ABSTRACT
Governance has risen to prominence as an academic concept and political practice across different fields and disciplines. Despite persisting diversity and disagreements, its various applications basically revolve around the emergence of new forms of coordination, steering and regulation that transcend traditional, state-centered understandings of political rule by hierarchical and formal structures of command-and-control (Rhodes 1996; Stoker 1998). The broader ‘governance turn’ has identified the European Union (EU) as an ideal case of modern governance (Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2006) and even extended this argument to the purportedly special field of security provision in and by the EU (Kirchner and Sperling 2007; Schroeder 2011; Christou et al. 2010). Research on EU internal security policy, or justice and home affairs (JHA), has been no exception to this trend (Bossong and Lavenex 2016). The varied references to governance in this area, however, do not yet add up to a cumulative research agenda and there is still a need to carve out the value-added by a governance perspective and what it offers to the field. Therefore, this chapter focuses on different foundational perspectives and questions that are highlighted by a governance perspective, rather than seeking to review the growth of empirical studies that employ the term governance.
