71

The approach in terms of new governance gives a significant place to civil society’s actors both within policy-making and policy implementation processes. The issue of governance has to be understood against the backdrop of the erosion of state’s prerogatives in industrialized countries. The governance perspective mirrors a move of the focus on public organizations toward an increased interest on actors’ networks. This article is concerned with the conceptualization of two perspectives on governance- one state-centered, the other centered on civil society- and attempts to draw some conclusions for the empirical analysis of governance processes. In a first place, the article develops the concept of “governance regime” which allows highlighting the plurality of modalities in which state and civil society relate to each others. The second part of the article contrasts this “vertical” approach to governance with a civil society-centered “horizontal” approach where civil society ability to self-organize and to cooperate within networks is under focus. In conclusion the article argues for the development of research articulating those two perspectives.