Governance is shorthand for the pursuit of collective interests and the steering and coordination of society.

During the 1990s, new or emerging models of governance have become debated among social scientists and practitioners alike as a combined result of budgetary cutbacks, the ‘hollowing out’ of the state, the development towards an enabling or regulatory state, a growing interest among politicians to forge partnerships with strategic societal actors, and a ‘multi-layering’ of political authority.

The recent debate on the role of the state in providing governance has featured growing doubts concerning the extent still can effectively play this role. Globalization theorists and ‘hollow-state’ observers alike seem to argue that governance is a process increasingly dominated by other actors than the state and its institutions. This chapter will argue that a more rewarding perspective on these issues is to conceive of recent changes within and outside the state in terms of a transformation of the state and its relationship to actors in its external environment. Theories of governance help us understand the historical trajectory of these developments and the current role of the state in the advanced Western democracies.

One of the fundamental tasks for any society is to govern itself. For most of the past three centuries or more we have associated that task with the state, and its monopoly of legitimate force within a territory. The term ‘Westphalian state’ is commonly used, denoting the inception of this type of governance structure at the termination of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe. In other parts of the world, e.g. China and Japan, analogous state structures had grown independently of this concept. The dominant pattern of governing has been hierarchical, with governments deciding - through democratic means or not - what laws and policies would be adopted and then proceeding to attempt to implement those rules. Especially in democratic systems societal actors may be involved in this process, on both the input and output sides, but government remained the final arbiter of law and policy.

The state has been experiencing challenges to its traditional role in governance coming from outside the society (globalization) and from within the society itself in the form of networks and other social actors seeking greater autonomy. In this paper we will be taking the currently unpopular view that, although governance has indeed changed, the state continues to play a major, if not the major, role in governing. Further we will argue that especially in democratic states we should value governance through institutions that are broadly, if imperfectly, accountable to the public as opposed to more narrowly conceived patterns of sectoral governance.