Governance and Policy Instruments

The section analyses governance from an instrumentally-oriented angle, looking at global and transnational governance as an ensemble of policy-relevant mechanisms embedded in coercive, economic, institutional and normative forms of power structures. The section focuses on the role of policy scripts, concepts and indicators in the diffusion of policy ideas. While sovereign states have developed semi-regulatory frameworks (international law and organizations) to work out their external relations, most supranational governance works through subtler mechanisms in governing regional, national and institutional decision-making and its structures. The section will focus on the “soft side” of transnational governance analyzing the role of policy scripts and statistics whose global importance as mechanisms of political influence is constantly growing.