Between coordination and regulation: Finding the governance in Internet governance

TLDR

Internet governance scholarship is marked by contradictory notions, with governance often framed as deliberate steering or regulation yet also as distributed ordering, while regulation is understood as targeted interventions to influence behavior. The article proposes a new approach to locating governance in Internet governance by grounding it in mundane coordination activities, thereby distinguishing governance from regulation and offering a conceptual framework for empirical studies. Governance is defined as reflexive coordination that focuses on critical moments when routine activities become problematic and require revision, grounding the concept in everyday coordination practices. The conceptual framework distinguishes governance from regulation and provides a basis for empirical studies of Internet governance.

Abstract

Following recent theoretical contributions, this article suggests a new approach to finding the governance in Internet governance. Studies on Internet governance rely on contradictory notions of governance. The common understanding of governance as some form of deliberate steering or regulation clashes with equally common definitions of Internet governance as distributed modes of ordering. Drawing on controversies in the broader field of governance and regulation studies, we propose to resolve this conceptual conundrum by grounding governance in mundane activities of coordination. We define governance as reflexive coordination – focusing on those ‘critical moments’, when routine activities become problematic and need to be revised, thus, when regular coordination itself requires coordination. Regulation, in turn, can be understood as targeted public or private interventions aiming to influence the behaviour of others. With this distinction between governance and regulation, we offer a conceptual framework for empirical studies of doing Internet governance.