Abstract

Amidst economic, social, and political crises, democratic political systems are confronted with the pervasiveness of society’s «economic government», with authoritarian pulses, new populisms and souverainism. The democratic promise represented at the end of the 1990s by governance seems exhausted to the extent that we may be tempted to consider governance on its way out. In summarizing the most relevant historical moments and the conceptual grid of governance, this paper seeks to problematize the idea that governance is in crisis today. The thesis is that governance has always displayed a dual dimension, negotiating and managerial, redefined in the current political context. It will then be argued that, while the succession of international crises pushes for the stiffening and re-nationalization of democratic political systems, the drive for hybridization between economics and politics, and therefore between public and private, does not seem to have ceased. At the intersection of these two problematic axes, governance rethinks itself as a form of governing, steering the complex relations between state and society, politics, and the economy