Knowing Governance ― The Epistemic Construction of Political Order

Knowing Governance sets out to understand governance through the design and making of its models and instruments. What kinds of knowledge do they require and reproduce? How are new understandings of governance produced in practice, by scientists and policy makers and by the publics with whom they engage? How does politics work through the production of ideas and information that both describe and prescribe how governing is done?

This book outlines and explores a new approach to the study of governance at the intersection of governmentality studies, interpretive policy studies and science and technology studies. Each chapter presents an empirically-grounded case study of how particular accounts of governing are worked out, and how new realities of governance emerge in the course of making it knowable. Each introduces and applies a key concept from science and technology studies, setting out a variety of ways of making knowledge about governance and its constituent politics.

Jan-Peter Vos is Junior Professor of the Sociology of Politics and heads the Innovation in Governance Research Group in the Department of Sociology at the Technische Universitat Berlin, Germany. He is author of Designs on Governance (2007) and co-editor of Reflexive Governance for Sustainable Development (2006).

Richard Freeman is Professor of Social Science and Public Policy at the University of Edinburgh, UK, where he is also Co-Director of the Academy of Government. He is co-editor of Knowledge in Policy: Embodied, Inscribed, Enacted (2014), and of the series Palgrave Studies in Science, Knowledge and Policy.