INERIS is a member of public institutions and companies' Sustainable Development (SD) Club and contributes, in this framework, to animate and to coordinate a working group on "the governance of public organizations in response to SD the challenges". This issue raises the question of the complexity in terms of the diversity of issues, the multiplicity of stakeholders, and the variability of decision-making contexts and of uncertainties as well as the non-predictability of decision impacts within the short, medium and long terms. This paper will give some results coming from the work done within the Governance working group, on what is the governance of a public organization in response to SD issues and the operational implications that are induced by this definition. The question of the operational capability of the participatory governance principle to manage the complexity of multi-stakeholders decision-making situations as well as the use of indicators in this framework will be discussed.