Governance: A Very Short Introduction

The word 'governance' is ubiquitous. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund make loans conditional on 'good governance'. Climate change and avian flu appear as issues of 'global governance'. The European Union issues a White Paper on 'Governance'. The U.S. Forest Service calls for 'collaborative governance'. What accounts for the pervasive use of the term 'governance' and to what does it refer? It has a bewildering set of answers. The word 'governance' is used in a variety of contexts, but at a general level, it refers to all forms of social coordination and patterns of rule.

In this Very Short Introduction, Mark Bevir considers not only the main theories of governance, but also their impact in a variety of areas including corporate, public, and global affairs.

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Mark Bevir is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of New Labour: A Critique (Routledge, 2005), Key Concepts in Governance (Sage, 2009), Democratic Governance (PUP, 2010), and The State as Cultural Practice (OUP, 2010). He is also the editor or co-editor of 10 books, including a two volume Encyclopaedia of Governance (Sage, 2007). He founded the undergraduate course on 'Theories of Governance' at Berkeley and he teaches a graduate course on 'Strategies of Contemporary Governance'.