternatives’ (Hooghe and Marks
2003: 241). However, while the two types have an intuitive appeal as ideal types, they are
 Multi-level governance  535

often difficult to distinguish in reality. Consequently, there is arguably greater value in focus-
ing empirical research on the nature of the connections between different forms of governance
and its multifaceted nature.
Skelcher’s (2005) work on the problems of jurisdictional integrity in a world of polycen-
tric governance provides a starting point, emphasizing ‘the reality of an interlinked duality
between “traditional” Type I and “emergent” Type II governance’ (Skelcher 2005: 95). This
‘interlinked duality’ forms the focus of Dommett and Flinders’s (2015) analysis of the chang-
ing relationship between the core executive, mainstream departments and various forms of
agencies, boards and commissions in the UK after the election of the coalition government in
May 2010. What this analysis reveals is not only a complex landscape of multiple principals
and multiple agents, but also a concerted effort by the government to reduce the length of the
‘arm’ in the ‘arm’s-length relationship’ between Type I and Type II bodies.
However, it seems clear that the analysis of MLG, both conceptually and empirically, would
benefit by looking beyond ‘the binary divide’ and acknowledging the more complex and mul-
tifaceted reality of contemporary public governance. Here, Piattoni’s work may be instructive,
building on the binary distinction to conceptualize MLG in terms of three interconnected and
interdependent dimensions: X1, X2 and X3 (Piattoni 2010). The X1 axis represents varying
degrees of federalization of the traditional tiers of government; X2 represents the national–
international dimension; and X3 corresponds to the public–private (or state–society) dimen-
sion. Type I and Type II (or Piattoni’s equivalent X1 and X3 axes) are in a dynamic balance
and co-exist in a complex relationship (Piattoni 2010: 207–209). It is interconnectedness itself,
meaning that the movement of actors in one dimension induces the countermoves of other
actors elsewhere, which is the defining characteristic of MLG and distinguishes it from other
forms of governance.
In some of the broader literature on governance we see diversity in the governing arrange-
ments and an abiding interest in the different ways in which public structures of government
are interconnected with networks of non-state actors. In a collected work on ‘the shadow of
hierarchy and new modes of governance’, there is an echo of the Type I–Type II formulation,
where two modes of governance are identified: ‘territorially bounded democratic government’
based on decision-making by public legislators and officials; and ‘sectoral governance’, which
is decision-making by public and/or private actors in delimited areas (Héritier and Lehmkuhl
2008). However, while the need for the two analytically distinct modes is argued to be neces-
sary, the main thrust is on the need to understand the linkages between the two forms and how
the shadow of hierarchy (Type I) influences sectoral governance (Type II).
A later collection on new modes of governance in Europe similarly articulates the idea of
governance as ‘co-production’ between public and private actors (Bartoloni 2011). There
is a wide range of forms of co-production, including the involvement of different kinds of
co-producers at different national and international levels, the different kinds of activity of
co-producers, and different ways of achieving co-production in different institutional contexts.
In the conclusion to the collected work on EU MLG referred to above (Kohler-Koch and Larat
2009), Olsen stresses the complexity and diversity of governing forms and their interlinkages:
‘different modes then compete with, and complement each other and they operate in different
and shifting mixes, variations that are unlikely to be captured by simple dichotomies seen
as providing exclusive alternatives’ (Olsen 2009: 196). Although the critique is primarily of
‘government’ versus ‘governance’ and ‘old’ versus ‘new’ forms of governance, rather than
536  Handbook on theories of governance

on the Type I–Type II formulation, the argument is that governance has become complex and
multifaceted; there is at once a need for a synthesis and recognition of complexity.
In MLG and associated areas of governance we therefore see a variety of interconnected
systems of governance rather than two distinctly different types. The binary divide thus
appears problematic not only because it fails to represent this variety and interconnectedness,
but also because there are no analytical tools to help us understand it.

CONCLUSION
Our purpose here is to suggest it might be time to go beyond the binary divide. There is much
in the idea of MLG that has been and continues to be of use to scholars. However, just as the
first wave of MLG scholarship was overtaken by the second wave focus on ‘two types’, it may
now be time for a new wave. Studies over the past decade or so have illustrated that, while
the ‘two types’ distinction continues to provide a reference point for scholars, its analytical
purchase is limited. Here we suggest a number of contributions that might help in moving the
debate on MLG forward, but there are other literatures that space does not allow us to reflect
on here that may also be useful: those on regulation, policy networks and depoliticization
strategies being just three. Such approaches might be fruitfully employed alongside MLG to
tease out the distinctions and dynamics present in different types of governance jurisdictions.
Moreover, the focus on two types has somewhat crowded out research on MLG as a concept
drawing attention to the dynamics between levels. This aspect was central to the initial formu-
lation of MLG and a large part of its appeal. It raised important questions about the strategies,
tactics, power and influence of different actors in a changing context that are equally impor-
tant today. The binary formulation encourages a focus on jurisdictions operating at the same
territorial level, for which there are many analytical contenders. Multi-level governance as
territorially overarching policy networks requires a focus both across and between levels (i.e.
matrix and diagonal governance relationships that still remain understudied).
Overall, MLG has travelled far from its origins in EU structural policy. As well as making
a significant contribution to the understanding of EU governance, it has been deployed in the
analysis of many international and non-European national settings across the world. For some,
it has ‘been thrown around by scholars like a favourite coat … perhaps one worn so often that it
has now become threadbare’ (Stephenson 2013: 817). In this chapter we have raised questions
about the suitability of the binary formulation for the analysis of contemporary governance.
In particular, we see much overlapping, interconnection and blurring of the lines dividing the
two types. At the very least it seems that the formulation requires development to reflect this.
To be sure, Hooghe and Marks (2003: 241) recognized the need for a formulation with a finer
grain: ‘Specialists will surely wish to make finer distinctions than the ones we draw. There is
an extensive variation within each type.’ This, however, implies that the finer grain required is
within each of the two types; we suggest the finer grain is also required between and beyond
the two types in order to conceptualize variety and interconnectedness. Moreover, and think-
ing of the adage of ‘not throwing the baby out with the bathwater’, we argue that the binary
formulation of MLG might obscure the advantages of the original formulation of MLG, which
remains as relevant as ever.1
 Multi-level governance  537

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the editors of this volume for their very helpful comments on
this chapter. We would also like to acknowledge the support of the UK Economic and
Social Research Council (Multi-level Governance, Transport Policy and Carbon Emissions
Management, Grant Ref: ES/J007439/1, 2010).

NOTE
1. For a fuller discussion of the arguments presented in this chapter, see Bache et al. (2015).

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47. EU and supranational governance
Diana Panke and Miguel Haubrich-Seco

INTRODUCTION
Always in flux and subject to the transfer of new competences from member states to the
European level, the European Union (EU)1 is a fertile breeding ground from which new
governance mechanisms and structures emerge and grow. To a probably unique extent and
depth, the EU combines international, national and local layers of decision-making across
a wide variety of policy fields. In many of these fields, governance is provided by both state
and non-state actors. It is therefore no surprise that the EU has led to a strong diversity of gov-
ernance modes in political practice – followed by an equally rich literature on the topic. The
so-called “governance turn” (Jachtenfuchs 2001; Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2006) in EU
studies testifies to these developments, which led to an increase in scholarly interest in regard
to old but especially to new modes of governance (NMGs). While supranational governance
is certainly the most prominent addition to the “toolkit” of governance that can be attributed
to European integration, many other modes of governance have emerged over the more than
six decades since the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was founded in 1951. The
chapter presents the key empirical variants of governance in current EU policy-making and
shows how they have evolved over time. Then it sheds light on up to date research questions
and concludes with a reflection on gaps in the research on EU and supranational governance.

KEY CONCEPTUAL AND DEFINITIONAL ISSUES: EU

GOVERNANCE BETWEEN “OLD” AND “NEW”
Starting from the definition of governance as “the formal and informal processes through
which society and the economy are steered in accordance with common goals” (see also the
Introduction in this Handbook), the first division along which governance in the EU can be
structured is that between “old” and “new” modes of governance.
“Old” modes of governance are those that have characterized EU decision-making for
most of its history: supranational or “community” decision-making on the one hand and
intergovernmental decision-making on the other. These modes of decision-making are usually
characterized by a clear – for example formal – attribution of competences enshrined in the EU
treaties.2 They also entail a clear sense of hierarchy between the participating actors, allowing
for binding decisions. The further evolution of EU governance has made supranational and
intergovernmental governance two “ideal types” that define the borders of a continuum along
which additional – “new” – modes of governance have developed. These are often used in
policy fields in which the attributions of competence are less formal (e.g. in fields without
EU competence or where competences are shared between the EU and its member states),
thus entailing a less hierarchical relationship between the actors in the field. In consequence,

540
 EU and supranational governance  541

decisions made under the auspices of new modes of governance are often non-binding, relying
on the voluntary agreement of all involved participants.

TRADITIONAL MODES OF EU GOVERNANCE:

INTERGOVERNMENTAL AND SUPRANATIONAL GOVERNANCE

Intergovernmental Governance

Intergovernmental decision-making is the pre-eminent governance mode in those areas of EU

policy-making in which the member states have been most reluctant to cede competences to
the EU level. Intergovernmental decision-making usually foresees no role – or at most a con-
sultative or technical role – for the Commission.
In its purest form, intergovernmental decision-making is used in the Common Security
and Defence Policy (CSDP), the EU’s policy field devoted to crisis management and military
cooperation. In this field, decisions are taken by unanimous agreement of the member states,3
acting upon a proposal of the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy
or of a member state (Article 42 TEU). As for the whole Common Foreign and Security
Policy (to which CSDP belongs), the role of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) is severely
constrained by the EU Treaty (European Union 2012a), which excludes these areas from
its jurisdiction (Article 24(1) TEU). Hence, no supranational institution is placed above the
member states in this field.
At the same time, intergovernmental governance is increasingly being exercised by the
European Council, the summit of the heads of state or government of the EU member states.4
While the European Council has played an important role for several decades most notably
concerning the general directions of EU integration, its “upgrading” into a formal institution
with a permanent president since 2010 has contributed to a more active role. This role is
especially prominent in those policy areas that sit outside of the supranational, “community”
decision-making process, such as foreign policy and economic governance (Puetter 2013). The
European Council is tasked not only to provide “general political directions and priorities”
(Article 15(1) TEU), but also to coordinate or mediate in specific policy areas (e.g. in judicial
cooperation or economic governance). While it shall explicitly not “exercise legislative func-
tions” (Article 15(1) TEU), meaning that it cannot actively participate in the development of
EU directives and resolutions, it has occasionally intervened in on-going legislative matters
(European Council 2012: 3).
In line with the increased role of the European Council, other intergovernmental forums and
ad hoc “coalitions of the willing” have gained relevance over the last few years, especially in
light of the financial and economic crisis or the refugee crisis. For instance, the need to find
quick and unprecedented solutions to defuse the consequences of the crisis has increased the
protagonism of the Eurogroup (the meeting of finance ministers in the Eurozone) (Puetter
2016). Beyond these governance modes foreseen in the treaties, intergovernmental governance
also plays a role outside of the formally defined competences of the EU whenever (a number
of) member states decide to find an agreement either in an area that is not an EU competence
or when they prefer to pursue a policy outside of the treaty framework. In such instances, the
participating member states enter a separate intergovernmental treaty. These treaties can and
occasionally do resort to the EU institutions to fulfill their objectives. One prominent example
542  Handbook on theories of governance

is the “Fiscal Compact,” which is designed to strengthen budgetary discipline and makes
use of the Commission and the Council of Ministers (European Union 2012d). Often, such
agreements have later been incorporated into the EU legal order, as in the case of the Schengen
agreement, which eliminated checks at the common borders between a number of EU member
states (Article 77 TFEU).

Supranational Governance

Supranational decision-making and supranational institutions are a distinctive feature of the

EU when compared to most other regional organizations. Supranational actors have the ability
to take decisions binding upon member states and other actors – even against the will of the
member states. The European Commission, the ECJ and the European Central Bank (ECB) are
the three actors that enjoy supranational power directly granted to them by the treaties. In its
purest form, supranational governance can be found in the fields of competition and monetary
policy, areas in which the Commission and the ECB can issue binding decisions affecting indi-
vidual businesses and governments or monetary policy, respectively (Article 105(2), Article
106(3) and Article 127(2) TFEU; cf. Börzel 2010).5 In the case of competition policy, these
decisions can be appealed to the ECJ, which can again decide independently from any national
authority (Article 263 TFEU).
The ECJ contributes to supranational governance through its role in ensuring a uniform
interpretation of EU law across all member states. Through the so-called preliminary-rulings
procedure, national courts can or must ask the ECJ to interpret EU law before issuing their
own rulings (Article 267 TFEU). Preliminary rulings issued by the ECJ do then become an
interpretation that binds all courts in all EU member states (Chalmers et al. 2010: 169–171).
In conjunction with several further principles that have been developed by ECJ jurisdiction,6
this strives to create a uniform legal order. As long as the question at hand relates to EU law,
this legal order supersedes the national orders, thereby constituting a form of supranational
governance. In a similar vein, infringement proceedings initiated by the Commission in cases
in which member states are in breach of EU law allow for the imposition of fines upon the
respective member state (Article 260 TFEU).
Supranational power is also reflected in legislative decision-making through the ordinary
legislative procedure (OLP),7 which is often referred to as the “community method.” The OLP
takes place in the “institutional triangle” formed by the European Commission, the Council of
the EU (usually referred to as “Council of Ministers”) embodying the governments of the 27
member states,8 and the European Parliament (EP) as the directly elected body representing the
citizens of the EU.9 This mode of decision-making places the Commission in a leading role, as
it is the sole holder of the right of initiative, which it must exercise in the interest of the whole
Union, refraining from national interests (Article 17(3) TEU). Once the Commission has tabled
a proposal for EU secondary legislation in the form of a directive or regulation,10 the European
Parliament as supranational institution and the Council of Ministers as intergovernmental
institution decide upon it as co-legislators. Thus, under the OLP, no EU law can be passed
against the agreement of the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. Depending
on the issue at stake, the Council decides by different majority thresholds, ranging from una-
nimity (e.g. for the harmonization of taxation rules) to simple majority. The most common
threshold is a qualified majority calculated on the basis of population size and number of states
(Article 16(4) TEU; Article 238 TFEU).11 Practice shows however that most decisions are still
 EU and supranational governance  543

taken by consensus (Novak 2013: 1092). Since the Treaty of Lisbon, the OLP is the standard
legislative procedure. Unless otherwise specified in the treaties, regulations and directives are
to be passed by the process described.
Other legislative procedures can be differentiated according to the degree of involvement
of the EP, with the consent and consultation procedures granting it the role of a veto player or
a right to state non-binding opinions, respectively. Over the last few years, both procedures
have lost relevance in favor of the OLP, which was first introduced in 1993 by the Maastricht
Treaty. Prior to the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009, the consent and consultation procedures applied
to about 40 percent of all decision-making procedures reflected in the treaties. Since Lisbon,
they have accounted for less than 30 percent (Diedrichs 2011: 222). Whenever the consulta-
tion and consent procedures foresee that the Commission has the exclusive right to initiate
EU secondary legislation (directives and regulations), they can be considered supranational
forms of governance in the EU. But, compared to the OLP, these procedures are less strongly
supranational in character, owing to the greater competencies and powers attributed to the
inter-governmental Council of Ministers in relation to the supranational European Parliament.
Although procedures exist through which the EP and citizens may ask the Commission to
propose legislation, the Commission is not bound to follow these requests.

“NEW” MODES OF EU GOVERNANCE BETWEEN NEGOTIATION

AND COMPETITION

As the areas of EU activity have been expanding over the years – often accompanied by
a reluctance of the member states to formally transfer competences to the supranational
level (Diedrichs et al. 2011: 24–31) – the modes of governance used in the EU have become
manifold. In the literature, these diverse modes of governance have been referred to as “new”
modes of governance (Héritier 2002). Opposed to the traditional modes, new modes of gov-
ernance are often characterized by informality and the lack of a clearly defined hierarchy in the
relationship between the intervening actors.12 In practice, however, new modes of governance
are often used in combination with traditional decision-making or in areas in which traditional
governance would also be possible. This relationship casts a “shadow of hierarchy” (Héritier
and Lehmkuhl 2008: 1–2), as institutions and legislators can threaten to issue binding decisions
or legislation if the results of non-hierarchical governance do not fulfill their expectations.
In order to present the wide variety of new governance modes, it is helpful to cluster them
according to the two predominant mechanisms of social coordination they represent: negoti-
ation and competition. Negotiation implies a situation in which the participating actors find
a result by mutual agreement, while in competition different actors pursue the same goal,
thereby spontaneously coordinating their behavior. In the latter case, the rules that structure
the competition are often set by governmental actors, which thereby remain in command of the
governance situation (Börzel 2010: 195–196).

Negotiation

EU governance by negotiation is often present as an ancillary to the more formal modes of

governance described in the previous section. With most of the legislation under the OLP
being adopted at first reading (Reh et al. 2011), informal “trilogues” have become a domi-
544  Handbook on theories of governance

nant trait in EU legislation. Trilogues are meetings between the European Commission, the
members of Parliament responsible for a specific piece of legislation (rapporteurs) and the
presidency of the Council of Ministers. Their purpose is to achieve an agreement that will be
acceptable to both legislative institutions, the Parliament and the Council, in order to adopt the
secondary legislation at first reading (Roederer-Rynning and Greenwood 2020). Once these
informal negotiations are concluded, the Council of Ministers and the plenary of the European
Parliament usually adopt this informal agreement, bringing it back on to the formal legislative
path.
A similar example can be found in the widespread use of committees formed by member
state representatives to control the European Commission when it implements EU legislation
(a task delegated to it by member states; Article 290, 291 TFEU). Decisions in this so-called
“comitology” procedure are formally taken by qualified majority. However, the fact that the
more than 200 committees interact over long periods of time in narrow areas of expertise13 has
raised the expectation that these are deliberative forums where arguments count more than the
number of votes (Joerges 2001). Empirical studies across policy fields are nonetheless scarce
and find support for the role both of votes and of deliberation (Blom-Hansen and Brandsma
2009).

Competition

Governance by competition in the EU is not a new phenomenon, but rather a mode of govern-
ance that has had a significant career and has expanded to more and more policy fields over
time. Its origins can be drawn back to a ground-breaking decision of the ECJ, which in its
“Cassis de Dijon” ruling established the principle of mutual recognition for the internal market
(ECJ 1979). According to this principle, goods that are lawful in one member state can also be
sold in all other member states.14 In practice, mutual recognition entails that all member states
can retain the national regulation of their markets but are also affected by regulations in other
member states. This situation can spur a dynamic in which peer pressure or market forces urge
member states to adapt their regulation to that of other EU members. Such competition can in
principle only be limited by agreeing on common standards.
Over time, competition has moved to additional areas of EU governance. It plays a role both
as an instrument of governance and as an incentive for governance. For example, competition
is used in cases in which legal enforcement is possible, but entails high costs that are to be
avoided. Following this latter goal, a “single market scoreboard” compares and publishes
the performance of member states in transposing EU legislation into national law (Sabel and
Zeitlin 2012; European Commission 2014). In policy areas in which member states have not
agreed to cede competences to the EU, competition has not been a direct instrument for gov-
ernance, but has often incentivized the regulation of new policy areas. This is the case in the
field of direct taxation. The fact that companies can quite easily relocate to any EU member
state can lead states to compete on corporate taxation. While this area has been shielded from
direct EU competences, this perceived competition has sparked some limited attempts to reg-
ulate this area, albeit met with strong political difficulties.15
 EU and supranational governance  545

Competing under Negotiated Rules

The so-called Open Method of Coordination (OMC) lies between negotiation and competi-
tion. It functions in an eminently intergovernmental way in policy areas for which the EU
either has no competence or is only tasked to help in coordinating member states, such as
employment policy (Article 5(2) TEU). Member states agree on common objectives and on
sets of guidelines or benchmarks that are adopted by the Council. In order to achieve these,
governments may be required to draw up action plans that are regularly monitored. The role of
the Commission is usually limited to acting as a secretariat that assesses whether the objectives
have been met. From this context, a governance situation arises in which member states set the
rules under which they can then compete to achieve specific policy objectives.
In some policy areas, the OMC has evolved into a more formal and hierarchical mode of
governance by the addition of treaty-based sanctions and gradual expansion of enforcement
measures. This is the case for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), an instrument of EU
governance that has gained prominence in the last few years as a result of the economic and
financial crisis. Created in 1997 to coordinate fiscal policies, especially of those EU states
that use the euro as currency, it is based on an intergovernmental peer review and on a sanc-
tioning by peers (e.g. through decisions in the Council). As this mode of decision-making
proved ineffective, recent reforms have intertwined the OMC-inspired SGP with instruments
of supranational supervision and decision-making (European Union 2011) – thereby partly
unveiling the hitherto weak “shadow of hierarchy” in this specific policy domain – as well
as with enforcement mechanisms established outside of the treaties (the TSCG). The less
formal and non-binding character of new modes of governance allows for the participation of
private actors in the process of governance. Beyond the usual role of defending their respective
interests, private actors may also contribute to the issuance of norms and rules. Private actors
can include the umbrella organizations representing the interests of labor and employers,
as in the case of employment policy, or organizations administering technical standards on
issues pertaining to the EU’s internal market (the “European standardization organizations”;
cf. European Union 2012c). However, research shows that their influence is generally low
(Börzel 2010: 201–203) and varies strongly according to the policy area at stake, with private
actors being most present in fields such as environmental or social policy, but less visible
in the traditional fields of national sovereignty such as foreign policy or legal cooperation
(Diedrichs et al. 2011: 34).

EMPIRICS: PATTERNS AND TRENDS IN THE EVOLUTION OF EU

GOVERNANCE

As a constant struggle between national and supranational governance actors, the pooling of
sovereignty and transfer of competences seldom lead to “pure” modes of governance. While
hybrid modes are widely evident, a dynamic perspective reveals two additional important
trends in the evolution of EU governance (see Figure 47.1).
Observing the horizontal axis in Figure 47.1, we can first see an evolution in decision-making
from the nation-state to non-state actors at the European level. Modes of governance that were
first developed informally and without binding decisions or through agreements outside the
EU treaties tend to be formalized and integrated into the general treaty framework later on.
546  Handbook on theories of governance

Note: Where the decision-making procedures have been introduced through treaty changes, the dates refer to the
date of entry into force, not to the date of adoption.

Figure 47.1 Examples of EU governance forms

In the process, they also move up the vertical axis of Figure 47.1. Two examples for these
phenomena have already been discussed above: the gradual reinforcement of the SGP by inter-
twining it with fields of binding, supranational decision-making and the inclusion of the once
intergovernmentally governed Schengen area into the EU treaties. In other cases we observe
that modes of governance that are relatively old, but were once limited to narrow policy areas,
expand their scope over time and become more frequent in overall EU governance. This is for
example the case for the comitology procedure, which was introduced for agricultural policy.
In practice, these developments imply a transfer of governance from the national, state level to
the supranational level of European institutions.
It is still unclear whether this trend will continue in the future. In recent years, and as a con-
sequence of the economic and financial crisis, governance outside the treaty framework and
intergovernmental decision-making have seen a resurgence. Several mechanisms have been
set up outside the treaties to prevent a reigniting of the financial turmoil that affected most EU
member states and the euro currency.16 At the same time, the role of formal and informal inter-
governmental decision-making bodies, such as the European Council or the “Eurogroup” of
Eurozone finance ministers for shaping EU governance, has increased and is being called the
“new intergovernmentalism” (Puetter 2012: 166–167). These developments can also be seen
from the perspective of an increasing differentiation in the EU’s political system, a pattern that
has characterized European integration, especially from the 1990s on (Dyson and Sepos 2010;
Leuffen et al. 2013). As the EU grows in membership and expands into new policy areas,
modes of governance are further differentiated to accommodate the increased divergence of
interests inside the EU.
 EU and supranational governance  547

The second trend can be observed on the vertical axis of Figure 47.1, which depicts the
evolution and relationship between non-binding and binding modes of governance. Two
patterns that both portray a trend for policies to move from non-binding to binding modes of
governance can be seen here. The first pattern reflects a tendency for non-binding, often infor-
mal, modes of governance to evolve into more binding, formal ones. This transformation often
goes hand in hand with a movement on the horizontal axis, as the examples of the SGP and
the Schengen area illustrate. These fields are integrated into the treaty framework or combined
with supranational policies, increasing the power of the Commission, ECJ and Parliament over
these fields as well. The second pattern is that non-binding modes of governance often appear
in conjunction with binding ones. New, non-binding and informal modes of governance often
complement “old” modes of governance, not least because they offer advantages in terms of
speed (the case of the trilogues) or stronger acceptance by potential veto players (the case of
the comitology procedure) or stakeholders (in the case of industry standards). This pattern
can be best explained through the “shadow of hierarchy”: new modes of governance often
contribute to governance in areas that could also be subject to hierarchical decision-making.

CENTRAL RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND LACUNAE

Regional integration research started off as a study of the processes and scope conditions for
regional integration to emerge and prosper (Haas 1958; Hoffmann 1966). The second wave of
academic engagement examined politics, policies and polity of the various regional organiza-
tions, most prominently the European Union, focusing on the impact of regional integration
on its members and vice versa (Börzel and Risse 2000; Cowles et al. 2001; Börzel and Panke
2010; Börzel et al. 2010; Panke 2010a). In a third wave, researchers examined how governance
is organized in regional organizations, with a special emphasis on questions of effectiveness
as well as legitimacy (Banchoff and Smith 1999; Scharpf 1999; Dobson and Weale 2003). In
a fourth wave, researchers have started to situate regional integration into the global context,
analyzing how regional organizations are influenced by international developments as well
as by international and transnational actors and vice versa (Mansfield and Milner 1999; Telò
2001; Van Langenhove 2011; Panke 2013; Haubrich-Seco 2019). Research on EU govern-
ance is plentiful. This section highlights two aspects of the third wave of regional integration
research. It sheds light on questions of the legitimacy and effectiveness of the EU in regard to
old as well as new modes of governance.
The community method and the role of the actors in the policy-formulation process of the
day-to-day operation of the European Union have received much scholarly attention. A major
focus of this research has been the efficiency and effectiveness of the operation of intergovern-
mental negotiations in the Council of Ministers. In order to work effectively as an institution
within the EU multilevel system and cope with the high workload, the Council of Ministers
is characterized by a horizontal (different Council formations depending on the policy area at
stake) and a vertical division of labor (ministerial level, ambassadorial level) (Committee of
Permanent Representatives) and working group level (more than 150 working groups in which
state attachés and diplomats negotiate). In this context, researchers have analyzed the influ-
ence and power of individual states, thereby illustrating that larger states tend to have higher
negotiation effectiveness scores in the Council of Ministers (Panke 2010b, 2012) and tend to
be more successful in influencing EU directives and regulations in line with national positions.
548  Handbook on theories of governance

This is not only due to their greater weight in qualified majority voting situations on the min-
isterial level of the Council (Thomson et al. 2006). It is also due to the fact that larger states
have larger staffs and financial and administrative capacities. Home ministries, therefore, are
better able to swiftly develop high quality negotiation instructions. In contrast, smaller, poorer
states more often struggle to do so, as a result of which their diplomats and attachés cannot
participate in the working group negotiations of the Council of Ministers as actively, although
the overwhelming majority of Council negotiations are concluded on this level (Panke 2011,
2012). Thus, domestic efficiency and effectiveness in formulating national positions influence
the effectiveness of member states in the Council, especially since the Council of Ministers has
a vertical division of labor to ensure its effective operation.
The European Parliament has not always been a strong legislative actor, but its competen-
cies have been extended over the course of more than 60 years of EU integration (Thomson
and Hosli 2006). Under the OLP, the Council of Ministers and the EP are equally important
co-legislators. Given that EU integration has led to the transfer of more and more compe-
tencies from the member states to the supranational level, national parliaments have lost
competencies relative to national governments, as the latter are represented in the Council of
Ministers, whereas the former do not participate in the EU’s legislative institutions (Martin
1995; Andersen and Burns 1996; Norton 1996). Thus, strengthening the EP in relation to
the Council of Ministers is often regarded as strengthening the democratic legitimacy of EU
governance (Bellamy and Castiglione 2000; Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2007), since the EP
is the only institution that is directly elected by the peoples of Europe. However, research has
pointed towards a paradox: while the EP has been strengthened over time, electoral turnout has
declined, with the 2019 EP election as a notable exception (Siaroff 2001; Shackleton 2002).
Questions of effectiveness and legitimacy are also important in regard to new modes of
governance. In NMGs, non-state actors often play an important role. For example, in the
Open Method of Coordination, the involvement of non-state actors ranges from the provision
of information and expertise to participation in negotiations and the implementation of rec-
ommendations and other outcomes (Hodson and Maher 2001; Armstrong 2003; Borrás and
Jacobsson 2004). Non-state actors are even more prevalent when it comes to public–private
partnerships or to self-regulation, for example concerning technical norms or details in the
provision of services, both of which are also forms of NMGs (Garcia Martinez et al. 2007;
Héritier and Eckert 2008). But why would state and non-state actors alike voluntarily engage
in NMGs? Do they comply with the policy outcomes? Can NMGs be effective at all? Research
tends to address these questions together. Even non-state actors have incentives to engage in
NMGs, as this is a means to exert influence over the related policies and preempt a binding
legal act, where they might have little say. In other words, the shadow of hierarchy cast by the
possibility of intergovernmental or supranational centralized governance creates incentives to
engage in voluntary cooperation and effectively work towards the development of common
norms and standards. Moreover, the shadow of hierarchy, most notably the ability of EU
institutions to create and enforce binding rules on the basis of “old modes of governance”
if NMGs should prove ineffective, also increases the incentives for compliance and thus the
effectiveness of non-binding arrangements resulting from NMGs (Héritier 2003; Héritier and
Rhodes 2010).
Given that NMGs are often informally embedded in institutionalized forms of
decision-making, such as the OLP or intergovernmental conferences, and given that NMGs
tend to be effective, the question of the legitimacy of NMGs arises. To what extent do NMGs
 EU and supranational governance  549

juxtapose or contribute to the legitimacy of EU governance as a whole? Similarly to the

legitimacy-related research concerning old modes of governance, there is no one simple
answer to this question concerning NMGs either. On the one hand, research points out that
non-state actors are not subject to democratic controls and that even state actors in NMGs tend
to lack accountability (Héritier 2002; Pech 2003; Caporaso and Wittenbrinck 2006). On the
other hand, compared to old modes of governance, NMGs are often characterized by a broader
access to collective actors and increased potential for deliberation, which can positively con-
tribute to the legitimacy of the EU (Manin 1987; Cohen 2003). In this sense, the operation of
NMGs in the shadow of hierarchy of old modes of governance can positively contribute to the
overall effectiveness of EU governance and also the EU’s legitimacy.
As this chapter has illustrated, research on the EU distinguishes between different types
of intergovernmental governance, supranational governance and new modes of governance
and provides insights into how they evolved in the course of European integration as well
as in their operation across various policy areas. However, the exclusive focus on the EU
has limited the comparability of dynamics and outcomes of the different governance modes
across political systems. To what extent is the EU a system sui generis and to what extent are
the different forms of EU governance also prevalent in other regional organizations (such as
ASEAN, AU, ANDEAN, ECOWAS, SCO), in international organizations or in states? Do the
scope conditions under which a mode of governance is effective or contributes to legitimacy
vary across political systems? Which problems or policy areas are best dealt with by which
mode of governance and by which combination? Can we generalize from the EU case to other
political systems and can we, vice versa, learn something about EU governance from studying
different modes of governance within the nation-state and in international organizations?
These questions are important, but are not often and not systematically addressed.17 Thus, they
reflect avenues for future research on EU and supranational governance.

NOTES
1. In this chapter, the term “EU” is also used for the predecessors of the EU such as the European
Communities unless explicitly mentioned otherwise.
2. EU competences are governed by the “principle of conferral,” meaning that the EU may only
become active in areas for which the member states have authorized it. These competences are listed
in articles 2 to 6 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) (European Union
2012b).
3. With the exception of Denmark, which does not participate in the CSDP.
4. The European Council is to be distinguished from the previously mentioned Council of the EU. The
latter is formed by ministers of the 27 member state governments.
5. To mention a prominent example, the Commission fined Microsoft €561 million for not offering
users of its operating system the choice between different web browsers (European Commission
2013). In monetary policy, the ECB influences the general interest rate by determining the amount
of euro currency in the market.
6. The “direct effect” and the “primacy of EU law” principles are the two most important in this regard.
The principle of direct effect establishes that individuals can refer to EU law before any court, even
if the matter has not yet been transposed to national law. The primacy of EU law establishes that EU
law supersedes national law, even at a constitutional level (Chalmers et al. 2010: 203–205).
7. Prior to the Treaty of Lisbon, this mode of governance was commonly referred to as the co-decision
procedure.
550  Handbook on theories of governance

8. Depending on the issue at stake, the Council of Ministers sits in different constellations (e.g. agricul-
ture ministers concerning a regulation on fertilizers, or economy ministers concerning a regulation
on chemical goods).
9. The European Parliament is composed of 705 deputies from the 27 member states, who are
organized alongside European political groups. Since 1979, the deputies are directly elected by the
citizens of the EU member states.
10. The EU’s primary law is constituted by the treaties, while the secondary law usually takes the form
of binding regulations and binding directives.
11. The Treaty of Lisbon simplified qualified majority voting (QMV) with the principle of double
majority. This principle combines the democratic one-citizen, one-vote principle with the inter-
national legal one-state, one-vote principle. Accordingly, if QMV takes place in the Council of
Ministers, a decision requires that at least 55 percent of the member states opt for it, representing at
least 65 percent of the EU’s population.
12. Other definitions focus on the multiplicity of actors, emphasizing that private actors play a promi-
nent role in NMG (e.g. Héritier and Lehmkuhl 2011: 49–50).
13. Thus, comitology is an example of network governance in the EU (Börzel 1998; Jönsson et al. 1998;
Pfetsch 1998; Eising and Kohler-Koch 1999; Börzel and Panke 2006).
14. In the “Cassis de Dijon” case, a German authority had forbidden the sale of the French crème de
cassis in Germany, arguing that it did not comply with the local regulations for liquor. The ECJ
decided that this prohibition constituted an unjustified restriction of trade and that it was sufficient
if the product complied with the rules of the member state where it was produced. In practice, this
entails that member states have to mutually recognize their market standards (except for clearly
specified reasons).
15. An example is the attempt to agree on a voluntary common tax base (while leaving tax rates open
for competition) (European Commission 2011).
16. These mechanisms include the previously mentioned “Fiscal Compact” (European Union 2012d),
the European Stability Mechanism designed to provide financial assistance to ailing states in the
Eurozone, and the Single Resolution Mechanism for winding up banks.
17. Exceptions are the early work on whether federalism can and should be used as a blueprint for the
final shape of European integration (although the focus is less on modes of governance used and the
conditions under which they are effective or legitimate, and more on the normative question on the
ends of EU integration; for overviews see Burgess 2000 and McKay 2002) and the research strand
“comparative regionalism” (which compares the institutional development as well as the polity,
politics and policy of the EU to those of other regional organizations; e.g. Nye 1965; Söderbaum
and Shaw 2003; Väyrynen 2003; Gómez-Mera 2008; Warleigh and Rosamond 2010; Wunderlich
2012).

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48. Transnational economic governance
Walter Mattli and Jack Seddon

INTRODUCTION
The inclusion of governance in the conceptual foundations of the global political economy can
be traced to the 1970s (Keohane and Nye 1974). The core trends associated with the rise of
global economic governance are strong linkages between proliferating actors from different
institutional levels (sub-national, national and supranational) and sites of authority (public and
private) that have shifted authority away from its traditional location in intergovernmental
organizations (IGOs) and changed its form, away from hierarchy and direct regulation towards
softer forms of law and indirect market-based instruments (Kahler and Lake 2003).
By now it is widely accepted that the structure and arrangement of global economic man-
agement has been transformed. A bewildering range of governance concepts, including “dele-
gated governance,” “experimental governance,” “multi-level governance,” “multi-stakeholder
governance,” “hybrid governance,” “network governance,” “complex governance,” and
“incorporated trans-governmentalism,” have been introduced to make the point. The transi-
tion to governance has been understood almost exclusively in functionalist terms (Slaughter
2004). In functionalist accounts, the allocation of policy responsibilities and authority in new
governance arrangements is explained either through efficiencies in the allocation of collective
institutional goods or the proposition that the structural properties of regulatory systems tend
towards greater specialization and stratification over time as the environmental systems they
regulate become more complex. The move to governance is seen as a synergistic force, helping
to coordinate and empower actors to meet functional needs.
The fundamental difficulty with functional accounts is not that they are necessarily wrong
but that they are often misleading. The gains from functional differentiation and specialization
are important. However, by limiting the analysis to these factors, the literature misses how
political power and conflict skew the workings of governance arrangements, favoring some
more than others – often in unintended or unexpected ways. Lacking a clearly articulated
theory of power and accepting at face value formal institutional linkages and contracts,
functionalist frameworks do not satisfactorily explain the distributional dimensions of global
economic governance.
This recalls Krasner’s famous critique of neo-liberal institutionalism: “[I]ndeed, institutional
arrangements [are] necessary to resolve coordination problems Without [these arrangements]
all parties would [be] worse off. There are, however, many points along the Pareto frontier”
(Krasner 1991: 337). The analysis of power remains pertinent to governance today. However,
state power, military might, and the size of the economy – central to Krasner’s analysis – are
less relevant to the new structures of global economic governance. The challenge is to identify
the alternative sources of decisive influence and where such power has been migrating in key
areas of the global economy.
In this chapter, we focus on cooptation as a particularly salient global governance arrange-
ment connecting governmental and non-governmental actors. States and inter-governmental

555
556  Handbook on theories of governance

organizations have found irresistible cause in the globalizing economy to coopt transnational
governance actors (non-governmental organizations (NGOs), private standard setters, and so
forth) to manage the challenges of economic inter-dependence. The strategy of cooptation
offers a means to augment global governing capacities. Yet, as Philip Selznick first showed,
cooptation can have unintended consequences, shifting the locus of power and authority within
a governance architecture. Following a brief literature review, we place this fertile insight in
a novel analytical framework to explain when and how power moves in the much vaunted
shifts from global economic “government” to “transnational governance.” We also extend
our analysis to think about the place of cooptation in the arena of capital market governance.

THE CONCEPT OF COOPTATION

The concept of cooptation was coined by organizational sociologist Philip Selznick in his
landmark study on the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) published in 1949. Selznick defines
cooptation as “the process of absorbing new elements into the leadership or policy-determining
structure of an organization” as a means of maintaining relevance and effectiveness in provid-
ing public goods and services (Selznick 1949: 13). He distinguishes two types of cooptation,
depending on the nature of the problem to be solved: formal and informal cooptation.
Formal cooptation occurs when the legitimacy of the authority of a governing group or
agency is called into question and “involves the establishment of openly avowed and formally
ordered relationships. Appointments [of outsiders] to official posts are made, contracts are
signed, new organizations are established – all signifying participation in the process of deci-
sion and administration” (Selznick 1949: 13). A key point, according to Selznick, is that these
formal devices result in shared responsibility for power rather than truly shared power. This
form of cooptation bolsters the legitimacy of the initiating organization whilst “preserving the
locus of significant decisions in the hands of the initiating group” (Selznick 1949: 14).
Informal cooptation, by contrast, tends to impose a significant cost on the initiating group in
terms of transferred de facto power and authority. Unlike formal cooptation, it is often a rather
quiet or secretive arrangement and not explicitly based on a contract. An organization may
realize that it no longer can fulfill a mandate or achieve a major policy goal without engaging
others that possess the necessary financial, technical, or informational resources. Informal
cooptation thus is not triggered by a lack or weakening of legitimacy; the initiator may enjoy
considerable legitimacy in the general public. Rather, the motivation stems from a desire to
achieve effectiveness and relevance in the face of new external challenges and few internal
means.

COOPTATION IN TRANSNATIONAL GOVERNANCE

Selznick’s conceptual innovation is highly relevant to the study of global economic gov-
ernance. Examples of cooptation – formal and informal – are abundant (see Figure 48.2 for
examples). The World Trade Organization (WTO), for example, has been linked through the
Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) and Technical Barriers to Trade
(TBT) agreements to private international standard setting organizations that set agricultural
product regulations, health and safety standards and a broad range of other product-related
 Transnational economic governance  557

standards. The global financial architecture is similarly no longer composed solely of the twin
Bretton Woods institutions but rather is the sum of cooptation arrangements between political
networks, for example the Group of Twenty (G20), IGOs, and a plethora of technocratic
authorities such as the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and International
Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO).
Cooptation has attained a particularly prominent status in the governance of the European
single market. Pioneered in the 1980s through the New Approach to product standard setting,
against a background of legal constraints and bureaucratic conservatism, there now exist over
20 pan-European specialized agencies that regulate the common market in conjunction with
the EU’s central institutions. The EU Commission also retains hundreds more cooptation
arrangements with NGOs, trade associations, and other actors. It is important to emphasize
that regional cooptation arrangements are not unique to Europe: the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for
instance, have also sought to realize governance objectives through cooptation.

COOPTATION AND SHIFTS IN GOVERNANCE POWER

Selznick’s conjectures regarding shifts in power and authority through cooptation hold for
a sizable subset of cases in the global economy – but to varying degrees, and in some they
do not hold. This suggests that Selznick’s propositions need to be embedded in a more fully
specified analytical framework. A key conjecture of this study is that in cooptation partners –
whether initiators or those who are coopted – often assume one of two complementary roles:
rule-making or rule-supporting. Rule-makers tend to accrue more power and gains over time
from cooptation for three reasons.
First, their technical or expert knowledge generates great information asymmetry between
partners, keeping the rule-supporter potentially in the dark or at bay. The latter partner may
trust the rule-maker but not fully understand the regulatory solutions proposed or grasp the
long-term implications of these solutions. Lack of information and knowledge makes it
difficult to effectively oppose a regulatory proposal that may have unfavorable distributional
implications. In other words, asymmetry reduces the constraints under which the rule-maker
operates, enabling the forging of solutions that will favor the interests of the rule-maker more
than those of the rule-supporter.
Second, rule-making is more constitutive than rule-supporting. A rule-maker is in the driv-
er’s seat, charting the course of action and continuously deciding which turn to take or not.
Rule-makers can use their power to directly enhance their own capacity for political action.
By contrast, rule-supporting activities – though critically important to effective governance
– are more discrete and backstage. A decision by an IGO, for example, to formally endorse
a rule-making partner can tremendously boost the legitimacy, authority, and leadership of the
rule-maker. However, the rule-supporting act of endorsement is a single event. Endorsement
can be revoked, of course, as can logistic or financial support. Nevertheless, rule-making is
a more continuous activity in the determination of cooperation outcomes.
Third, rules once set and adopted may be hard to change because of network effects. The
power to institute rules inevitably attracts actors outside the cooptation partnership with an
interest in the form and content of rules, gradually concentrating and reinforcing the locus
of relevant information and deliberation, decision and authority. The logic of these increas-
558  Handbook on theories of governance

ing returns is to spawn large networks of vested interests in and defenders of the rules and
rule-makers, increasing the cost to opponents seeking to dislodge their status. Network effects
entrench and magnify the power of the rule-maker over time and, ceteris paribus, render it
more difficult for the governance partner to successfully rectify the rules’ distributional biases
(David 1985; Arthur 1989; North 1990).
The ease with which rule-makers obtain their preferred outcomes (that is, realize their policy
preferences and maximize their organizational gains) is not constant, however. The price of
cooptation in terms of power and gains also depends on the number of (actual or potential)
partners. An organization facing a steady supply of (actual or potential) partners to coopt
incurs a lower opportunity cost (suspended gains if a partnership breaks down) than a less
easily substitutable partner. The former will find it easy to arrange an alternative arrangement
with another “supplier,” whereas the latter may be excluded from such an arrangement for
some time and thus incur a high opportunity cost. As a result, an actor is expected to accrue
fewer benefits or pay a higher price to institute and/or maintain a partnership with an organiza-
tion in a monopoly position than if the actor faces many (actual or potential) partners.
The combination of the two central variables of our framework – a rule-making versus
rule-supporting role and single/focal versus many cooptation partners – generates four con-
jectures for domain power and authority, listed in Figure 48.1. The figure plausibly assumes
that in a cooptation arrangement only one initiator is involved; this organization coopts either
a single/focal organization or multiple organizations.
One extreme is the case of a focal coopted organization assuming the task of principal
rule-maker. The initiator’s main contribution to the arrangement may be one of encouragement
and endorsement. In this arrangement, we would expect the coopted agent to be the primary
beneficiary. It takes most of the gains from the cooptation arrangement, defining the rules
(or policy) that will govern the behavior of states or private actors. If displeased with (some
of) these rules, the initiator will have few means at its disposal to put pressure on the cooptee
(Conjecture 1). At the other extreme is the case of a coopted player confined to a rule-supporting
role and easily substitutable. In this case, the distributional implications strongly favor the ini-
tiator; its power will not only remain unchallenged but may even be strengthened, since it can
leverage the organizational resources of the coopted partner (Conjecture 4).
The model generates two further conjectures. In cases where the coopted partner – selected
from a menu of possible partners – assumes a rule-making role, it will be able to set the agenda
and/or define the regulatory details, subject to minimal acceptability by the initiator. If dis-
pleased, the initiator may shop for a more compromising or pliant rule-making organization.
The distributional consequences weakly favor the coopted partner (Conjecture 2). Finally, in
cases where the initiator is in the rule-making driver’s seat, the outcome will favor the initi-
ator. However, if unhappy with the arrangement, the single partner can walk away from the
partnership, jeopardizing an effective solution. The initiator will have to make concessions and
compromise to avoid such an outcome (Conjecture 3).

ILLUSTRATING THE THEORY’S CONJECTURES

This section examines the conjectures regarding the downstream distributional implications
of informal cooptation in global economic governance using short case-studies. The selected
cases work through structured focused comparisons between Conjecture 1 and Conjectures 2,
 Transnational economic governance  559

Figure 48.1 Types of cooptation and distributional implications

3, and 4 respectively. We should observe different distributional outcomes across each com-
parison. Each selected case (listed in Figure 48.2 in bold) is representative of a much wider set
of cases corresponding to the various conjectures (see Figure 48.2).

Conjectures 1 and 2: European Accounting and Environmental Regulation

The analytical framework of this study suggests that coopting a focal independent rule-maker
is likely to result in distributional outcomes favoring the coopted partner. If displeased with
(some of) the rules, the initiator will have few effective options to bring about change. De facto
power shifts to the cooptee. The European Commission’s decision in February 2002 to coopt
the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), the focal private sector rule-maker in
global accounting standards, to develop a harmonized set of financial reporting rules in the EU
confirms this expectation.
560  Handbook on theories of governance

Note: Cases in bold are discussed in this chapter.

Figure 48.2 Cooptation examples corresponding to the theory’s conjectures

Since its cooptation by the Commission, the IASB has emerged as the clear winner. For
sure, both partners have been benefiting from their arrangement. The Commission has finally
achieved its objective of having a single set of financial reporting standards across Europe.
However, the IASB, in turn, received a big boost to its legitimacy as a global regulator
from EU endorsement, prompting major countries to set out timetables for adoption of or
convergence to IASB standards. By 2010, about 100 countries required compliance with
International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), up from fewer than 20 countries ten years
earlier. In short, IASB’s organizational interests have been very well served: demand for its
rules and services has surged and is likely to keep growing for years to come. Remarkably,
however, the IASB has been reaping these gains largely cost-free, that is, without concessions
to the Commission.
Shortly after endorsing the IASB, the Commission began to press the IASB to overhaul its
governance system on the grounds that Europe deserved much wider representation in IASB
rule-making. The complaint was that an Anglo-Saxon alliance could dictate the rules and
Europe would have to take them. However, the criticism cut no ice with the IASB. It countered
that, as it was a private sector expert body, membership selection must be guided not by polit-
ical or regional criteria but by technical expertise. The Commission possessed no real powers
to change course. The Commission has no formal role in IASB’s governance structure and
cannot intervene directly in the private rule-making process of the IASB. With no alternative
cooptation partner in sight, the Commission is in no position to extract significant concessions
(Jupille et al. 2013: 184–193).
 Transnational economic governance  561

This position of relative weakness mirrors that of the Commission in its cooptation of
environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs), but with one crucial difference.
Consistent with Conjecture 2, the Directorate-General Environment (DG ENV) has been
able to reduce the price and control and manage the cooptation arrangement, because it can
forum-shop and choose its preferred partner from a menu of potential organizations.
With the passage of the Single European Act (SEA) in 1986, DG ENV won formal
authority to draft pan-European environmental legislation. However, it faced one major
difficulty: a severe lack of resources. Its staff counted only 60 civil servants, and it possessed
little in-house scientific expertise. Against all odds, DG ENV succeeded in “produc[ing]
an enormous amount of legislation in a very short period of time” and becoming one of the
most respected departments (Schön-Quinlivan 2012: 104). This feat was achieved through
cooptation. DG ENV found resourceful allies, ENGOs, willing and able to act as de facto
rule-makers.
In the early years, this set-up strongly benefited the ENGOs. DG ENV’s ability to
forum-shop was severely constrained by the high level of cohesion and coordination within
the so-called Gang of Four: four major Brussels-based ENGOs – Friends of the Earth (FoE),
Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), and the European Environmental
Bureau (EEB) – that had agreed to coordinate action with the purpose of “promoting
a message of strength, unity, and professionalism” (Long and Lörinczi 2009: 173–174).1 The
Commission found itself being accused of becoming a “nest of green radicalism” or an organ-
ization captured and dominated by “ecological freaks.” However, DG ENV was not caught
over a barrel in the same way as in the accounting domain, because, over time, more and more
ENGOs flocked to Brussels.
The G4 eventually grew into the G10. The newly arrived ENGOs began to vie for work
with DG ENV not only to shape EU environmental policy but also to improve their financial
position and grow. As a result, DG ENV has gradually been able to improve its ability to
forum-shop and reduce the “price” it pays in cooptation. By the late 1990s, it had succeeded
in shedding some of its “green radical” image and had even managed to shift the ENGOs
from a rule-making to an increasingly rule-supporting role. This subtle switch has served the
Commission well, allowing it to return to a position of influence.

Conjectures 1 and 3: The Architecture of Global Finance

The Asian financial crisis catalyzed two cooptation arrangements. First, the G7 coopted
various technocratic standard setting bodies (SSBs), such as the Basel Committee on Banking
Supervision (BCBS), IOSCO and the International Association of Insurance Supervisors
(IAIS), through the Financial Stability Forum (FSF). Second, these same SSBs filled a major
gap in their institutional capacities by coopting the international finance institutions (IFIs)
(i.e., the World Bank and International Monetary Fund). In these cases, both coopted parties
are non-substitutable, but one is a rule-maker while the other is a rule-supporter. The frame-
work expects the distributional implications to vary as a consequence.
The G7 cooptation of SSBs through endorsement significantly boosted the SSBs’ legiti-
macy and position of leadership in shaping the rules of the global economy.2 The technocratic
work of these regulators gained the impetus of a quasi-political authority at a cheap price. As
Howard Davies and David Green conclude, the most significant impact of the new governance
structure was to “add impetus to the sector-based regulatory groupings” (Davies and Green
562  Handbook on theories of governance

2008: 117). The initiating G7 and FSF, by contrast, lacking in a clear direction and effective
leadership, drifted into stasis having delivered this endorsement. As one regulator recalled, the
G7 set up the FSF, which “failed miserably. It simply did not do what it was set up to do.”3
To function effectively, the political masters of the FSF recognized that they had to
somehow shake up the status quo. The Financial Stability Board (FSB), established by the
G20 to replace the FSF in 2009, set out to recalibrate the cooptation relationship accordingly.4
However, the FSB has struggled to achieve its goals. All proposals for major reform – of which
there were many – found themselves derailed by strong resistance from the SSBs.5 The acting
Secretary General of the FSB candidly conceded that “The problem is political – you wouldn’t
get the standard-setting bullies to sign onto it.”6 The SSBs are the masters of the arena because
they are single, and irreplaceable, rule-makers.
This can be sharply contrasted with the position of the rule-supporting coopted partner
that constitutes the other part of the international standards regime. Prior to the cooptation
of the IFIs in 1999, the SSBs active in global finance had very limited means to encourage
the uptake and consistent application of their regulatory standards. The IFIs were the logical
solution to this resource gap: they had near-universal membership and access to key resources,
in particular hard law and human resources. When they were coopted, the IFIs were reduced to
a rule-supporting function, monitoring the implementation of standards through the Financial
Sector Assessment Program (FSAP), which produces reports on the observance of standards
and codes (ROSCs) and financial sector stability assessments (FSSAs).
The distributional effects of this deal were dramatic and immediately felt. Overnight the
SSBs experienced a “huge uplift” in the reach and force of their standards, and they paid
very little for this gain.7 By contrast, the IFIs were left ruing the need to perform what they
considered a Cinderella task (Goodhart 2011: 338–440). However, consistent with Conjecture
3, the SSBs have felt the constraints of non-substitutability on occasion. For example, when
the IFIs required a methodology by which to benchmark national compliance with IOSCO’s
Core Principles of Securities Regulation (the Principles), key members of IOSCO expressed
strong reservations and pledged resistance. However, IOSCO had little practical choice in the
end but to succeed.8

Conjectures 1 and 4: European Securities Regulation

An important instance of a Commission-led cooptation occurred in the context of building an

integrated EU securities market. This example is particularly felicitous because the coopted
partner – the independent Committee of European Securities Regulators (CESR) – had
a double functionality, rule-making and rule-supporting in separate but related domains. This
allows for hypotheses testing in conditions close to those found in controlled experiments
for Conjectures 1 and 4. The analysis confirms the theoretical expectations that the coopta-
tion arrangement will (strongly) favor the coopted partner in relative terms where it acts as
rule-maker and disfavor it where it acts as a substitutable rule-supporter.
The powers of CESR were specified in the Lamfalussy policy-making process – a process
invented in 2001 to revitalize the development of pan-European financial services regula-
tion. The multi-level Lamfalussy system divided CESR’s functions into a rule-supporting
and a rule-making role. At level 1 (L1), the Commission proposed “framework” legislation,
which was then adopted under the EU’s co-decision procedure. The Commission next devel-
oped level 2 (L2) rules to clarify and supplement the adopted framework legislation. In this
 Transnational economic governance  563

L2 process, the Commission enlisted CESR in an advisory rule-supporting capacity, but

rule-making authority remained with the Commission, Council of Ministers, and European
Parliament. CESR played a second role – this one much more consequential in terms of de
facto power shift – at level 3 (L3). CESR’s L3 task was to “foster and review common uniform
day-to-day implementation and application of Community legislation, issuing guidelines,
recommendations, and standards to be adopted by CESR members in their regulatory practices
on a voluntary basis.”9 Seemingly technical and narrow, this provision laid down the principle
that CESR had rule-making power through the issuance of “guidelines,” “recommendations,”
and “standards.”
At L2, where CESR was in a rule-supporting role and substitutable, it seemed to have
been “bought by the Commission.”10 Indeed, the Commission emerged as clear winner in
the L2 arrangement. It retained all of its legislative powers, and obtained from its partner
valuable technical assistance and market information for the “cheap price” of CESR inclusion
in the Lamfalussy system. With this support, the Commission successfully tabled a large
number of major pieces of financial legislation. The Commission also frequently rejected or
ignored CESR advice when it failed to fit with its general regulatory preferences. Further,
the Commission sometimes marginalized CESR in discussions over certain sensitive issues,
seeking advice from other expert groups, including groups it established in 2004 partly to
diminish CESR’s monopoly status, such as the European Securities Markets Expert Group
(ESME) and the Forum of User Experts in the Area of Financial Services (FIN-USE). Thus,
consistent with the theory’s Conjecture 4, the presence of alternative rule-supporting groups
weakened the position of CESR in L2 matters.
By contrast, CESR did astonishingly well in L3 matters.11 As summarized by Moloney,
“Through level 3 activities, CESR acquired a degree of influence over the financial markets
which is remarkable given its establishment in 2001. This has occurred through a range of
quasi-regulatory [and] supervisory mechanisms no[t] specified in CESR’s founding Decision”
(Moloney 2009: 451–452). CESR used its L3 powers to effectively amend EU legislation or
introduce rules in areas not yet covered by the Commission. CESR guidelines and standards,
though formally not binding, were quickly “regarded by market [actors] as tantamount to
regulatory fiat” (Moloney 2009: 455). Finally, CESR used its rule-making authority to posi-
tion itself as the focal interlocutor for operational negotiations with the US Securities and
Exchange Commission (SEC) and IOSCO, as well as a range of societal groups, including the
financial services industry.12

Conjectures 1 and 4: Global Capital Market Governance

The framework of cooptation developed in this chapter can also be applied to think about the
relationships between national regulators and global marketplaces. Take for example the long
run evolution of global capital market governance. Here the governors in question are regu-
latory agencies of the state, such as the US Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and the
Bank of England, and the intermediaries are capital market organizations with transnational
reach, such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and London Metals Exchange (LME).
Capital market organizations evolved in the late nineteenth century as mutualized
self-regulatory entities serving the needs of their members. Over time, the most successful
among them became the centralized markets of global importance. The LME for instance
represented the world’s foremost center for trading in nonferrous base (non-precious) metals
564  Handbook on theories of governance

(Seddon 2020). Such market organizations thus became single-focal intermediaries with
rule-making powers and authorities. In this context, corresponding to conjecture 1, the stew-
ards of capital market organizations were the key players in the regulation of global capital
markets, while state officials assumed a supportive and enabling role (Seddon and Mattli
2020).
In the past three decades however this pattern of governance was transformed. The paradigm
of self-regulation was rejected in favor of external statutory regulation. Meanwhile, central-
ized market structures fragmented amid technological change and globalization. The resulting
new governance structure, per conjecture 4, has seriously undermined the power and position
of capital market organizations in the regulatory process. State officials at the national and
international level have instead been able to dictate regulatory terms to market organizations.
This change in structure has done little to improve the quality of capital market governance
(Mattli 2019). The traditional regime empowered insiders with an intimate knowledge of
market conditions and practices in the regulatory process. This helped to ensure that rules
and regulators were well calibrated. In the new regime, on the other hand, capital market
organizations are tied down in external statutory constraints. These state-imposed rules often,
ultimately, reflect the narrow interests of powerful groups rather than all the stakeholders in
the market. This serves as an important reminder that the locus of power and authority in any
cooptation arrangement will have important public policy implications.

CONCLUSION

Through the cooptation of new actors and institutions, the governance of the global political
economy has been transformed in recent decades. In this new world order, we have argued
that, over time, greater benefits will accrue to the rule-makers rather than the rule-supporters.
However, the locus of power will also vary according to the number of available partners
in different fields. The empirical part of this study compellingly supports these conjectures.
International standard setters in global finance reveal the advantages that accrue to incumbent
rule-makers. The contrasting position of the Commission in the realms of accounting and envi-
ronmental regulation speaks to the importance of substitutability. CESR offers a nice illustra-
tion of organizational marginalization and empowerment along the explanatory dimensions.
We see this study as an overdue corrective to the prevailing analytical tenor in much of
the rapidly growing literature on new transnational economic governance. This literature
overwhelmingly espouses a largely functionalist approach to novel forms of governance.
These accounts are right in highlighting the significance of the shift from “government” to
“governance” and often brilliantly describe categories of new actors on the global stage. They
fail, however, to ponder the distributional dimension of the new governance arrangements.
The politics is missing. We have offered a simple yet powerful analytical framework that
reveals surprising, even disturbing, distributional outcomes of cooptation in the governance of
the world economy.
This study represents a call to future research. The time for arguments about the
“post-international political economy” has passed. The field no longer needs to establish its
validity, if it ever did. The importance of governance is self-evident. Yet too many studies
remain long on conceptual ingenuity but short on analytical depth. The association of govern-
ance with an ever expanding set of adjectives – “new,” “good,” “transparent,” “multilateral,”
 Transnational economic governance  565

“complex,” “many-sided,” “multi-layered,” “fragmegrated,” “networked,” and so on – often

detaches observers from what is at stake. The syntax infuses real world proposals for reform
and propagates an innocent unworldliness and untempered optimism about governance. In
the real world, the costs and benefits from shifting from government to governance are never
equally or equitably distributed. The new actors on the international stage will fight bitterly,
using whatever resources they have at their disposal, to gain power and influence. We must
endeavor to think more systematically and in less encumbered ways about these politics.

NOTES
1. G10 Protocol of 1999.
2. Andrew Crockett (Chairman of FSF, 1999–2003), Interview, 10 January 2012, San Francisco, CA.
3. Svein Andresen (Secretary General, Financial Stability Board since 2007), Interview, 5 April 2012,
Basel.
4. Andrew Crockett, Interview, 10 January 2012.
5. Ethiopis Tafara (Director of the Office of International Affairs at the United States Securities
Exchange Commission), Interview, 17 January 2012, Washington, DC.
6. Quoted in Brookings Institution Transcript, 2011.
7. Michel Prada, Interview, 19 January 2012.
8. Tony Neoh (Chair of IOSCO Technical Committee, 2003–2006), Interview, 22 January 2013,
Beijing.
9. CESR Charter, Article 4.3.
10. Fabrice Demarign, Interview, 19 January 2011.
11. Docters van Leeuwen, Interview, 15 February 2012.
12. Docters van Leeuwen, Interview, 15 February 2012.

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Beyond Principals and Agents, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 159–179.
Selznick, Philip (1949), TVA and the Grass Roots, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Slaughter, Anne-Marie (2004), A New World Order, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
49. Metagovernance
Jacob Torfing

Today, we are witnessing a proliferation of interactive forms of governance that carry the
promise of mobilizing the resources and energies of public and private actors, aligning goals
and coordinating actions across organizational boundaries, solving wicked and unruly prob-
lems, deepening democracy and enhancing collaborative innovation (Sørensen and Torfing
2007; Heinrich et al. 2009; Hartley et al. 2013). However, interactive and collaborative forms
of governance do not arise spontaneously. They frequently fail to deliver on their inherent
promises, and they need to be given a public purpose and political direction in order to ensure
that their outcomes are in accordance with overall policy objectives. Hence, in order to reap
the fruits of collaborative governance in networks, partnerships and relational contracting,
the interactive governance arenas must be properly governed. This poses a delicate problem,
since interactive governance is generally considered to be self-governing in terms of having
the ability to define its own agenda, the rules and norms for appropriate behavior and the
content of new solutions on the basis of ongoing negotiation. Thus the challenge is to govern
relatively self-governing arenas of multi-actor collaboration without reverting too much to
traditional hierarchical forms of governance based on command and control. This challenge
is exactly what the notion of metagovernance aims to capture. Metagovernance is defined as
the “governance of governance” and involves deliberate attempts to facilitate, manage and
direct interactive governance arenas without undermining their capacity for self-regulation
too much. Thus the exercise of metagovernance is really a complicated balancing act, since
too much metagovernance may pacify the participants or generate fierce opposition, while too
little metagovernance may lead to the exclusion of relevant and affected actors, the develop-
ment of destructive conflicts and the failure to achieve common goals.
This chapter first looks at the emergence of metagovernance avant la lettre, and then pro-
vides an overview of the different theoretical approaches to the understanding of metagovern-
ance that enable us to broaden the definition of metagovernance. The theoretical discussion is
followed by an attempt to clarify the analytical and practical value of the concept of metagov-
ernance. The chapter goes on to identify different goals, tools and forms of metagovernance as
a prelude to a discussion of administrative and political forms of metagovernance. The chapter
then sets out some important metagovernance dilemmas and concludes, advancing some
reflections on the need for further research.

METAGOVERNANCE AVANT LA LETTRE

The concept of metagovernance – defined as “third-order governance” that involves the art of
governing more or less self-regulating governance arenas that are producing concrete acts of
governance – emerged at the beginning of the 1990s (Kooiman 1993), and since the beginning
of the new millennium it has become a frequently used term (Jessop 1998, 2002; Kooiman
2003; Sørensen and Torfing 2007, 2009; Meuleman 2008; Torfing and Triantafillou 2011).

567
568  Handbook on theories of governance

However, the attempt to metagovern particular governance arrangements predates the notion
of metagovernance. The consecutive EU Treaty reforms that aim to change the interaction
between the EU institutions, the member states and numerous private stakeholders are a clear
example of metagovernance avant la lettre. The same goes for the attempts of federal states to
regulate the conditions for state-level governance and the efforts of national governments to
shape the conditions for governance at the subnational and local level.
The advance of governance reforms associated with New Public Management really hits
the nail, as it was driven by an explicit attempt to transform public governance by creating
spaces for “regulated self-regulation” (Sørensen and Triantafillou 2009). Elected politicians
should do the “steering” and leave the “rowing” to public administrators or private contractors
(Hood 1991). Steering should take the form of strategic goal setting and framework budgeting
supported by an elaborate system of performance management that measures the results of
the service delivering agencies. The idea was that the creation of a result-driven rather than
rule-driven steering system would leave considerable autonomy for public and private service
providers to pursue radical efficiencies through a self-regulated use of local rules, resources
and competences (Osborne and Gaebler 1993). However, the self-regulated pursuit of effi-
ciency would not be without boundaries provided by political objectives, legal parameters and
centralized budget allocations.
Although New Public Management reforms clearly aimed to replace the traditional bureau-
cratic steering system based on authoritative rule-making with a new steering system based on
regulated self-regulation, the attempts to understand the new governance practices were few
and far between. An exception is Rose and Miller, who claimed that government has become
“dependent upon technologies for ‘governing at a distance,’ seeking to create locales, entities
and persons able to operate a regulated autonomy” (Rose and Miller 1992: 173). This succinct
diagnosis captures the new emphasis on regulated self-regulation and thus constitutes a pre-
cursor to the emergence of the notion of metagovernance that helps us not only to understand
the new governance practices associated with New Public Management, but also to understand
the governing of networks and partnerships and other collaborative arenas that seek to coun-
teract the growing fragmentation of the public sectors caused by New Public Management
(Rhodes 1997). The attempt to govern interactive governance in networks and partnerships
is sometimes reduced to a question of the right way of leading and managing networks and
partnerships (Agranoff and McGuire 2003). Although this is an important part of metagovern-
ance, the latter goes beyond simple managerial interventions and includes the institutional and
political framing of interactive governance as well as the “mobilization of bias” through the
attempt to shape the structural context for interactive governance.
With its emphasis on “regulated self-regulation” and the use of soft governance tools
based on norms, values and standards, the notion of metagovernance resembles the notion of
“meta-regulation” (Scott 2003; Parker 2009) that has recently emerged in legal studies (see
Chapter 9 in this Handbook). However, whereas metagovernance aims to govern interactive
governance arenas, meta-regulation seeks to influence the capacity of public organizations
and private corporations to regulate themselves in accordance with ethical standards and fiscal
norms.
 Metagovernance  569

Table 49.1 Overview of theoretical approaches to metagovernance

Social agency is driven by rational Social agency is driven by rule-following

calculation
Public governance is conflict-ridden Interdependency theory Governmentality theory
Public governance is consensual Governability theory Normative integration theory

THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO METAGOVERNANCE

In the scholarly debate on metagovernance there are four theoretical approaches that deserve
special attention because they provide new and important insights into the nature of interactive
governance, why it must be meta-governed and how it can be done (Torfing et al. 2012).
The theoretical approaches differ in terms of their micro-level conception of social agency
as driven by rational calculation or rule-following and in terms of their macro-level view of
public governance as essentially conflict-ridden or consensual (Sørensen and Torfing 2007).
An overview of these theoretical approaches is found in Table 49.1.
Let us briefly consider each of the four theoretical approaches in order to see how they
contribute to our understanding of metagovernance.
Interdependence theory is firmly anchored in historical institutionalism (Kickert et al. 1997;
Rhodes 1997; Jessop 1998). It defines governance networks as an interorganizational medium
for interest mediation between interdependent actors with conflicting interests. Governance
networks are formed as a result of strategic calculations of self-interested collective actors
who choose to interact because the presence of mutual resource dependencies makes it
rational to exchange resources. The formation of governance networks enables the actors to
find joint solutions to joint problems and counteracts the institutional fragmentation caused by
New Public Management reforms, which prevents the actors from benefiting from resources
exchange and resource pooling. Governance networks are formed through incremental
bottom-up processes, but are often recruited as vehicles of public policy-making by public
authorities. The network actors pursue different interests through internal political conflicts
and power struggles, but the actors are held together by their mutual interdependence and the
gradual development of common norms, values and perceptions, which permit negotiation,
mutual learning and compromise formation. However, social and cognitive closure may
exclude relevant actors from the collaborative arena (Schaap 2007). Competition and oppor-
tunistic behavior may foster defensive and non-cooperative strategies and give rise to destruc-
tive conflicts. Finally, the lack of trust, diverging worldviews and high transaction costs from
networking may prevent sustained interaction. These potential obstacles to successful network
governance call for the exercise of metagovernance that for the most part is discussed in terms
of network management, which involves a skillful combination of process design and process
management (Kickert et al. 1997; Koppenjan and Klijn 2004). Other interdependency theorists
such as Jessop (2002) tend to view metagovernance as a possibility for the State to exercise
power by choosing between and mixing different modes of governance, mitigating the risks of
failure associated with each of these modes of governance and structuring the conditions for
their functioning and operation. Regardless of whether metagovernance is seen from the point
of view of the State or the point of view of public managers, interdependency theorists agree
that metagovernance of interactive governance processes aims to secure a stable exchange of
resources in the face of conflicts between relatively self-interested actors.
570  Handbook on theories of governance

Governability theory combines rational choice institutionalism with a systems theoretical

view of societal development (Mayntz 1993a, 1993b; Scharpf 1994; Kooiman 2003). It
defines governance networks as arenas for horizontal coordination between autonomous
actors who interact in game-like structures. The formation of governance networks is seen
as a functional response to the increasing societal complexity, differentiation and dynamism
that undermine the ability to govern society efficiently through the traditional means of hier-
archy and market (Kooiman 1993). Governance networks are held together by the anticipated
gains from the exchange and pooling of resources and by the development of mutual trust
between the participants. However, owing to the propensity of the social and political actors
to pursue individual strategies and to defect from negotiated agreements, governance net-
works are constantly on the brink of collapsing as a collective form of governance. Therefore,
metagovernance is strictly required in order to overcome collective action problems and
secure trust-based resource exchange between organizational actors with different goals
and preferences. Metagovernance involves deliberate attempts to clarify, strengthen or even
construct interdependencies between the potential participants in interactive governance. It
also involves game-structuration that seeks to design cooperative games either by providing
positive incentives for the social and political actors to collaborate or by threatening to reduce
or even remove the relative autonomy of the governance networks and thus letting the actors
understand that network governance always takes place in the “shadow of hierarchy” (Scharpf
1994; Héritier and Lehmkuhl 2008). Finally, in order to avoid unwarranted cost-shifting from
the interactive arenas to third parties, the public metagovernors must play an important role in
regulating the distribution of the costs of the negotiated governance solutions.
Institutional theories of normative integration, which draw on sociological organization
theory, tend to perceive governance networks as institutionalized fields of interaction that
bring together interdependent actors that become normatively integrated by the emerging
rules, norms, values and perceptions that define the logic of appropriate action that regulates
and sustains interaction (Powell and DiMaggio 1991; March and Olsen 1995). Governance
networks are regarded as a way of organizing and structuring “organizational fields” (Powell
and DiMaggio 1983) and as a normative response to the twin problems of totalitarian
over-integration of social agency, which is typically found in bureaucratic settings, and indi-
vidualistic under-integration of social agency, which often emerges in market-based contexts
(March and Olsen 1995). They are formed through a bottom-up process whereby tentative and
provisional contacts, which are established as a result of the need for exchanging resources, are
positively evaluated and extended on the basis of institutional logics of appropriateness that
over time are adjusted through mutual learning. The proliferation of governance networks in
organizational fields may also be further accelerated by isomorphic pressures that praise net-
works as the best way of organizing resource exchange among interdependent actors (Powell
and DiMaggio 1991). Network actors interact on the basis of a shared logic of appropriate
action, but that does not preclude the rise of conflicts. However, there seems to be consider-
able scope for civilizing conflicts through the construction of solidarity and the formation of
democratic identities (March and Olsen 1995: 48–89). Nevertheless, metagovernance is not
so much a matter of mediating or resolving conflict or creating cooperative games. Rather it
involves developing the identities and capacities of the actors and promoting the accountabil-
ity and adaptiveness of interactive governance arrangements (March and Olsen 1995). The
actors’ perception of themselves, each other and their joint mission is shaped by storytelling,
learning processes and the formation of institutional rules, norms, values and rituals. The
 Metagovernance  571

empowerment of the actors to act alone and together involves the constructing and distribution
of rights, resources, competences and political know-how. Accountability is ensured through
the production of narrative accounts of how the actors perceive the problems at hand and why
they have chosen a certain solution. Last but not least, the adaptiveness of interactive govern-
ance arenas is enhanced through risk sharing and the encouragement of experimental learning
based on trial and error.
Governmentality theory (Foucault 1991; Rose and Miller 1992; Dean 1999) offers a special
kind of poststructuralist discourse institutionalism, which implicitly defines governance net-
works as an attempt by an increasingly reflexive, facilitating and regulatory state to govern by
means of mobilizing and shaping the free actions of actors who are connected in and through
interactive policy arenas. Citizens, community groups, interest organizations, private enter-
prises and public agencies are encouraged to regulate themselves and their mutual interaction
in a particular area. However, their self-regulated governance practices take place within an
institutional framework of regulatory norms, performance standards and calculative practices
that ensures conformity with overall policy objectives. Governance networks are in this per-
spective viewed as a political response to the failure of neo-liberalism to realize its key goal
of “less state and more market”: market-based public governance has grown, but so has the
amount of market-enhancing and market-controlling state regulation. The problematization of
neo-liberalism has led to the formulation of a new governmentality program – referred to as
“advanced liberal government” – that aims to displace governmental tasks to local, regional
and national networks in which the resources and energies of social and political actors
are mobilized and given a particular direction in order to achieve overall policy objectives.
Governance networks are constructed and framed by particular government technologies
and narratives that aim to recruit social actors as vehicles of the exercise of power. Hence,
metagovernance combines “technologies of agency” that hail social and political actors as free,
active and responsible subjectivities with “technologies of performance” that subject the free
and responsible actions of the social and political actors to collective and individual scrutiny
through the dissemination of a large array of norms, standards, benchmarks and performance
indicators (Triantafillou 2007). At a more general level, metagovernance is exercised through
the promotion and adjustment of a certain governmentality that defines and institutionalizes
a hegemonic conception of how to govern and be governed. Thus governmentality involves
“the conduct of conduct” (Foucault 1991) and accordingly describes an “art of governance”
that conditions and shapes particular “acts of governance” (Dean 1999).
The four theoretical perspectives all provide valuable insights that can help us to qualify
and expand the minimalistic definition of metagovernance as “the governance of govern-
ance” (Kooiman 1993). Thus metagovernance can be redefined as a reflexive and strategic
higher-order governance that involves: (1) the production and institutionalization of hegem-
onic ideas about how to govern and be governed; (2) a political, normative and context
dependent choice between different modes of governance or different combinations of these
modes of governance; and (3) the structuring and managing of particular institutional forms of
governance in order to facilitate stable interaction, prevent dysfunctions and advance particu-
lar goals (Torfing et al. 2012).
572  Handbook on theories of governance

CONNECTING GOVERNMENT AND GOVERNANCE THROUGH

METAGOVERNANCE

The concept of metagovernance enables us to understand the new and emerging ways of
governing interactive forms of governance in order to bring out their inherent potential for
enhancing the efficient, effective and democratic governance of our increasingly complex and
fragmented societies. Perhaps more importantly, the concept of metagovernance helps us to
understand the role of the State in the world of interactive governance by providing a linking
concept that connects traditional forms of government with new forms of governance (Torfing
et al. 2012).
The rise of interactive forms of governance prevents states at different levels from exer-
cising the kind of control that they are assumed to have had in the past. States are no longer
sovereign in the sense that they hold an undisputed power and authority within a certain juris-
diction. State power is challenged not only by new forms of multi-level governance through
which power is displaced upwards to supranational institutions and downwards to subnational
and local governments, but also by the displacement of power to interactive governance arenas
in which a plethora of public and private actors participate in the authoritative allocation of
values. Thus the State has lost its monopoly on public governance and policy-making and
should, therefore, be viewed as “semi-sovereign” only (Katzenstein 1987).
However, we should be careful not to paint a picture of a weak and impotent State that is
rendered powerless by the advent of new forms of decentered governance. The State is not
being “hollowed out,” as some scholars have been suggesting (Milward and Provan 2000,
2003), since many traditional state powers are still in place and new powers are developing
in the face of the challenges from the surge of networks, partnerships and other kinds of
collaborative governance in which the State is merely one among many actors. Hence, rather
than seeing “government” and “governance” as partaking in a zero-sum game in which the
latter can only expand at the expense of the former, we should envisage the possibility that
government is not being marginalized but transformed by the development of new forms of
interactive governance. The concept of metagovernance is important for understanding this
transformation of the State from a sovereign law-maker and regulator to a semi-sovereign
facilitator and enabler. Governments are still in charge of running the large-scale bureau-
cracies that regulate social and economic life and provide services to the citizens, but they
are also aiming to facilitate, manage and direct interactive forms of governance. In a way
metagovernance offers a means for governments to loosen the reins without losing control.
Metagovernance enables government officials to use subtle and indirect means to influence
the form, functioning and outcomes of interactive governance in a situation where traditional
forms of imperative rule through command and imposition would either make the actors leave
the network or create fierce resistance. In other words, metagovernance is a tool that govern-
ments can use to exercise power in a world of pluricentric governance.
Metagovernance provides the missing link between “government” and “governance” and
thereby enables us to rethink how “the primacy of politics” can be maintained in areas where
interactive forms of governance play a crucial role (Torfing et al. 2012). The exercise of
metagovernance permits elected governments to maintain some kind of control over public
governance in those situations in which they are no longer in charge of public regulation and
service production. This argument has led some scholars to argue that metagovernance helps
to ensure the democratic anchorage of governance networks by allowing elected politicians
 Metagovernance  573

and public managers acting on their behalf to monitor, influence and sanction decisions made
in collaborative governance arenas (Sørensen and Torfing 2005). Metagovernance is not the
only way of ensuring the democratic anchorage of governance networks, but it is an important
one, since the oversight of elected politicians enhances the democratic legitimacy of interac-
tive governance.

GOALS, TOOLS AND FORMS OF METAGOVERNANCE

Having demonstrated the analytical and political value of metagovernance, we shall now turn
to consider the objectives pursued by metagovernance, the tools that can be used when aiming
to metagovern interactive governance arenas, and the different forms that the exercise of
metagovernance can take.
Metagovernance can serve many different purposes and may have different goals. The
immediate purpose of metagovernance can be to recruit relevant and affected actors, provide
the conditions for stable interaction, enhance collaboration, resolve or mediate conflicts,
ensure goal achievement and prevent unwarranted cost-shifting. Metagovernance may also
seek to influence the form, functioning and outcomes of governance networks in order to
realize a broad range of normative goals such as democracy, efficiency, policy innovation,
equity and mobilization of resources from the private sector (Provan and Kenis 2008). Some
of the goals might be conflicting and give rise to serious trade-offs. For example, ensuring
the democratic participation of a broad range of actors may impede effective governance by
slowing down the decision-making process and enhancing the risk of conflicts and logjams.
When it comes to the tools of metagovernance we can distinguish between general and
specific tools. The general tools involve the “mobilization of bias” (Schattschneider 1960: 71)
in terms of invoking, maintaining or changing particular aspects of the structural environment
for interactive governance: accentuating particular constitutional or legislative rules; changing
the public budgeting system; strengthening public auditing institutions; devolving power from
central to local government; or shifting the balance between the public and private sector.
These examples show how the structural conditions for interactive governance can be manip-
ulated. Metagovernance through the mobilization of bias provides a rather blunt instrument,
and it often takes considerable time before the effects kick in.
By contrast, the specific tools of metagovernance are instrumental actions that metagov-
ernors can use to achieve particular results and solve emerging problems in interactive
governance arenas. Hence, the barriers to collaborative governance can be mitigated, or
even eliminated, and the drivers can be enhanced through the deployment of different tools,
which fall into four categories (Sørensen and Torfing 2009): (1) institutional design of rules,
norms and procedures, which determines the scope, character and composition of governance
networks as well as the time horizon for accomplishing the mission and tasks; (2) goal and
framework steering, which gives direction to the interactive governance processes and facil-
itates systematic auditing by allocating resources, defining the overall objectives, specifying
the legal parameters and constructing the discursive storyline that frames the problem and
the possible solutions; (3) process management, which aims to facilitate collaboration and
ensure progress towards goal achievement by means of strengthening the relations of mutual
dependence, resolving internal and external conflicts, building trust, selectively empowering
particular actors and lowering the transaction costs from networking; and (4) direct partici-
574  Handbook on theories of governance

pation, which seeks to influence the agenda, the decision making premises and the negotiated
solutions through leadership, argumentation and coalition building.
While the first and second of these categories of tools are examples of “hands-off” metagov-
ernance that can be exercised at a distance from the interactive governance arenas, the third
and fourth categories of tools are examples of “hands-on” metagovernance that bring the
metagovernor into relatively close interaction with the participants in the networked arenas.
Whereas New Public Management – in accordance with its neo-liberal heritage – prescribes
the use of hands-off metagovernance, empirical studies suggest that metagovernance is most
successful when it combines hands-off and hands-on metagovernance (Marcussen and Torfing
2007).

ADMINISTRATIVE AND POLITICAL METAGOVERNANCE

The literature on metagovernance is not very clear about who the metagovernor is, but talks
alternately about government, public managers, external consultants and anonymous facilita-
tors. However, it seems to be clear that metagovernance can be exercised by public as well
as private actors who are inside, outside or distant from the collaborative arenas that they are
trying to metagovern. Metagovernance can also be exercised collectively by the network par-
ticipants themselves or by governance networks placed at a higher level, and to further com-
plicate things there is often rivalry between different metagovernors and sometimes a carefully
planned division of labor between metagovernors.
In order to metagovern an interactive governance arena a would-be metagovernor must
have: (1) nodality (N), in terms of being a central actor with many strong and weak ties to
other actors; (2) authority (A), in terms of being a knowledgeable and respected actor whom
the other actors listen to; (3) treasure (T), in terms of having access to resources that can be
used to “grease the wheels” and “pay the bill”; and (4) organization (O), in terms of capacity
to monitor the performance of the interactive processes, diagnose the problems and choose
the right solutions. In principle everybody fulfilling these so-called NATO criteria (Hood
1986) can exercise metagovernance. However, the central position, democratic legitimacy and
economic and organizational resources of public authorities seem to make them particularly
suited for exercising metagovernance (Klijn and Koppenjan 2000). Although this prediction is
confirmed in empirical studies (Marcussen and Torfing 2007), there seems to be a lot of varia-
tion in the actual organization of the exercise of metagovernance. Sometimes metagovernance
is undertaken by the members of a particular governance network in meetings that evaluate
the joint performance and set the course for the future. At other times, metagovernance is
delegated to a lead organization or professional facilitator. In formal governance networks,
a steering group may set up a network administrative organization (NAO) that manages the
daily operation of the network (Provan and Kenis 2008).
Notwithstanding the variations in the actual organization of metagovernance, public man-
agers seem to be the typical metagovernors. They have the time, resources and competences
to act as metagovernors, and managing interactive governance arenas is often a part of their
job description. By contrast, the role of elected politicians in metagoverning interactive
governance arenas is negligible and often overlooked in the literature on metagovernance
(for important exceptions see Sørensen 2006; Koppenjan et al. 2009; Klijn 2014). This is
problematic and reflects a deeper problem, which is that governance research suffers from an
 Metagovernance  575

unfortunate tendency to present an overly depoliticized image of governance and the exercise
of metagovernance. Thus governance tends to be portrayed as a neutral mechanism for coor-
dination and resource exchange, and metagovernance is seen as a technical and managerial
tool kit that public administrators can use in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness
of interactive governance arenas. This rather reductive account seems to hide the fact that
governance is ridden by crisscrossing power struggles and that metagovernance involves the
exercise of political leadership in terms of political agenda setting, giving direction to change,
regulating access to collaborative arenas, mobilizing support, evaluating trade-offs, endorsing
final outcomes and so on that go beyond the more administrative endeavor of making interac-
tive governance efficient and effective (Sørensen and Torfing 2009). The marginalization of
the political aspects of governance and metagovernance leads to a systematic neglect of the
role of elected politicians in the exercise of metagovernance because it is wrongly asserted that
there is no need for the political power, skills and democratic legitimacy that they can bring to
the process (Mayntz 2003; Sørensen and Torfing 2005).
By ignoring the role of politicians in the exercise of political metagovernance, the current
research not only risks portraying interactive governance as a post-political process of
pragmatic problem solving devoid of political power, conflicts and visions (Mouffe 2005).
It also fails to assist politicians in strengthening their role as political leaders in relation to
the interactive governance arenas. The continued failure of politicians to lead collaborative
policy-making undermines their power and authority and leaves it to non-elected public
administrators or private stakeholders to fill their shoes (Koppenjan et al. 2009).

METAGOVERNANCE DILEMMAS

Metagovernance is a necessary but tough assignment that both public managers and elected
politicians (and other would-be metagovernors) must take responsibility for and learn to
master if they want to reap the fruits of multi-actor collaboration in public governance and
policy-making. As metagovernors they will face a series of problems and challenges in terms
of complexity, uncertainty, free-riding, defection and political resistance. They will also con-
front a number of important dilemmas. Some of these have already been mentioned above, but
more can be added to the list. Hence, at least six metagovernance dilemmas deserve our full
attention (Jessop 2002; Torfing et al. 2012).
The first dilemma confronting public or private metagovernors concerns the question of
inclusion and exclusion. It might be a good idea to include all the social and political actors
who are deemed relevant and affected in order to ensure access to all the resources and com-
petences that are necessary to solve a given problem or task. However, a large number of
participants tend to enhance the transaction costs of networking and reduce the ability of the
metagovernors to keep the group together, ensure a constructive management of the internal
differences between the diversity of actors and lead them in a certain direction.
The second dilemma has to do with the scope of the interactive governance arena. A broad
agenda may facilitate creative problem solving and the production of policy innovation as
problems are redefined and merged in ways that would not have been possible if the scope
of the agenda had been restricted to a single item. However, a broad policy agenda may be
a problem, since the actors may cherry-pick and ignore difficult problems and since conflict
576  Handbook on theories of governance

and stalemate in one area may block the entire process and thus call for segmentation of the
collaborative arena.
The third dilemma is whether to aim for stability or flexibility. Collaborative governance
in networks and interactive policy arenas thrives on stability, which permits the actors to get
to know each other, develop mutual trust, scrutinize the problem or task at hand, and search
for feasible solutions. Stability is often achieved by institutionalizing interaction by means
of developing, clarifying and gaining support for collective rules, norms and procedures.
However, one of the major attractions of governing by networks is the flexibility gains that
come with the ability to change the composition of the network, the policy agenda and the
conditions for solving a given problem or task. Too much institutionalization may undermine
the production of these flexibility gains and thus calls for de-institutionalization.
The fourth dilemma concerns the question of how to avoid either excessive or insufficient
metagovernance. Metagovernors who tend to be metagoverning too much and too tightly risk
straitjacketing the participants in interactive governance arenas and thus undermining their
willingness to participate and invest in joint problem solving. By contrast, if metagovernors
do too little and are too weak and vague, it might give rise to underperformance, stalemate and
disintegration and thus lead to governance failure.
The fifth dilemma is whether to rely on hands-off metagovernance by acting as convener
and facilitator only and thus leave considerable room for self-regulated problem solving, or
whether to rely on hands-on governance that places limits on self-regulation while aiming to
solve emerging conflicts and drive the decision making process onwards so that it reaches
a conclusion. Hands-off metagovernance creates good conditions for self-regulation, but
it might not pay enough attention to the internal processes and outcomes. However, while
hands-on metagovernance has a keen eye on process and outcomes, it might tie the metagover-
nors too closely to the actors in the interactive governance arenas, and thus leave little, if any,
scope for subsequent changes in the negotiated solutions.
The final dilemma relates to the normative objective that the metagovernors hope to
achieve. The problem here is that democratic inclusion and deliberation might prevent the
production of efficient solutions and that cost-efficient solutions might not be effective in
solving the problem or challenge.
The dilemmas are hard to solve and call for hard choices and difficult balancing acts. The
many, tough and persistent dilemmas point to the importance of pragmatic learning through
trial and error and continuous reflection and adjustment of the strategies and tools that are used
in metagoverning complex and uncertain processes of interactive governance.

CONCLUSION AND FURTHER RESEARCH

Although it does not remove all problems, risks and stumbling blocks from the processes
and arenas of interactive governance, metagovernance may help elected politicians, public
managers and other would-be metagovernors to reap the fruits of collaborative governance,
which seems to provide a good alternative to authoritative, competitive and even adversarial
governance processes. However, it requires that public managers and not least elected politi-
cians assume responsibility for metagoverning governance networks and acquire the necessary
skills and competences.
 Metagovernance  577

The research on metagovernance has only just begun, and in the future there will be a need
for further empirical studies in order to learn more about: Who is metagoverning and which
strategies are the metagovernors pursuing when metagoverning interactive policy arenas?
What are the normative objectives, which tools are deployed and what is the effect? How are
the metagovernors handling the normative dilemmas they are facing? How are the interactive
governance arenas reacting to metagovernance? How can elected politicians and public man-
agers team up and produce a more jointly coordinated metagovernance? How can political
forms of metagovernance help politicians to strengthen their political leadership in the world
of interactive governance? These are just a small sample of the many empirical questions that
call for further research.
There are also important theoretical questions, for example about the relation between the-
ories of metagovernance and theories of public management and political leadership. Despite
notable advances (Jessop 2004; Meuleman 2008, 2011), we are also still short of adequate
theories of multi-level metagovernance and metagovernance of hybrids of different modes
of governance. Last but not least, we need to theorize the limits of metagovernance in order
to better understand the conditions for metagovernance failure and the return of hierarchical
government based on command and control.

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50. Adaptive governance
Toddi Steelman1

INTRODUCTION
The adaptive governance tree has branched in multiple directions since the term first emerged
in the 1990s. The goal of this chapter is to bring some organizational coherence to the liter-
ature on the topic, both theoretical and applied, so readers can effectively situate themselves
on the right branch for their own scholarship. This is important, because the term has been
applied with different meaning in different contexts. Additionally, the scholarship has tended
to re-discover patterns that approximate adaptive governance without being aware of existing
work or how new work fits into the current scholarship. My hope is that this chapter can
facilitate synthesis, integration and advancement of the scholarship on and practice of adaptive
governance for sustainable resource management in the common interest. This chapter pro-
vides an overview of the differences between adaptive management and adaptive governance,
and a systematic profile of different versions of adaptive governance, and details how adaptive
governance has been applied in different case studies.
For the purposes of this chapter, I divided adaptive governance into three primary
branches—socio-ecological, institutional, and the policy sciences approach. Hatfield-Dodds et
al. (2007) characterized the work on adaptive governance as emerging out of the intersection
of the work done by Holling and many at the Resilience Alliance (Holling 1978; Gunderson
and Holling 2002; Folke et al. 2005) and the work of Ostrom on self-governing institutions
(Ostrom 1990, 1992; Dietz et al. 2003). However, this characterization missed the unique
contribution from the policy sciences, as articulated by Brunner et al. (2002, 2005), with its
historical roots in American pragmatism. Brunner (2010) identified three streams implicitly—
socio-ecological, institutional and the policy sciences approach. I build on this division here.
The field is growing. According to Hatfield-Dodds et al. (2007: 2) a literature search exe-
cuted on the term “adaptive governance” in 2007 returned only nine references, while a search
on “adaptive” and “governance” revealed 60 references, half of which occurred between
2003 and 2006. A search executed by me in June 2014 on the term “adaptive governance”
(via Google Scholar) revealed 5130 references, while a search on “adaptive” and “govern-
ance” returned 172,000 results. The most cited reference was “Adaptive Governance of
Social-ecological Systems” by Folke et al. (2005) with 1680 citations, followed by “Shooting
the Rapids: Navigating Transitions to Adaptive Governance of Social-ecological Systems”
by Olsson et al. (2006) with 487—these works represented the socio-ecological branch of the
adaptive governance tree. The next most cited reference was the book Adaptive Governance:
Integrating Science, Policy, and Decision Making by Brunner et al. (2005) with 185 citations;
it represented the policy sciences approach. The institutional branch was less well represented
in a Google search, because it was less identified with the term and more identified with the
concepts that structure the thinking about levels of governance and institutional interaction
across levels, especially related to the commons. Consequently, it is likely underrepresented
using these metrics.

580
 Adaptive governance  581

ADAPTIVE MANAGEMENT AND ADAPTIVE GOVERNANCE

Adaptive governance is often conflated with adaptive management. For the purposes of this
chapter it is important to draw a distinction between the two concepts. A common theme in
the adaptive governance literature is recognition that we must have structures that support
a broad range of actors, sometimes at multiple scales, to deal with the interrelated dynamics
of resources and ecosystems, and social and management systems, as well as uncertainty,
unpredictability and surprise (Dietz et al. 2003; Brunner et al. 2005; Folke et al. 2005, 2007).
Adaptive structures come in at least two forms, which may overlap and are not strictly mutu-
ally exclusive—adaptive management and adaptive governance.
Adaptive management emerged out of the need to create a project or program specific,
iterative learning system to manage ecological resources. Much of contemporary resource and
environmental management is based on steady-state views and assumptions, such as linear
dynamics and optimal based solutions (Holling and Meffe 1996). According to proponents
of adaptive management, managing for a few selected target variables under these condi-
tions reduced the capacity for change and created vulnerability in socio-ecological systems
(Holling 1973; Gunderson et al. 1995; Folke 2007) and failed to define, integrate or balance
the common interests of the multiple stakeholders who value resources from different perspec-
tives (Brunner et al. 2002; Brunner and Steelman 2005a). Many scholars initially suggested
that learning through experimental design based on simulated modeling of ecological systems
was the key to making a transition to more resilient ecological communities (Holling 1978;
Walters 1986). This initial focus on how experimental, usually quantitative, science could
inform management is now somewhat conflated with subsequent literature that focused on
the social aspects of collaboration, capacity building, and learning systems that provide the
broader context related to management choices for socio-ecological resilience (Noble 2015).
The foci in the adaptive management literature have shifted from quantitative modeling
based approaches based on biological attributes of the ecological system (Holling 1973;
Walters and Holling 1990) to biological, social and political interactions of the socio-ecological
system (Lee 1993; McLain and Lee 1996; Schreiber et al. 2004), followed by research on the
need for an institutional infrastructure that supports a dynamic and interactive management
capacity (Gunderson et al. 1995; Folke et al. 2005; Gunderson and Light 2006). The shift
toward addressing institutional, cross-scale challenges and the structures and incentives that
support adaptive management signified the transition to adaptive governance.
Adaptive management initially was identified as a way to deal with the uncertainties asso-
ciated with ecological science in the management of environmental and natural resources
(Holling 1978; Walters 1986, 1997) and emerged out of ecological theories of resilience
(Gunderson and Light 2006). Original theorists pointed out that uncertainty abounded owing
to the complexity of environmental problems and the ecosystems in which they occurred.
Instead of trying to eliminate uncertainty, the idea was to embrace it. Accordingly, the goal
for adaptive management was to use management policies as hypotheses so that the results
of a management experiment could help refine management action (or natural resource
manipulation) to improve ecological resilience (Walters 1986). The primary participants in the
process were managers and scientists from a variety of disciplines. These stakeholders created
quantitative models of ecological systems to aid in the identification of gaps in information
and ecological understanding, developed natural resource management goals, and allowed
a comparison of management scenarios (Walters and Holling 1990; Schreiber et al. 2004).
582  Handbook on theories of governance

This understanding was used to select future management policies (Walters and Holling 1990;
Schreiber et al. 2004). Under this conception, improved scientific understanding automatically
informed and became the new policy. Scientists and experts were firmly in control under
these scenarios, which were criticized for underestimating the social processes in which these
complex problems were embedded (McLain and Lee 1996). Picking up on these social short-
comings, other works in the adaptive management literature identified problems in decision
making and focused on remedying them. While still primarily concerned with the ecological
components of the system, this grouping of adaptive management literature recognized the
need to broaden the participants involved in defining problems and the potential solutions for
addressing them. Excluded participants could delay or dispute selected management strategies,
thereby inhibiting the practice of adaptive management (McLain and Lee 1996). Scientists
consulted a broader range of participants so that their values, goals and objectives could be
incorporated into the development of the ecological model (McLain and Lee 1996; Manring
and Pearsall 2005). The definition of stakeholder was expanded from scientists to include
individuals with a “vested interest” and “management authority” in a given natural resource
issue and individuals with “expert knowledge” relevant to the issue (Manring and Pearsall
2005). While the diversity of participants expanded, consultation appeared to be the primary
modality of involvement, and the outcome remained technical learning about the ecological
system. Ecological science and learning by “experts” continued to provide the foundation for
management action. Other scholars were critical of this approach, arguing that stakeholders
needed to be fully integrated, not just consulted, in the identification, prescription, monitoring
and refinement of management actions (e.g. Stringer et al. 2006).
The next iteration of adaptive management literature began trending toward adaptive
governance. The initial trajectory of the focus on ecological resilience gave rise to the
socio-ecological version, as addressed in the next section. In particular, the scholars affiliated
with the socio-ecological branch recognized the need to foster social learning, collaboration
and cultural change, and address the multiple scales that affected environmental and natural
resource management.

ADAPTIVE GOVERNANCE—SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL,
INSTITUTIONAL AND POLICY SCIENCES BRANCHES

There are similarities and differences associated with the three branches of adaptive govern-
ance. All branches identify the challenges with existing governance structures, whether it is
from the failure of markets or centralized structures to adequately address environmental and
natural resource problems (Ostrom 1990; Ostrom et al. 1994; Dietz et al. 2003) or from the
underlying assumptions associated with management and institutional practices (Gunderson
et al. 1995; Holling and Meffe 1996; Brunner et al. 2002, 2005). The pathology of centralized
management, “command and control” or scientific management is also a strong theme through
all three branches (Holling and Meffe 1996; Dietz et al. 2003; Brunner and Steelman 2005a).
Common elements include a focus on locally based initiatives and deliberative, collaborative
practices with an emphasis on learning and feedback loops. The branches of adaptive govern-
ance then diverge. The socio-ecological branch emphasizes linked social-ecological systems
whose dynamics can be understood through the adaptive cycle model, the institutionalists
emphasize theoretical scale interactions among different levels of decision making, and the
 Adaptive governance  583

policy scientists take a more normative direction to focus on documented patterns of practice
that serve the common interest. Each is discussed briefly below.

Socio-ecological Adaptive Governance

The socio-ecological branch has its roots with Holling and the scholars affiliated with
the Stockholm Resilience Center (http://​www​.stockholmresilience​.org/​) and the Resilience
Alliance (http://​www​.resalliance​.org/​). The socio-ecological branch evolved out of the inade-
quacies of what started as a primarily expert-dominated, ecological approach to adaptive man-
agement (see previous section). The point of departure from adaptive management to adaptive
governance for the socio-ecological branch had to do with incorporating explicit social dimen-
sions as part of advancing the feasibility of ecological resilience and understanding the com-
ponents of governance to support this goal (Gunderson and Light 2006). For instance, Folke
et al. (2005) discussed adaptive governance as the collaborative, co-governance structures that
facilitated decision making for adaptive management.
Other scholars, also writing from a socio-ecological perspective but not so firmly rooted in
achieving ecological resiliency only, offered additional social and institutional dimensions to
be considered as part of what would make robust governance structures. Labeled “adaptive
co-management” to explicitly recognize the collaborative nature of what was needed, this
literature addressed not just collaboration, but institutional development and social learning
across spatio-temporal scales (Armitage et al. 2007, 2009). Additionally, while scientific
learning was considered important, other types of knowledge beyond science were also
viewed as key to fostering understanding about social, political or economic aspects related
to the socio-ecological system. Hence, researchers argued that knowledge integration required
efforts to mobilize, make use of and combine different knowledge systems and learning envi-
ronments to enhance the capacity for dealing with complex adaptive systems and uncertainty
(Berkes et al. 2000; Folke et al. 2005; Armitage et al. 2009).
Addressing barriers inhibiting social and technical learning would require institutional
reform (Folke et al. 2007). Researchers viewed institutional rigidities and fragmentation as
limiting the ability of individuals and organizations to engage in management experimen-
tation, inclusive decision making and social learning. Remedies for these rigidities included
expanding social networks across spatial and temporal levels, the incorporation of different
knowledge types, and power sharing across central and local level institutions to provide
support at higher levels for the management actions that were taking place below (Olsson
et al. 2006; Armitage et al. 2007; Folke et al. 2007). In sum, the socio-ecological version of
adaptive governance provided a model in which individuals, organizations and agencies struc-
tured a process in which they interacted at various levels of organization and across multiple
domains (social, policy, economic and ecological). The vision was a social or institutional
structural support network that had the capacity to learn and adapt to management needs at the
project or programmatic level.

Institutional Adaptive Governance

Implicit in the institutional approach to adaptive governance is that governance structures need
to support management actions. Governance refers to higher ordered decision making that
creates conditions for social coordination and collective action at lower levels (Ostrom 1990).
584  Handbook on theories of governance

This branch is more explicitly theoretical than the other two. Dietz et al. (2003) use the term
“adaptive governance” to expand the focus from adaptive management to address the explicit
institutional context that supports adaptive management. This specific use of the term is most
aligned with Dietz et al. (2003) and Ostrom (1990; Ostrom et al. 1994), but has many others
contributing to it (Imperial et al. 1993; Scholz and Stiftel 2005; Hatfield-Dodds et al. 2007).
The problem is defined from the perspective of the tragedy of the commons (Hardin 1968)
and the failure of primary institutional arrangements, including centralized governments and
markets, to adequately address environmental and natural resource issues. A third option, as
defined by Ostrom (1990), is the focus on local, self-governing institutions. The predominant
alternative for reaching the broadly stated goal of sustaining ecological diversity and human
life rests with identifying effective governance institutions. Lessons emerge from locally
evolved institutional arrangements, and over time this institutional approach has emphasized
the need to consider scale. This includes how financial, political and cultural forces at national
and international levels pose challenges to local institutions to work effectively to achieve
their goals (Dolsak and Ostrom 2002; Young, O. 2002; Young, O. et al. 2008).
Hatfield-Dodds et al. (2007) take a more economics defined approach to the institutional
dimension of adaptive governance by framing it in the collective choice literature. Scholz and
Stiftel (2005) come at adaptive governance from a planning perspective, and recognize the
need for constitutional level institutional reforms to improve the practice of adaptive manage-
ment on the ground. In other words, we need to change more than just the operational decisions
on the ground; we need to change the higher order processes by which we choose who should
be involved in making decisions in the first place. Key elements include effective representa-
tion of interests, deliberative process design, scientific learning, public learning, and problem
responsiveness with a highly contextual focus (Scholz and Stiftel 2005: 11).
From an institutional perspective, adaptive management and adaptive governance can be
thought of as nested rule structures. Ostrom (1990) and Ostrom et al. (1994) elaborate on the
interconnected nature of rulemaking structures and how this affects resource management.
Ostrom (1990) identifies operational rules, collective choice rules and constitutional rules,
which apply to three levels of decision making about environmental resources. Operational
rules structure the day-to-day decisions about how to appropriate resources, provide infor-
mation, monitor actions and enforce rules. Collective rules affect the policy and management
decisions that determine the operational rules for managing a resource. Constitutional rules
determine who is eligible to participate and the specific governance structure to be used in
crafting collective choice rules. All sets of rules interact and structure activity at another
level. “Decisions made in constitutional-choice situations indirectly affect operational sit-
uations by creating and limiting the powers that can be exercised within collective-choice
arrangements (creating legislative and judicial bodies, protecting rights of free-speech and
property, etc.) and by affecting the decision regarding who is represented and with what
weight in collective-choice decisions” (Ostrom 1990: 192). Given the interconnected nature of
the nested system of rules and the crucial role that constitutional and collective rules play in
influencing the operational level, it is constructive to treat adaptive management and adaptive
governance as nested and interactive components (Figure 50.1). Several authors take this
approach of nested structures with differential control over the level of operations (Ostrom
1990; Imperial et al. 1993; Hatfield-Dodds et al. 2007). If we accept the nested and interactive
qualities associated with adaptive management and adaptive governance two key insights
emerge. First, establishing rules at one level without putting into place complementary rules at
 Adaptive governance  585

the other levels produces an incomplete system (Ostrom 1990). Expecting adaptive manage-
ment to take place at the operational level may be unrealistic, impossible and perhaps illegal in
the long run if adaptive governance structures are not present at the collective or constitutional
levels to support such operational level action. Second, rules at each successive level of the
hierarchy are increasingly costly to change (Goodin 1996). Institutional rigidities solidify and
norms and culture become established. Change is difficult, particularly at the collective and
constitutional levels, because significant commitments in terms of infrastructure, staff and
budgets are made based on the expectation that rules at the collective and constitutive levels
are more permanent than at the operational level. Additionally, efforts to change rules at the
collective and then the constitutive levels require greater levels of consensus among actors
(Goodin 1996). For instance, changing federal law can be harder than changing state or provin-
cial law because one needs consensus from an arguably broader group of people and in some
cases the standards for change (majority versus super-majority) can be higher. These insights
pose challenges for the long term implementation of adaptive management. First, it is easier to
undertake adaptive management at the operational level and more difficult to create adaptive
governance structures at the collective and constitutive levels. Without adaptive governance
structures or support at the collective and constitutive levels, adaptive management at the
operational level will stand little chance of long term success. Recognizing the interdependent
complexities among the nested levels of governance helps us better understand barriers to
adaptive management.

Figure 50.1 An institutional approach to adaptive management and adaptive governance

Continuing challenges to local institutions to effectively manage environmental and natural

resources include the harmonization of privatization trends related to access of common pool
resources, the increased influence of centralized governments in locally managed common
property institutions, and the force of globalization on local institutions (Steelman 2004).
Remaining areas of scholarship include how to manage the interests of resource users at mul-
tiple levels, managing at multiple social and ecological levels, and leveling the power imbal-
ances and resource availability for participants at different levels of management (Dolsak and
Ostrom 2002; Young, O. 2002; Young, O. et al. 2008).
586  Handbook on theories of governance

Policy Sciences Adaptive Governance

The policy sciences approach echoes classical American pragmatism with an emphasis
on problem orientation and working alternatives that can address these problems. It was
focused initially on natural resource policy (Brunner et al. 2002, 2005) and then on climate
policy (Brunner and Lynch 2010). Brunner (2010) then promoted adaptive governance as
a widespread reform strategy for the deficiencies of governance at large. The policy sciences
approach to adaptive governance is distinguished from the institutional and socio-ecological
versions by its presentation as an empirical pattern of practice, based on working case studies,
which linked policy, decision making and science. It also had an explicit normative focus on
the goal of serving the common interest.
According to policy scientists, the interdependencies among how policy is conceived, how
decision making is practiced and how science and other kinds of knowledge are used created
an identifiable pattern of practice recognizable as adaptive governance. In the policy sciences
version, adaptive governance supports the fulfillment of a common interest oriented problem
definition and policy solution. Institutional levels of support are important insofar as they
contribute to the achievement of this goal, and inclusive decision making is necessary so that
the common interest can be identified by those whose interests are affected. The focus is on
locally emergent alternatives. This local level emphasis “open[ed] up new opportunities for
participants to balance or integrate their interests into policy that advances their common
interest” (Brunner et al. 2002: 7). Pragmatic emphasis on identifying existing models that
could “fix the situation,” in accordance with Dewey (Smith 1978: 98), were empirically
gathered and deductively unpacked to identify patterns of governance practice (e.g. Brunner et
al. 2002, 2005). The policy goal was identified as the common interest, which was defined as
“composed of interests widely shared by members of the community” (Brunner et al. 2002: 8).
A policy focus on the common interest and the need to define or negotiate a common interest
meant that diverse interests were recognized and then balanced or traded off against each other
(e.g. Steelman and Rivera 2006; Steelman and DuMond 2009). Rather than being rooted in
a theoretical conception of democratic practice, this version emerged from workable, messy
solutions identified at the local level. Acknowledging that there were diverse interests meant
creating decision making structures that could accommodate these interests so that they could
define problems from their perspectives and then identify workable alternatives for local con-
texts. These locally determined solutions needed to be harmonized with policies and structures
at higher levels in the state and federal governance structure (Brunner and Steelman 2005b).
To fully understand such problems and alternatives, science and other kinds of knowledge
were important. While many decision and policy processes privileged science above other
kinds of knowledge, policy scientists argued that social, cultural, traditional and political
knowledge held by place based experts could also be helpful in identifying problems and their
solutions (Wilkinson et al. 2007; Ascher et al. 2010).
Adaptive governance is contrasted to a different pattern of governance practices labeled
scientific management (Brunner and Steelman 2005a). Scientific management is character-
ized by a policy focus often on a single target goal that is implemented through centralized
bureaucratic structures and favors scientific expertise and knowledge that prescribe how the
single target goal can be maximized with technical efficiency. It is this pattern of practice that
has often been recognized as giving rise to a variety of intractable environmental and natural
resource problems (Holling and Meffe 1996). Importantly, because scientific management
 Adaptive governance  587

and adaptive governance are each distinctive, interdependent patterns of practice, they are
mutually exclusive. “Adaptive governance is not merely scientific management done right”
(Brunner and Steelman 2005a: 20). The practice of adaptive governance requires a funda-
mental rethinking of the basic assumptions underlying how a problem and its alternatives
are approached, defined, promoted, implemented and evaluated while including the relevant
stakeholders in each phase of the process. It is not an administrative or technical fix, but
rather it is a new paradigm of practice—a cultural shift to create governance structures that
support common interest oriented solutions. Because of the tendency of scientific managers
to view insights like adaptive governance from a technical or administrative implementation
standpoint, a significant challenge to the transition to more adaptive governance structures
is the inclination for “partial incorporation” or the propensity to adopt part of the practice
but not all of it (Brunner and Steelman 2005b). For example, it may be tempting to adopt
a more participatory decision making approach or to include different knowledge types within
a management process and then call it adaptive governance without actually trying to seek
a common interest oriented problem definition. Policy scientists see this as a superficial incor-
poration that will likely perpetuate existing patterns of scientific management and not alter
existing power distributions. The interdependent interactions among how a problem is defined
(a common interest oriented policy goal), the decision support structure that accommodates
diverse interests in a collaborative or participatory model while incorporating diverse types of
knowledge to inform the problem definition, implementation options and alternative selection
ultimately characterize the genuine practice of adaptive governance.
Brunner (2010) speaks to adaptive governance as a reform strategy that extends beyond the
domain of environmental and natural resource arenas. A broader range of problems plague
contemporary democracies, including the lack of constitutive mechanisms to manage conflict
(Brunner et al. 2002). Addressing the American context, Brunner et al. (2002) noted that inter-
est group based democracy pits interest against interest with the underlying assumption that the
checks and balances in the separation of powers and the marketplace of advocacy will result
in a solution that is mutually beneficial. “What is missing, because the [constitutional] framers
did not provide for it, is a constitutional process for readily resolving these conflicts” (Brunner
et al. 2002: 20). They argued that the basic strategy of dividing large national or international
problems into smaller, locally based problems created the opportunity for more contextually
relevant science, knowledge and participation and the ability to serve the common interest.
These conditions could be applied to the health, military, development and technology sectors.

APPLICATIONS OF ADAPTIVE GOVERNANCE

Beyond the conceptual characterization of the different branches of adaptive governance, the
literature is replete with case studies and examples of adaptive governance. When the term is
invoked, authors are often not clear about which branch they are addressing or contributing
to. This limits the cumulative learning that could be taking place. Case studies cover all
parts of the globe—North America (Cosens and Williams 2012), Central America (Basurto
and Jiménez-Pérez 2013), South America (Young, K. and Lipton 2006), Southeast Asia
(Clark and Semmahasak 2013), Russia (Elbakidze et al. 2010), Africa (Sanginga et al. 2010;
Herrfahrdt-Pähle 2013; Knüppe and Pahl-Wostl 2013), Australia (Bettini et al. 2013; Maclean
et al. 2013), Northern Europe (Elbakidze et al. 2010; Sandström and Rova 2010; Clark and
588  Handbook on theories of governance

Clarke 2011) and Western Europe (Knüppe and Pahl-Wostl 2013). A variety of problem
areas are also addressed, including water resources (Cosens and Williams 2012; Bettini et al.
2013; Clark and Semmahasak 2013; Herrfahrdt-Pähle 2013; Knüppe and Pahl-Wostl 2013),
park management (Clark and Clarke 2011), biodiversity conservation (Young and Lipton
2006; Basurto and Jiménez-Pérez 2013), Aboriginal conceptions of land and sea management
(Maclean et al. 2013), fisheries management (Sandström and Rova 2010), soil and water con-
servation (Sanginga et al. 2010) and forest management (Elbakidze et al. 2010). These are by
no means exhaustive lists, but serve as examples of the international and substantive diversity
covered in the literature.
The applications of adaptive governance concepts to water resource management stand out
as a distinct subfield. Pahl-Wostl (2009) and Huitema et al. (2009) have provided structured
conceptual approaches that are leveraged by other scholars to investigate specific case studies
related to water (Cosens and Williams 2012; Bettini et al. 2013; Clark and Semmahasak 2013;
Herrfahrdt-Pähle 2013; Knüppe and Pahl-Wostl 2013). Huitema et al. (2009) identified four
distinct characteristics associated with adaptive co-management, including collaboration in
a polycentric governance system, public participation, an experimental approach to resource
management, and management at the bioregional scale. Pahl-Wostl (2009) identified the key
attributes of governance regimes to facilitate the more systematic analysis of these character-
istics and how they influence adaptive capacity and social learning across multiple levels of
governance. Her ideal was to move beyond single loop learning into double and triple loop
learning, which is akin to the collective action and constitutive levels articulated by Ostrom
(2005). Huitema et al. (2009) and Pahl-Wostl (2009) do not invoke the term “adaptive gov-
ernance” explicitly in the vein addressed previously in this chapter. Nonetheless, Pahl-Wostl
(2009) in particular appears to be building on the institutional branch of adaptive governance
with her distinctive focus on water resource governance. Huitema et al. (2009) reference the
institutional literature while also recognizing the socio-ecological stream of scholarship. The
primary point here is that there is a tendency to re-invent and re-discover on parallel paths
similar patterns or lessons in governance that might support or foster sound management of
water resources. A review of other environmental sectors might reveal similar patterns.

CONCLUSIONS

The scholarship on adaptive governance is poised to continue to grow. Hybrids of adaptive

governance, adaptive co-management, collaborative adaptive governance and other versions
are emerging. Climate change, globalization, financial interdependence and the spread of
information technology create conditions where adaptive management isolated at the oper-
ational level is precarious if considered apart from supportive action at the collective and
constitutional levels. Locally developed solutions to problems that focus on common interests
have been touted widely in the literature as workable solutions for intractable environmental
and natural resources problems. Vertical and horizontal linkages among diverse stakeholders
and their contributions to operational, collective and constitutive learning are important com-
ponents of adaptive governance. Our collective ability to see these characteristics as interde-
pendent patterns of practices, as opposed to individually implemented components, can lead
to a cultural shift in how we approach environmental and natural resource management and
governance for the betterment of society for all.
 Adaptive governance  589

NOTE
1. I would like to acknowledge Ms. Kathryn Reis for contributing to the thinking related to some of
the concepts presented here. Drs. Doug Clark and Maureen Reed provided helpful critical feedback
on earlier versions of the chapter. All errors or mischaracterizations are, of course, my own.

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51. Experimentalist governance
Bernardo Rangoni

Over the past two decades, experimentalist governance (XG) has been attracting consider-
able attention in both academic and policy debates. Defined in general terms as recursive
decision-making and revision based on comparison of alternative implementation experi-
ences, XG is said to have spread widely across several policy domains and polities, to ensure
inclusiveness and accommodation of local diversity, and to foster continuous learning from it.
However, these claims have not been accepted uncritically. Critiques question how pervasive
XG really is, given that it has not replaced but rather co-exists with other forms of governance,
including traditional hierarchy. They point to dangers and biases that XG may actually bring
to participation. And they suggest that, in order to be effective, XG needs the ‘shadow of
hierarchy’.
This chapter first looks at the emergence of XG avant la lettre, by very briefly discussing
two notions – directly deliberative polyarchy and democratic experimentalism – that are
largely equivalent to XG but have slightly different emphases and have appeared earlier. It
then offers a conceptual definition of XG, discussing what XG shares but also how it differs
from other important notions, as well as briefly describing its key empirical manifestations.
Thereafter, the chapter concentrates attention on three sets of central and currently open ques-
tions on XG, concerning pervasiveness, participation, and effectiveness. For each, it illustrates
competing views and offers fresh empirical examples. The chapter concludes by suggesting
how future research can contribute advancing beyond the current state of the literature,
emphasizing the value of comparative works looking at governance processes in action across
different contexts and policy cycles, giving due weight to the influence that not only functional
but also political factors may have on XG, and distinguishing the widely canvassed shadow of
hierarchy from alternative mechanisms to overcome gridlock such as penalty defaults based
on their distinctively positive and negative characters respectively.

EXPERIMENTALIST GOVERNANCE AVANT LA LETTRE

The concept of XG emerged in the late years of the first decade of the 2000s, but the ideas
surrounding it appeared a decade earlier, under the notions of directly deliberative polyarchy
and democratic experimentalism. In a much-cited 1997 article, Joshua Cohen and Charles
Sabel took as a point of departure, on the one hand, that in a range of areas existing institutions
were not solving the problems they were supposed to solve, and on the other, that collective
decision-making based on direct participation and reason-giving by citizens is valuable in
itself. Against this backdrop, Cohen and Sabel made a case for a novel form of governance,
which they called ‘directly-deliberative polyarchy’.
In directly deliberative polyarchy, decisions are taken through deliberations open to the
affected citizens. But in taking decisions, citizens must examine their own choices in the light
of deliberations and experiences of others facing comparable problems (Cohen and Sabel

592
 Experimentalist governance  593

1997). This form of governance is deliberative because it is based on arguments; it is directly

so because it builds on actors’ practical experiences; and it is polyarchic because actors learn
from and influence each other (Sabel and Zeitlin 2008: 276). The pooling of several concurrent
experiments is said to facilitate scrutiny of their effectiveness, which in turn aids learning. At
the same time, these problem-solving institutions also offer the values associated with radical
democracy (Cohen and Sabel 1997).
In an even more highly cited article published one year later, Charles Sabel went on – this
time with Michael Dorf ‒ to identify a new form of governance which they labelled demo-
cratic experimentalism. In democratic experimentalism, citizens and other actors are empow-
ered to use their local knowledge to adapt solutions to their own circumstances, but in return,
coordinating bodies at regional and national level require such actors to share information
and knowledge with others facing similar problems. Inspired by examples of novel forms of
coordination within and between private firms, the authors argued that this type of governance
was emerging in settings ranging from regulation of nuclear power plants and the environ-
ment, through community policing and procurement of sophisticated military hardware, to
services to protect children (Dorf and Sabel 1998). Importantly, Dorf and Sabel argued that
democratic experimentalism is not only able to enhance the efficiency of governance by aiding
mutual learning, emphasizing the normative merits of this new form of governance also from
a democratic perspective.
Having briefly introduced the precursors of XG, the chapter now moves to clarify the
boundaries between XG and other important neighbouring notions, defining what XG is and
what XG is not. In the same section, the chapter also summarizes the main empirical manifes-
tations of XG to date.

CONCEPTUAL DEFINITION AND EMPIRICAL MANIFESTATIONS

OF EXPERIMENTALIST GOVERNANCE

XG is presented as an alternative to conventional hierarchical governance (Sabel and Zeitlin

2012a). It shares with new modes of governance the departure from old modes of governance
that tend to be less inclusive, more rigid, more prescriptive, more committed to uniformity
and overall more hierarchical (de Búrca and Scott 2006). Yet, XG is not necessarily confined
to informal, non-binding tools (Sabel and Zeitlin 2008: 274). Thus, it should not be conflated
with ‘soft law’ and characterized as distinct from binding law-making (Eberlein and Kerwer
2004; Bickerton et al. 2015: 707), nor should it be defined along the public versus private
actors divide used to distinguish new from old modes of governance (Bartolini 2011).
XG aims at moving beyond the principal‒agent framework long used to analyse hierarchical
relations, with its core assumption that at least one actor knows what needs to be done and,
accordingly, the chief issue is to delegate tasks to that actor, while keeping it under control
through a variety of ex ante and ex post mechanisms (Weingast and Moran 1983). XG also
differs from orchestration, a recent alternative that aims at challenging and moving beyond
hierarchical, dyadic delegation, by focusing attention on the voluntary enlisting of intermedi-
aries possessing (often cognitive) resources needed by governors to reach their targets (Abbott
et al. 2015). But like principal‒agent delegation, orchestration fails to address the limits of
conceptualizing hierarchical relationships in terms of static information asymmetries, and
does not appreciate that the cognitive challenge runs much deeper (Sabel 2004; Sabel and
594  Handbook on theories of governance

Zeitlin 2012b: 411), in fact echoing the fundamental recognitions by Herbert Simon (1947)
and Friedrich von Hayek (1974) of humans’ limited ability to rationally optimize decisions
and understand and predict social phenomena.
Rather than ‘satisficing’ or markets, XG suggests that what might help is a distinctive
institutional structure. In such an architecture, local actors are intentionally granted discretion
to pursue different solutions, thus sanctioning the discretion that ‘street-level bureaucrats’
have long been said to problematically possess (Lipsky 1980). Furthermore, XG shares Elinor
Ostrom’s intuition that most successful solutions tend to come from decentralized polycentric
experiences (Ostrom 1990), but it differs from polycentrism in emphasizing the role of central
actors in pooling information on the most successful local experiences and their generalization
(de Búrca et al. 2014: 478). Similarly, XG shares with collaborative and adaptive governance
the importance of learning from implementation (Goldstein 2011), but also shows how such
learning processes can be institutionalized (de Búrca et al. 2014: 478).
In effect, this form of governance is said to be experimentalist precisely by reference to
American pragmatism (Dewey 1927), characterized by solutions systematically treated as
provisional and by the reciprocal readjustment of ends and means (Sabel and Zeitlin 2008:
276‒277; see also Ansell 2011). It is also close to reflexive governance (Scott 2010), under-
stood here as the reciprocal redefinition of policy formulation and implementation (Rangoni
and Zeitlin 2021: 823). But relative to both, XG provides a distinctive institutional architecture
structuring such reciprocal readjustments and redefinitions.
Conversely, XG shares with multi-level and network governance the attention paid to net-
works involving actors at subnational, national and supranational level (Hooghe and Marks
2001; Kohler-Koch and Eising 1999; Sørensen and Torfing 2007), but it also highlights how
such multi-level networks can facilitate learning processes (de Búrca et al. 2014: 479; Sabel
and Zeitlin 2008: 273).
In its most developed form, experimentalist architecture is multi-level and involves key
elements linked to each other in an iterative cycle:

First, broad framework goals and metrics for gauging achievement are provisionally established by
some combination of central and local units, in consultation with relevant civil society stakeholders.
Examples of such framework goals are ‘good water quality’ or ‘safe food’. In regulation, the local
units are typically private actors such as firms and/or territorial authorities to whom they immediately
respond (state regulators in the US [United States] or Member State authorities in the EU [European
Union]), while the centre can be the national government in the US or EU authorities in the EU.
In service provision, the local units are typically front-line workers such as teachers, police, or
social welfare workers or the district or regional entities supervising them, while the centre can be
a government agency or organization. Second, local units are given broad discretion to pursue these
goals in their own way. Third, as a condition of this autonomy, these units must regularly report
their performance and participate in peer reviews in which their results are compared with those
of others employing different means to the same ends. Where they are not making good progress
against the agreed indicators, the local units are expected to show that they are taking appropriate
corrective measures, informed by the experience of their peers. Fourth and finally, the goals, metrics
and decision-making procedures themselves are periodically revised by a widening circle of actors
in response to the problems and possibilities revealed by the review process, and the cycle repeats.
(Sabel and Zeitlin 2012a: 168–9; see also Sabel and Zeitlin 2008, 2010; for a diagram, see Zeitlin
2015: 2)1

Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin (2008: 274) clarify that these key elements should be
understood in functional rather than institutional terms, in the sense that each of the key func-
 Experimentalist governance  595

tions just described ‒ such as peer reviews, for example ‒ could be performed through a variety
of institutional tools such as benchmarks, progress reports or impact assessments; conversely,
a single institutional tool could perform more than one of the key functions.
With this qualification, and through a variety of institutional forms including fora, open
methods of coordination, councils of regulators and networked agencies, the experimentalist
literature found experimentalist architecture in the US and other developed democracies, both
in the provision of social welfare services such as education and child welfare, and in the reg-
ulation of health and safety risks such as nuclear power, offshore oil and gas, food processing
and environmental pollution (Sabel and Simon 2011, 2012; Sabel and Zeitlin 2012a; Sabel et
al. 2018).
Furthermore, it documented the emergence of transnational experimentalist regimes across
a number of major issue areas, including disability rights, data privacy, food safety, and the
environmental sustainability of forests and fisheries (de Búrca et al. 2013, 2014; Overdevest
and Zeitlin 2014, 2018; Sabel and Victor 2017; Zeitlin 2015; Zeitlin and Overdevest 2020).
But it is the EU that is said to have found its way more quickly and consistently to exper-
imentalist architecture in a broad array of policy domains. These include the re-regulation of
network infrastructure sectors such as electricity, gas and telecommunications; the regulation
of public health and safety such as drug authorization, occupational health and safety, environ-
mental protection, food safety, and maritime, rail and aviation safety; and social solidarity in
employment and social protection. They also encompass regulation in response to catastrophes
such as food and maritime safety/pollution; prudential regulation in financial services; com-
petition policy; and fundamental rights against discrimination (Sabel and Zeitlin 2008, 2010;
Zeitlin 2015, 2016; Mathieu and Rangoni 2019; Rangoni 2019; Rangoni and Zeitlin 2021).
Having demarcated the boundaries between XG and adjacent notions, and having summa-
rized XG empirical manifestations to date, the chapter now shifts attention to three especially
important and currently controversial sets of questions.

CONTESTED QUESTIONS ON EXPERIMENTALIST

GOVERNANCE
Today, there are at least three major sets of disagreements on XG. The first concerns the
present balance between XG and other forms of governance, with closely related questions
about XG scope conditions and future trajectory. The second is whether XG is really beneficial
to participation and inclusion, or actually the opposite. The third is whether, in order to be
effective, XG requires the shadow of hierarchy, or else penalty defaults. Let us now consider
each of these questions.

What is the Balance between Experimentalist and Other Forms of Governance, Today
and Tomorrow?

As seen, XG advocates have documented how XG architecture has become pervasively

institutionalized through a variety of forms across several policy domains in the EU, US and
other developed democracies, and transnational regimes alike (de Búrca et al. 2013, 2014;
Sabel and Zeitlin 2008, 2010; Sabel and Simon 2011; Sabel et al. 2018; Zeitlin 2015). In their
view, the spectacular emergence of XG is first and foremost the result of the turbulent and
596  Handbook on theories of governance

volatile environments associated with globalization, vertical disintegration of value chains

and rapid technological innovation. Indeed, XG scholars have made it clear that the first and
most fundamental scope condition for XG is strategic uncertainty, in which actors are unable
to precisely define in advance their goals or how best to achieve them. Another major scope
condition identified is a polyarchic or multipolar distribution of power, in which no single
actor can unilaterally impose their preferred solution without considering the views of others
(de Búrca et al. 2013: 725‒726, 743; 2014: 479, 483; Overdevest and Zeitlin 2014: 26, 43–44;
Rangoni and Zeitlin 2021: 823‒824; Sabel and Simon 2011: 56, 78, 82; Sabel and Zeitlin
2008; 2012a: 174–176; 2012b: 411–412; Sabel et al. 2018: 371–372; Zeitlin 2016).2 Since
these scope conditions are quite general and widespread, the proliferation of XG should not
come as a surprise.
Furthermore, although XG scholars recognize that, for the moment, XG co-exists with old
forms of governance, they consider most likely a trajectory whereby the latter are eventually
transformed by the former (Sabel and Simon 2006). By building on and extending previous
research in EU electricity regulation, for example, a recent study has elaborated and tested
ideal-typical pathways for the temporal evolution of XG, ranging from reversion to hierarchi-
cal governance through endogenous reduction of strategic uncertainty at one extreme to insti-
tutionalization of XG as a multipurpose governance architecture at the other. It has found that,
in the long term, the relationship between XG and strategic uncertainty may be self-reinforcing
(Rangoni and Zeitlin 2021).
By contrast, critics underline that, although XG may be an important and until recently
overlooked form of governance, it has not replaced but rather co-exists with other forms of
governance, such as hierarchical, decentralized or market-based modes (Börzel 2012: 380,
382). This view is supported by works suggesting that the EU polity is better captured by
a governance mix than by any single form of governance (Wallace et al. 2005; Tömmel and
Verdun 2008; Héritier and Lehmkuhl 2008). In effect, recent analyses comparing EU regula-
tion of electricity, gas and telecommunications over the past two decades have found varying
degrees of XG and hierarchical governance across otherwise comparable sectors, as well as
over time (Rangoni 2019; Mathieu and Rangoni 2019).
While corroborating the importance of strategic uncertainty, these same studies have also
clarified that polyarchy can be understood in both de jure and de facto terms, suggesting that
it is the latter that really matters. Thus, for example, the European Commission engaged in
XG even in domains characterized by exceptionally centralized powers – such as competition
policy, when facing great cognitive uncertainty and weak supporting coalitions in the regula-
tion of digital markets and namely Google (Monti and Rangoni forthcoming). Yet conversely,
in the natural gas domain the Commission favored more hierarchical processes despite largely
polyarchic constraints, because it perceived to know the best solution and could rely on the
support of some key national regulatory agencies to impose such solution on other recalcitrant
actors (Rangoni 2019).
When looking at future trajectories, Tanja Börzel (2012: 381) responds to XG transforma-
tive claims by recommending caution, suggesting that ‘it is probably too early to speak about
a broad and deep transformation of governance’. Here, a particularly insidious argument is the
one put forward by Burkhard Eberlein, according to which strategic uncertainty is bound to
decline over time as actors gradually learn about initially very complex and uncharted issues,
with the upshot that XG may actually be self-limiting (Eberlein 2008, 2010; but cf. with
Rangoni and Zeitlin 2021).
 Experimentalist governance  597

Is Experimentalist Governance Good or Bad for Participation?

Turning attention to inclusion and participation, directly deliberative polyarchy and demo-
cratic experimentalism are said, as seen, to offer advantages not only in terms of effective
problem-solving but also in terms of inclusive deliberation (Cohen and Sabel 1997; Dorf and
Sabel 1998). Equally, while its supporters acknowledge that XG might give rise to new risks
of outside influence and hidden agendas and strategies, and that the inclusion of all relevant
stakeholders cannot be guaranteed (de Búrca et al. 2014: 478, 480, 484), they suggest that the
increased transparency resulting from peer reviews and enhanced participation should mitigate
risks of capture (Stigler 1971) and, more generally, that XG is normatively promising:

By opening agenda setting and problem solving to a wide range of actors, particularly from civil
society, XG makes possible a forward-looking or dynamic form of accountability that is unavailable
in traditional, principal‒agent regimes. In XG practices at their best, the openness of decision making
improves dynamic accountability, which increases participation in decision making. While this
amounts neither to traditional, representative democracy nor to counter-majoritarian constitution-
alism, we argue that it can constitute a form of deliberative, collective rulemaking. (de Búrca et al.
2014: 484)

In short, XG is presented as a form of governance with the potential of increasing participation

in institutions and thus enhancing democratic legitimacy (de Búrca et al. 2014: 484; see also
Overdevest and Zeitlin 2018: 66).
A fresh illustration is provided by an analysis carried out for the European Parliament on
eurozone banking regulation (Zeitlin and Bastos 2020). The study begins by recalling that
the conventional accountability model based on principal‒agent relations, which focuses
on checking ex post whether the agent has used its discretion as intended by the principal,
presupposes that the principal had ex ante a clear enough view of the goals the agent had to
pursue (as well as the powers to sanction it as appropriate). By contrast, in cases characterized
by technically complex and rapidly changing environments (and where political bodies have
scarce sanctioning powers), a dynamic and forward-looking accountability model is more
appropriate. In such a model, actors such as the European Central Bank would be required to
give reasons for how they used their discretion to pursue relatively broad mandates, as well as
to explain what changes they have adopted following such reviews.
Again, XG claims have been challenged. Some have accused XG of being biased toward
‘output legitimacy’, not paying enough attention to ‘input legitimacy’ (Verdun 2012). Others
have attacked directly the output legitimacy that XG could generate, arguing that, at least in
the EU, this would anyway be skewed toward certain goals and policies (e.g., deregulation,
neoliberalism), notably due to existing structural imbalances favouring market-making pol-
icies and significant budgetary constraints (Fossum 2012; but cf. Sabel and Zeitlin 2012b).
Building on evidence that often member states do not comply with EU requirements (Börzel
2009), still others have raised doubts that the demanding procedural requirements on which
the XG democratizing potential depends could really be met in practice. Indeed, research on
the operation in practice of what may be considered an archetypal XG architecture – the open
method of coordination ‒ has revealed significant variation, also in terms of participation
(Zeitlin and Pochet 2005; Radaelli 2008). Combined with the observation that XG seems to
be biased toward administrative agents, these findings could lead to perceptions of XG as too
598  Handbook on theories of governance

technocratic, ultimately exacerbating rather than mitigating issues of participation and inclu-
sion within the EU (Börzel 2012: 379, 381‒382) and beyond.

Is Experimentalist Governance Effectiveness Supported by the Shadow of Hierarchy or

by Penalty Defaults?

Shifting attention to effectiveness, finally, XG advocates have not refrained from lauding XG
in these terms either. Besides accommodating the diversity in policy preferences, institutional
structures and socio-economic conditions at the heart of European and global governance,
through adaptation of common goals to varied contexts rather than imposition of uniform
one-size-fits-all solutions, XG is claimed to facilitate learning from the most successful local
experiments, as well as to provide corrigibility over time by design (de Búrca et al. 2014:
483–485; Overdevest and Zeitlin 2018: 66; Rangoni and Zeitlin 2021: 823).
XG is expected to transform distributive bargaining into deliberative problem-solving
(Sabel and Zeitlin 2010: 9), with strong claims put forward that, through deliberation and
argumentation, XG ‘disentrench[es] settled practices and open[s] for reconsideration the
definitions of group, institutional, and even national interests associated with them’ (Sabel
and Zeitlin 2008: 276). In sum, ‘XG is normatively justified by the deliberative and inclusive
redefinition, based on exchanges of information and experiences over time, of the preferences
and goals that it fosters’ (de Búrca et al. 2014: 478).
Once again, XG claims have not met uncritical acceptance. At the most general level, due
to its closeness to incrementalism, XG was accused of being unable to deliver broad-sweeping
changes (Dorf and Sabel 1998: 403‒418). A harsh criticism characterized XG as a ‘pussy-
footed rolling-rule regime’ without a chance of being as effective as hierarchical intervention
by the state (Lowi 2000: 75).
But perhaps the most challenging critique is one that does not deny that XG is entirely work-
able, but suggests that its effectiveness depends on the shadow of hierarchy. This argument
was previously applied in the debate on new modes of governance (Héritier 2002; Héritier
and Lehmkuhl 2008), and in turn derives from earlier works (Scharpf 1997). The starting
point is the recognition that, in many cases, the state has an interest in letting private parties
co-produce solutions for the public good. But at the same time, this creates a risk of gridlock
resulting from parties’ conflicting interests. The core argument, then, is that the shadow of
hierarchy incentivizes non-state actors to cooperate, as these parties are endowed with author-
ity to bargain with one another, but they do so under the ‘Damocles sword of threatened direct
state intervention’ (Schmitter and Streeck 1985: 131). Legislators, governments and courts can
thus threaten to enact adverse legislative, executive or judiciary decisions unless parties alter
their behaviour to accommodate their demands.
In the context of debates on new modes of governance in Europe, the shadow of hierarchy
argument was supported by empirical examples from domains such as the European social dia-
logue, competition policy, the regulation of energy, telecommunications and financial markets,
and environmental self-regulation, which documented that effective societal self-coordination
was rarely found without the involvement of state actors that had the capacity to make and
enforce collective decisions (Héritier and Lehmkuhl 2008; Héritier and Rhodes 2011). More
recently, the same argument has been cast over XG, raising the question of whether the shadow
of hierarchy is a necessary condition for this novel form of governance to be effective (Börzel
 Experimentalist governance  599

2012: 380‒381), as appears to be suggested by evidence of decision impasses in domains such

as energy and genetically modified organisms (Sabel and Zeitlin 2010).
For their part, promoters of XG plainly acknowledge that there are many instances where
there are substantial distributive conflicts that could jeopardize XG, but counterargue that,
rather than by the shadow of hierarchy, XG is often underpinned by penalty defaults. The
notion of ‘default rules’ was first coined by Ian Ayres and Robert Gertner (1989) while ana-
lysing the rules that courts apply to fill gaps left by incomplete contracts signed by parties.
The notion was further elaborated by Bradley Karkkainen (2006) in the context of US envi-
ronmental regulation.
The basic insight is that default rules may be so burdensome that, counterintuitively, this
may lead to desirable behaviour by the otherwise affected parties. In order to avoid especially
onerous default rules, parties may in particular choose to disclose information that otherwise
they would not have revealed. Since this may be efficient, especially in contexts marked by
strong information asymmetries, defaults rules may then be intentionally designed as puni-
tive. In a world of pervasive uncertainty where higher-level authorities are clearly incapable
of developing solutions on their own, XG scholars conclude, the possible use of traditional
hierarchical governance counts as a penalty (Sabel and Zeitlin 2008: 305–309; 2010: 13–16;
2012b: 413–414; Zeitlin 2016).
Accordingly, XG advocates have suggested that previous interpretations – for example, of
EU energy regulation – as instances of deliberation in the shadow of hierarchy (Eberlein 2008)
are in fact misconceived, since the European Commission could not really have taken over
the functions performed by the Florence Electricity Forum, should this have failed (Sabel and
Zeitlin 2008: 306‒307).
Having discussed three major areas of disagreement on XG – pervasiveness, participation
and effectiveness ‒ the chapter now concludes by suggesting how future work can contribute
advancing understanding on these important and currently unsettled questions.

NEED FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

The chapter suggests that comparative work analysing how XG architectures operate in prac-
tice is especially well suited to advance understanding on the present balance between XG and
other forms of governance, as well as on closely related questions on XG scope conditions and
future trajectory. Although XG scholars had anticipated that institutions do not always work
as intended (Sabel and Zeitlin 2008: 280‒281), and in some instances went on to study their
operation in detail (e.g., Sabel et al. 2018; Overdevest and Zeitlin 2018), thus far, most sys-
tematic, comparative attention has been dedicated to widespread identification of institutional
arrangements reflecting the key elements of XG (Sabel 2004; Sabel and Zeitlin 2008, 2010;
Sabel and Simon 2011, 2012; de Búrca et al. 2013, 2014). This is problematic because, as
recent research has shown, experimentalist architectures and governance processes may not be
equivalent (e.g., de Búrca 2010; Rangoni 2019; Weimer 2019). Prompted by this cutting-edge
research, and now that the first logical step has already been undertaken, it is appropriate to
extend systematic comparative analysis to operation in practice, so as to gauge how pervasive
XG really is, relative to several other modes of governance with which it currently co-exists.
These scholarly efforts will naturally lead also to investigation of scope conditions for XG.
Here, recent claims challenge the importance of polyarchic or multipolar distributions of
600  Handbook on theories of governance

power, underlining instead the influence of strategic uncertainty as well as readily available
coalitions (Rangoni 2019; Mathieu and Rangoni 2019; Monti and Rangoni forthcoming).
These arguments should now be tested against new evidence. If supported, they would run
counter to the common view that functional and political factors are antithetical, with the
implication that XG may not only be a machine for learning, but also for consensus. Further,
how these factors might vary over time should also be examined, as this will allow testing
diametrically opposed views that XG is self-limiting or on the contrary self-reinforcing (Sabel
and Simon 2006; Börzel 2012: 381; Eberlein 2008, 2010). To date, empirical examination of
pathways for the evolution of conventional and novel governance over several policy cycles
has been scant (for an exception, see Rangoni and Zeitlin 2021).
Comparative analysis of XG in action across different contexts and periods will also con-
tribute to the ultimately empirical question of whether XG is good or bad for participation
and inclusion, insofar as scholars will pay systematic attention to this dimension, in effect
extending what already done for the open method of coordination (Zeitlin and Pochet 2005;
Radaelli 2008) to the several additional institutional forms the XG architecture is said to have
taken (Sabel and Zeitlin 2008).
Finally, to advance on the unresolved question of whether XG effectiveness requires the
shadow of hierarchy or else penalty defaults, future research will have to distinguish the
two notions empirically. This is particularly challenging since both notions are said to often
depend on hierarchical authority, and when they do not, they still tend to manifest through
the same functional equivalents, such as consumer boycotts (cf. Börzel and Risse 2010; de
Búrca et al. 2014: 484). To complicate matters further, shadow of hierarchy scholars do not
deny that solutions developed through governance processes including non-state parties are
superior to those that can be provided directly by the state; in fact, this is the argument’s
starting point (Héritier 2002; Héritier and Lehmkuhl 2008; Börzel and Risse 2010). According
to the present literature, then, the key difference is that while in the shadow of hierarchy inter-
pretation solutions developed hierarchically are only marginally inferior to those producible
by parties, which are induced to cooperate by rational calculations including probabilistic
elements (Héritier and Lehmkuhl 2008: 2; Halfteck 2006), in the penalty defaults interpre-
tation, hierarchically developed solutions are so manifestly unworkable that it is exactly this
which induces parties to cooperate (Sabel and Zeitlin 2008: 305‒309; 2012b: 413‒414). Yet
in practice such a distinction poses formidable methodological challenges. To address the
current concept stretching and allow falsification of competing claims about the mechanisms
required to overcome gridlock in non-hierarchical governance, by building on recent insights
(Zeitlin 2016: 1076; Rangoni and Zeitlin 2021: 823), the chapter suggests distinguishing the
shadow of hierarchy from penalty defaults depending on whether threats involve specific
positive solutions, or else negative sanctions and prohibitions. In this way, future works will
be able to overcome the current scholarly debate – itself gridlocked – about the mechanisms
underpinning non-hierarchical, XG, which should be treated as matters to be studied rather
than merely assumed.

NOTES
1. Interestingly, fresh research is suggesting that, especially in contexts featuring strong interde-
pendence but also great uncertainty, XG might be experiencing a metamorphosis, whereby XG
in its classic four-step form is replaced by high synchronic uniformity which, however, remains
 Experimentalist governance  601

coupled with high diachronic revisability (Zeitlin 2016: 1075; Rangoni 2020; Zeitlin and Rangoni
forthcoming).
2. Complementary scope conditions identified in the literature include a high level of diversity, which
makes it harder to adopt and implement uniform solutions; and strong interdependence, which
stimulates actors to seek joint solutions rather than only learning from each other’s separate efforts
to address similar problems.

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52. Epilogue: the current status and future
development of governance theories
Christopher Ansell and Jacob Torfing

In this Epilogue, we reflect on the findings and arguments of the chapters in this Handbook
and look for common themes that appear across the chapters. Our goal is to draw some modest
conclusions about the current status of governance theories and to identify opportunities for
refining and elaborating these theoretical perspectives. We first identify ten broad themes that
cut across the chapters. These themes certainly do not appear in all the chapters, and some
chapters may even challenge these themes. Nevertheless, we hope that, by drawing out some
points that bridge the chapters, we can identify some common preoccupations of governance
theories. In recounting these themes, we identify the Handbook chapters where readers may go
to learn more about specific topics.
Governance theories have arisen in the last 20 or so years to explain new challenges and
new forms of governing. We commissioned the chapters in this Handbook, in part, to explore
the idea that governance theories arose semi-independently across multiple disciplines more
or less simultaneously in response to similar though not identical challenges. In law and
regulation, planning, democratic theory, economics, public management and international
relations, among other disciplines, scholars have tried to describe new forms or rationalities of
governing that were difficult to describe using traditional concepts and lenses.
Although the purpose of the Handbook was not to provide a history of the rise of govern-
ance theories, it seems reasonable to argue that this common response across disciplines arose
from some common sources. In the 1970s and 1980s, political economies were transformed
from a logic of Keynesianism and embedded liberalism toward supply-side neoliberalism and
globalization. Fordist logics of mass production were transformed in the direction of more
flexible production, and new forms of transnational political and economic organization arose.
Powerful fiscal pressures pushed states to engage in major reforms of the welfare state and
pushed public agencies to explore new logics of public management. Command-and-control
regulation was challenged as inefficient, and new forms of post-bureaucratic organization
began to appear. We do not mean to imply that these historical events produced a single total-
izing epochal shift to the brave new world of governance. They did, however, intensify experi-
mentation with new forms of organization, new strategies of governing, and new relationships
between state and society. No related theoretical discipline was left unaffected.
If theories chronicle their times, they also explore frontiers of threat and possibility. A first
common theme we draw from the chapters is that new modes of governance raise both anxi-
eties and hopes. Seen from one angle, new forms of interactive governance can be viewed as
a potential erosion of the publicness of the state, one that weakens public authority and grants
private actors greater sway. Thus, accountability—or its absence—becomes a central theme of
the governance literature (see Papadopoulos, Chapter 20). Seen from another angle, however,
new modes of governance seem to offer the potential for new forms of citizen engagement and
more flexible and integrated modes of governing (see Edelenbos and van Meerkerk, Chapter

604
 Epilogue  605

38). New modes of governance, for instance, may open up possibilities for greater citizen
participation (see Quick and Bryson, Chapter 14; and Bovaird and Loeffler, Chapter 39). As
theories of governance have matured, however, scholars have increasingly recognized that
governance represents both a threat and an opportunity for democracy (see Klinke, Chapter
8, on democratic theory, and Sørensen, Chapter 40, on democratic governance). Moreover,
governance mechanisms like transparency (de Fine Licht and Naurin, Chapter 21) and public
participation (Quick and Bryson, Chapter 14) are recognized to have both strengths and limi-
tations that depend on context and purpose.
Another common theme of the Handbook chapters is that they aim to set the record straight:
the rise of governance does not render the state obsolete. It is common to attack the governance
literature for suggesting a totalizing and radical shift from “government” to “governance.”
While governance theories arose, in part, as a critique of state-centric government, new forms
of governance often supplement or extend the state rather than supplant it. A good example
is found in the chapter on development theory (Brass, Chapter 10). While acknowledging
the legitimate concern that the proliferation of NGOs might be eroding the capacity of states
in developing countries, she points to ways that NGOs may complement state capacity and
even enhance democratic access to the state. As Jessop develops in his chapter on state theory
(Chapter 7), governance often operates in the shadow of the state, leading to a view of the state
and governance as co-implicated.
A third common theme offers elaboration: while the state is not becoming obsolete, gov-
ernance does create more decentered, pluri-centric modes of governing. Thus, the role of
the state is to some degree being transformed rather than supplanted by the shifting logics
of governance. States are learning to steer in or through networks of public and private
actors, as explored in the chapters by Mayntz (Chapter 26) and Torfing (Chapter 49). The
most common descriptor for new modes of governance in the Handbook chapters is the term
“network,” which signifies the concerted interaction among a number of public and/or private
stakeholders (see Siddiki, Chapter 6; Stephenson, Chapter 12; Kenis, Chapter 13; and Keast,
Chapter 42). A notable feature of decentered, pluricentric modes of governance is that they
place trust, deliberation, learning and collaboration at the heart of the governing process (see
Öberg, Chapter 16; Nootboom, Chapter 19; Heikkila and Gerlak, Chapter 23; Ansell, Chapter
37; Gash, Chapter 43; and Steelman, Chapter 50). However, just as we must be careful not to
assume that new modes of governance supplant the state, we must not assume that networks
supplant markets or hierarchies. In many cases, networks, markets and hierarchies are inter-
woven and interdependent, and governance is best understood as a hybrid of different modes
of organization.
In addition to the prominence of networks in the literature on governance, the theme of
“self-organization” or “self-regulation” is a common one. Networks and partnerships are
described as self-organizing, which signifies that stakeholders participate voluntarily in gov-
erning activities and jointly determine their own rules and procedures.
Certain forms of regulation are also described as self-regulatory, because the stakeholders
who set and administer the regulations are the same stakeholders who must comply with
them. Yet governance theories also sensitize us to a range of types of self-organization or
self-regulation and their political limits (see Talesh, Chapter 9; Yasuda, Chapter 41; and
Isailovic and Pattberg, Chapter 44). As developed in the chapters by Haugaard (Chapter 17)
and Triantafillou (Chapter 34), a governmentality lens also yields important insights into
how power functions within self-organizing networks or self-regulatory associations. And,
606  Handbook on theories of governance

as pointed out in the chapter by Mattli and Seddon on transnational governance (Chapter 48),
governance needs to recognize the distributional dynamics of governance.
Given the deliberative, self-organizing character of many modes of governance, it is not
surprising that governance theories foster an appreciation for the discursive, constructivist
and agential aspects of governing, especially in the way that they may shape the identities of
governance actors. The chapter by Griggs and Howarth (Chapter 29), for example, notes how
discourse theory foregrounds the political construction of governance networks and their con-
stitution through acts of power. Turnbull’s chapter on interpretive theory (Chapter 36) explores
the importance of governance narratives and points out how interpretive theory’s focus on how
actors interpret meaning offers insight into the agency of governance actors. An actor-oriented
approach to governance is also visible from quite different theoretical angles. As explored by
Holahan and Lubell’s chapter on collective action theory (Chapter 2) and Eriksson’s chapter
on public choice theory (Chapter 31), understanding the structure of incentives faced by public
and private actors is important for explaining how they will act within governance contexts.
A general point that can be drawn from the chapters is the reminder that governance can
be both an independent and a dependent variable. Some of the literature on governance is pri-
marily interested in explaining why certain modes of governing emerge or become dominant
in a particular context or domain. This literature appeals to a range of contextual factors—
complexity (Koliba, Gerrits, Rhodes and Meek, Chapter 35), institutions (Peters, Chapter
30), ideas (Pierce and Osei-Kojo, Chapter 32), legitimacy (Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen, Chapter
18), incentives (Holahan and Lubell, Chapter 2; Eriksson, Chapter 31) and so on—to explain
governance. Other literature is primarily concerned about the outputs or consequences of gov-
ernance. The chapter by Radnor, Osborne and Glennon on public management theory (Chapter
4) is interested in how New Public Governance (as contrasted with New Public Management)
produces public services. Similarly, Cairney’s chapter on the use of evidence (Chapter 22) and
Renn and Klinke’s chapter on risk governance (Chapter 25) is focused on governance strate-
gies for effective management and communication of risk. In addition, Sørensen (Chapter 40)
highlights the democratic implications of governance, Mayntz (Chapter 26) discusses how
governance can improve implementation, and Hartley and Torfing (Chapter 24) focus on how
collaborative governance can enhance innovation. In some cases, governance outcomes may
be less formal or tangible than the outcomes associated with the formal institutions of govern-
ment. For example, Heikkila and Gerlak (Chapter 23) describe how governance theory may
care a great deal about whether stakeholders learn from one another, and Rangoni (Chapter 51)
describes how governance may involve experimentation.
Learning and experimentation (see also Ansell, Chapter 37 and Steelman, Chapter 50)
are prominent mechanisms of governance, in part, because governance is often linked with
practical efforts at solving complex problems in new and creative ways. Interactive modes of
governance, in particular, are thus understood to offer a potential tool for finding innovative
solutions to policy failures (see Hartley and Torfing, Chapter 24). The Handbook also illumi-
nates how governance deploys a wide variety of social, institutional and political mechanisms,
such as incentives (Holahan and Lubell, Chapter 2; Eriksson, Chapter 31), formal organization
(Egeberg, Gornitzka and Trondal, Chapter 3), information (Bullock, Chapter 28), soft policy
tools (Blomqvist, Chapter 27) and experimentation (Rangoni, Chapter 51), among others.
Mattli and Seddon caution (Chapter 48) that the problem-oriented approach to governance
needs to be careful to avoid functionalism.
 Epilogue  607

Table 52.1 Ten common governance themes from across the chapters

1. New modes of governance raise anxieties about the erosion of publicness and loss of accountability but also raise hopes for new
and improved modes of democratic participation and an enhanced capacity for public problem-solving and innovation.
2. The rise of governance does not render the state obsolete; governance may substitute for, supplement, extend or transform the
state.
3. Governance does, however, create more decentered, pluri-centric modes of governing, often organized through networks.
4. “Self-organization” and “self-regulation” are oft-noted features of governance, and governance theories sensitize us to a range
of types and their political limits.
5. Governance theories foster an appreciation for the discursive, constructivist and agential aspects of governing.
6. Governance can be understood as both an independent and a dependent variable—that is, as an analytical framework for
explaining governing outcomes and as a process to be explained.
7. The concept of governance is often linked with practical efforts to solve complex problems, and the governance tool kit contains
a wide variety of social, institutional and political mechanisms.
8. Governance theories tend to be process-oriented and context-sensitive.
9. Governance is particularly challenging when it must operate across levels, spatial scales and jurisdictions.
10. Governance processes are often freighted with conflicting normative expectations that can be hard to realize in practice.

A number of the Handbook chapters also emphasize that governance theories tend to be
process-oriented and context-sensitive. Sahlin (Chapter 11), for instance, emphasizes that
transnational governance is a process-oriented as opposed to an interest-oriented perspective.
The point is not that transnational actors do not have interests, but rather that those interests
are endogenous to the governance process. Moreover, governance mechanisms interact
significantly with their context. The chapter by Hartmann and Geertman (Chapter 5), for
instance, emphasizes the context-sensitivity of planning theory. While institutional design is
important, it must be highly sensitive to context. An important implication here is that we
must be cautious in generalizing across contexts (see Yasuda, Chapter 41).
Governance is particularly challenging when it is invoked to describe governing processes
that operate across levels, spatial scales and jurisdictions. The chapters on urban and regional
governance (Pierre, Chapter 45), multi-level governance (Bache, Bartle and Flinders, Chapter
46), European and supranational governance (Panke and Haubrich-Seco, Chapter 47) and
transnational governance (Mattli and Seddon, Chapter 48) all examine this issue. Governance
facilitates coordination by linking public and private actors along the vertical and horizontal
axes, but alignment of social and political actors across scales and sectors is highly demand-
ing owing to the persistence of cultural, political and organizational differences and the lack
of proximity.
A final common theme is that governance is often freighted with conflicting normative
expectations that can be hard to realize in practice (see, in particular, Edelenbos and van
Meerkerk on normative theory, Chapter 38). The chapter on transparency by de Fine Licht
and Naurin (Chapter 21), for example, describes the potential trade-off between account-
ability and efficiency, while the chapter by Papadopoulos on accountability (Chapter 20)
describes the fundamental tension between accountability and representation, and the chapter
by Taylor (Chapter 15) on representation suggests tensions around inequality and inclusion.
Thus, we see that governance is a complex field of normative tensions and trade-offs. Table
52.1 summarizes ten common governance themes from across the chapters.
608  Handbook on theories of governance

A FUTURE RESEARCH AGENDA

There is no single unified governance theory. As this Handbook illustrates, there are many dif-
ferent governance theories, which approach the issue from different disciplinary perspectives,
using different analytical tools and adopting varied normative criteria. Governance is plural-
istic and so are the theories that try to make sense of it. Each of the chapters in the Handbook
includes a brief discussion of where the theoretical domain covered might be advanced in
the near future. Given the pluralism of the field, however, this does not amount to a unified
research agenda. Nevertheless, we have noted a number of important themes that appear
across the chapters that may lead to refinements in governance theories in the future. We
therefore conclude the Epilogue and the Handbook with a discussion of this research agenda.
One prominent theme is the need to develop tools for measuring and evaluating govern-
ance, and particularly for evaluating governance outcomes. An interesting example comes
from the chapter on legitimacy by Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen (Chapter 18). After pointing out the
importance for governance theory of distinguishing between different kinds of legitimacy
(input, throughput and output), Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen argues that we need to develop tools to
conduct “legitimacy audits” that enable researchers to systematically evaluate the legitimacy
of different modes of governance. She acknowledges that this is a challenging analytical task,
but one that is important for advancing governance theory. A similar argument is made by
Heikkila and Gerlak in their chapter on learning (Chapter 23), where they argue that we need
better concepts, metrics and measures for evaluating learning in governance contexts. Gash’s
chapter on collaborative governance (Chapter 43) draws a similar conclusion about the need
for research on how to evaluate and measure collaborative governance outcomes. Her chapter
and the chapter by Stephenson on heterarchy (Chapter 12) argue that articulation of standards
can facilitate the management of these distributed processes. Cairney’s chapter on evidence
offers a somewhat broader discussion of the mutual conditioning relation between governance
and evidence (Chapter 22).
A closely related theme is the need to develop clearer theoretical specification of the dimen-
sions of and conditions for many forms of governance, which is particularly important for
understanding the effective design of governance processes. For example, Egeberg, Gornitzka
and Trondal’s chapter on organization theory (Chapter 3) argues that we still lack a clear
specification of the organizational dimensions of governance. Sahlin’s chapter on interna-
tional relations (Chapter 11) urges the importance of building more systematic descriptive and
explanatory models of the expansion and dynamics of transnational governance. Nooteboom
discusses the role of trust for forming collaborative relationships (Chapter 19). Hartley and
Torfing (Chapter 24) identify a pressing need for the elaboration of a contingency framework
that relates how forms of governance encourage or suppress different types or dimensions of
innovation, and Renn and Klinke (Chapter 25) argue that we still lack a comprehensive theory
of risk governance. Similarly, Bullock (Chapter 28) argues that we need a more complete
picture of how information-based governance operates, and Keast (Chapter 42) suggests that
we need more attention to the variability of networks and the ways they can be governed.
Pierre’s chapter on urban and regional governance (Chapter 45) argues that empirical data
collection has not been guided by theoretical concepts and ideas and has not spurred the
development of theory. Thus, in many important areas of governance, important insights and
empirical studies exist, but well-developed theoretical frameworks are still lacking.
 Epilogue  609

The chapters suggest that we need both process-oriented qualitative studies and quan-
titative, structural studies. For instance, in their chapter on discourse theory (Chapter 29),
Griggs and Howarth suggest the need for “thick descriptive,” longitudinal studies that cover
the lifespan of governance networks. By contrast, in their chapter on collective action theory
(Chapter 2), Holahan and Lubell argue for additional development of social network analysis
as a tool for analyzing the structure of commons problems. In his chapter on networks (Chapter
13), Kenis argues that we need studies of both structure and process.
In keeping with the process orientation of many governance theories, however, another
common theme is that there needs to be more attention to how different modes of governance
interact and combine. Jessop’s chapter on state theory (Chapter 7), for instance, calls for
further study of how government and governance co-evolve. Mayntz’s chapter on steering
(Chapter 26) makes a similar claim. It argues that, since the state and government still attempt
to steer society despite the rise of new forms of interactive governance, we should study how
different modes of governance interact and can be combined. Isailovic and Pattberg’s chapter
on private governance (Chapter 44) suggests that we need more empirical research on how
governing takes place within and between the public and the private sphere, especially in cases
where hybrid public–private spaces have been created. And Peters’s chapter on institutional
theory (Chapter 30) claims that we need to better understand the formation, form and function-
ing of informal institutions and their relations to formal institutions. Similarly, in their chapter
on normative theory, Edelenbos and van Meerkerk (Chapter 38) observe that there is a lack of
systematic comparative research on the co-existence of interactive governance and formal gov-
ernmental institutions. Yasuda’s chapter on regulatory governance (Chapter 41) argues that we
need to better understand the interconnectedness of regulatory systems. And, in their chapter
on multi-level governance (Chapter 46), Bache, Bartle and Flinders argue that the third wave
of the multi-level governance literature should continue to break down the duality of Type
I and Type II governance. We also need to better understand how processes of multi-actor
collaboration are led and managed in a broad range of governance arenas. Brass’s chapter
on development theory (Chapter 10), for instance, suggests that additional research is needed
on the mechanisms of coordination between and among local and international groups. A sub-
theme here is that administrative and political leadership roles need to be clarified. In their
chapter on innovation (Chapter 24), for instance, Hartley and Torfing argue that we need to
know much more about the leadership and management of collaborative innovation. Radnor,
Osborne and Glennon’s chapter on public management theory (Chapter 4) urges the need to
reflect on the distinctiveness of public services in order to adapt a service-dominant logic to
the public sector. And, in his chapter on metagovernance (Chapter 49), Torfing suggests that
empirical studies are needed in order to understand how metagovernance works in practice.
Governance theory also needs to show how it can represent and harness complexity,
especially via learning and multi-actor collaboration. Koliba, Gerrits, Rhodes and Meek’s
chapter on system theory and complexity theory (Chapter 35) calls for more research on how
to harness complexity for practitioners and on how to communicate complexity concepts to
them. With respect to adaptive governance, Steelman (Chapter 50) argues that we need to
know much more about management of interactive learning across levels. A related theme
is that we need to attend to the spatial and scalar dimensions of governance. Hartmann and
Geertman’s chapter on planning theory (Chapter 5), for instance, argues that it should integrate
concerns for spatiality together with the collaborative dimension of planning. In their chapter
610  Handbook on theories of governance

on discourse theory, Griggs and Howarth (Chapter 29) suggest that research needs to contextu-
alize how networks operate at the intersection of processes working at multiple spatial scales.
The final three themes refer to the interconnected issues of accountability, transparency,
representation and democracy. The first such theme is that we need to further explore
how accountability and transparency contribute to the democratic quality of governance.
Papadopoulos (Chapter 20) argues that we need more empirical research on how accountabil-
ity operates within interactive governance. This research should systematically examine who
is accountable to whom and for what, and how the accountability process unfolds through
time. Papadopoulos further recommends that this research should be comparative in order to
better generalize these findings. In their chapter on transparency, de Fine Licht and Naurin
(Chapter 21) argue that we must further investigate the conditions under which different forms
of transparency and secrecy enhance or detract from democratic accountability and efficiency.
We also need to study both the conditions and the processes of inclusion and exclusion in
governance and the ways that power subtly—or not so subtly—operates within governance
arenas. Talesh’s chapter on public law and regulatory theory (Chapter 9) argues that, to
understand collaborative and self-regulatory modes of regulation, we need to conduct more
research on how law is interpreted, implemented and constructed in governance models,
especially by private and civil society actors. Taylor’s chapter on representation (Chapter 15)
argues that inequality and exclusion remain a problem for governance theory that cannot be
solved by institutional tinkering. In his chapter on deliberation, Öberg (Chapter 16) argues
that more research is needed in order to explore the conditions for deliberative democracy to
be inclusive. In his chapter on power, Haugaard (Chapter 17) argues that we know quite a lot
about power as an episodic constraint exercised through agency-based decision making in col-
laborative arenas, but little about how the predispositions of the participants in collaborative
governance are shaped. Triantafillou’s chapter (Chapter 34) argues that governmentality, with
its attention to soft power, needs to be applied to actual governance practices (and not just at
the discursive level). And, in his chapter on interpretive theory (Chapter 36), Turnbull also
argues for further elaboration of a theory of power. Finally, Mattli and Seddon (Chapter 48)
call for greater attention to politics in the study of transnational governance.
We also need to investigate the potential for new forms of governance to deepen democracy
and further explore the meaning of democracy in the context of governance. Klinke’s chapter
on democratic theory (Chapter 8) suggests the need for more comparative empirical studies
across sectors and across countries to explore the democratic and undemocratic implications
of governance. With respect to public participation, Quick and Bryson (Chapter 14) argue that
theory development is particularly needed on how much participation is desirable and work-
able and on the implications of increasingly diffuse systems of governance for opportunities
for public participation. In her chapter on public choice (Chapter 31), Eriksson argues that
we need to learn how to promote citizen and community participation without encouraging
rent-seeking. Ansell’s chapter on pragmatism (Chapter 37) argues that further exploration
of modes of “democratic experimentalism” may reveal the democratizing potential of
governance, while Sørensen’s chapter on democratic governance (Chapter 40) argues that
future research should look at the extent to which governance, and particularly interactive
governance, contributes to developing or transgressing liberal democracy. The relationship
between governance and democracy is particularly crucial in some domains, such as in the EU,
where Panke and Haubrich-Seco (Chapter 47) argue that democratic legitimacy remains a key
concern. Table 52.2 summarizes ten common future research themes from across the chapters.
 Epilogue  611

Table 52.2 Ten common future research themes from across the chapters

1. There is a need to develop tools for measuring and evaluating governance, and particularly for evaluating governance outcomes.
2. A clearer theoretical specification of the dimensions of and conditions for many forms of governance is required.
3. Both process-oriented qualitative studies and quantitative, structural studies are desirable for advancing governance theories.
4. More attention to how different modes of governance interact and combine would be useful.
5. We need to better understand how processes of multi-actor collaboration are led and managed in a broad range of governance
arenas.
6. Governance theories need to better demonstrate how complexity may be represented and harnessed.
7. We need to give more theoretical and empirical attention to the spatial and scalar dimensions of governance.
8. Additional work is needed to explore how accountability and transparency contribute to the democratic quality of governance.
9. The conditions and processes of inclusion and exclusion in governance arenas and the operation of power within processes of
governance should be explored in more detail.
10. We should further investigate the potential for new forms of governance to deepen democracy and should continue to explore
the meaning of democracy in the context of governance.

This Epilogue has sought to identify some of the common themes that bridge the chapters. But
this discussion hardly captures the richness of many of these chapters. For further insights,
we urge you to delve into the individual Handbook chapters, which will reward you with
their insights. The state of these theories is advancing rapidly, enabling them to increasingly
improve their ability to explain novel dimensions of governing. While most of the chapter
authors would probably agree that governance theories have a long way to go before they
provide comprehensive theoretical frameworks, these theories nevertheless provide many
useful analytical concepts for helping us understand and explain contemporary governance.
Index

accountability recent developments in 360–61

as central theme of governance literature 604 strengths and weaknesses of 355–7
concept of 199, 215 Africa
as constitutive part of democratic anchorage ACF in 358
of interactive governance 215–17 crisis of governance in 121
cooperative logic of interactive governance inefficient manufacturing 119
217 NGOs 124
and decision-making 228 structural adjustment programs 120–21, 124
and democracy, disjuncture between 221–2 agencification 6, 33–4
future research avenues 222, 610 altruism 206–7
individual, of participants in interactive antitrust 146
governance 219–20 Arab Spring 141–2
lack of visibility of interactive processes Aristotle 19, 91, 211, 281
217–18
loose coupling of governance sites with bounded rationality 30, 216, 236, 247, 354
formal, decision-making institutions bureaucracy
218–19 as actor in interactive governance 219–20
and multi-level governance 530 participation and self-organizing processes
NMGs lacking 549, 607 leading to 438
as normative problem 435–7 political control and 343–4
and regulatory governance 473–4 and privatization 346
through narrative accounts 570–71 public choice theory applied to 343–4
and transparency 159, 161, 165, 193, 226, rationalistic planning applied to 59
228, 231, 491, 610–11 relation with politicians 348
actors, links between state 279, 486
analyzing, visualizing and explaining supranational 32
patterning of 151–4 Weberian model of 44
importance of 150–51 businesses
adaptive governance collaborative approaches toward 105–9
and adaptive management 581–2 construction of meaning of legal regulation
applications of 587–8 109–11
collective choice rules 584–5
constitutional rules 584–5 “Calimero syndrome” 206, 212
future research avenues 558, 609 Canada
institutional 583–5 ACF theory of policy learning in 358
nested rule structures 584–5 coastal fishery management solutions in 479
operational rules 584–5 distinctive forms of governance existing in
policy sciences 586–7 parallel 328
scholarship on 580–81 Great Lakes regime 98
scientific management 586–7 homelessness governance networks 439
socio-ecological 583 “Cassis de Dijon” case 544, 550
administrative metagovernance 574–5 centralization vs. decentralization 344–5
Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) citizen participation 52, 61, 97, 99–100, 159, 178,
267–8 384, 395, 436–7, 450, 605
Advocacy Coalition Framework 70–72, 74, Clayton Act 146
353–4, 361, 397 clenched fist of economic theory 366, 367–8
applying of governance 357–9 collaborative governance
future research avenues 361, 606 challenges 503–6
overview of 354–5

612
 Index  613

commitment to 506–7 in the policy process 67, 67–75

context for 500–502 provision of collective goods in complex
defining systems 22–4, 26
categorization of conceptual approaches public choice theory applied to 341–2
497 collective goods
commonalities 499–500 Adam Smith’s view on 20
method of operation 499 neoclassical economic models of 20–21
nature of 498–9 provision of
and democratic inclusion 93–4 aim of scholarship on 22
development of, in variety of fields 10 challenge remaining for 25–6
and discourse representation proposal 175 in complex systems 22–4, 25–6
facilitative leadership 500–502 modern field research on 25
future research avenues 507–8, 608 under- and over- 19
as hard solution to hard set of problems 164 top-down and bottom-up governance
as high risk, high reward policy endeavor arrangements 24
507 trust, reciprocity and altruism as central
HOPE VI 497, 507 to research in 24
and inclusion 93 requirements for effective governance of 22
and innovation 257–8, 260, 606 collibration 84–6
and learning 246, 500, 502, 505 command-and-control regulation 82, 104–8, 111,
and metagovernance 573–4, 576 288, 394, 408, 462, 466, 472, 474, 502,
as multi-actor governance 254 567, 582, 604
and network approach 151 common pool resources
in networks and interactive policy arenas in economic theory 374–5
575–6 neoclassical economic models of 20–21
pitfall of 507 privatization trends related to access of 585
and public–private partnerships 222 problems addressed through development of
in relation to network governance 488–9 institutions 326
in relation to procedural legitimacy 98 as rivalrous in consumption 19
studying, in goal-directed networks 154–5 similarity to public goods 18
collective action visible and invisible handshakes 374–5
and boundary crossing policy problems 429 communication, risk 272–4
creating conditions for 583–4 communicative action 179, 420, 500
double and triple loop learning akin to 588 communicative character of accountability 199
empirics of 24–5 communicative discourse 329
glue binding individuals to 485 communicative formation of public opinion 96
interaction dilemmas solved through 374 communicative forms of coordination 94–5
political economy of 21–2 communicative planning 58, 61–2
problems 5, 8, 35, 221, 326, 337, 341–2, 349, competition
375, 523, 570 among multiple governments 23
process of steering society and economy global 522
through, as definition of governance governance by, in EU 544
3–4, 150, 155, 365, 456 and public choice theory
by state and institutions 373 applied to 345–7
and system dynamic models 396 as insight into 347
collective action theory in Type II multi-level governance 531–4
classical, and governance 19–20 complex adaptive systems (CASs)
collective dilemmas 8, 8–26 core dynamic properties of 400
experiments and field studies 24–5 definition of 390–91
future research avenues 25–6, 556 features of 390–91
as insight into public choice theory 339 governance arrangements as 393–4
neoclassical economic models of public path dependency 391, 400–401
goods and common pool resources research methodologies 398
20–21 transfer of concepts 392
new institutional economics 21–2 complexity theory and systems analysis
614  Handbook on theories of governance

application to governance 389–90 market economy attempting to

complexity maximize forms of 93
harnessing, for good governance mechanisms of 543–5
400–401 and steering 278–9, 281
in regulatory governance 473, 478–80 voluntary policy 290
as theory 390–93 co-production
complexity-informed governance theories concept of 446–7
396–7 disciplinary perspectives on 447
future research avenues 401–2, 609 design science 454–5
governance arrangements economics 447–9
as complex adaptive systems 393–4 political science 450–51
describing, as networks and systems public choice 449–50
394–6 services management 455–6
provision of collective goods in complex social and consumer psychology 453–4
systems 22–4, 26 sociology 452–3
research methodologies for complex adaptive future research avenues 458, 605
governance systems and networks between public and private actors,
397–9 governance as 535
compliance of risk knowledge 274
and power 200–201 role of in theories of interactive governance
in public law and regulatory theory 108–11 456–8
and regulatory governance 473–8 of services 47, 49–52, 165, 259
and soft and hard governing tools 292–3 COVID-19 328, 236
trust, obligation and reputation as conduits crowd sourcing 141
for 487
context-focused planning theory 61–2, 607 Deepwater Horizon oil spill 146, 147, 472
cooptation deliberation
concept of 556 and civic engagement 347–8
and shifts in governance power 557–8 and collaboration 86
theory conjectures collaborative governance’s capacity for
architecture of global finance 561–2 501–2, 507
European accounting and environmental components of 178–9
regulation 559–61 controversies
European securities regulation 562–3 capacity and willingness to deliberate
in transnational governance 557–8 182
types of, and distributional implications 559 factors conducive to 182–3
coordination nature of deliberation 181–2
and discursive approach 329 promotion of democracy or technocracy
in economic theory 365–75 183
effectiveness, in European Commission 32 deliberative capacity of governance
governance processes 170
facilitating 607 and deliberative democracy 178
as neutral mechanism for 575 deliberative dialogue 499
horizontal deliberative governance arenas
communicative forms of 94 deliberative forums 180–81, 544
in European public administration 6 empowered spheres 180
governance networks as arenas for 570 public sphere 179–80
imperative 81–2, 85–6 future research avenues 183, 610
relational, theory of 489 governance as deliberative exercise 410
of sectoral planning 59 in interactive governance 216–17
social and learning 248, 420
communication as central for 425 NMGs’ potential for 549
decision-making creating conditions for in planning theory 60
583–4 Pragmatist model of 420–25
and economic theory 375 in public participation 160, 162
 Index  615

and risk 265, 268–9, 271–4 future research avenues 100, 610
of soft governing tools 286–7, 291 and governance 89–90, 98–100, 605
and throughput legitimacy 198–9 and inclusion 92–4
in transnational governance 134 liberal
and transparency 228 defining liberal democracy 463–4
Type I governance 531–4 dispositions of public officeholders 191
democracy idea of political system as a set of
and accountability, disjuncture between neutral institutions 189
221–2 on new governance forms promoting
deliberation’s promotion of 183 participation and deliberation 97
deliberative model of as normative theory of democracy 94–5
aspects of communication 97, 378, 420 in relation to inclusion 92–3
and citizen participation 97, 178, 395, in relation to self-determination 94–5
435–6 of pluralism
democratic literacy of networks 435–6 nature of 92
growth of 100 on new governance forms promoting
nature of 91–2 participation and deliberation
as normative theory of democracy 91 97, 99
in relation to inclusion 92–4, 438 as normative theory of democracy 91
in relation to public opinion and in relation to inclusion 92–3
political will 97–8, 100 in relation to self-determination 94–5
in relation to self-determination 95 processes forming public opinion and
how governance networks affect 464–7 political will 96–8
normative theories 90–92 republican
republican models of 91–2 as normative theory of democracy 91
see also representative democracy in relation to public opinion and
democratic deficit political will 91–2
of contemporary societies 315 in relation to self-determination 91
of European Union 7, 282 self-determination and self-rule 94–6
of global governance 198 dependent variables
of private forms of governance 513–14 governance as 29, 38, 79–80
democratic experimentalism 420, 424, 593, 610 state as 79–80
democratic governance design science 163, 454–5
and accountability 221–2 development theory
argument for more practice in 410–11 bureaucratic reforms 120–21
citizen participation as objective of 395 dirigiste state 118–19
enhancing through metagovernance 572 future research avenues 125, 609
focus on 122 governance
and Pragmatism 419–20, 423 development, in twenty-first century
and regional governance 523–4 123–5
traditional definition of 164 role of market-enabling institutions in
see also network governance: democratic 121–2
democratic theory and role of state 118, 121–2, 124, 605
deliberative historical summary 118
growth of 100 non-governmental organizations 123–5
nature of 92 protectionism 119–20
as normative theory of democracy 91 role of politics in economic policymaking
in relation to inclusion 93–4 119
in relation to public opinion and state-led development during Keynesian
political will 97–8, 100 revolution 118–19
in relation to self-determination 98 structural adjustment programs 120–21,
epistemological and ontological strands of 123–4
empirical-analytical theories 90–92 turn toward market solutions 120–21
generic democratic ideas 91 directly deliberative polyarchy 592–3
normative theories of democracy 90–92 Discourse Network Analyzer 361
616  Handbook on theories of governance

discourse theory environmental law 108, 281, 476

affective dimension of governance network and information-based governance strategies
practices 316–17 302–4
critical explanation and normative evaluation and legitimacy 197, 200
317–19 and multi-level governance 534
definition 412 and private governance 513
floating signifiers 311, 313–14 and soft policy tools 289, 291–2
future research avenues 319, 609 Europe
and governance networks 309–10 corporatist systems in 372
hegemonic politics and reproduction of governance
network governance 313–15 concept of, in public administration 6
poststructuralist 310–11 as “co-production” between public and
problematizing governance networks 311–13 private actors 535
discursive institutionalism 329–30, 412, 571 and governmentality 379
discursive interaction 96, 366 hierarchical style of regulation 90
discursive representations 169–70, 175 indicative planning 372
diversity 162 links between firms 152–4
local and regional government research
ecology of games framework 71–3 programs 524
economic models push towards co-production of public
applied to legislative and administrative services 165
decision-making 104 state
neoclassical, of public goods 20–21 conception of 278
economic theory elements of 77–9
clenched fist 366, 367–8 welfare 328
common pool resources 374–5 technical assistance programs 478
coordination in 365–75 transnationalization of public spheres in 96
future research avenues 375 urbanists embracing governance paradigm
governance in 365–6, 371, 375 520–21
helping hand 366, 368–70 use of term “soft law” 107
invisible hand 366–70 voluntary environmental programs 303
invisible handshake 366, 373–5 Weberian model of bureaucracy in 45
micro-, and public choice theory 336–7, 340 European Union (EU)
from visible hand to vanishing hand 366, adoption of soft governing modes 285–6,
370–71 289–91
visible handshake 366, 371–3 applying the ACF to 357–8
effectiveness and competition 544
of global governance, extent of private as complex multi-level political system 282
governance’s contribution to 512, 513 cooptation in
goals, means and tensions in 433 accounting and environmental
as normative objective 430–31 regulation conjecture 559–61
questions of, on regard to new modes of architecture of global finance conjecture
governance 548–9 561–2
efficiency prominent status of 557
goals, means and tensions in 433 securities regulation conjecture 562–3
as normative objective 431–2 on coordination 32
empirical institutionalism 328–9 democratic deficit of 7, 282
environment and natural resources management experimentalist governance 594–7, 599
adaptive governance approach 248, 581–2 governance
applications of 587–8 conceptual and definitional issues
institutional 583–5 540–41
policy sciences 586–7 as fertile breeding ground for new
socio-ecological 583 mechanisms of 540
collective action theory for 8, 23 future research avenues 549, 610
in cooptation conjecture 559–61, 564 intergovernmental 541–2
 Index  617

multi-level 528–36 complexity theory and systems analysis

new modes of 543–5 401–2, 609
origin of concept of 7 co-production 458, 605
patterns and trends in evolution of deliberation 183, 610
545–7 democratic theory 100, 610
regional 523–4 development theory 125, 609
research questions and lacunae 547–9 discourse theory 319, 609
supranational 33, 542–3 economic theory 375
through regulation as central reform 107 EU and supranational governance 549
traditional modes of 541–3 European Union (EU) 549, 610
and horizontal specialization 32 evidence 240–41, 606
and innovation 256, 258–9 experimentalist governance 599–600, 606
and negotiation 543–4 governance networks 319, 468, 609
and non-binding regulation 292 governmentality 384–5, 610
reflections on state and statehood 7 heterarchy 147, 608
soft and hard governing tools 289–91 information-based governance 305–6, 608
territorially arranged legislation 34–5, 90 innovation 260, 608
transboundary communicative spaces within institutional theory 332–3, 609
96 interactive governance 222, 440–41, 467–8,
use of policy instruments 280–81 609–10
evidence international relations theory 608
evidence–policy gap as a governance interpretive and narrative theory 413–15, 610
problem 235–7 learning 249–50, 608
future research avenues 240–41, 606 legitimacy 201–2, 608
good governance of 239–40 metagovernance 576–7, 609
key elements of 234–5 multi-level governance 536, 609
models of governance in relation to use network governance 492, 608
237–9 democratic 467, 610
experimentalist governance normative theory 440–41, 609
avant la lettre 592–3 organization theory 38, 608
conceptual definition and experimental planning theory 62–3, 609–10
manifestations of 593–5 policy process frameworks 75, 605
contested questions of 595–9 power 192–4, 610
definition of 592 Pragmatism 425, 610
future research avenues 599–600, 606 private governance 515, 609
expertise public choice theory 349, 610
and collaborative governance 497, 506 public law and regulatory theory 111–12,
and legitimacy 199 610
in organization theory 31 public management theory 53, 609
and private governance 511, 515 public participation 164–5, 610
in public management theory 51–2 regulatory governance 303, 479–81, 609
in public participation theory 158, 162–3 representation 175–6, 610
and risk governance 265, 273 risk 275, 608
technical 257, 473, 560, 586 soft and hard governing tools 293
state theory 86–7, 609
Federal Trade Commission Act 146 steering 282–3, 609
Foucault, Michel 77–8, 82, 85, 187, 190–91, 194, transnational governance 135–6, 609
310, 315, 378–85 economic 564–5, 610
future research avenues transparency 231, 610
accountability 22, 610 trust 213, 608
ACF theory of policy learning 361, 606 urban and regional governance 524–5, 608
adaptive governance 558, 609
collaborative governance 507–8, 608 gender inequality 173–5
collective action theory 25–6, 556 Germany
common themes 608–11 ACF theory of policy learning in 359
618  Handbook on theories of governance

Advisory Council on Global Change ACF 70–71

(WBGU) 267–8 ecology of games framework 71–3
“Cassis de Dijon” case 544, 550 institutional analysis and development
corporatist systems 372, 381 framework 73–5
example of collaborative governance governance networks
approach 93–4 and accountability 215–16, 219–20, 222,
governance featuring deliberative and 435–7
participatory democracy 95–6 affective dimension of practice 316–17
rail network 33 asymmetric power relations of 174
risk regulatory practices 475 defining 430, 463–4, 569–71
state theory 278 and democracy 462–7, 492, 572–3
and steering 278–9 and discourse theory 309–10, 606
transformation of energy in 90, 95 factors shaping learning in 246–7
global finance architecture conjecture 561–2 forms of systems-level feedback 395
good governance future research avenues 319, 468, 609
concept of 2 hegemonic politics in 313–15
constructivist role of state intervention found how democracy is affected by 464–7
in writings on 381 interactive nature of 429, 462
critique of 123 loose coupling of governance sites with
of evidence 239–40 formal, decision-making institutions
focus on 123 215, 218–19
harnessing complexity for 400–401 many actors involved in 432
institutions, recognizing role of 121–2 and metagovernance 573–4, 576
internationalized 107 and new public management reforms 569–70
prioritizing 171 normative issues and tensions in 435–9
use of discourse of 7 oppositions between narratives of 318–19
governability theory 569–70 as post-political form of governmentality 318
governance problematizing 311–13
applying the ACF to 357–9 research methodologies for complex 397–9
collaborative see collaborative governance and standards of inclusiveness and equal
defining 2–4, 29, 78–9, 155–6, 264 treatment 216
development, in twenty-first century 123–5 viewed as means of increasing efficiency,
disciplinary perspectives on co-production as effectiveness and legitimacy of public
an aspect of 447–55 governance 462
evidence–policy gap as a governance weak visibility of 215
problem 235–7 and “wicked problems” 462
experimentalist see experimentalist governance of the firm 8, 366, 370–71
governance governance turn 77, 108, 533, 540
good see good governance governance-centric approaches, in state theory
interactive see interactive governance 81–2, 86–7
as magic concept 12–13, 353 governing tools see soft and hard governing tools
models of in relation to evidence use 237–9 government
rise and development of debate on connecting to governance through
decentering of power and authority 8 metagovernance 572–3
discipline of economics 8 perspective on transparency 226–8
focus on networks and partnerships 9 shift to governance
globalization and EU 7 collaborative approaches toward
governing as distributed process 8 businesses and legal institutions
multilateral interaction 9 105–9
reasons for, from different perspectives in collaborative governance context 499
5 distribution of costs and benefits from
theoretical inversion 4 565
of trust relations 207–10 in network governance context 488
understanding through policy process in planning context 60–61
frameworks 70 in state theory context 77, 81, 83–4, 86
 Index  619

through theoretical inversion 4–5 and risk 273–4

in urban and regional governance as theme in public participation theory 162
context 519 inclusiveness
governmentality in deliberative democracy discussions 178
concept of 378–9 in government networks 216
future research avenues 384–5, 610 in normative problem 437–8
governance as new form of 309 of participation, as source of input legitimacy
and governance networks 315, 318 198
methodological issues and empirical studies independent variable
382–4 governance as 79–80
perspectives and arguments within literature organizational factors as 29, 38
379–82 state as 79–80
shift to advanced forms of 82 indicative planning 372
state as object of 78–9, 80 inequality
strengths and weaknesses of notion of 384–5 gender 173–5
theory 569, 571 and public participation 164
Gramsci, Antonio 77, 85–6, 310, 313 information-based governance theory
graphical displays of policy networks 152–3 additionality 303
commensuration 305
hegemonic politics 313–15 conceptual and definitional issues 298–9
helping hand of economic theory 366, 368–9 empirical findings 303–5
heterarchy empirical variants 299–301
beyond hierarchy 141–2, 147 future research avenues 305–6, 608
future research avenues 147, 608 limitations 304–5
as hybrid 79 nudging 301
as organizational form 142 research questions and lacunae 301
pan-human imperatives theoretical gaps and areas for future
digital imperative 141 development 305–6
place 140 theoretical perspectives 301–3
social proximity 140–41 unintended consequences of 305
of reflexive self-organization, as definition of innovation
governance 3 concept of 254
structure vs. scale 142–4, 147 defining 255–6
when worlds collide future research avenues 260, 608
ensuring sustainable collaboration in governance 258–9
145–6 regulatory 473–5
measurement tools 145–6 impact of governance systems on 256–8
policy tools 146 pro-innovation bias 254
segmentary politics in healthcare input legitimacy 7, 197–9, 231, 438–9
example 145 institutional analysis and development (IAD)
segmentary systems 144–5 framework 73–5
successful healthcare heterarchy institutional approach to adaptive governance
example 145 580–81, 583–5
hierarchy 141–7 institutional economics
historical institutionalism 327–8, 569 new, and political economy of collective
Hobbes, Thomas 19–20, 25 action 21–2, 373
HOPE VI 497, 507 theory of transaction costs as basis for 337–8
horizontal specialization 31–4 institutional theory
Hurricane Katrina 147 future research avenues 332–3, 609
hybrids 79, 291–2, 577, 588 informal institutions for governance 330–32
of normative integration 570
inclusion questions for use of 324
conflict with flexibility 504 and role in governance
and democratic theory 92–4 discursive institutionalism 329–30
as dilemma of metagovernance 575 empirical institutionalism 328–9
620  Handbook on theories of governance

historical institutionalism 327–8 argumentative turn 413

rational choice institutionalism 326–7 debates and challenges
sociological institutionalism 324–6 bottom-up emphasis in interpretive
virtue of institutional approach 323–4 theory 414
institutions non-interpretivists’ critique about
formal, and interactive governance 218–19 methodological basis 413–14
informal, for governance 330–32 relationship of interpretivism to
and liberal democracy 189 institutionalism 414
role for market-enabling 121–2 status of narratives as explanations of
see also institutional theory governance 414
interactive governance structure vs. agency in governance
accountability explanations 414–15
as constitutive part of democratic distinctive contributions of interpretive
anchorage of 215–17, 222 governance theory 410–13
and democracy 221–2 emphasis on practice 411–12, 415
individual, of participants in 219–20 ethnomethodology 409, 412
tensions in 435–7 foundations of 407–9
as added value to representative democracy future research avenues 413–15, 610
432–3, 440 individual agency 408–11, 414–15
cooperative logic of 217 narrative analysis 408–11, 414
defining 430 problem framing 410–14
as dilemma of metagovernance 575 invisible hand of economic theory 143, 366–9,
drawbacks 440 374
future research avenues 222, 440–41, 467–8, invisible handshake of economic theory 366,
609–10 373–4
as instrument for reducing costs 431–2 “iron triangle” 69
lack of visibility of processes 217–18 ISO (International Standardization Organization)
and liberal democracy 464, 467–8 303–4, 476, 513, 560
loose coupling of governance sites with
formal, decision-making institutions Latin America
218–19 development of dependency theory 118–19
and metagovernance 567–77 forestry management systems in 479
in normative theory 429–30 governance through regulation as central
in organization theory 9 reform 107
in planning theory 9, 61 inefficient manufacturing 119
and power 187, 192–4, 435, 437–8 joined by non-state actors in governing
public–private partnerships as typical case process 124
of 222 structural adjustment programs 121–2
as remedy for fragmentation 430–31 law see public law and regulatory theory
role of co-production in theories of 456–8 learning
strengthening interest in 8 as collective phenomenon 224
tensions in definitions of, governance context 245–6
accountability 435–7 evolutionary, and Pragmatism 420–21
inclusiveness 437–8 factors influencing 246–7
throughput legitimacy 438–9 future research avenues 249–50, 608
trust relationships necessary in 221 governance processes associated with
interdependence theory 569 boundary organization 247–8
intergovernmental governance 540–41 importance of, in collaborative governance
international relations 500–501, 505
compliance mechanisms 293 issues and challenges for studying 248–9
and hard and soft law 285, 287, 289, 293 “ways of knowing” 248, 249
structure of international organizations 35 legal institutions
international relations theory see transnational collaborative approaches toward 105–9
governance theory and debate over, in twentieth century
interpretive and narrative theory 104–5
 Index  621

legal regulation, organizational constructions of Leviathan 19–20

meaning 109–11 liberal democratic theory
legitimacy defining liberal democracy 463–4
accountability, democratic control and 89, dispositions of public officeholders 191
100, 226 idea of political system as a set of neutral
and antagonisms 317–18 institutions 189
audits 202, 608 on new governance forms promoting
augmenting through participation 180 participation and deliberation 97
claimants of 197–8 as normative theory of democracy 95
and collaborative governance 499–502, in relation to inclusion 92–3
505–6 in relation to self-determination 94–5
concept of 196 Locke, John 91
and cooptation 556–7, 560–62 loose coupling
crises 6, 78 of governance networks, with formal
of deliberative processes 173 decision-making institutions 215,
democratic 6, 62, 181, 216, 258, 435–6, 218–19
464–5, 573–5, 610 of organizational structure 31
of dispute resolution structure 110
of European Union 547–8 market solutions
as function of soft and hard policy economic theory of “helping hand” 368–9
instruments 292 propagated as better than inefficient
future research avenues 201–2, 608 government interventions 370
of global governance, extent of private turn toward 120–21
governance’s contribution to 512–14 market-enabling institutions 121–2
goals, means and tensions in 433 Marxist thought 80, 190, 310, 312–3, 367–8,
of governance mechanisms 172 380–81, 522
and governance networks 462 metagovernance
of government 169, 254, 259 administrative and political 574–5
and innovation 259 avant la lettre 567
input 7, 197–9, 231, 438–9 concept of 567
interactive governance enhancing 429, connecting government and governance
432–3, 572 through 572–3
multiple notions and sources of 197 dilemmas 575–6
of new modes of governance 548–9 future research avenues 576–7, 609
of new public management 46 goals, tools and forms of 573–4
as normative objective 432–3 as governance of governance 83–4, 219, 564,
or organizational forms 37, 132 572–3
output 7, 197, 200–201, 228, 231, 438–9 and mobilization of bias 568, 573
and participation 275 and regulated self-regulation 466, 568
for planning 59, 61–2 theoretical approaches to
political and administrative sector ensuring governability theory 570
274 governmentality theory 571
political institutions conferring 190 institutional theories of normative
of political systems 227 integration 570–71
and power 161, 196 interdependence theory 569
and private governance 510–12, 515 as third order governance 567–8
procedural 92, 97 Mill, John Stuart 91
of public participation 159 mobilization of bias 189, 568
reduced, of steering 289 multi-level governance (MLG)
in regional governance 548–9 Canada’s Great Lakes region 98
state providing private schemes with 473–4 conceptual and definitional issues 529
as theme in public participation theory 161 debates, dilemmas and lacunae 531–4
throughput 198, 438–9 future research avenues 536, 609
traffic police example 191 increasing concern with 324
and transparency 198–9, 226, 228, 231, 439 and learning 248
622  Handbook on theories of governance

moving forward 534–6, 609 within neoliberalism 86

origins 528 possible outcomes of moves to establish 318
research questions 530 related governance concepts
state power challenged by new forms of 572 collaborative governance 489
Type I–Type II new public governance 488–9
binary divide 531–3 new public management 489
breadth of role 533 relational coordination 489
divide, as problematic 534–5 relational governance 489
typology 529 reproduction of 313–15
voice and deliberation vs. exit and and shadow of hierarchy 570
choice 523–4 sovereign power for effective 85
as widely adopted by European Union 535 theories
and definitions 487–8
narrative theory see interpretive and narrative underpinning 490
theory transatlantic dialogue on 9
negotiation, governance by 543–4 types, forms and functions 487
neoclassical economic models of public goods new modes of governance (NMGs)
and common pool resources 20–21 benefits and disadvantages 604, 607
nested qualities of social structures 393 character of 549
nested rule structures 584–5 in European Union, between negotiation and
network approach competition 543–5, 549
benefits of 155–6 increase in scholarly interest in 540
concept of 149 influencing research on policy instruments
features of 149–50 285
analyzing, visualizing and explaining limitations of hierarchies and markets
patterning of links 152–4 necessitating development of 8
importance of links between actors literature on 535
151–2, 431, 486 “network” as most common descriptor of
studying collaborative governance in 605
goal-directed networks 154–5 and non-binding decisions 540–41
fundamental characteristics of 149–50 and power 414
history of 149 questions of effectiveness and legitimacy 548
in relation to modern governance approach regulatory 473–5
150, 155 simple dichotomies 532, 535–6
network governance soft governing tools as 286
as asymmetrical 86 structure of EU governance 540
beyond the polity 82 and urban governance 521
challenges and implications 491–2, 570 new public governance (NPG)
compared with state and market governance as component of hybrid assembly 489
486 embedding public service logic within 48–50
democratic implications for governance 53
defining governance networks and limitations and challenges 51–3
liberal democracy 463–4 focus on public service delivery systems 43
future research avenues 467, 610 as form of neoliberal governing 380–81
perspectives on how governance move from new public management 47–8
networks affect democracy 464–7 as opportunity for public participation 164–5
role of government networks 462–3 new public management (NPM)
discourse-dispositif approach 82 and competition 345–7
elements of 485–6 fatal flaw within 43–4, 51
empirical evidence 490–91 influenced by principal–agent theory 8
failure 86 innovation within 256–7, 260
future research avenues 492, 608 and metagovernance 568, 573
ideal form of 317 move from classical public administration
messy politics and power struggles of 317 44–6
nature of 486–7 move to new public governance 47–8
 Index  623

neoliberal economic analysis leading to 370 organization change

practices 43, 381 analytical problem solving 35–6
public choice theory applied to 345–7 as diffusion and isomorphism 37
reforms functional account of 35–6
and agentification 33 institutional perspectives on 37
and governance networks 569 power and conflict oriented perspective on
NMGs see new modes of governance 36
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) types of 35–6
and accountability 220 organization theory
as active players in co-regulation 511–12 application to governance, uses of 37–8
agenda-setting 511 approach to governance 29–30
as analogous to global civil society 8, 511 future research avenues 38, 608
continuous growth of 131 impact of structure on governance at
cooptation of 556–7, 560 implication stage 33–5
development theory 123–4 organizational capacity 31–8
as empowered actors 431 organizational change 35–8
environmental 561 at policy-making stage 32–3
ISO system embedded in networks of 476 structure–governance relationship 30–31
legitimacy dynamics 514 and transnational governance 131–2
as major actors in interactive governance 220 organizational constructions of meaning of legal
management of crises 142 regulation 109–11
and representation 172, 174 Ostrom, Elinor 8, 22–3, 25, 326–7, 333, 375, 397,
role in shaping private governance 513 447, 449–51, 456, 475, 478, 580, 584, 588,
and state capacity 605 594
normative theory output legitimacy 7, 197, 200–201, 228, 231,
of democracy 90–92 438–9
example of trade-off 440
future research avenues 440–41, 609 participation
interactive governance designing processes 163–4
contribution to realization of normative new governance forms promoting 97,
goals 429 99–100
defining 430 participatory democracy 92
developments evoking 430–34 risk 272–4
networks, tensions in 435–9 as theme in public participation theory 163
normative integration, institutional theories see also citizen participation
of 570–71 participatory budgeting 457
normative objectives planning theory
effectiveness 430–31, 433 advocacy planning 59
efficiency 431–3 collaborative planning 61–2, 258–9
interactive governance’s contribution to future research avenues 62–3, 609–10
realization of 430 mixed scanning 58, 60
legitimacy 432–3 nature of 57
normative problems object-focused 58–9
accountability 435–7 paradigm shift within 58–60, 62
inclusiveness 437–8 perspectives relating planning and theory
throughput legitimacy 438–9 57–8
NPG see new public governance process-focused 59–61
NPM see new public management rationalistic planning 59–62
towards balanced 62–3
object-focused planning theory 58–9 towards context-focused 61–2, 607
Olson, Mancur 21, 25, 337, 341–2, 374 pluralist democratic theory
Open Method of Coordination (OMC) 7, 133, nature of 92
285, 290, 545, 548, 597, 600 on new governance forms promoting
ordinary legislative procedure (OLP) 542–4, participation and deliberation 97, 100
548–9 as normative theory of democracy 91
624  Handbook on theories of governance

in relation to inclusion 93 and managerial capitalism 370–71

in relation to self-determination 95 monopoly 339, 368
society as essentially plural 188 multi-level governance 478–9
policy process frameworks in narrative and interpretive theory 414–15
future research avenues 75, 605 networks enhancing national agencies 35
key premises of 67–8 oriented perspective on organizational
key questions motivating change 36
governance research 68–9 political 78, 89, 91, 93, 99, 111, 172, 187,
policy process research 69–70 301, 384, 412, 468, 555, 575
understanding governance through 70 predictive 398
ACF 70–71 and public participation 159–60
ecology of games framework 71–3 segmentary systems 144–5
institutional analysis and development sharing 583
framework 73–5 shifts between different levels of government
policy sciences approach to adaptive governance 530
580, 586–7 state 7, 77, 82–3, 85–6, 305, 380–83, 555,
policy styles 291–3 572
political control struggles 198–9, 319, 575
and the bureaucracy 343–4, 348 supranational 542–3, 547–8
politicization strengthening 33–4 Pragmatism
political economy American 408, 419, 580, 586, 594
as classical liberalism 378 conception of human action 425
of collective action 21–2 creative syncretism 424
governance of global 564 democratic experimentalism 420, 424, 610
urban 521–2 as distinctive theoretical lens on governance
political metagovernance 574–5 as dynamic conception of evolutionary
political will learning 420–21
basis of 91 focus on what is problematic 421
processes forming 92, 96–8, 100 possibilities 423–5
power values at stake 422–3
and accountability 215, 217–22 future research avenues 425, 610
of bureaucrats 343 origins and early period of 419
business 104, 302–3 revival of 419–20
of citizens 61, 95 principal–agent
of collaboration 497–8, 506 problem
and cooptation 556–64 in democratic theory 96–7
debate 187 as insight into public choice theory
decentering of 8, 89 339–40
decision-making 95, 218–19, 286, 302–3, privatization as possible solution 345,
339, 432, 439, 584 349
distribution of 92, 163, 587 resurfacing, conditions for 346
four dimensions of 187–91 relationships and delegation 327
future research avenues 192–4, 610 terminology, in relation to government
and gender inequality 174–5 226–7
and governance 2 theory 8, 217–18, 343
governance network logic of 465, 605–6 Prisoner’s Dilemma 22, 25, 337, 341–2, 374, 392
and governmentality 378–85, 605–6 private governance
and hard and soft governing tools 285–7, civil regulations 511
290–92 definitions and concepts 510–12
importance of communication networks 301 delegated and entrepreneurial 515
of information 304, 306 dichotomy with public governance 515
and interactive governance 187, 192–4, 435, explanations for emergence and proliferation
438 of 512–14
and legitimacy 161, 196 extent of contribution to effectiveness and
management of 161 legitimacy of global governance 515
 Index  625

future research avenues 515, 609 public law and regulatory theory
inter-firm cooperation 511 altered through editing and retheorization
non-governmental organizations 511–12 111
process-focused planning theory 59–61 collaborative approaches toward businesses
PSOs see public service organizations and legal institutions 105–9
public administration command-and-control regulation 104–5,
and complex governance systems 389–90, 107–9, 111
393, 395, 398 and debate, in twentieth century 104–5
European concept of 6 dispute resolution system 106–7, 110
innovation within 256, 260 future research avenues 111–12, 610
move to new public management 44–6, 53 from government to governance 105–9
old controversy of 30 meta-risk management 108
possible role of expert-based 183 organizational constructions of meaning of
previous understanding of how public legal regulation 109–11
services were governed and managed responsive regulation 107
43 public management theory
and public service delivery 48 contentious issues 43–4
public choice theory future research avenues 53, 609
applied to new public governance
centralization vs. decentralization 344–5 embedding public service-dominant
collective action theory 341–2 logic within 48–50
competition and new public move from new public management
management 345–7 47–8
political control and bureaucracy 343–4 new public management
and co-production 450–51 move from classical public
future research avenues 349, 610 administration 44–6
historical background 336–8 move to new public governance 47–8
insights product-dominant approach 43–4, 47–8, 51,
collective action theory 338–9 53
competition 339 public opinion
costs and benefits accruing to different and deliberation in public sphere 179–80
agents 339 within democratic society 91
principal–agent problem 339–40 processes forming 96–8, 100
rent-seeking 340 “refined” 179
methodology 340–41 public participation
nature of 336 association with adaptive co-management
self-interest 336, 346–8, 369 588
strengths and weaknesses 347–8 definition and salience of 159–60
public goods and democratic governance 164
Adam Smith’s view on 20 as established part of risk management 275
Aristotle’s view on 19 future directions for theories of, in
contribution to, as condition for output governance 164–5
legitimacy 200 future research avenues 164–5, 610
and cooptation 556 nature of 158
costs, benefits and agents 339 and participatory democracy 92
helping hand for 368–9 tensions in 158
and the Leviathan 19–20 theory themes
neoclassical economic models of 20–21 designing participation processes 163–4
as non-rivalrous in consumption 19 diversity and inclusion 162
and principal–agent problem 339–40, 346 expertise and participation 162–3
and private clubs 23 legitimacy 161
problem of over-supply 345 public service organizations (PSOs) 43, 47–8,
as “public products” or “public service” 43–4 51, 53
similarity to common pool resources 18–19 public service-dominant logic (PSDL)
in Type I multi-level governance 531 argument of 43
626  Handbook on theories of governance

embedding within new public governance interactive governance as added value to

48–50 432–3, 440
implications for governance 52–3 and liberal democracy 91, 464
limitations and challenges 51–2 new governance approaches
future research avenues 53 emerging in response to perceived
failures of 93, 98
rational choice institutionalism 326–7, 570 potential to enhance or deteriorate
regional governance 99–100
in America 524 and voter paradox 337
drivers of 523 republican democratic theory 91, 95
in EU member states 523–4 responsive regulation 107–8, 472, 476–7
as forgotten level of governance 523 risk
future research avenues 524–5, 608 characterization and evaluation 269–70
regional politics 519 communication and participation 272–4
theoretical approaches to 523–4 estimation of interdisciplinary 267–8
regulatory governance failures, and conditions for success 274–5
as bottom-up process, in public law context framing 266–7
111 future research avenues 275, 608
on business activity 109 governance framework
character of regulatory problems 473 adaptive and integrative 266
China’s food safety crisis 472, 478 as attempt to address issues of inclusive
complexity and uncertainty in 472–3, 477–9 governance 275
co-regulation 474 development of 264–5
experimental governance 478–9 effective communication as challenge
future research avenues 303, 479–81, 609 272–3
new modes of 473–5 inclusion as challenge 273–4
no panaceas in 475–7 limitations 275
prompted by catastrophic governance need for two types of assessment 267
failures 472 relationship between stakeholder
recognition of 108 participation and risk categories
scholarship focus on 109, 472–3 in 271
transaction costs 479 management 270–72
use of technology 480 pre-estimation 265–7
voluntary forms of regulation 474–5 screening 266
and “wicked problems” 473, 477–9, 481 as social construct 265–6
regulatory theory see public law and regulatory transition to new concept of risk governance
theory 264
relational coordination 489
relational governance 51, 489 scientific management 586–7
relational signaling 211–12 self-determination and self-rule 91, 94–6
rent-seeking 216, 340, 347, 349, 610 self-interest
representation Aristotle on 19
discourse representation 170–71, 175 and collaborative governance 499
in discourse theory 312–13, 315 and corporatist governance 96–7
future research avenues 175–6, 610 and deliberative theory 182
gender inequality, and governance 173–5 in economic theory 367, 374
interest 94, 96, 282, 372, 503 experiments regarding 24
in public participation 159–60 and governance networks 569
representative claim 171–3, 175 in market governance mode 486
studies, and governance perspective 169–73 and metagovernance 569
representative democracy pragmatic legitimacy linked to 200–201
alternative model to 171 and public choice theory 336, 340–41,
and deliberative forums 181 346–8, 369–70
and information available to public 229 of public officeholders 191
and rationality 21
 Index  627

rules designed to overcome 326 de-politization of power 82

services theory 48–50 future research avenues 86–7, 609
shadow of hierarchy German 278
and accountability 216 from government to governance 81, 83–6
in the EU 543, 545–7, 549 network governance beyond the polity 82
experimentalist governance effectiveness policy labor 77–8
supported by 598–9 vs. society-centered theory 79–81, 86–7
as form of interaction between hard and soft “state effect” 78, 82
policy tools 292 strategic-relational approach 83–6
and institutional theory 323 third-order governing 84
and interactive governance 440 towards governance-centric approaches 81–2
and network governance 570 state-led development 118–19
and new modes of governance 515 steering
and private governance 515 capacity 34
in self-regulating networks 283 concept of, and use 278–9
and state theory 83, 85–6 critique and extension of paradigm 280–82
Sherman Act 146 distinction with rowing 6, 568
Skocpol, Theda 80 function of soft and hard governing tools
Smith, Adam 20, 143, 267–8 285–9, 292–3
social learning 69, 160, 244, 248–9, 274, 582–3, future research avenues 282–3, 609
588 goal and framework 573
social network analysis informal institutions for providing 323
aims of 463 information-based 288, 289–90
application to collective dilemmas 25–6 and institutional theory 323
application to study of governance 393–4 interactive processes of 368, 375
argument for development of 608 of local state 521
definition of 18 macroeconomic 368–70
limitations 395–6 move to governance 282–3
as measurement tool for heterarchies 145–6 new system of 568
sociograms as early companions 153 paradigm 279–80, 431
use in studying knowledge diffusion 394 political representation 78
social-ecological systems (SES) framework 23 of power resources 92
society-centered theory 79–81, 86–7 research on public 8
socio-ecological approach to adaptive governance role of norms and ideas in 325
580, 582–3 society 2–3, 29, 150, 155, 223, 254, 302,
sociological institutionalism 324–6, 329 305, 365–6, 456
soft and hard governing tools and targeted transparency 229
concept of, and distinctions between 285–8 term and its use 278–9
in the EU 289–91 transparency as tool 226–7
future research avenues 293 and vertical specialization 33
research on strategic-relational approach (SRA) 83–6
compliance 292 supranational governance
hybrids 292 behavioral consequences of horizontal
national policy styles 291–2 specialization within 32–3
steering function of 285–8 within EU 33, 289–90, 529
studying 288–9 future research avenues 549
soft law struggle between national and supranational
and idea of steering 289 actors 545–6
in public law and regulatory theory 107 systems analysis see complexity theory and
and transnational governance 129–34, 285, systems analysis
289
spatial planning see planning theory technology
state theory deliberation’s promotion of 183
concept of state 77–9, 86–7 managerial 216
de-hierarchization of state 81–2 rationalistic planning approach leading to 59
628  Handbook on theories of governance

technocratic authorities 557, 561–2 self-reinforcing and ambiguous processes

territorial imperative 140 134
territorial mobilization and soft law 130–34, 289
of regional identities 524 transnational world 130–31
of resources 519 transparency
territorial specialization 31–2 and accountability 159, 161, 165, 193, 226,
territorialization 7, 78, 82, 529, 535 229, 231, 492
territorially arranged implementation 34, 90 civil and private sector perspectives 230–31
theories of governance future research avenues 231, 610
as analytical constructs 10 government’s perspective 226–8
comprising overlapping discussions and increased, resulting from peer reviews 597
debates 1–2 and legitimacy 198–9, 226, 228, 231, 438–9
current status of 604–7 public’s perspective 228–30
future research avenues, common themes and trust 156, 227–8
608–11 Transparency International 121–2, 299–301
leading to development of new theories 10 trust
likely components of 10 altruism 206–7
pitfalls antitrust 146
impressionistic descriptivism 11 connection to process legitimacy 161
theoretical reification 11 definition of 205
purposes of 1 and distrust, in transnational governance 134
relationship with empirical work 1–2, 10–11 future research avenues 213, 608
strengths of 12–13 governance of relations 207–10
throughput legitimacy 198–9, 438–9 horizontal control 212–13
Tocqueville, Alexis de 20, 433 interpersonal relations based on 486–7
Tragedy of the Commons 21–2, 25, 375, 584 necessary in interactive governance 221
transnational governance and network governance 485–6, 569–70
Canada’s Great Lakes region 98 in provision of collective goods 24–5
cooptation in 556–7 relational signaling 211–12
difficulty in identifying relevant constituency taken too far 210–11
in private 199 and transparency 156, 227–8
economic two types of 205–6
architecture of global finance conjecture
561–2 United Kingdom
and cooptation 556–64 ACF theory of policy learning in 358
critique of neo-liberal institutionalism Big Society 164–5, 431
555 campaign against third runway at Heathrow
European accounting and environmental Airport 317
regulation conjecture 560–61 clinical appraisal schemes in health sector
European securities regulation 532
conjecture 562–3 compulsory competitive tendering by local
functionalist frameworks 555 political authorities 345
future research avenues 564–5, 610 COVID-19 policy 236
shifts in governance power 557–8 disabled people’s movement 452
future research avenues 135–6, 609 electricity regulation in 475
from international relations to 129–30 holistic governance 34
multi-institutional dynamics 132–4 procedure for chemical risks based on risk–
networks, as democratic 467 risk comparisons 269
organizations product-dominant approach 44
diversity of 130–31 as receptive to risk regulation discourse 475
growth of international 131–2 risk classification components 268
as organized 131–2 Type I–Type II examples 533–4
as process-driven 134, 607 “Westminster model” 44–5, 237, 411
regulatory activism 129–30, 133 United States
Scandinavian institutionalism 133 ACF theory of policy learning in 358, 360
 Index  629

American pragmatism 408, 419, 580, 586, future research avenues 524–5, 608
594 from local government to 520–22
attempt to respond to public administration networks, taking on “Janus-faced” autocratic
critiques 45 forms of government 315
business influencing regulatory policy 105 urban politics 519
collective goods 22–3
community organizing efforts to transform vanishing hand of economic theory 366, 370–71
social dynamics 159 veil of ignorance 189–90
decision-making vertical specialization 31, 33–5
risk 273 visible hand of economic theory 143, 366, 370–71
strategic manipulation of procedure 340 visible handshake of economic theory 366, 371–3
environmental regulation 599
good governance 123 Washington Consensus 120, 123, 384
governance through regulation as central “wicked problems”
reform 107 and collaborative governance 257–8, 506
heterarchies 144–6 and complexity theory 389–90, 401
measures of “conscious consumption” 304 concept of 6
public participation and democratic and governance networks 462
governance 164 and planning theory 58–9
regional governance 524 policy-making regarding 68
toxic pollution emitted by industry 304 and regulatory governance 473, 477–9, 481
trust in 208 and state theory 80, 86
urban governance 520
urban governance
XG see experimentalist governance