Governance

Geographers have long been interested in how societies and places are governed, both with respect to how sovereign states (embodied in local, regional and national governments and state agencies) manage civil society and markets within their territories, but also how businesses, third-sector bodies (e.g., NGOs, charities), and the general public seek to regulate domains and maintain social order (Herod et al., 2002). Indeed, traditional governmental structures, policies and legislative bodies are just one component of governance, with many other actors increasingly playing a role in managing social and spatial relations, sometimes in conjunction with or on behalf of the state, or independently. This relationship appears to be in flux at present as the relations between sovereign states, the market, and civil society are renegotiated and blurred, with a shift from centralised and bureaucratic forms of regulation and government to a plurality of co-existing and overlapping networks and partnerships that work at different scales from the local to global