Publisher: SAGE

Editor
Professor Mark Bevir
University of California, Berkeley

Managing Editor
Naomi Choi
University of California, Berkeley
egov@berkeley.edu

Editorial Board
Professor Chris Ansell
University of California, Berkeley

Professor Colin Hay
Birmingham University, UK

Dr Andy Smith
Sciences Po, France

Rorden Wilkinson
University of Manchester, UK

Lisa Zanetti
University of Missouri, Columbia

Naomi Choi
University of California, Berkeley

The language of governance has risen to prominence in the last twenty years as a way of describing and explaining changes in our world. It has become a prominent part of disciplines such as political science, economics, sociology, and public administration. And it has also become a major topic of concern for political and non-profit actors, as evidenced, for example, by its role in shaping the lending criteria of institutions such as the World Bank.

Governance refers, in particular, to changes in the nature and the role of the state since the last quarter of the twentieth century. The state has become both increasingly dependent on organizations in civil society and increasingly constrained by international linkages. On one hand, the public sector in many states has shifted toward markets and networks, as opposed to bureaucratic hierarchies: governance thus refers to the ways in which patterns of rule operate in and through groups within the voluntary and private sector. On the other, states have become increasingly embroiled with transnational and international settings as a result of the internationalization of industrial and financial transactions, the rise of regional blocks, and concerns over problems such as terrorism and the environment: governance thus refers to the formal and informal ways in which states have attempted to respond to the changing global order.

Although governance has arisen as a major new language in which to discuss and to implement changes in our social and political world, there are few works that translate this language into a more familiar and commonsense vocabulary. The Encyclopedia of Governance would seek to unpack the jargon that characterizes much writing in the field so as to make it intelligible to other scholars, to students, to political actors, and even ? we might hope ? to informed laypeople who want to pass democratic judgment on the new patterns of governance in which they find themselves.

The encyclopedia aims to provide a one-stop point of reference for the diverse and complex topics surrounding governance. It would concentrate primarily on topics related to the changing nature and role of the state in recent times, and the ways in which these have been conceptualized. The relevant time period dates roughly from the rise of neo-liberal regimes, and so the end of the post-war consensus, in the 1970s. The changes in the state are those associated with, firstly, the transfer of powers, rights, and functions to organizations within civil society, and, secondly, the rise of new types of regional and international linkages and problems. The conceptual focus would be on the ways in which these changes in the state are explored in political science, public administration, political economy, and sociological or organizational theory. The more substantive material in the encyclopedia would derive from across the globe as necessary.