Theorizing 'governance' and the problem of conceptual boundary setting

Over the past twenty years the use of the term 'governance' has become widespread within both scholarly and everyday discourse. It circulates within and between disciplinary specialities with seeming abandon. Yet scant consideration is given either to its conceptual grounding or to the conceptual price that might have to be paid for its movements from discourse to discourse. 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 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 conceptualizing the term remains to be resolved. The paper explores this problem with the aim of sketching a more adequate approach to the conceptual analysis of the term 'governance'.