Virtually all governance is indirect, carried out through intermediaries. Governors prefer both to engage intermediaries that are competent and to control intermediary behavior. But governors face a pervasive tradeoff between competence and control. Competent intermediaries are difficult to control, even with complete information, because their capacity to advance or threaten the governor’s policy goals gives them power over it. At the same time, governor control can weaken important intermediary competencies, constraining their development or exercise. The governor thus faces a dilemma: if it emphasizes control, it limits intermediary competence and risks policy failure; if it emphasizes competence, it empowers potentially opportunistic intermediaries and risks control failure. Competence–control theory explains many features of governor–intermediary relationships that other theories of indirect governance cannot: why such relationships are not limited to principal–agent delegation, but take multiple forms including trusteeship, orchestration, and cooptation; why governors choose forms of indirect governance that appear counter-productive in other theoretical perspectives; and why indirect governance relationships are frequently unstable and subject to repeated tinkering and changes of form over time.