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È da almeno un ventennio che si assiste all'uso crescente del termine governance nei più diversi ambiti istituzionali, politici e di ricerca e con significati e implicazioni differenti nei diversi contesti d'utilizzo. In particolare, nella comunità scientifica essa attraversa le contemporanee dottrine dell'amministrazione e dello stato (New Public Management, dottrine o teorie della regolazione), le teorie dell'organizzazione delle corporazioni economiche (corporate governance), i dibattiti sul governo locale e urbano, alcuni sviluppi della politica internazionale (global governance). Il contributo si propone di ricostruire queste diverse accezione segnalandone i termini di rilievo per la contemporanea riflessione politica e politologica.

To explain the institutional developments of the EC/EU, the traditional theories of European integration used to build their arguments around two opposite and well-known models of public authority, the International Organisation one vs. the State one: But both of these yardsticks have proven to be of limited heuristic power, faced with the peculiarity of the EC/EU institutional configuration. The deadlock that classic theories run into, then, was just bypassed by the following studies, that left behind the "ontological question" to focus on middle-range fields or specific dynamics, driven by the idea that the system had a unique nature, but the way it worked could be known and named. Thus, the post-ontological studies often referred to the European institutional level as a "governance system", to indicate that the EC/EU is able to allocate values by shaping trans-boundary policy processes, but through an institutional interplay hardly referable to some conventional political model. Thus, this paper aims (1) to analyse the different contents attached to the "governance" label in European studies since the fixing Hix made when talking of a "new governance agenda" in 1998, (2) to recast the ontological question in the light of the "new governance", a theoretical framework linking Rosenau's concept of self-sustaining trans-boundary "Spheres of Authority" to policy cycles now decoupled from the nation-state jurisdictions, and (3) to define and apply this framework to the institutional development of the EC/EU, to identify the reasons beneath the common project actual stalemate.