Surcando los mares de la gobernanza: Cinco coordenadas de lectura de un concepto babélico

Abstract

Governance is a term that is currently part of research agendas in many different disciplines of the social sciences. Despite important problems of polysemy, the concept colonizes new academic realms and public spaces and its use has become more widespread than ever in history. In this context, the main objective of this paper is to offer a small contribution to make the concept of governance and its multiple variants something more understandable. In order to accomplish this objective, five reading coordinates are offered to help to give some order and conceptual clarity: 1) To the use of the concept “without surnames” in a distinction from its analytical and normative versions, 2) To the use of the concept “with surnames”, using the same distinction, 3) to distinguish the levels of governance, 4) to understand the times of governance, and 5) to trace the generations and waves in governance studies. In the end, it is an eminently theoretical work based on a careful selection of significant contributions within the vast specialized literature on governance.