ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of the Developing Institutional and Social Capacities for Urban Sustainability (DISCUS) research, and provides the context for subsequent chapters. As was explained in Chapter 1, our central concern in this book is to investigate the process of governing for sustainability, which may be understood as comprising the two interrelated processes of government and governance. These refer, respectively, to the role and capacity of, in this case, local government, and to the ways in which local government interacts with actors in civil society. In order to undertake this investigation, we need to clarify the concepts involved and the interaction between them. However, in drawing upon the existing literature and research evidence, it is clear that the guiding paradigm in virtually all cases is one where ‘governance’ is used to describe the process that we are choosing to call ‘governing’ – that is, the processes of government and governance, which for us are conceptually distinct, are conflated into one by many analysts.
