ABSTRACT
All contributions to this special issue examine specific aspects and cases of security governance, but they do not subscribe to an identical understanding of it. The vast literature embraces very different definitions of security governance. Taking into account the existence of diverse research foci, it is certainly unlikely and arguably undesirable to have one unifying conceptualization of security governance to be applied to all relevant areas. Nevertheless, the articles in this special issue refer to a few ‘standard’ definitions that converge around a set of basic assumptions that can be seen to form the core of the security governance concept.1 Most notably, these are: pluricentric coordination in which national governments are one central, but not necessarily the only actor; a combination of formal and informal structures among interdependent but autonomous actors operating beyond formal hierarchies; and a tendency toward cooperative bottom-up implementation rather than top-down command and control (van Kersbergen and van Waarden 2004, pp. 151-152). The most popular definitions from the earliest formulations of the security governance concept reflect these basic elements. For Webber et al. (2004, p. 8), security governance denotes the:
The second frequently cited founding text defines security governance as ‘the structures and processes which enable a set of public and private actors to coordinate their interdependent needs and interests through the making and implementation of binding policy decisions in the absence of a central political authority’ (Krahmann 2003, p. 11).
