ABSTRACT
Throughout his academic career, Walter Carlsnaes has been among the strongest promoters of comparative foreign policy analysis, not as a separate subdiscipline of International Relations, but linked to international relations theories in general (see, for example, Carlsnaes 1986, 2002, 2004, 2012; Carlsnaes and Smith 1994; Carlsnaes et al. 2004). In particular, his contributions to the agency–structure debate have been significant and very influential in the discipline (Carlsnaes 1992). This chapter introduces the governance perspective into the study of comparative foreign policy thereby engaging in a discussion with Walter Carlsnaes' work. I argue that the governance turn in international relations, while not ignoring the state and state foreign policy, broadens the perspective of foreign policy analysis by overcoming a state-centric focus. Since governance encompasses actor, process, and structure dimensions, it also takes the mutual constitutiveness of agency and structure seriously and is fully compatible with it. This chapter starts with a short description of the ‘governance turn’ in international relations and then discusses the consequences for foreign policy analysis.
