Governance and Governance Networks in Europe

Abstract

The term governance has been used in a variety of ways, but is most often presented as an attempt to improve co-ordination between relatively dependent actors for the purpose of solving societal problems. It involves the horizontal steering of relations across networks, and can certainly be viewed as a ‘growth industry’. This article describes the most important traditions in European governance network literature in the last ten years, and highlights the different foci within the field, particularly between European and American researchers. Finally, the article outlines important research areas that are likely to dominate the field in the future.

Key words:

• Decision making
• governance
• network management
• networks
• overview

Notes

¹ Although Putnam's claims are not uncontested, most authors agree on the fact that society (at least western society) has become more individualized and pluralized in its values.

² I would like to thank Larry O'Toole and Jacob Torfing for their comments on an earlier draft. Of course no one can be blamed for the opinions in this article but me.

³ If one were to seek articles with the word ‘governance’ in Scopus, over 8,000 articles are found. The articles fall under the category of social science, with a large number being from public administration and environmental planning. A significant rise is seen in the number of governance related articles between 1996 (106) and 2007 (1,193).

⁴ This is a conclusion that Rhodes made in his 1997 article on new governance (Rhodes 1997).

⁵ This is probably the reason why in their search for governance related articles, Hill and Lynn (2005) found that the vast majority of the studies still adopt a top–down approach. However, one can question their selection of journals as important journals such as Governance and other European journals are not included in their analysis. Also, they included articles written on or before the year 2001. From Scopus (see note 3), we can see that the number of articles begins to rise from 1996, with a steeper increase beginning in 2003.

⁶ Frederickson cites Kettl: ‘Government refers to the structure and function of public institutions. Governance is the way government gets its job done’ (Kettl 2002: xi in Frederickson 2005: 296).

⁷ This does not mean that the classical political institutions have no position at all. Rather, it indicates that they are mostly part of the governance network and that politics, defined as the authoritative allocation of values (Easton 1954), takes place just as much in the governance network as in political institutions.

⁸ One can find in the governance literature ideas on governance mechanisms that are related to performance indicators or the use of market-like mechanisms, but these are placed in an inter-organizational context and they focus on the processes between various organizations. This context is quite different from the original NPM ideas and reforms that focus on reforming and changing the public bureaucracies (see Pollitt and Bouckaert 2000).

⁹ There are several established statistical packages to analyse networks and their interactions (Scott 1991) but UCINET is the most well known. One can also use Multi Dimensional Scaling techniques to represent the interactions (or other characteristics) of the networks. These techniques can be observed in all three traditions of the research.

¹⁰ Like the well known study of Laumann and Knoke (1987) in the policy study tradition, the works of O'Toole and Meier (Meier and O'Toole 2001, 2007) in the governing type of research, or the work of Provan and Milward in the inter-organizational relations tradition (Milward and Provan 2000) to mention a few of the many examples.