The term "governance" has become one of the most widely used in debates in Political Science, Public Policy, and International Relations--often to mean very different things. Written by two leading political scientists, Governance, Politics and the State is the first systematic introduction to its nature, meaning, and significance. Its central concern is with how societies are being, and can be, steered in an increasingly complex world where states must increasingly interact with and influence other actors and institutions to achieve results.

How do government arrangements emerge? When and how does individual agency turn into collective agency? How do sensory experiences of violence, instability, etc affect the configuration of governance arrangements? When, why, and how are governance arrangements institutionalized? This book seeks to contribute to a non-normative conceptualization of the emergence and transformation of government arrangements, and addresses the under-theorization of actors and agency in conventional governance theories. The editors and contributors theorize the concept of governance more concretely by analyzing the key actors and arrangements that define states of governance across different places and by examining its performance and development in particular settings and time periods. Each contribution to the edited volume is based on a case-study drawn from Africa, though the book argues that the core issues identified remain the same across the world, though in different empirical contexts. The contributions also range across key disciplines, from anthropology to sociology to political science. This ground-breaking volume addresses governance arrangements, discusses how social actors form such arrangements, and concludes by synthesizing an actor-centered understanding of political articulation to a general theory of governance. Scholars across disciplines such as political science, development studies, African studies, and sociology will find the book insightful.

A world government capable of controlling nation-states has never evolved, but governance does underlie order among states and gives direction to problems arising from global interdependence. This book examines the ideological bases and behavioural patterns of this governance without government.

A groundbreaking analysis that sheds new light on global governance

Globalization today is as much a problem for international harmony as it is a necessary condition of living together on our planet. Increasing interconnectedness in ecology, economy, technology, and politics has brought nations and societies into even closer contact, creating acute demands for cooperation. Earthly Politics argues that in the coming decades global governance will have to accommodate differences even as it obliterates distance, and will have to respect many aspects of the local while developing institutions that transcend localism. This book analyzes a variety of environmental-governance approaches that balance the local and the global in order to encourage new, more flexible frameworks of global governance. On the theoretical level, it draws on insights from the field of science and technology studies to enrich our understanding of environmental-development politics. On the pragmatic level, it discusses the design of institutions and processes to address problems of environmental governance that increasingly refuse to remain within national boundaries. The cases in the book display the crucial relationship between knowledge and power—the links between the ways we understand environmental problems and the ways we manage them—and illustrate the different paths by which knowledge-power formations are arrived at, contested, defended, or set aside. By examining how local and global actors ranging from the World Bank to the Makah tribe in the Pacific Northwest respond to the contradictions of globalization, the authors identify some of the conditions for creating more effective engagement between the global and the local in environmental governance.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. There has been an enormous increase in interest in the use of evidence for public policymaking, but the vast majority of work on the subject has failed to engage with the political nature of decision making and how this influences the ways in which evidence will be used (or misused) within political areas. This book provides new insights into the nature of political bias with regards to evidence and critically considers what an ‘improved’ use of evidence would look like from a policymaking perspective. Part I describes the great potential for evidence to help achieve social goals, as well as the challenges raised by the political nature of policymaking. It explores the concern of evidence advocates that political interests drive the misuse or manipulation of evidence, as well as counter-concerns of critical policy scholars about how appeals to ‘evidence-based policy’ can depoliticise political debates. Both concerns reflect forms of bias – the first representing technical bias, whereby evidence use violates principles of scientific best practice, and the second representing issue bias in how appeals to evidence can shift political debates to particular questions or marginalise policy-relevant social concerns. Part II then draws on the fields of policy studies and cognitive psychology to understand the origins and mechanisms of both forms of bias in relation to political interests and values. It illustrates how such biases are not only common, but can be much more predictable once we recognise their origins and manifestations in policy arenas. Finally, Part III discusses ways to move forward for those seeking to improve the use of evidence in public policymaking. It explores what constitutes ‘good evidence for policy’, as well as the ‘good use of evidence’ within policy processes, and considers how to build evidence-advisory institutions that embed key principles of both scientific good practice and democratic representation. Taken as a whole, the approach promoted is termed the ‘good governance of evidence’ – a concept that represents the use of rigorous, systematic and technically valid pieces of evidence within decision-making processes that are representative of, and accountable to, populations served.

Now available in a substantially revised 3rd edition covering the changes of the Seventeenth Party Congress and Eleventh National People's Congress and other recent developments, this major text by a leading academic authority provides a thorough introduction to all aspects of politics and governance in post-Mao China.