Various institutions of the Union at local, regional, national and supranational levels, with ever increasing frequency and emphasis, have devised policies and initiated mechanisms, which are best, represented by the concept of governance. The Union, while formulating common policy in limited areas, has accepted the principle of subsidiarity in many others, encouraging collaborative schemes and approaches among various actors at different sub-national levels. Major instruments for implementation like the Social fund and Regional and Cohesion Fund envisage and encourage a new societal division of labour, new types of collaboration among a multiplicity of stakeholders and new forms of participation and accountability, true to the spirit of governance.All these developments and trends justify a course in which this concept and its various applications within the European Union are taken up systematically, to facilitate a clearer understanding of how the Union functions.
