The term transnational governance designates untraditional types of international and regional collaboration among both public and private actors. These legally-structured or less formal arrangements link economic, scientific and technological spheres with political and legal processes. They are challenging the type of governance which constitutional states were supposed to represent and ensure. They also provoke old questions: Who bears the responsibility for governance without a government? Can accountability be ensured? The term 'constitutionalism' is still widely identified with statal form of democratic governance. The book refers to this term as a yardstick to which then contributors feel committed even where they plead for a reconceptualisation of constitutionalism or a discussion of its functional equivalents.
'Transnational governance' is neither public nor private, nor purely international, supranational nor totally denationalised. It is neither arbitrary nor accidental that we present our inquiries into this phenomenon in the series of International Studies on Private Law Theory.

Christian Joerges was Professor of Law and Society at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, and Co-Director of the Centre of European Law and Politics at the University of Bremen.
Inger-Johanne Sand is Professor at the Institute of Public and International Law, University of Oslo.
Gunther Teubner is Professor of Law and Principal Investigator at the Cluster of Excellence: Formation of Normative Orders, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and Distinguished Professor at the International University College, Torino.