Networked governance: Taking networks seriously

Abstract

Governance refers to the multitude of ways, mechanisms, and processes in which individuals, companies, organizations, societies, states, and supranational forms of organization arrive at and implement decisions. Governance research today faces increasingly complex organizational forms that consist of different types of actors, instruments, and arenas from the local up to the global level. This questions theoretical models that focus primarily on markets and hierarchies as modes of governance. In this book, we seek to explore older as well as emergent forms of governance by using concepts and methods of social network analysis. The introduction outlines the basic ideas of this approach and provides an overview of the contributions assembled in this volume.