ABSTRACT
The Social Science Citation Index has since the mid-1990s recorded a steep rise in frequency of the mention of the term in social science and economics publications. A Google search brought to light in 2007 that the term governance even more frequently emerged in the production of various scientific disciplines and in political journalism than the also widely used term of globalization. The reconstruction of the conceptual history also shows that the World Bank is sometimes asserted in retrospect with the origins of the concept of good governance in its 1989 study on the “crisis of governance” in Sub-Saharan Africa, but this was not the starting point of the governance debate. Textbooks on governance and on the paradigm of New Institutionalism distinguish several academic schools and theoretical approaches. In the development of economic theory over the last four decades a radical shift of direction has taken place.
