Governance
Definitions
The particular approach an organization uses to keep its design system current, consistent, and adopted — who may change what, how a change is proposed and reviewed, and how drift from the system is found and corrected
The system is the artifact; governance is the practice that keeps the artifact true. A design system without it is a snapshot: right on the day it shipped, and less right every day after.
The rules, roles, and review that decide how a shared technical thing — a codebase, a platform, a data model — may change, and who is accountable when it does
Lightweight governance is a lint rule, a required review, a schema test that bites. Heavy governance is a committee. The useful kind is the smallest amount that makes the next change safe.
Who decides, and how the decision holds. The design-system sense is the one that comes up most: a component library is easy to build once and hard to keep right, and governance is the name for the keeping.
Avoid: using governance to mean approval. Approval is one event; governance is the standing arrangement that makes approval unnecessary for most changes and mandatory for the few that need it.