The Conundrum of Order: The Concept of Governance from an Interdisciplinary Perspective

The term governance has made an impressive career in a number of disciplines concerned with regulation, order and law. This chapter draws on insights from legal studies, sociology, political science, anthropology, history and geography to paint a multifaceted picture of existing, competing and complementing approaches to the concept of governance. For reasons of space, the chapter can but point to the different variations on a theme, as governance occupies an ambivalent place in past and present discourses on political (or, legal or economic) order and society. It is argued that beyond pointing to crucial phases of methodological and theoretical transformation within different disciplines such as the often perceived transition ‘from government to governance’, governance is itself a deeply interdisciplinary concept