DOI
Doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199560530.013.0009

Summary
The chapter aims to explore the way that complexity theory can support governance theory to strengthen its analytical focus and potential. Throughout the article, the different variances of governance theory are analyzed, as well as their relation to complexity theory. Governance theory plays an important role in 4 major sub-disciplines of political science: comparative politics, policy analysis, political economy, and international relations. Despite their differences, the various applications of governance theory share at least three similarities:
- They avoid holistic macro explanations with unified actors (states, systems, sub-systems, etc.);
- They adopt a variety of different and new institutional arrangements
- They provide a synthesis between purely conflict-oriented and purely integration-oriented perspectives.
The infusion of complexity theory concepts can enhance governance theory in various respects, providing a more fine-grained and dynamic perspective. Adopting complexity theory, governance systems appear composed of many governing agents whose diverse incentives, motives, calculations, and so on at the micro-level are important factors in the explanation of regulation and feedback processes at the different levels of the social fabric. These agents are further embedded in larger political, economic and cultural systems. The goal of governance theory research would be to explain adaptive capacity and performance of differently structure governance systems.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
The chapter provides a relevant explanation of how governance theory and complexity theory are related and, thus, how the second can be integrated in the first. Governance theory, similarly to complexity within the domain of hard sciences, appears to be a far-reaching system of ideas that brought substantial insights to different sub-disciplines of political science (in the case of this article, 4). As such, the incorporation of relevant complex systems concepts (emergence, networks, nonlinearity, adaptation) can help support further advances in the field of governance theory and, more in general, in political science.

Point of Strength
- It presents rather clearly the point of contacts between complexity theory and governance theory.
- The explanation of governance theory’s impact in the field of political science is rather interesting and well defined.