Metagovernance, Network Structure, and Legitimacy: Developing a Heuristic for Comparative Governance Analysis

The burgeoning debate on metagovernance examines attempts by the state and others to regulate self-regulating networks. In seeking to better understand the conditions affecting an actor’s capacity to metagovern, we introduce a distinction between relations within networks on the state-society axis, the key concern of the network governance school, and those on the interest integration axis, the key concern of the policy network school. This produces a heuristic consisting of four network types that vary in the type of metagovernance outcomes, defined here in terms of the level of input and output legitimacy. We suggest how different network types exhibit different metagovernance outcomes and what a network that produces a ‘successful’ metagovernance outcome might look like. The final section of the paper uses a comparative study of organic farming in four countries, and land use policy in one country, to demonstrate the usefulness and analytic potential of the heuristic developed