doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9299.2011.02003.x SYMPOSIUM OVERVIEW: CONCEPTUALIZING NEW GOVERNANCE ARRANGEMENTS CHRIS TOLLEFSON, ANTHONY R. ZITO AND FRED GALE This symposium, ‘Conceptualizing New Governance Arrangements’, takes up the challenge of refining governance theory to better integrate work in several disciplines, most notably politics, public administration and law. To this end, we argue for a theoretical framework that profiles three key dimensions of governance: institutional, political and regulatory. This framework, in our view, offers new insights into the nature and operation of various governance arrangements, and offers the potential to assess and measure change within such arrangements over time. After describing our methodology for selecting and analysing the case studies profiled in the symposium, we introduce each of the articles that apply our three-dimensional governance framework. These articles employ the framework to consider a variety of contemporary governance scenarios that vary widely by sector (environmental, climate change, forestry and education policy) and level of analysis (sub-national, national, and bi-national). INTRODUCTION Across a range of academic disciplines, the concept of ‘governance’ has secured remarkable currency and durability (Williamson 1985; Rosenau 1992; Rhodes 1996; Blair and Roe 1999; de Burca and Scott 2006). This is perhaps not surprising in an era where the traditionally conceived hierarchical models of government, heavily reliant on centralized command and control regulation, have come under sustained critique and challenge from academics and practitioners alike. While their core business remains ‘governing’, in discharging this role governments have displayed an unprecedented appetite for experimenting with new modes of governance that blur the lines between public and private, state and market, and hard and soft law. These developments, some claim, are indicative of the erosion of territorial, nation-state-centred political rule and constitutionalism (Gatto 2006). Indeed, this transformation has significance beyond conventional state-based politics: the European Union (EU), for instance, has seen a proliferation of ‘soft law’ instruments, which lack formal legal force yet have a range of highly salient practical effects (Senden 2004, p. 5). Environmental protection and resource management have both been crucial venues for real-life experimentation with new governance arrangements and the focus of a growing governance literature. One key reason for this is the predominance in these policy domains of uncertainty and complexity, making it difficult to predict the costs and benefits of policy choices, define regulatory payoffs, and maintain interest coalitions (Sprinz and Vaahtoranta 1994; Zito 2007). These are also policy arenas in which it is becoming increasingly evident that states can no longer ‘govern alone’. This is especially the case in the environmental policy arena where the prevalence of ‘wicked problems’ requires wholesale behavioural change at multiple levels from the individual to the corporation to the state (Rittel and Webber 1973; Gale 2009). Indeed, two of the policy domains profiled in this symposium (climate change and environmental assessment) are particularly compelling illustrations of this wicked problem archetype. Chris Tollefson is the Hakai Chair in Environmental Law and Sustainability at the Faculty of Law, University of Victoria, Canada. Anthony R. Zito is in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, UK. Fred Gale is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Government, University of Tasmania. Public Administration Vol. 90, No. 1, 2012 (3–18)  2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.