The book’s approach to governance underscores the need to a broader look at governance beyond networks and network governance. The focus on ambiguities which are consubstantial to governance raises the question of how those ambiguities are handled and resolved through the institutionalization of practices and on the social, political and policy outcomes and consequences of these institutional solutions. As a result, contributions to this volume explicitly address ambiguities in governance dynamics, institutions and actors, and aim at shedding light on their complex interactions. Most chapters present a comparative perspective to governance arrangements, providing detailed knowledge on case studies in a number of crucial policy sectors: health care, rural and urban development, local planning.

On the whole, the book collects a set of local/national experiences that allows to elaborate on conceptual issues through the notion of governance ambiguities. The book is structured in three parts: ambiguities, hybridity and failures; networks, participation and community; decision-making, democracy and power.