Governance. A Critique of the Definitions Underlying the Construct

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: A, University of Malta (Ecnonomics, Management, Accountancy), course: Evidence-Based Management, language: English, abstract: The use of governance terminology has been used substantially throughout the 21st century, with buzz-phrases such as ‘good governance’ taking centre stage in the recent global development agenda. Whereas before, governance implied statesmanship, nowadays, the term encompasses the non-profit and private sectors, and, is used as an alternative to ‘government action’. In an attempt to better compare and contrast between different (and somewhat vague) explanations, there is a list, from which the most relevant keywords were extracted. It was also possible to create a ‘word cloud’ of associated terms; this tool is commonly used to visualise text data and is useful in exploratory search tasks. Our impression of the literature and reports related to this term is that the authors tend to generalise and are inclined towards giving either a state-centric or a society-centric definition of ‘governance’. In trying to define the terminology, studies, and reports comply in that ‘governance’ is ‘a process’ or ‘method’ of ‘controlling’, ‘states’, ‘society’, ‘citizens’ and ‘organizations’. It was observed that political unions or institutions (such as the European Commission and EU agencies) tend to emphasise the political aspects of governance, whereas others (such as the World Bank) focus more on the societal and economic aspects, thus giving a more generic explanation. There seem to be instances where definitions of the term are ‘built’ or ‘tweaked’ purposefully and subsequently agreed upon, for example, during the opening stages of national and global fora. Supposedly, this is done to establish common ground among all the parties before discussions ensue. We believe that the most relevant definition of this structure should encompass the way citizens choose to run society and imply that governance is broader than government. It should also reflect the management of a process. We feel that the explanation recently stated by the World Bank comes closest to our view – the process through which state and non-state actors interact to design and implement policies within a given set of formal and informal rules that shape and are shaped by power.