Knowing Governance: The epistemic construction of political order

Knowing Governance sets out to understand governance through the design and making of its models and instruments. What kinds of knowledge do they require and reproduce? How are new understandings of governance produced in practice, by scientists and policy makers and by the publics with whom they engage? How does politics work through the production of ideas and information that both describe and prescribe how governing is done? This book outlines and explores a new approach to the study of governance at the intersection of governmentality studies, interpretive policy studies and science and technology studies. Each chapter presents an empirically-grounded case study of how particular accounts of governing are worked out, and how new realities of governance emerge in the course of making it knowable. Each introduces and applies a key concept from science and technology studies, setting out a variety of ways of making knowledge about governance and its constituent politics.