This essay engages with Florian Grisel’s The Limits of Private Governance and uses it as a springboard to rethink the theoretical foundations of the social norms and private governance literature. Drawing on Grisel’s historical study of the Prud’homie de pêche of Marseille—a centuries-old institution that governed fisheries—as well as my own research on property and neighborhood governance in China, including Chinese Small Property and The Authoritarian Commons, the essay proposes a new framework: “social norms 2.0.” This approach views governance as a process of co-evolution in which norms, legal institutions, and political authority continuously reshape one another. By reframing private governance as a dynamic and relational process, the co-evolutionary model moves the field beyond conventional debates about whether governance emerges primarily from informal norms or from state support. The essay suggests that future research should focus instead on the recursive interactions through which social norms, legal institutions, and political authority jointly produce and transform systems of governance.