Knowing Governance

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?

Nina Amelung, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany Sonja van der Arend, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands Nicolas Baya-Laffite, Université Paris-Est, France Jelle Behagel, Wageningen University, the Netherlands Christian Bueger, Cardiff University, UK Richard Freeman, University of Edinburgh, UK Brice Laurent, Mines ParisTech, France Rebecca-Lea Korinek, WZB Social Science Centre, Germany Jan-Hendrik Passoth, Technische Universität München, Germany Thomas Pfister, Zeppelin University, Germany Nicholas J Rowland, Pennsylvania State University, USA Arno Simons, Institute of Ecological Economy Research (IÖW), Germany Linda Soneryd, University of Gothenburg, Sweden Andy Stirling, Sussex University, UK Holger Strassheim, Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany Jan-Peter Voß, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany

“Knowing Governance provides an in many ways impressive collection of work. It manages to intervene in current discussions in thoughtful ways, and offers useful conceptual devices for understanding the epistemic construction of knowledge. … it manages to provide a cogent argument for its overarching goal, namely to establish knowing governance as an exciting research agenda going forward.” (Jannick Schou, Science & Technology Studies, Vol. 30 (2), 2017)

"This is the manifesto of the knowledge turn in research about governance and public policy. By making knowledge central to the study of politics and policy choice, the authors explain how scientists, policy-makers and citizens engage in the production of meanings and representations about what governance is, how it is knowable and for what purposes. The book will have a formidable impact on the fields of science and technology studies, governance and the policy sciences." - Claudio M. Radaelli, University of Exeter, UK

"For more than a quarter century, American scholars exploring the links between knowledge, expertise, and politics found few voices to engage with across the Atlantic. Knowing Governance definitively ends that silence. Featuring some of the brightest young Europeans working at the nexus of science and technology studies and political science, the book establishes beyond question that modern states are states of knowledge. Ranging across issues from piracy to emissions trading, these essays lay the groundwork for a genuinely transnational conversation on the ways in which contemporary practices of governance construct their ways of knowing, and in turn are shaped by the knowledges they generate." - Sheila Jasanoff, Harvard Kennedy School, USA

"The STS-informed perspective of the process of knowing governance creating political order is breaking new ground. In this book, a new generation of scholars offers an interesting variety of unusual cases, and novel views on age-old problems." - Arie Rip, University of Twente, the Netherlands

"Historians and sociologists, from Max Weber to Michel Foucault, have long documented the connections between science and politics, and between the history of the state and the history of statistics. But researchers have paid remarkably little attention to the politics of the political sciences, nor concerned themselves with the relation between governance, and knowledge about governance. Knowing Governance does nothing less than open up a whole new field of inquiry, posing urgent new questions for the disciplines of politics." - Andrew Barry, University College London, UK