Governance Theories

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 Governance Theories
• At the most general level, governance refers to theories and issues of
social coordination and the nature of all patterns of rule.
• Governance refers to various new theories and practices of governing and
the dilemmas to which they give rise.
• These new theories, practices, and dilemmas place less emphasis than
did their predecessors on hierarchy and the state, and more on markets
and networks.
• These theories draw attention to the processes and interactions through
which all kinds of social interests and actors combine to produce the
policies, practices, and effects that define current patterns of governing.

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 Governance Theories

• The relationship of ‘state’ and ‘society’ changed significantly in the late twentieth century. New
practices of governance find political actors increasingly constrained by mobilized and organized
elements in society.

• States and international organizations increasingly share the activity of governing with societal
actors, including private firms, non-governmental organizations, and non-profit service providers.

• Current public problems rarely fall neatly in the jurisdictions of specific agencies or even states. –
so government poses dilemma that require new governing strategies to span jurisdictions, link
people across levels of government, and mobilize a variety of stakeholders.

• Governance as theory, practice, and dilemma highlights phenomena that are hybrid and
multijurisdictional with plural stakeholders who come together in networks (Mark Bevir).
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 Distinctive Feature of Governance
I.
- New governance combines established administrative arrangements with features
of the market.
- Governance arrangements are often hybrid practices, combining administrative
systems with market mechanisms and non-profit organizations.
Example: charter school, voucher system.
II.
- Another distinctive feature of governance is that it is multijurisdictional and often
transnational.
- Current patterns of governance combine people and institutions across different
policy sectors and different levels of government (local, regional, national, and
international). Example: International food safety standards.

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 Distinctive Feature of Governance
III.
- A third distinctive feature of governance is the increasing range and plurality of
stakeholders.
- a wider variety of non-governmental organizations are becoming active participants in
governing.

- One reason for the pluralization of stakeholders is an explosion of advocacy groups during the
last third of the twentieth century.
- Another reason is the increasing use of third-party organizations to deliver state services.
- Arguably, yet another reason is the expansion of philanthropists and philanthropic
organizations, both of which are becoming as prominent as they were in the nineteenth century
(EX- Gates Foundation, )
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Linkage between State and Society
• There
are three conventional models of the relationship
between government and society.
1) Pluralism
2) Corporatism
3) Corporate Pluralism

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 Pluralism

 Pluralism is the theory that a multitude of groups, not the people as a

whole, govern the State.
 These organizations, which include among others unions, trade and
professional associations, environmentalists, civil rights activists, business
and financial lobbies, and formal and informal coalitions of like-minded
citizens, influence the making and administration of laws and policy.
 Since the participants in this process constitute only a tiny fraction of the
populace, the public acts mainly as bystanders.

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 Pluralism
• For North Americans, the most familiar model is state-society interactions is
pluralism , assuming that government is relatively little involved with the interest
groups directly.
• Rather, government establishes the arenas through which the groups work out
their own political struggles and establishes a set of ‘rules of the game’ about
how decisions will be made.
• In this theoretical position, no single group is considered as dominant but all
groups have relatively equal chances of winning on any issue.
• Further, groups move in and out of the policy process relatively easily, with
impunity, and largely at their own initiative.
• Every body in the country has freedom to organize a group in pluralist society.

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 Pluralist view of Power
₪ Resources:
 Power is not an identifiable property that humans possess in fixed amounts.
Rather, people are powerful because they control various resources.
 The list of possibilities is virtually endless: legal authority, money, prestige, skill,
knowledge, charisma, legitimacy, free time, experience, celebrity, and public
support.
 Pluralists emphasize that power is not a physical entity that individuals either
have or do not have, but flows from a variety of different sources.

The major tenets of the pluralist school are : (1)resources and hence potential
power are widely scattered throughout society; (2) at least some resources are
available to nearly everyone;

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 Pluralist view of Power

₪ Potential versus Actual Power

• Actual power means the ability to compel someone to do something; potential power
refers to the possibility of turning resources into actual power.
• Cash, one of many resources, is only a stack of bills until it is put to work. A millionaire
may or may not be politically influential; it all depends on what the wealth is spent for--
trips to the Bahamas or trips to Washington.
₪ Scope of Power
 No one is all-powerful. An individual or group that is influential in one realm may be weak
in another.
 Large military contractors certainly throw their weight around on defense matters, but
how much say do they have on agricultural or health policies? A measure of power,
therefore, is its scope, or the range of areas where it is successfully applied .
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 Corporatist Model
• Corporatist model, in contrast to the pluralism, assumes a much
closer linkage between state and society, and some official
sanctioning of interest groups by government.
• In corporatism, particular interest groups are accorded a legitimate
role as representatives of their sector of the economy or society.
• Despite different variation and interpretations of corporatism, the
fundamental point of corporatism is that only a limited number of
actors can play the game, and those that do are bound closely with
power of the state.

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Pluralism v Corporatism

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2TYB9-92v4

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 Corporate Pluralist Model

• Corporatist pluralist model falls somewhere between the other two

models.
• The basic logic is this model is that like pluralism there are a large
number of actors involved but like corporatism those actors are
given legitimate status for influencing public policy.
• These groups are formally recognized as legitimate participants in
the policy process, and they tend to establish stable relationships
with formal actors in the public sector, particularly the ministries.

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 Corporate Pluralist Model

• In corporatism, in contrast to pluralist, groups are not only thought of

as free forming, voluntary, or competitive, rather group needs to be
recognized or licensed (if not created) by the government (Schmitter,
1977, p. 9 as cited by Howlett and Ramesh, 2009, 41).

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