ABSTRACT
After at least two decades of discussion and debate around the term, there is now a fair degree of agreement among public policy scholars as to what governance is and what it does. Policy making is an arena full of actors who are not only vertically structured but also linked together by a series of informal relationships, and we need to understand how these work together so that society is steered. The use of the term ‘governance’ helps to capture these additional aspects of government and governing where a multitude of actors interact in both formal and informal ways (for example, international relations, international political economy, global studies). The governance lens and the notion of ‘modes’ or ‘styles’ of governance is useful in helping us understand how political power is distributed and exercised and how policy problems are dealt with by it. And here the concept of governance is useful from a heuristic perspective as well, since it enables us to reduce the apparently chaotic reality of policy making by describing sets of state and societal relationships as different styles of governance which affect and direct policy making in specific ways.
