1. The way of "government management". This method equates governance with government management, focusing on understanding the public management reform under the market-oriented conditions from the perspective of government departments, mainly including the usage of "governance of the smallest country", "new public management" and "good governance".
2. The way of "civil society". This method holds that governance is a "self-organizing network" of civil society, an order created by various departments (or the third sector) of civil society in the process of pursuing the same interests independently, which is common in public resource management, community service and development, industry associations and transnational problem networks.
3. The way of cooperation network. This method attempts to integrate the above two research methods within the framework of "network management", and holds that governance is a network management system composed of government and social forces through face-to-face cooperation.
Our current mainstream research direction is the third kind, that is, network governance. In order to realize and promote public interests, many public actors, such as government departments and non-government departments (private sector, third sector or individual citizens), cooperate with each other, share public power and jointly manage public affairs in an interdependent environment.