ABSTRACT
The transition to sustainability in Europe will have to take place through a complicated and ever-shifting set of governing structures. These structures underwent a slow but nonetheless radical transformation in the latter part of the last century, as government was increasingly replaced by governance. According to Stoker (1998, p17), the word ‘government’ refers to activities undertaken primarily or wholly by states bodies, particularly those ‘which operate at the level of the nation state to maintain public order and facilitate collective action’. Typically these latter functions were performed by the state within its own territory via different parts of the public sector. The term ‘governance’, on the other hand, refers to the emergence of new styles of governing in which the boundaries between public and private sector, national and international, have become blurred. For Stoker, then, ‘the essence of governance is its focus on governing mechanisms which do not rest on recourse to the authority and sanctions of government’. Under a system of governance, more services are supplied by the market, with the state retaining control over core functions such as law and order, regulation and civil defence. Because of policies pursued by many industrialized states such as privatization, new public management and cutting the size of the civil service, the operations of the central state have in many countries become gradually more reduced, with more and more services provided by government agencies and the private sectors. In consequence, governance also involves a search for new means of steering and controlling activities through more indirect mechanisms such as financial control and incentives.
