Wageningen Centre of Governance

Information for SCHOLARS

The study of governance is timely and exciting, with multiple shifts in governance now underway. Governance arrangements are increasingly linked across local and global scales. Shifts in governance are also underway from pre-dominantly state-led steering to a growing diversity of private and public-private governance arrangements. The WCG offers analysis of these shifts in governance from a variety of social scientific perspectives.

We focus on:

  • Shared questions related to the role and influence of multiple actors in governance arrangements and processes;
  • Sources of accountability, legitimacy and effectiveness of multilevel and multi-actor governance;
  • Designing anticipatory governance arrangements to keep pace with the rapid evolution and
  • dissemination of technological and scientific innovations

Our conceptual concerns include social mechanisms that underpin how issues are framed and placed on the political agenda.

  • Leadership in public administration and trust are important concepts.
  • We develop methods to intervene in stagnated policy processes through action research, collaborative research and configuration management.
  • We study actors, institutions and norms of global environmental change and the processes and dynamics of multilevel and multiactor networked environmental governance in an era of globalization.
  • We interrogate the nature of the times we live in and the implications for a transition to sustainable consumption and production worldwide.

Our research spans the national, regional, comparative, and international level.