From the text: So conceived, governance is a process that involves many institutions — in the economy, civil society, and religious and cultural organizations — in addition to the government legally defined. Governance is even more ubiquitous than the entity, also not identical with the government, called the state. Questions about the form that governance in a degrowth society should take are therefore not limited to structural questions about the location of authority, the distribution and interaction of powers, the selection of individuals to fulfill specialized roles, or the enactment and enforcement of common rules, as vital as these matters are. Glancing toward Montesquieu, I would say that governance is not about the letter of the laws, but about their spirit; not about the body of law, but about its mind. . . .