The Past and Future of Governance Studies: From Governance to Meta-governance?

Abstract

This collection is informed by an understanding of the concept of “governance” as a heuristic lens through which the contextual realities of the co-ordination of multiple actors and institutions in the policy system can be reconstructed in detail. The governance lens is presented as trifocal, its three distinctive facets focusing attention respectively on the dynamics of governance or the sense in which governance arrangements can be observed changing over time; on the strategies that actors use to achieve or avoid particular kinds of governance arrangements in the policy realm; and on the “dual capacity” of governance arrangements to achieve (or fail to achieve) concrete policy outcomes and sustain (or fail to sustain) their own legitimacy with respect to co-ordination. This chapter assesses the broader implications of this complex picture of governance as dynamic, strategic and effective for the increasingly popular concept of metagovernance or the governance of governance arrangements and the extent to which the case studies in this volume support the emerging findings of the metagovernance literature. It does so by delineating three main schools of governance studies and demonstrating how they each converged on a concept of second-order or metagovernance. While convergence and the reasons behind it are clear, each has a slightly different concern that colours its conception of metagovernance.