Governance: Government, governing, management or a new term »vladovanje«?

Abstract

This article provides a short contextualisation of use of the term governance at the international level and its uptake in Slovenian political and communication sciences. The authors then focus upon the lack of a clear consensus regarding the translation and definition of the term in Slovenian literature. They provide an analysis of Gigafida, the main corpus of the Slovenian language, concerning how the term governance is translated and used in the Slovenian language. The authors critically juxtapose the concepts of governance with the main current translations: government, governing and public administration and management. Finally, the authors propose that governance should be conceptualised as part of a newly coined term “vladovanje” (Splichal 2008) since the absence of such a completely new term reduces the accuracy of Slovenian terminology.

Keywords

• governance
• government
• governing
• public administration
• public management