An Overview of EGT’s Main Concepts

This chapter briefly outlines the theoretical framework of Evolutionary Governance Theory. It presents its architecture as well as the most important concepts and their relations. We emphasize the concepts of contingency and co-evolution, which serve as the base of an analysis of co-evolving configurations: actor/institutions, formal/informal, and power/knowledge. We discuss the three dependencies: path dependence, interdependence, and goal dependence and reflect on governance techniques and steering options. For a more detailed overview of EGT we refer to the book: ‘Evolutionary Governance Theory, an introduction’ (Van Assche et al. (Evolutionary governance theory: an introduction. Springer, 2014a)). For a further elaboration on the relations between concepts we also refer to the Glossary chapter at the end of this book.