The application of systems theory to governance generates several different approaches to system management. How can policy actors manage new self-organizing governance systems? The autopoetic approach suggests that any system that persists over time will be self-regulating. In this view, the system steers itself, and it does so through closed, self-regulating processes. The autopetic approach thus leads to pessimism over the possibility of the state (as a subsystem) steering society. The interaction approach, in contrast, identifies governance as product of interactions within the system. It highlights the impact of relationships between governors and those being governed, between public and private actors, and between institutions and the social forces they regulate. All these interactions offer sites at which the state, and also societal actors, might intervene so as to steer self-governing systems. In this view, recognition of the importance of interactions help us to understand how steering becomes possible.