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but the problems differ with the mode in question. Markets, states, networks and solidarity fail in different ways. One practical response to this situation is to combine modes of policy-making and vary their weight over time – thereby shifting the forms in which tendencies to ‘failure’ manifest themselves and creating room for manoeuvre (Offe, 1975a, b). This suggests that the current expansion of networks at the expense of markets and hierarchies and of governance at the expense of government may involve little more than a specific stage in a regular succession of dominant modes of policy-making. In this sense, what we are witnessing today is really discontinuity in continuity: oscillation within a repeated policy cycle. In other words, the rediscovery of governance could mark a fresh revolution in this process – a simple cyclical response to past state failures (especially those linked to attempts to manage the emerging crisis of Atlantic Fordism from the mid-1970s) and more recently, market failure (and its associated crisis in corporate governance).

      An alternative explanation would be that, for various reasons, there has been a shift in the institutional centre of gravity (or ‘institutional attractor’) around which policy cycles operate due to some qualitative shift in the basic problems that regularizing or governmentalizing policies must address. Here we would be dealing with continuity in discontinuity: the revival of familiar governance mechanisms for qualitatively new purposes. If there is a major transition from Fordism to post-Fordism (linked additionally to new technologies, internationalization and regionalization), then such a long-term shift may be at work. Similar possibilities are indicated by the crisis of the national state – with a proliferation of cross-border and multitier problems that can no longer be coordinated within national state hierarchy or through neorealist anarchy of market (see Jessop, 1995). Here, too, we could anticipate that the expansion of networks and/or governance is a sign of a qualitative shift rather than a simple pendular swing within a policy cycle. Rather than prejudge this issue, however, one should recognize that there could be various path-dependent possibilities.

      The fourth possibility is that a fundamental secular shift in social relations has occurred. Important new economic and social conditions and attendant problems have emerged that cannot be managed or resolved readily, if at all, through market-mediated anarchy or top-down state planning. This secular shift reflects the dramatic intensification of societal complexity that flows from growing functional differentiation of institutional orders in an increasingly global society – which leads, in turn, to greater systemic interdependencies across various social, spatial and temporal horizons of action. As Scharpf (1994: 37) notes:

      … the advantages of hierarchical coordination are lost in a world that is characterized by increasingly dense, extended, and rapidly changing patterns of reciprocal interdependence, and by increasingly frequent, but ephemeral, interactions across all types of pre-established boundaries, intra-and interorganizational, intra-and intersectoral, intra-and international.

      A similar argument could be made about the declining advantages of market coordination. In this sense, the recent expansion of networks and solidarities at the expense of markets and hierarchies and of governance at the expense of government is not just a pendular swing in some regular succession of dominant modes of policy-making. It reflects a shift in the fundamental structures of the real world and a corresponding shift in the centre of gravity around which policy cycles move.

       Introducing some conceptual clarity

      Faced with the wide range of factors that have prompted interest in governance and metagovernance and the wide range of usages and parallel vocabularies, it is useful to distinguish words from concepts. This holds especially where the terminology is not only unclear but also essentially contested. The latter is particularly common in periods of rapid social change and/or when new fields of academic inquiry are emerging. Both sets of circumstances apply in the present case. This illustrates the close, mutually constitutive, links among academic discourse, political practice and changing realities.¹¹ This reflects the fact that the question of governance is more often and more directly related to problem-solving and crisis management in a wide range of fields than the regulation approach in heterodox economics. While this can have salutary effects in diverse fields, it also risks falling into a ‘floating eclecticism’¹² by working both within and against old paradigms in a wide range of terrains. The risk of eclecticism is reinforced in some cases by the interest of governance theorists in issues of institutional design, which has led some governance theorists to focus more on specific collective decision-making or goal-attainment issues in relation to specific (socially and discursively constituted) problems. In this sense, governance theorists have sometimes inclined towards instrumentalist analyses that are less concerned to speak truth to power than to become its advisers. This is a temptation in the WISERD Civil Society programme.

      More disinterested governance scholars are also interested in the diversity of policy regimes that emerge in response to crises, emergencies and other social problems and the political dynamic behind regime shifts. This often leads to an innovation process oriented to solving the purported governance problems and doing so in a more or less turbulent environment; new forms of governance will emerge on condition that collective action problems are resolved through one (or more) of the attempted solutions and become part of new patterns of conduct. Thus, one might examine how failure in established forms of governance and/or an emerging ‘crisis’ of governance is perceived by political actors (broadly conceived) and is then translated into demands for restructured and/or new governance regimes. This helps to explain the growing breadth of interest in the relative weight of government and governance.

       Defining governance

      Having emphasized the polyvalent, polycontextual and essentially contested nature of ‘governance’, I will now engage in the seemingly self-defeating exercise of offering a definition of governance. But at least this will provide a basis for later discussion in this book and illustrate ironically the importance of self-reflexive irony in addressing complex problems. This approach involves two analytical steps, the first identifying the broad field of coordination problems within which governance can be located, the second providing a narrow definition that identifies the differentia specifica of governance within this broad field. In broad terms, governance is one of several possible modes of coordination of complex and reciprocally interdependent activities or operations. What makes these modes relevant for our purposes is that their success depends on the performance of complementary activities and operations by other actors – whose pursuit of their activities and operations depends in turn on the performance of complementary activities and operations elsewhere within the relevant social ensemble (see Table 1.1).¹³ In general, the greater the material, social and spatio-temporal complexity of the problems to be addressed, the greater the number and range of different interests whose coordination is necessary to resolve them satisfactorily, and the less direct the reciprocities of these interests, the greater will be the difficulties of efficient, effective and consensual coordination regardless of the method of coordination that is adopted (for further discussion of complexity, see the chapters in Part I). It is still useful to distinguish four main forms of coordination of complex reciprocal interdependence: ex post coordination through exchange (for example, the anarchy of the market); ex ante coordination through imperative coordination (for example, the hierarchy of the firm, organization or state); reflexive self-organization (for example, the heterarchy of ongoing negotiated consent to resolve complex problems in a corporatist order or horizontal networking to coordinate a complex division of labour); and coordination through drawing as needed on unconditional commitments based on more or less extensive solidaristic relations in an imagined community. It is the third type of coordination that I refer to as ‘governance’ when the term is otherwise unqualified.

Table 1.1: Modalities of governance

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Exchange

Command

Dialogue

Solidarity