Democratic Governance

     ...at the forefront of practice and theory"Building Democratic Institutions" bridges the gap between theoretical literature and the actual tools and practices needed to strengthen or rebuild democratic institutions and reform governance systems. Through...

     ...the conditions for governance networks to produce public policy and governance on the basis of stable, negotiated interaction between interdependent, but relative autonomous actors? How is it possible for political authorities of various kinds to regulate self-regulation governance networks in order to minimize the risk of governance failure and maximize the prospect of success? How can we assess the problems and merits of governance networks in relation to normative standards of democracy, and what is the result of such an assessment? The overall ambition of the book is to create a platform for the development of a second generation of research into the problems and potentials of new forms of interactive governance that tend to spread faster and wider than most academics have hitherto recognized....

     ...and around the world. Policymakers cling to outdated concepts of representative government while at the same time placing ever more faith in expertise, markets, and networks. Democracy exhibits blurred lines of accountability and declining legitimacy. Bevir explores how new theories of governance undermined traditional government in the twentieth century. Politicians responded by erecting great bureaucracies, increasingly relying on policy expertise and abstract notions of citizenship and, more recently, on networks of quasi-governmental and private organizations to deliver services using market-oriented techniques. Today, the state is an unwieldy edifice of nineteenth-century government buttressed by a sprawling substructure devoted to the very different idea of governance--and democracy has suffered. In Democratic Governance, Bevir takes a comprehensive look at governance and the history and thinking behind it. He provides in-depth case studies of constitutional reform, judicial reform, joined-up