Volume 2: Political Regulation, Governance, and Societal Transformations
This chapter attempts a broad analytical compass for surveying the main actors, institutions and instruments governing our world. Despite its seeming ubiquity, governance is a relatively new expression in this context suggestive both of new modes of exercising power, and an enhanced focus on ordering a world undergoing rapid change. Speaking generally governance may be understood as the exercise of power organized around multiple dispersed sites operating through transnational networks of actors, public as well as private, and national, regional as well as local. This chapter maps a rather more fluid and differentiated landscape of governance across the five areas it surveys, i.e. finance, investment, trade, labor and environment.