Comparative Governance: Rediscovering the Functional Dimension of Governing van B. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre is an English-language textbook on governance. This book is aimed at professionals who want to know more about administrative decision-making within complex and globalized environments.
The authors introduce a new framework for comparative analysis of governance, highlighting the central role of the state. By emphasizing the functional aspects of governance—such as goal-setting, mobilizing resources, decision-making, implementation, and feedback—they show how different actors cooperate, while effective governance requires a leading role for the state.
The book also offers a typology of governance arrangements and national administrative styles. Comparative Governance increases insight into failures in governance and the changes therein, and strengthens the theoretical foundation of this field.
With this conceptual and empirical approach, the work of Guy Peters and Jon Pierre makes a valuable contribution to the study of governance in political science.