Concepts, damned concepts and governance

Over the past twenty years ‘governance’ has become a ubiquitous term within a wide range of disciplines, so much so that for many disciplines it has become elevated to key concept status. Scholars from quite diverse disciplines make use of the term, giving little thought to the conceptual price that might have to be paid in consequence of giving it a new home within their particular disciplinary discourse. Yet within the voluminous literature generated by the term, there is little or no consideration given to this issue, even when scholars claim to be offering a theoretical account of it. What passes for theorising ‘governance’ usually amounts to surveying competing uses of the term, as if identifying a term’s meanings from its various uses amounts to adequate conceptual analysis. At best, this is a representational strategy that has its own problems. Despite claiming to explicate the meaning(s) of ‘governance’, a concept, these surveys rapidly become accounts of governance, a practice. An ambiguity emerges between concept and practice, between idea and reality, an ambiguity that raises questions about the ontological commitments arising from the use of the concept. Discursive uses of concepts involve a double claim, one about what is real and the other about how we should interpret that reality. Thus it needs to be asked what is the reality (or understanding of reality) that ‘governance’, as a theoretical term, brings into being within whatever discourse it is inserted? Yet this question cannot even be answered within the current governance scholarship because the problem of theorising the term remains to be developed. The paper aims to take a few tentative steps in that direction, towards a more adequate theoretical analysis of the term ‘governance’.