Governance is where you find it

ABSTRACT

The concept of governance is used frequently and in a variety of different ways. This article discusses Mark Bevir’s use of an interpretative approach to governance and its implications for understanding better how we govern. This approach has particular relevance to democratic forms of governance, and to the use of deliberative and direct forms of democracy.

KEYWORDS:

• Governance
• Democracy
• Interpretative Analysis
• Deliberation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

B. Guy Peters is Maurice Falk Professor of American Government at the University of Pittsburgh. He earned his PhD at Michigan State University in 1970 and has four honorary doctorates from European universities. He is the founding President of the International Public Policy Association. Guy Peters is associate editor of the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis and also editor of a book series on public sector organizations for Palgrave/Macmillan. He is author or editor of over 80 books, including most recently Governance and Comparative Politics (with Jon Pierre), Pursuing Horizontal Management: The Politics of Policy Coordination, and The Politics of Representative Bureaucracy.

Notes

1. That said, with the development of New Public Management there has been a tendency to assume that if it works in New Zealand it will work anywhere—even when if it did not necessarily work in New Zealand.

2. The need for goal setting and goal attainment emphasizes the functional nature of governance theory as it currently stands. While functional theories are often suspect, by specifying the conditions that must be met for governance this approach can identify processes through which governance occurs and choices that must be made.

3. Success in network politics involves not only formal access but also the ability to persuade and marshal information in order to have policies made in a certain way. The poor and otherwise excluded population tends to lack just those crucial abilities, as would also be true for deliberative forms of democracy (Gutman and Thompson, 2004).

4. And not just in this book. See also Bevir (2003).