Governance på norsk. Samstyring som empirisk og analytisk fenomen

”Governance” has become a catchword to explain some of the changes and challenges facing contemporary democracies. In the Norwegian language there is no corresponding word, and “governance” has to some extent become part of the academic language. Thus, the multifaceted international literature discussing governance has brought some conceptual confusion also to the Norwegian discussion. This article aims to clarify how governance can be understood in a Norwegian setting by discussing the concept of governance, what empirical phenomena governance should be associated with, and the theoretical framework for studying these phenomena. We argue that the concept of governance can be replaced by the Norwegian term “samstyring”, defined as the non-hierarchical process through which public and private actions and resources are coordinated and given a common direction and meaning. Based on a typology of empirical forms of “samstyring”, we show that organisational forms as for example projects, partnerships, intermunicipal cooperation and limited companies all are relevant. We then argue in favour of a multi-theoretical perspective combining perspectives from the literature on regimes, partnerships and network with organizational theory.