These new perspectives on government – its changing role in society and its changing capacity to pursue collective interests under severe external and internal constraints - are at the heart of governance.The concept of governance is notoriously slippery; it is frequently used among both social scientists and practitioners without a definition which all agree on. To be sure, even within each of these groups there are many different definitions and connotations of governance. Throughout the book we discuss ‘governance theory’which might be slightly misleading. The current academic governance debate is still to a large extent concerned with defining key concepts. Thus ‘governance theory’ refers to a proto-theory but remains basically a set of observations looking for a more comprehensive theory. We also discuss different types of ‘actors’. Actors’ includes real actors such as presidents,prime ministers and bureaucrats; in other instances, ‘actors’ is more amorphous. That is, they may be structures, interests, international regimes or policy networks. We are trying not to anthropomorphize the many entities such as regimes and networks. Still, these entities do have political influence over policy and governance.