Governance

Jacob Torfing

From the mid-1980s and onward, governance has become a catchword in discussions about how the economy, society, and different kinds of organizations are, or should be, governed. In August 2008, a Google search on governance gave more than 50 million hits, almost twice as many as globalization. The widespread reference to governance creates frequent translation problems, as many languages do not have a proper equivalent to the term. Because many people tend to stick to the English term, governance has itself become an instance of globalization. Governance is one of the most fashionable terms within political science, and it is also widely used among practitioners. Part of the attraction is that governance signals a weakening of the state-centered view of power and societal steering, which has dominated the Western world for centuries but now seems to be problematized by contemporary empirical and ideological developments. Governance is a notoriously slippery term. ...

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