Private Actors and the State: Internationalization and Changing Patterns of Governance

Abstract

This article investigates the implications of political and economic internationalization on patterns of governance from a statecentric perspective. The actual patterns of governance in internationalized environments can be related to the respective governance capacity of public and private actors, which hinges in turn on the strategic constellation underlying the provision of a public good. The specific strategic constellation varies in three dimensions: the congruence between the scope of the underlying problem and the organizational structures of the related actors, the type of problem, and the institutional context, all of which involve a number of factors. With this concept in mind, we identify four ideal‐typed patterns of governance, enabled by different configurations of public and private capacities to formally or factually influence in various ways the social, economic, and political processes by which certain goods are provided.