Abstract
Governance instruments are the operational tools of public policy. While the functionalist approach sees them as neutral tools aiming to solve problems, the political sociology approach considers them as a means to incorporate a specific representation of the issue that they seek to influence. We review different taxonomies of governance instruments and highlight a change in instruments used when moving from hierarchical government to network governance. The neighbourhood revitalization policy in the Netherlands and water supply in urban Uganda are used as examples to discuss potentials and limits of urban governance instruments. They show the importance of framing, governance complexity, geographic specificities and implementation at different, often interrelated, scale levels. A further exploration of intelligent instruments is proposed for guiding extremely complex systems such as cities in a more organic manner.
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Notes
- 1.
The Ministry of MWR was transformed into the Ministry of Water, Lands and Environment in the early 1990s and into the Ministry of Water and Environment in 2007.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Sako Musterd for his contribution, and to the editors and reviewers Glen Robbins and Willem Salet for helping to structure and improve the argument of this chapter.
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Majoor, S., Schwartz, K. (2015). Instruments of Urban Governance. In: Gupta, J., Pfeffer, K., Verrest, H., Ros-Tonen, M. (eds) Geographies of Urban Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21272-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21272-2_6
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