Governments and state agencies are participants in particular governance arrangements, but they also play a key role in metagovernance, or the ‘government of governance’. As Mark Whitehead (2003, 8) argues, ‘metagovernance…focuses explicitly on practices and procedures that secure governmental influence, command and control within governance regimes’. Yet, as Eva Sorensen (2006, 101) complains, ‘governance theorists do not define the concept of metagovernance precisely’. An example of this can be found in a paper by Josie Kelly (2006) on the devolution of regulatory authority over local government in England to an independent regulatory agency (the Audit Commission, AC). She argues that ‘the shift from direct to indirect regulation has resulted in the AC becoming a vehicle of metagovernance, acting on the government's behalf’. In our view the devolution of authority to the AC is more accurately seen as a governance strategy itself; essentially a reallocation of parcels of authority from one part of the state to another. By contrast, the central metagovernance role in the case explored by Kelly is how such governance relationships (between the government and the AC and between the AC and local councils) are developed, managed, resourced, audited, assessed and ultimately controlled by the central government.

The first part of this chapter defines metagovernance in terms of the performance of six functions. We show why metagovernance functions are the prime responsibility of the state, a view also adopted by scholars such as Renate Mayntz (1993) and Fritz Scharpf (1994).