Introduction: knowing governance

Knowing Governance sets out to understand governance through the making of knowledge about governance itself. We are interested in the means by which those who govern and those who engage with them come to know what they do: we seek to identify and explore the devices with which they work and the processes and practices and by which they establish and expand particular models and techniques. Drawing on work on governmentality, in interpretive policy studies and in science and technology studies we explain just how we might identify, problematize and investigate the elements of 'knowing governance'. We outline the set of case studies collected here, and conclude by pointing to more general questions of reification and reflexivity raised by our work.