ABSTRACT
The concept of govern ance became part of our vocabulary in the 1990s, in the context of the need to capture conceptually an inter national reality composed of “systems of rule at all levels of human activity” that are ultimately interlinked in relationships of interdependence.1 We have been engaged in a conversation on political rule and the concept of govern ance that allows scholars and political actors to pay due attention to the significance of rules that are produced in social spheres beyond (though not in spite of) the state and in the absence of an overarching political authority. The disaggregation of the loci of govern ance, a dispersion of sites of authority,2 can be detected, and the wider concept of govern ance allows for a theoretical and political debate on the process.
