Globalisation and Development

A write up on the article:

Governance and Pluralisation of the state- Implications for Democratic

Citizenship

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Decentralization and pluralization of the state has been a welcome development of late. This
process has been done in stretching the levels horizontally from civil society and market
organizations to vertically from transnationals to local self-governments. However few questions
arise because of this transition of governance for practices of democratic citizenship. These
questions are about the pluralization of citizenship, the enforcement of an individual’s rights, and
the view of the organizations about the citizens’ rights.

There was a historical transition which transforms a pre-modern state into a modern state. This
accompanies treating the individuals as citizens as against treating the individuals as subjects as
done in the pre-modern states. The citizens are endowed with rights and the democratic states
grant status to these citizen rights in form of laws. Thus the state, through a series of bridging
movements, connects the possession of rights and the actualization of rights.
In the recent times, we see the state as one of the many agencies,
organizations, or associations that dot the landscape. All these other organizations along with the
state affect the lives of the people in a significant way. All these organizations have different
vantage points but they may be associated with a similar kind of activity, i.e. delivering services
along with the state. That is why all of them are partners in a wider project. The state can no
longer be seen as the only or even the main player in these activities. The state thus remains one
of the players among the many.
According to the pluralism theory, the society consists of a number of
organizations which work towards similar goals, thus they may have competition between
themselves. The state takes the role of arbitrator and regulator in the society but it is just another
organization and not necessarily the most important one. Also the role of the state in governance
is both contingent as well as contextual.
We can state the features of governance that 1) it pluralises and decentres the
state, by making it the part of a network, 2) various level of governance engage in partnership
which are cooperative in nature, 3) the relationships are horizontally linked, 4) these relations are
flexible.

During the early decades of the 20th century, the industrial formations had somewhat rigid
structures of business management which is commonly referred to as the Fordist method of
management. The characteristics of this management process were centralization of production
process, hierarchical management, control over knowledge and the separation of the manual
from the mental aspects of production. By the last decades of 20th century, the industrial firms
have been de centered and the rigidly hierarchical structure of management has been replaced by
matrix like structure of management. Thus we now see more partnerships between different
firms and elasticity in management structures and procedure which was earlier absent.
In the same way, the state has been disaggregated vertically and pluralized
horizontally and the state is seen as enmeshed in a number of organizations.

The state , is considered to be incapable of delivering what it is supposed to deliver. Welfarism

had placed large domains of economic transactions outside the reach of market transactions. This
had constrained the market because it couldn’t utilise the resources fully. The late 1980s saw
neo-liberalism which changed the trend of government interference and led to the idea of the
minimalist state. But in the 90s many economies crashed and many scholars saw these economic
and financial crises as the consequences of unfettered globalization. The neo-liberal formula had
failed to deliver the much-promised benefits of greater growth, stabilization of financial markets,
and political order.
 By late 1990s it was realized that there was a need for the free
market and the generic process of globalization to be governed. Consequently, there was the
consensus that states were to be partly rehabilitated as actors in the development domain. Also
the state had to enter into partnerships with organizations in civil society, the market and with
transnational organizations to effect the governance of globalization.