New Governance and Policy Instruments: Are Governments Going "Soft"?

This article investigates the nexus between policy instruments and governance, with an emphasis on how questions and research that deal with the former should inform the literature which is dedicated to the latter. It comments on the hard-versus-soft-policy-instrument debate in the governance literature and introduces an alternative policy instrument conceptualization called the Vedung's trichotomy. The article argues that although recent temporal trends vary across sectors and nations, it is generally the case that there is an increase in the number and type of policy instruments employed in most policy domains.