ABSTRACT
Over the past decades the role of government in policy making and implementation has changed in many countries. Incited by reforms toward new public management, marketization and privatization coupled to participatory democracy, centralized bureaucracies have given way to loosely structured, sometimes fragmented, governance networks (Bevir, 2010: ch. 4). These networks do not appear in every field of policy: they are, for example, more pronounced in social and environmental policies in the Global North and around aid-dependent policies in the Global South. As a counter tendency, securitization policies tend to strengthen central governments.
