The term governance has become a part of day-to-day vocabulary. Politicians talk about the importance of ‘good governance’ in developing countries and the significance of corporate governance in firms. Journalists write about the governance of charities, football clubs, museums, universities, schools and football clubs. In these cases it appears that governance is an alternative term for management or leadership. In political science, however, governance has a distinct meaning. Here writers talk about a transition from ‘government to governance’ and even of the exercise of ‘governance without government’. At its simplest, the argument is that governments have been ‘hollowed out’ or ‘decentred’ and must now work with a range of non-state actors in order to achieve their goals.

In our view these arguments are overblown. In fact, part of the motivation for writing this book was the lack of a sustained alternative account of governance in which the state played a central role in governance arrangements and relationships, but also steered or metagoverned them. Although we point to instances in which governments have been marginalised and collectively valued policy goals are being pursued by non-state actors, such cases are few and far between. In our view governments and the broader set of agencies and public bodies which together constitute the state are and should remain central in governance processes. But while rejecting what we call ‘society-centred’ arguments about governance, we also express reservations about alternative ‘state-centric’ accounts in which governments are imagined to operate in splendid isolation from the societies they govern, descending from on high occasionally to impose their policy preferences.