Governance

‘We want governance’, a friend in Delhi said. His plea, he continued, was not for ‘good governance’, just ‘governance’. The conversation took place a year or so before the 2014 elections at which Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised ‘Minimum government; maximum governance’. Why were they talking about ‘governance’, what did they mean, and why is it important? Two strands of thought are relevant. The first is about persistent demands for more effective and accountable political and policy leadership in India; the second is about trends in international scholarship and in institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in thinking about state and society. In this strand, which is admittedly diverse, usage has expanded to cover how a broad range of social and political relationships can provide guidance and direction. The first strand is dominant in India. Its focus on the institutions of government and how well they perform sits at the more specific end of the international range of meanings. It fits comfortably with the word for governance in Hindi, ‘shaasan’, which is also used for administration and other terms such as kingship, dominion, rule, direction, edict, management and guidance. But the term for good governance, ‘sushaasan’, introduces elements of the second strand that are familiar beyond India. For this reason, and others that emerge below, when governance is used in relation to India, its meaning needs to be interrogated. The significance of the second strand is that its focus on patterns of rule and social coordination shifts attention from formal arrangements to activity and practice. Government and administration are part of a wider web. While government is about the institutions of state—constitutions, laws, elections, legislatures, executives, judiciaries and other formal arrangements—governance is about how rule and co-ordination emerge from relationships among a wide range of participants within and between states. Within governments, a focus on relationships directs attention to how elected and appointed participants perceive their roles and the complex interactions through which they aim to shape directions and achieve outcomes. More widely, governance is about mechanisms of social, economic and political organisation in which the roles of government may vary, for example, from creating market-supporting institutions to backing private-sector winners, or from direct provision of public services by government agencies to provision through markets and networks. More widely still, governance is about the evolution of