Governance

GERHARD ANDERS
University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Governance has become a key concept in policy making and academic debates across
the social sciences. This dual nature of governance, normative and analytical, constitutes
one of its striking characteristics. Social and cultural anthropology has been a latecomer
to the study of governance but the anthropological research tradition of studying the
exercise of authority and influence in local settings outside the reach of the state has a
great deal to offer to debates across the social sciences.
Within less than a decade, governance became a key concept in policy making and
academic debates across the social sciences. Prior to the 1980s, publications were small
in number and mainly limited to the field of corporate governance. This changed during
the 1990s when the number of publications explicitly addressing governance increased
dramatically. By the end of the 1990s, the concept had become a buzzword and impor-
tant focal point for debates in political science, public administration, international
relations, sociology, and economics. In these disciplines, governance tends to be dis-
cussed in contrast to government and the state. While no agreed definition exists, many
authors associate governance with new processes of governing reflected in the “hollow-
ing out of the state” (Rhodes 1994), the “retreat of the state” (Strange 1996), and a shift
from government to governance (Rosenau and Czempiel 1992). The concept is gener-
ally associated with reconfigurations in the exercise of authority and influence; from
state to private actors, from formal to informal institutions, from the national to the
transnational sphere, and from hierarchical forms of organization to networks. These
shifts are linked to recent processes of globalization and the growing and accelerating
movement of people, money, goods, images, and ideas.
The advent of governance as academic buzz concept is closely linked to its institution-
alization in national and international policy making. Good governance, transparency,
and accountability became the new paradigms of public management and international
development. This dual nature of governance, normative and analytical, constitutes one
of its striking characteristics. This tension also shapes approaches in a number of disci-
plines that have been at the forefront of debates about governance. Social and cultural
anthropology’s take on governance has markedly differed from the other disciplines in
the social sciences. It has been much slower to explicitly address governance and, in
contrast to the other disciplines, it has mainly drawn on Foucault’s notions of govern-
mentality and power. Especially political anthropology, the anthropology of law, and the
anthropology of development have developed a rich body of work studying practices
and processes of governance.

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2026
2 G O V E R N A N CE

Globalization and governance

The rise of governance as concept in policy making and academic debates is linked
to another concept that has gained prominence during the 1990s: globalization. Like
governance, globalization lacks precise definition and is regarded by many as buzzword
largely devoid of analytical value. Broadly, the term denotes the rapidly expanding
global flows of people, capital, commodities, images, and ideologies. Whether global-
ization is a new phenomenon is a hotly debated question. Some authors trace it to the
emergence of a world economy in the early modern period while others locate it at the
end of the nineteenth century. Most point to the second half of the twentieth century
as the beginning of expanding and accelerating global flows.
Globalization involves the speeding up of global processes and the effective shrink-
ing of space resulting in new relations of time and space. This reconfiguration is largely
driven by new transport and communication technologies. According to some schol-
ars, evidence of this effect is found in the emergence of a network society constituted
by digital information and communication technologies. Processes of globalization are
highly uneven and affect localities in diverse and contingent ways, with profound effects
on cultural diversity, which has become more fluid and deterritorialized.
The expansion and intensification of global flows of trade, investment, finance,
migration, and culture have contributed to the growing importance of transnationally
operating nonstate actors such as private companies and international organizations.
This has resulted in polycentric configurations of different sets of actors exercising
authority and influence in ways that often transcend the territorial and legal boundaries
of the nation-state. With regard to both globalization and governance, the extent to
which these processes and configurations are new and to what degree they have actually
replaced government by the state has been debated. At one end of the spectrum are
those who predict the end of the nation-state and the emergence of new forms of
governance in the wake of globalization. At the other end are skeptics of various stripes
who continue to deem the nation-state as the principal regulator of social, economic,
and political life. Most observers occupy the middle ground between these extreme
positions. On the one hand, they recognize the impact of globalization and the growth
of governing institutions and processes transcending the sphere of the nation-state. On
the other hand, they do not deny that national institutions and boundaries continue to
exercise considerable influence on economy and society.

A normative and analytical concept

Governance is an ambivalent concept blending normative and analytical elements. The

growth of governance in the social sciences during the 1990s is inextricably linked to
the institutionalization of governance in international and national policy making. Dur-
ing the 1980s and 1990s, governance emerged as central concern in efforts to reform
bureaucracies in the West, in particular the United Kingdom and the United States,
and developing countries of the global South, especially in Africa. These reforms were
 G O V E R N A N CE 3

driven by neoliberal economic thinking and the principles of “new public manage-
ment” and quickly became paradigmatic in public administration and international
development. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund promoted good
governance as a tool to support the development of public institutions as efficient and
transparent service providers accountable to the public and subject to the rule of law.
During the 1990s, good governance became one of the key concepts in international
development. It became part of the conditions for financial support for developing
countries where an overhaul of public-sector management and the legal framework was
supposed to create favorable conditions for economic development.
As part of the general proliferation of transnational (nongovernmental) and interna-
tional (multilateral) organizations, the number of organizations focusing on governance
doubled during the 1990s. The dramatic increase of nonstate actors exercising influ-
ence across national boundaries and the more prominent role assumed by international
organizations since the end of the Cold War exemplifies the merging of governance as
a normative term employed in policy making and an analytical concept used to make
sense of new patters of governing. From a normative perspective, governance tends
to be associated with the proper and rational provision of public services by a mix of
providers that adhere to standards of liberal democracy and rule of law. At the global
level, the normative perspective gives rise to the question of whether it is possible to cre-
ate democratic and effective institutions in situations transcending the capabilities and
authority of national governments. From an analytical perspective, it usually denotes
the exercise of formal and informal authority and influence by a range of institutions,
including networks of public and private organizations often operating across the legal
and territorial boundaries of the nation-state. This dual nature constitutes a challenge to
academics’ analysis employing the same concepts as the subjects of the research use to
describe their field and reflect on their actions. It gives rise to a peculiar tension between
normative and descriptive, analytical category and folk concept, that poses a challenge
to academic debates but also contributes to the vitality and promise governance holds
for both academics and practitioners.

A cross-disciplinary concept

During the 1990s, governance quickly became a key concept in a number of disciplines
across the social sciences. It proved particularly popular in economics, business and
finance, public administration, political science, international relations, and law. Dis-
cussions in the related fields of economics and business studies have focused on “new
institutional economics” (NIE). NIE gained prominence during the 1990s, drawing on
earlier discussions about corporate governance and transaction cost theory. The shift
toward institutions understood as a set of rules governing the market and resources
stemmed from a growing realization among economists that rational choice theory did
not sufficiently account for cooperation between individuals as well as the influence of
knowledge and cultural values on individuals’ choices. According to proponents of NIE,
individuals create institutions to manage demands and transaction costs in attempts to
address shortcomings of the market.
4 G O V E R N A N CE

An excellent example of the application of NIE to a wide range of social domains

is Elinor Ostrom’s (1990) analysis of common-pool resources. Her study of the mul-
tifarious ways in which people govern the commons transcended the assumptions of
mainstream economists about individual agency and property. She took issue with the
dominant approaches to management problems of common-pool resources that advo-
cated either more government control or privatization. By contrast, Ostrom analyzed
individuals’ efforts to develop and adapt institutions in situations where free riders and
unregulated access threaten the common resource and cause environmental degrada-
tion. In an attempt to identify the properties of successful common-pool resource man-
agement, Ostrom highlighted the importance of local conflict-resolution mechanisms
and the recognition of local rights by governments.
The attention to collective decision making and a plurality of hubs exercising author-
ity also characterizes two other important fields where governance gained wide cur-
rency early on: public administration and political science. According to proponents
of the governance approach, processes of globalization and the rise of a whole range
of organizations operating outside government, such as quasi-autonomous nongovern-
mental organizations (QUANGOs), straddling the public–private divide, have resulted
in the “hollowing out of the state” (Rhodes 1994) and a shift from government to gov-
ernance in public administration. Another important influence on the literature on
governance has been European integration and the expansion of supranational reg-
ulations. These developments are reflected in the stronger emphasis on the influence
of networks on policy making and the need to address the interaction of subnational,
national, and supra- or international hubs of authority. With regard to the European
Union (EU), this has given rise to the conceptual framework of multilevel governance
differentiating between subnational, national, and supranational levels from whence a
wide range of organizations govern citizens’ lives.
The expansion and growing influence of nonstate actors has also been recognized
in international relations where the Westphalian system has been challenged by vari-
ous theories of global governance. Global governance is generally seen in the context
of recent processes of globalization. The intensification of the global flows of people,
capital, goods, and ideologies has led to the proliferation of a wide range of organiza-
tions and networks comprising international organizations, nongovernmental organi-
zations (NGOs), public–private agencies, and transnational companies. The growing
importance of nonstate actors in political and economic global governance is often
described in terms of a shift from government to governance (Rosenau and Czem-
piel 1992). The extent to which this shift has actually contributed to the weakening
of sovereign nation-states is hotly disputed. Some authors observe the retreat of the
state (Strange 1996) and the emergence of a global order with a patchwork of overlap-
ping claims to authority. Others speak of the shift in terms of a transformation of the
state rather than its retreat. From this perspective, networks connecting specific units
or departments of different countries and nation-states continue to shape global order
in spite of globalization.
The debate about global governance has analytical and normative aspects. On the
one hand, global governance is a concept employed to better understand the complex
ways in which the different actors exercise informal and formal authority globally. On
 G O V E R N A N CE 5

the other hand, global governance is seen as a response to economic globalization and
global problems that require the development of new political institutions. Fundamen-
tally, the normative perspective is based on a belief that it is possible to create efficacious
and democratic global institutions to address global problems beyond the capabilities
and authority of the nation-state. As a consequence, organizations such as the UN Com-
mission on Global Governance or the Global Environment Facility set up in the early
1990s are tasked with addressing the challenges posed by global problems while they are
also the subject of academic studies of global governance. The tension between the ana-
lytical and the normative is especially pronounced in relation to the regulation of the
new global order. The expansion of nonstate actors has contributed to complex webs
of rules that range from the formal law of international treaties to various forms of
self-regulation, policies, and industrial standards often denoted as “soft law” (i.e., legally
not binding). It also includes the exercise of informal authority or influence such as that
exercised by transnational networks of officials or experts. From an analytical perspec-
tive, these forms of para-law pose profound conceptual and methodological challenges
whereas from a normative perspective the main question is how to create effective and
fair norms in the absence of world government.

Underlying theories

Of course, academic disciplines are far from being monolithic fields. Within disciplines,
there are a wide range of epistemologies and theories. With regard to governance stud-
ies, the tension between the normative and analytical perspectives is reflected in the
choice of theories. At one end are positivist approaches such as new institutional eco-
nomics and good governance. These theories are based on the fundamental belief that
scientific knowledge can be usefully employed as a tool of social engineering. They
are often associated with rational choice theory and institutionalism (Ostrom 1990;
Williamson 1979). Transaction cost theory has played an important role in normative
studies of governance. In contrast to neoclassical economics, transaction costs theory
focuses on the costs of individual transactions in markets, companies, and bureaucra-
cies. In practical terms transaction cost economics aims at developing and adapting
institutions (i.e., contracts and rules) to minimize the costs of economic exchanges. For
scholars with a more normative perspective, research should be aimed at developing
ways to make institutions more efficient and accountable. For instance, Ostrom advo-
cates the use of empirical evidence to inform policy making and aid the development
of better institutions (Ostrom 1990, 23–24).
At the other end are interpretive approaches that are not geared toward developing
practical solutions to problems of policy making. By contrast, these approaches take
issue with normative and positivist governance studies. They criticize their ideological
underpinnings and deny the technical and value-free character of applied research.
Critical interpretive governance studies often have a social–constructivist outlook.
They focus on the discursive production of knowledge and power relations. Critical
interpretive studies interrogate how problems, policies, and incentives are framed.
Economics, business studies, and public management tend to employ positivist and
6 G O V E R N A N CE

normative approaches. Political science and international relations also have a strong
positivist and institutional focus although interpretive and social–constructivist
approaches have become more widespread since the beginning of the twenty-first
century.
A major influence on interpretive governance studies has been the work of Michel
Foucault. These studies draw mainly on his concepts of governmentality and biopower.
Internationally, these concepts gained wider currency during the 1990s following the
English translation of one of Foucault’s lectures given at the Collège de France in 1978.
In this and the following lectures, Foucault presents an outline of the development of the
art of government in Europe. He traces the ideas of governing and government from
Christian pastoral care to the statecraft of Absolutist government in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. According to Foucault, the term government was employed
in a variety of fields, including the conduct of oneself and others, the care for a family
or community, and the governing of a household before it became associated with the
state in the sixteenth century.
Foucault develops the concept to denote “the ensemble formed by the institutions,
procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise
of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as
its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means
apparatuses of security” (Foucault 1991, 102). Crucially, he differentiates the state and
government. According to Foucault, governmentality has become the dominant form
of power in the West where it led to the governmentalization of the state and the devel-
opment of a set of governmental rationalities. The technologies of government that
penetrated the state are associated with the category of population as principal target
of policies aimed at governing processes of production and reproduction. This form of
power is also referred to as biopower. For Foucault, the connection between govern-
ment, the state, and the population as the object of rationalities of governance charac-
terizes the advent of the modern European nation-state.
Within political science and legal studies, there has been some engagement with
Foucault’s work in relation to governance but generally this has remained marginal in
relation to the main debates in these disciplines. The opposite is the case in social and
cultural anthropology, where Foucault has shaped the debate about governance (as the
next section will show).

Anthropological perspectives

Anthropologists have been much slower than their peers in other disciplines in adopt-
ing governance as an object of inquiry. The number of publications explicitly addressing
governance in social and cultural anthropology has been dwarfed by publications in
political science, international relations, and economics. It is striking that the debates
about the shift from government to governance, governance in public administration,
or the design of better institutions have been mainly playing out without the input
from anthropologists. The debates in political science, public administration, and eco-
nomics, in turn, only have had limited impact on social and cultural anthropology. This,
 G O V E R N A N CE 7

however, does not mean that anthropologists have not addressed issues associated with
governance. The exercise of authority and influence in situations outside the sphere of
the modern nation-state used to be the principal concern of political and legal anthro-
pology. These scholars studied conflict resolution and social order in tribal societies.
Subsequent anthropological studies presented fine-grained ethnographic evidence of
dispute resolution and nonstate law in local sociocultural settings but in contrast to
earlier studies situated them in the context of the nation-state.
In many ways, these studies adumbrated the main themes of the debates about gov-
ernance that were taken up by political scientists at the turn of the twenty-first century.
They focused on the empirical study of the often informal modes of collective decision
making and exercising authority without the “central authority, codes, courts, and con-
stables” of the modern nation-state (Malinowski 1926, 14). E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s study
of Nuer politics exemplifies this. He characterizes the Nuer as a society without gov-
ernment in a state of “ordered anarchy” (Evans-Pritchard 1940, 5–6). Evans-Pritchard,
however, clearly described a society governed by a set of rules and institutions. It is
striking how his and other anthropologists’ studies speak to recent debates about gov-
ernance. According to Evans-Pritchard, the Nuer acephalous political system is by and
large governed through networks of tribe, kinship, and age set. In the absence of cen-
tralized political and legal institutions, collective decision making is highly dynamic
and contingent. If he would have included the colonial state apparatus in his analysis he
would have produced an account of governance in South Sudan bearing striking resem-
blance to contemporary analyses of governance transcending the scope of the modern
nation-state. In fact, if the concept had existed at the time, anthropologists could have
sidestepped the debate that has bedeviled legal and political anthropology for a long
time, as to whether juridico-political order is the prerogative of societies with some
form of centralized authority and separate administrative and legal institutions. Para-
phrasing Evans-Pritchard, the Nuer might have lacked government but they did not
lack governance.
Foundational studies of governance are not limited to political and legal anthropol-
ogy. In economic anthropology, Keith Hart coined the concept of the informal sector
in his study of urban employment in Ghana (Hart 1973). Generally, social and cultural
anthropology can be said to have come to the study of governance from the opposite
end. Political scientists, sociologists, and economists have made a shift from the study
of the state and other formal institutions to informal networks outside the state. By con-
trast, for a long time anthropologists focused on tribal societies and excluded the state
from their analysis even in situations where colonial administrations had made a sig-
nificant impact on the communities they were working with. This attitude started to
change during the 1970s, with anthropologists turning their gaze to Western societies
and the influence of the state on communities they were studying. During the 1990s
and 2000s, the anthropology of the state became a major concern across the discipline.
The growing interest in the state was accompanied by more emphasis on the influence
of transnational governance networks on anthropologists’ research sites, especially in
the field of indigenous and human rights.
The first anthropological studies addressing governance explicitly did not engage
the burgeoning literature in other disciplines. By contrast, they mainly drew on
8 G O V E R N A N CE

Foucault’s work, especially the concept of governmentality. This shift to Foucault in

anthropology owed a great deal to the promotion of Foucault’s work in the United
States by anthropologists. The engagement with Foucault led to a number of studies
exploring social planning (Rabinow 1989), policy making (Shore and Wright 1997),
and international development (Ferguson 1994). In subsequent years, governmentality
attracted considerable interest among anthropologists exploring various aspects
of governance, including the colonial state and transnational networks. Whether
biopower and governmentality are actually useful analytical categories has been hotly
debated in anthropology. Recent anthropological studies of governance take more
distance to Foucault and focus much more closely on practices rather than broad
discursive formations (Blundo and Le Meur 2009; West 2005).
The new wave of anthropological studies of governance takes a critical perspective on
governance as normative concept and adopts an interpretive approach to study power
relations and the exercise of authority and influence in localities where regulations ema-
nating from the state and transnational sources are instantiated. They examine the mul-
tifarious ways in which people articulate ideas about social order, decision making, and
dispute resolution, drawing on local norms that are often unwritten and considered cus-
tomary, the institutions and ideas of the nation-state, as well as transnational discourses,
for instance on human rights and development. This often results in situations of legal
or normative pluralism, with different sets of rules claiming validity in localities where
people are exposed to and invoke competing legal and moral rules and principles. These
overlapping and conflicting claims shape the implementation of development policies
and the exercise and contestation of public authority both in the global North and
South. The scope of these ethnographies extends beyond the boundaries of the locality
and includes the nation-state and transnationally operating organizations. These pro-
cesses are situated in the context of rationalities shaping and legitimizing them, such as
neoliberal economics, liberal democratic thought, humanitarianism, and moderniza-
tion theory.
The current anthropological scholarship speaks to governance studies in other dis-
ciplines. The shift toward globalization and the state in both former colonial territories
and metropolitan centers has brought social anthropology into fields that used to be the
exclusive domain of political science and sociology. Social and cultural anthropology
challenges the other disciplines’ heavy emphasis on the state and the West by explor-
ing marginality in the West and elsewhere. Drawing on a long tradition of studying the
informal exercise of authority in settings beyond the control of the nation-state, anthro-
pology has much to offer to political scientists, economists, and lawyers. For instance,
the study of forms of normative ordering that are considered to be not formally bind-
ing, such as best practices or soft law, can learn from legal anthropological research. It is
time to engage our peers in other disciplines on their terrain and give the debates about
governance an anthropological turn.

SEE ALSO: Biopower; Crime; Customary Law; Democracy; Disaster Relief and Man-
agement; Documents as Ethnographic Objects; Economic Anthropology; Ethnography,
Multisited; Europe, Language Research in; Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1902–73); Finance;
Foucault, Michel (1926–84); Global Governance; Globalization; Governance Issues
 G O V E R N A N CE 9

in Development; Governmentality; Humanitarianism, Anthropological Treatments

of; Indicators, Politics of; Indigeneity in Anthropology; International Organizations,
Anthropology of; Law and Anthropology; Legal Pluralism; Liberalism; Malinowski,
Bronisław (1884–1942); Modernization Theories of Development; Neoliberalism;
Nongovernmental Organizations; Peacekeeping; Policy, Anthropology and; Political
Anthropology; Power, Anthropological Approaches to; Security; Social and Cultural
Anthropology; Soft Law; States; States: Transnationalism; Tourism, Travel, and
Pilgrimage; Transparency; Urbanism

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Blundo, Giorgio, and Pierre-Yves Le Meur, eds. 2009. The Governance of Daily Life in Africa.
Leiden: Brill.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1940. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political
Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ferguson, James. 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureau-
cratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1991. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality,
edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Hart, Keith. 1973. “Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana.” Journal
of Modern African Studies 11 (1): 61–89.
Malinowski, Bronisław. 1926. Crime and Custom in Savage Society. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rabinow, Paul. 1989. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Rhodes, Roderick A. W. 1994. “The Hollowing Out of the State: The Changing Nature of the
Public Service in Britain.” Political Quarterly 65 (2): 138–51.
Rosenau, James N., and Ernst-Otto Czempiel, eds. 1992. Governance without Government: Order
and Change in World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright, eds. 1997. Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Gover-
nance and Power. New York: Routledge.
Strange, Susan. 1996. The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
West, Harry G. 2005. Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Williamson, Oliver E. 1979. “Transaction Cost Economics: The Governance of Contractual Rela-
tions.” Journal of Law & Economics 22: 233–61.