ABSTRACT
Governing complex actors is problematic. At stake is not only efficiency and legitimacy. Governance is always about the power of individual units which are run by people with different views and ambitions. The literature covers different modes of governance with little agreement on their respective strengths and weaknesses (there is not even a commonly agreed definition of governance1). At one end of the spectrum we have a hierarchical mode of governance, and at the other a pluralistic or plurilateral mode. Needless to say, various other mixed or intermediate modes of governance have also been observed and conceptualized, hence the enormous confusion.
