Learning from mistakes It's not difficult to see that the role of government is changing drastically everywhere in western Europe. There is even a slogan to describe the change: 'from government to governance'. Everybody has a sense of what this means: the development in which a directive, steering government is transformed into a government involved in a network of consultations and reciprocal influences. But when you try to pin down exactly what 'governance' stands for, it is easy to get confused. A brief excursion to the Internet yields dozens of quite varied definitions. Some of them have an almost moralising undertone ('good governance'), and others involve an over-businesslike description of 'intervention issues' involving 'actors' and 'subjects'. But there is an almost universal consensus that 'governance' is much better than 'government'.

And that is indeed the case in many areas. The networks involved in policy have become much more complex and there is much more interdependence between a wide range of players (both public and private). This is also true of urban regeneration processes.

The ReUrbA partners have dealings with government authorities in all their projects. And because these almost always involve fairly complex urban regeneration processes, you see the government authorities involved doing their utmost to make something of 'less government' and 'more governance'. Even though this is the latest policy fashion, it is a very welcome development.

But it isn't easy. What is it that makes replacing 'government' with 'governance' so difficult'?

The explanation can be found in the idea of power. When all is said and done, administration is an expression of power and governance involves a completely different ball game: providing a direction for shared power. But it is precisely when things get difficult and when risks emerge that the counterreaction starts and government authorities hanker back towards the safe ground of government.

So government authorities still need to learn how to deal with 'governance'; they need to learn that the game and the rules are constantly changing.

And indeed, things can go wrong in all sorts of ways. If 'governance' degenerates into a sort of consensus democracy, there is a serious risk that consensus becomes the aim of the process and that policy becomes symbolic in nature. This can result in a situation in which nobody thinks about efficacy, efficiency, legitimacy or democracy.

However, there is unfortunately no straightforward guidebook for governance. We are aware that we sometimes suggest that this may be the case with our ReUrbA method. But our method is no more, and no less, than a heartfelt invitation to learn to think differently, to experiment, to learn from each other and to create space, both in the field of governance and elsewhere.

It is only in this way that governance can become a balanced combination of steering, control, accountability and supervision. And this is the only way to create space for new interaction patterns between government authorities, society as a whole and the market.

During the learning process, there needs to be a certain amount of understanding for mistakes made by others from all the players in the policy network.

Mark Reede, project manager ReUrbA²