Each mode of governance comprises an ideal-typical mix of possible tool preferences whose use and interactions are more or less coherent and compatible. Legal governance, for example, is correlated closely with a preference for the use of direct government, laws and direct regulation, the use of excise taxes and insurance and, often, censorship and privacy laws; corporatist governance is correlated with a preference for the use of state-owned enterprises, independent and other forms of delegated regulation, the use of subsidies and grants, interest group mobilization and information campaigns; market governance is correlated with a preference for contracting out, voluntary regulation and deregulation, tax incentives, and data collection; and network governance with the use of clientele agencies, consultation mechanisms, interest group creation and access to information.

Experts in government see the links between these policy components in terms of their inter-compatibility and inner coherence and use their positions in policy advisory networks to develop policy alternatives which combine these elements in more or less consistent ways, choosing particular tools based on factors such as political, social and economic feasibility government capacity and target group structure, and calibrating specific tool components taking into account factors such as automaticity, cost, intrusiveness, visibility and precision of targeting. These factors and calculations change over time as the context of policy-making changes and shifts in governance modes and policy regime logics do occur, as globalization and network theorists rightly noted, leading to changes in overall policy design preferences.

However, these changes occur at different times and with different impacts in each policy sector and it is a mistake to think that a general macro-level societal movement such as networkization will manifest itself equally in all areas of state activity. This can be seen from even a rudimentary examination of the globalization and network literature which, in fact, argue equally vehemently that such shifts are occurring, but in two different directions: towards either the general adoption of market governance, or network governance, respectively. Within the context of these general trends several distinct meso-level trends can be observed in the use of particular types of governing tools in contemporary public policy designs within already existing sectoral governance modes.