Governance: Prospects of Complexity Theory in Revisiting System Theory

The broadest meaning of governance is the regulation of social activities utilizing a variety of modes and mechanism of societal regulation. These range from collectively binding decisions to uncoordinated individual action guided by social norms and rationality principles. In the political science literature of the 1950s and 1960s this theoretical problem was treated in terms of "control" and "regulation" by variants of system theory. However, during the 1980s this systematic perspective was crowed out by individualist approaches – above all rational choice – and a macro perspective of societal regulation was lost. Although governance theory tries to speak to these questions, its foundation in general social theories is rather weak. This paper argues that various streams of complexity theory offer a broader and deeper theoretical foundation for theories of governance and regulation than other existing approaches. Complexity theory was initially developed in the physical and biological sciences. However , social scientists rapidly recognized its potential in formulating dynamic theories of the evolution of social systems. Whereas the various approaches differ in detail, they share common elements. These include the explicit modeling of multiple positive and negative feedbacks among the agents in a system, the introduction of learning and adaptation at the level of purposive agents, and the recognition of the multi-layer nature of social systems, in which phenomena at higher levels emerge from (but are not necessarily fully determined by) interactions at lower levels.