How do individuals or organizations manage to structure, regulate, and coordinate their actions to solve collective problems or deliver joint performances? How does coordination work in different forms of interaction and institutions? These are questions that lie behind the concept of governance, which is increasingly used in the social, legal, and economic sciences. This handbook provides the theoretical and analytical foundations of the concept and offers an overview of important application areas. It presents forms and mechanisms as well as variations in the dynamics of governance. Additionally, various disciplinary and theoretical perspectives are addressed. A third group of contributions deals with governance at local, regional, national, European, and global levels.