“Government often refers to the governing body itself, while governance refers to the act of governing. So members of a government are engaged in governance.” But why is the term “governance” needed (and needed only recently) as a substitute or supplement for the active verb “to govern”? Why does the act of governing need to be consolidated into a noun, and what is the significance of that conversion? What continuous process of power, detached from agents of execution or enforcement, does it signify?

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 236