The Limits of Governance: How Far Does Policy Analysis Travel in International Relations?

ABSTRACT

This article retraces the mutual rapprochement between Policy Analysis and International Relations and addresses its limits. Looking beyond the circle of advanced liberal-democratic economies, three limits are discussed: the need to specify the prerequisites of different modes of governance; to consider the relations of power and domination in these processes; and to look beyond regulatory issues at the political and societal conflicts surrounding policy diffusion.

KEYWORDS:

• Governance
• international relations
• policy analysis

Notes

¹ Translated from the original in German: “Public Policy als Gegenstand öffentlichen Handelns ist ein unendlich weites Feld…. Auch mit dem grössten Aufgebot an Phantasie sind hier keine “natürlichen” Grenzen zu entdecken” (ibid.)

² This to say that there are important subfields within PA and IR that remain unconnected, for instance IR scholarship that is not interested in international cooperation.

³ “Politikwissenschaft beschreibt eher die Erosion der hierarchischen Koordinationskapazität nationalstaatlicher…Politik” (Scharpf, 1993, p. 57).

⁴ Here, this term is used not in Robert Dahl’s sense, where it refers to different degrees of democracy existing in a country (Dahl, 1989).

⁵ Since its emergence in the 1990s, the notion of governance has become ubiquitous in political science research and different phases of governance research can be distinguished. For an overview see Rhodes (2012).

⁶ In addition, Bach and Newman propose that a jurisdiction’s incentive to join will vary with the importance of the sector in the domestic economy. The larger the domestic industry in question, the more domestic market participants have a stake in and are affected by global rules, and, therefore, the greater their interest in ensuring their jurisdiction gets involved in international regulatory efforts (ibid.).

⁷ See for instance the Varieties of Democracy Project at http://kellogg.nd.edu/projects/vdem/.