The sum of all global governances is not likely to be entirely coherent or to avoid competitive or antagonistic relationships

Abstract

The use of the term ‘governance’ is not confined to activities taken to regulate matters at the highest levels or in the most inclusive arenas of human activity — global governance. ‘Governance’ has long been in use to describe the ways in which non-governmental actors, activities and relations combine with the machinery of government to produce social order. Effective government is necessary for the orderly functioning of large and complex societies throughout the developed world, but state and society are not co-extensive; and it would be difficult to imagine a state lacking an extensive civil society that was not also a tyranny of frightening proportions. So there are many forms of order and association which are outside of the remit of government, or outside of its purview; and the lines between public and private are routinely contested. At the same time, when international organisations and donors subject weak states to ‘good governance’ criteria, they do so on an understanding that an imbalance between forms of order that are regulated/unregulated, public/private, accountable/unaccountable can be pernicious, as in aptly-named ‘kleptocracies’.¹ However benign and inclusive the form of governance in particular states or sub-state polities, we can say that governance ‘[comprises] patterns that emerge from governing activities of social, political and administrative actors…[Thus], modes of social-political governance are always an outcome of public and private deliberation.’²