Most definitions of good governance include the following elements: participation, consensus, accountability, effectiveness, efficiency, equitability, inclusiveness, and following the rule of law. Thus, while governance analytically describes decentered and devolved power, as a policy term, governance aims to substitute consensus-oriented policy formation and implementation for the overt exercise of authority and power through law and policing. It is a short step from this reorientation of democracy into problem solving and consensus to a set of additional replacements fundamental to the meaning and operation of governance today: “stakeholders” replace interest groups or classes, “guidelines” replace law, “facilitation” replaces regulation, “standards” and “codes of conduct” disseminated by a range of agencies and institutions replace overt policing and other forms of coercion. Together, these replacements also vanquish a vocabulary of power, and hence power’s visibility, from the lives and venues that governance organizes and directs.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 249