This chapter forms part of a larger project examining governance ‘beyond the regulatory state’. Governance has been defined in a variety of ways in both official and secondary literatures. In this chapter the ‘age of governance’ is conceived in terms of recognising the dispersal of capacities and resources relevant to the exercise of power among a wide range of state, non - state and supranational acto rs. It is claimed that ‘[t]he essence of governance is its focus on governing mechanisms which do not rest on recourse to the authority and sanctions of government’). An analysis in which governing is no longer seen as the exclusive prero gative of the nation state presents a challenge to the literature which argues that the last years of the twentieth century witnessed ‘the rise of the regulatory state’