The Question: Governance, Authoritarian Upgrading and Local Governance

Governance

The word ‘governance’ has had a somewhat obscure dictionary presence for a long time, but its extensive usage in academic literature occurred in tandem with its adoption in donor circles and policy-oriented discourse shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall (1991). Yet the basic purpose of each use has been quite different. The notion of ‘governance’, in the donor-driven discourse, refers to the way in which countries, or provinces for that matter, were being ‘governed’, or were to be governed. The focus here is on formal state structures and intra-governmental relations. By adding the adjective ‘good’ to it, ‘good governance’ has been ambiguously geared towards enhancing policy effectiveness, transparency, accountability, and conceptually preparing the terrain for policy intervention and encouraging public–private partnerships. The guiding motive in this trend, according to Martin Doornbos, was to establish new global–institutional patterns of hegemony after the Cold War that entailed making the states apolitical.

In contrast, the academic concept of ‘governance’, with which we are concerned, though also ambiguous, is primarily oriented towards better analysis of the institutional linkages between state and society contextually rather than intrinsically, which requires in-depth case studies and thus cannot be limited to the formal–legal analysis of legislation. It is largely concerned with developing a better understanding of the ways in which power and authority relations interplay to constitute or affect the process of decision-making. In this regard, governance in a very general sense is defined as ‘the formation and stewardship of the formal and informal rules that regulate the public realm, the arena in which the state as well as economic and societal actors interact to make decisions’. The focus here is on the interaction between institutional changes, formal and informal, and the local social and political responses being engendered in various forms. However, although the term ‘governance’ is still debatable in its meaning, many social scientists today can hardly do without it.

Authoritarian Upgrading

In the past two decades, there has been another academic trend focusing on the ways and strategies used by Arab and Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes to ‘upgrade’ their governance in response to external and internal pressures and demands.