Governance through communication

• Date: 01 May 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1571
• Author: Juliet Roper,Magda Pieczka
• Published date: 01 May 2015

■Editorial

Governance through communication

This special issue of the Journal of Public Affairs is

devoted to governance, and all but one of the

articles collected here were originally presented as

papers at the International Communication Associ-

ation pre-conference ‘Governance through commu-

nication; stakeholder engagement, dialogue and

corporate social responsibility’, organised jointly

by Queen Margaret University and Copenhagen

Business School in 2013. The concept of governance

has wide-ranging applications signalled by adjec-

tives such as public, corporate, organisational,

global or good governance, to mention just the most

commonly used ones. Depending on the context,

governance may have a somewhat different focus

and practices. For example, while public gover-

nance may be focused on state institutions, their

decision-making processes and their relationship

with citizens as shown in the extensive work of the

World Bank or OECD, corporate governance safe-

guards shareholders’rights and is, in the first in-

stance, established through appropriate legal and

regulatory frameworks (OECD, 2004). These differ-

ences have also been mirrored in the academic divi-

sion of labour in respect to the practices taken as a

focus: while public engagement or public dialogue

tend to be studied more as part of public policy,

public administration and community develop-

ment, corporate social responsibility belongs to

business and business ethics. One of the aims of this

special issue is, therefore, to explore ways in which

these different domains of life and academic

activity, rather than separated, could be seen as con-

nected and, more to the point, connected through

the role communication plays in the constitution of

governance and it its enactment.

We understand governance by the well-known

and widely quoted, broad definition as ‘… the pro-

cess of decision making and the process by which

decisions are implemented (or not implemented)’

(UNESCAP, 2007). However, the authors of the

articles published in this issue are quite clearly

interested not simply in processes of governance

but, rather, in what is known in development stud-

ies as good governance, understood as: participa-

tory, consensus oriented, accountable, transparent,

responsive, effective and efficient, equitable and inclu-

sive, following the rule oflaw (UNESCAP, 2007).This

interest emerges across the articles as the preoccupa-

tion with power (Trowbridge; Willis), accountability

(Burnside-Lawry & Ariemma;Tsetsura);participation

as access, or collective learning (Roper, Collins & de

Jong; Burnside-Lawry & Ariemma; Trowbridge),

competence (Aakhus & Bzadak) and identity

(Bartlett, McDonald & Pini), issues that are

further problematised by the use of social media

(Johnston; Lutz).

The articles presented in this special issue can be

loosely grouped into three sections, exploring

questions of collective learning and participation in

public policy and decision making processes, the

implications of new technologies for governance

and probing specific communication practices or

dilemmas (final four articles).

In the first group, Burnside-Lawry and Ariemma

examine issues of democratic participation in policy

decision making in the case of a transnational orga-

nisation, and the particular dilemmas of account-

ability encountered in such cases. Trowbridge

similarly examines stakeholder issues in a transna-

tional governance situation—that of US–Canadian

water management in the context of the Lake

Ontario-St. Lawrence River, and the controversies

engendered.

Roper, Collins and de Jong describe innovative

approaches, primarily based in what is commonly

termed the business case for sustainability, that

were used to facilitate stakeholder engagement in

achieving changes in governance aimed at improv-

ing water quality of a critically important lake in

New Zealand.

These articles are followed by two that deal with

governance and the implications of new communi-

cation technologies: Johnston examines policy

guidelines developed in a range of sectors in re-

sponse to threats posed to organisations by social

media use, in particular by employees; Hoffmann

and Lutz conduct a literature review to map the

contours of the discussion on using the internet for

stakeholder engagement and proposes a framework

for future research.

Journal of Public Affairs

Volume 15 Number 2 pp 127–128 (2015)

Published online in Wiley Online Library

(www.wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/pa.1571

Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.