“Governance,” at the nation-state level of political organization, refers to the exercise of authority over a defined population. Authority is the capability to make decisions binding on that population by reasons of affective loyalty, habituation to the legal order, calculations of interest, or, in the last analysis, coercion. The social/legal framework through which political authority is wielded is the state, the territorial boundary of which defines the population subject to the political authority. It is political authority’s connection to the state that distinguishes it from authority expressed through other social frameworks. The wielders of political authority—the government—are the individuals or groups whose formal or informal decisionmaking roles are ultimately related to state structures and institutions. Their claim to authority can be derived from a variety of sources: hereditary tradition, constitutional practice, expressions of popular will, oppressive coercive force, or a combination of factors. The exercise of authority, or governance, involves the allocation of material, social, and value goods to institutions, groups, and individuals in the state and the extraction, mobilization, and deployment of the human, material, and symbolic resources to support governance. To paraphrase Lasswell’s famous statement, governance is the distributive aspect of who gets what, when, and how in a society; that is, the creation and enforcement of public policy. This definition of governance is relatively values-free and universal, characteristic of authority in any state at any time. Whether the government is democratic or authoritarian, military or civilian, capitalist or socialist, the task of governance is the same.