ABSTRACT
What may adopting a governance perspective add to our understanding of transitions? To be sure, such perspective involves certainly more, and other, things than the stipulations of some who embrace a reductionist view of the concept of governance. This view holds that the quintessence of a governance perspective is the recognition that the process of steering society and the market can no longer be located exclusively in political-administrative institutions, taking the shape of central control (government). In this view, governance implies the attribution of a much more prominent role to the interactions between state, market and society. However, the idea of a shift from central steering to interaction is historically fl awed, as our example below will demonstrate. In line with this empirical reality, moreover, the conceptual insights sometimes attributed to the governance notion can hardly count as new. Over the past two-thirds of a century, rooted in accurate empirical analysis, the policy sciences have developed models for policy making which take into account that:
rationality is bounded (Dewey, 1938; Simon, 1944);• the policy process is essentially embedded in socio-economic power • structures (Dahl, 1956); the traditional state-central stage model of the policy process over-• emphasizes “the most visible part of the policy process”: public offi cials in the form of politicians, governors and civil servants (Lindblom, 1968 [1993]); policy implementation is not simply determined by policy documents • defi ned in an earlier stage but also by unintended effects and exogenous development, and the ways in which actors involved in societal practices implementation interpret and respond to policies as one infl uence among several (Derthick, 1972; Pressman and Wildavsky, 1973; Mazmanian and Sabatier, 1989; Yanow, 1996);
that, therefore, policy making should avoid a “quest for control” (Van • Gunsteren, 1976), and take into account a contingent understanding of the sociological and economic nature of the processes they seek to infl uence (Elmore, 1985).
