The Emergence of Governance and the Function of Law

Within the context of evolutionary governance theory (Van Assche et al. (Evolutionary governance theory: an introduction. Springer, 2014)), this contribution develops a particularly coevolutionary view of governance by understanding governance frameworks as forms of transfer. World society consists of multiple types of normative orders. It is within this structural setup that a governance phenomenon has emerged as the form through which expectations between different normative orders are stabilized. In addition, governance institutions serve as the central channels through which transfers between such orders are made possible. They structure the transposition of condensed social components such as economic products and capital, political decisions, legal judgments, scientific knowledge, and religious acts of salvation from one order to another, thereby allowing coevolution to unfold. In this context, law and legal instruments gain a central role since legal formalization is the central element that enables successful transfers to take place.