Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

authors started focusing on how chaos could be prevented at the global
level and effective decision-making could be promoted by revisiting
cooperation at the global scale. In this regard we can understand the
origin of the concept of ‘global governance’, which Rosenau framed as
“a modicum of order” (2002,72).
Since then the term governance is used in the most different contexts
– ranging from a new attempt to define international relations over
good governance to new public management and corporate management
[1] – and has been applied to the different levels of decision-making
ranging from the local to the international level. Hence, Offe’s statement
that it can be “employed for the communication of diverse and contradictory
semantic contents and associations” (Offe 2009, 551). He makes
this statement by referring to the semantics of the concept. The concept
is subject- and object-less, as there exists no verb that expresses the
act of governance or the addressee of governance [2] . Furthermore, it is
an untranslatable concept, that has no synonyms, nor clear opposites
(unless maybe government?). The conceptual confusion is related to
the complexity of the content of the concept. Governance is a “bridge
concept” that blurs several theoretical distinctions “that conventionally
structure thought in the social sciences” (Ibid., 553). [3]
Crucial for the thesis of this paper is the blurring of the theoretical
distinctions between “state and society spheres”, on the one hand, and
“political and economic action”, on the other hand (Ibid.). These two
‘blurrings’ are the result of the state’s incapability of maintaining its
central authority. The state starts cooperating with other societal spheres,
namely society and the market. Hence, power gradually shifts to the
border zones where the different societal spheres overlap (Figure 1). The
following definition of Mayntz captures this given: “‘Governance’ is now
39
GOVERNANCE
THROUGH THE LENS OF
REPRESENTATION
Femmy Thewissen
1
In the book chapter ‘Democracy and governance’ Paul Hirst (2000) distinguishes 5 main
areas in which the term is used.
2
“Something happens, but nobody has done it” (Offe, 550).
3
The following seven distinctions are blurred in the use of the governance-concept according
to Offe: (1) State and society spheres (private-public partnerships), (2) Political and
economic action (corporate governance), (3) Structures and processes, (4) Observable facts
and social norms regarding desirable modes of action (governance vs. good governance),
(5) Subject and object (the addressees of rules participate in their making), (6) Domestic
and foreign/international issues (global governance), (7) Political strategies in developing
countries as well as in OECD states (Offe, 2009, 553).