What is the Difference between Government and Governance - Essay Example

What is the difference between ‘government’ and ‘governance’? The Government is considered to be conventional pattern of public power in which ity is centralized and worked out hierarchically. In this set up, Prime Ministers control other ministers, ministers dominate civil servants, and central government controls local government and, usually, governments are considered to control all activities. The government’s foremost orientation is quest of common ‘national interest,’ and command and control is based on majority rule. The state as dominant actor has a clearly demarcated border which is impermeable and scope of political allocation is done at central level (Meehan, 2003). The concept of governance has become prominent in the last decade, and it is considered as the modern political scenario. The notion governance covers a broad range of meanings. One of its very important scopes is the idea that, differing to the classic forms of ‘government’, modern governance is not limited to the national boarders and is not the region of professional politicians. It refers to models of decision-making, taking place in a larger set of institutions, with a broader range of performers and practices. One of the main objectives of those who preserve this new thought is indeed to enlarge the established notion of public contribution beyond the well recognized and constantly waning events of representative democracy. This most likely explains why the concept has found a favourable ground in non state polities such as the European Union. Within this kind of multi-layered polities, electoral systems only play a limited role. The European Parliament has been elected by universal right of voting since 1979. The Council of Ministers and the European Council are not affected by European elections, and the composition of the Commission is only dependent on the results of these international elections. In this institutional system, where autonomy is pooled and accountability remains divided (Peterson, 1997), elections can not ‘throw the scoundrels out’ (Weiler, 1999). As it does not correspond to the methods of participation and accountability with which citizens are familiar, the EU is often said to suffer from an cordial ‘democratic deficit’, and its constitutional reform is the entity of a permanent debate. Improving its governance is one of the approaches recently suggested to face this major limit of European integration (Magnette, 2003). The earlier thought that national governments are the key actors in public policy and that they are able to power the economy and society through their actions seems to be doubtful. The tension on national governments has been the consequence of the increased importance of the international setting and perhaps weakened capability of those governments to protect their economies and institutions from the global pressures. Those demands on national governments come about through international capital markets as well as through supranational institutions such as the European Union (Scharpf 1997). A different strain on the conventional notion of governing occurs from changes in the rapport between government and the private sector. Hence it is disputed that governance without government is becoming the leading model of management for superior industrial democracies. Further descriptions include "hollow" states and governments and "negotiated" states and economies. These interpretations of changing patterns of government, it is disputed that institutional actors have become influential over policy and administration and have done so in ways that were unbelievable in past times. The traditional concept of government as a controlling and regulating union for society seems to be outdated The debate of governance without government has been largely European and has concentrated mainly in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. The European roots of this discussion come into view to be a function of the most excellent role of government in the welfare state in Europe and of the strength and established position of interest groups in these societies. In spirit government has much more power to lose, more areas of policy participation, and a network arrangement already in place that can restore or complement the power of government (Peters and Pierre, 1998). The governance is related to number of disciplines; for example, law, sociology, management and economics, political science and European studies. This view seem accepted that a number of forces have united so as to change the nature of what it means to govern: forces such as globalization, Europeanization, decentralization, pressures on the traditional welfare state, and new political cultures in which traditional methods of delivering the services of the welfare state are no longer regarded as ‘empowering’. It is also accepted that there is a visible difference between government and governance. This does not mean to say that governance is dislodging government; just that the two forms of activity coexist. Political analysts of governance focus on a variety of new arrangements and practices. These comprise the disintegration or sharing of public power amongst various tiers of directive such as the European Union (EU), state governments and sub-state governments. Secondly, they point to other planning encouraging policies to be devised and realized away from the centre; the ‘hollowing out’ of the state through the ‘agentization’ of government and the privatization of the provision of utilities and services (Rhodes, 1997). Thirdly, analysts note an increasing confidence on partnerships, networks and novel forms of discussion that are the heart of ‘Third Way’ thinking about policy design and delivery. Governance is typically defined by differencing it with what is thought of as the traditional pattern of public power in which authority is centralized and implemented hierarchically. On the contrary, analysts of governance draw upon a Foucauldian understanding of the concept of power as dispersed and relational and dispute that governance begins from a lack of ability on the part of governments to result preferred changes. Critics are often moved by Held (et al, 1999); according to him it cannot be taken for granted that the loci of effective political power are national governments. In its place, effective power is shared, traded and struggled over by diverse forces and agencies at national, regional and global levels. It is being ‘repositioned’ and ‘transformed by the rising importance of other less territorially based power systems’. In dealing with governmental actors in the context of ‘pooled sovereignty’ in the EU and devolved power in the UK, Sloat (2002) points out that cooperation between levels replaces before hierarchical relations and legislative capabilities are shared among several levels. In relation with non-governmental actors, it should be noted that one classical view of civil society is that it is characterized by self-organizing networks that are independent of government- sometimes even a counteracting force (McLaverty, 2002). In this view, it is agreed that networks are not separate from government but increasingly part of the entire policy series. Governance moves from acting through vertical chains of command and accountability in a hierarchy of societies to become a facilitator of what goes on in the public space in order to try to solve problems. Governance means collective problem solving in the public realm. And the public dominion is ‘an area of policies, techniques and events through which different forces and groups attempt to render their programs operable’. It point outs that governance turns the state from being the central, dominating source of authority within a definite territory to being an activator in the compromise of positions which suit a huge number of actors on precise topics over a territory where borders are less evidently fixed (Meehan, 2003). The idea of governance has come to be used more frequently in the debate of public administration, but the meaning of the term is not much clear. There is a growing body of European journalism that can be characterized as governance without government, stressing as it does the importance of networks, partnerships, and markets (especially international markets) (Peters and Pierre, 1998). As per James Rosenau, Director, Institute for Transnational Studies, University of Southern California, observes that since last three centuries, world politics has been founded on a disordered system of sovereign nation-states that did not have to answer to any higher authority. This state-centric world is no longer predominant and a multifaceted multi-centric world of varied and fairly self-directed actors has come in to existence. The opportunity for the UN to serve as an agent of transformation seems to increase. To maximize the UN’s chances of functioning as an agent of positive change Rosenau suggest: to review the sovereignty principle so that it boost up UN authority which makes services available to individuals and institutions in the multi-centric world; create a global "Peace Corps" service to cope with UN system; consider new measures for selecting future Secretary Generals: increase the number of Deputy Secretaries General who would visit national capitals and engage chiefs of state and other key leaders in exchange of ideas. (Rosenau, 1992). Rosenau and his associate, Ermst-Otto Czempiel, uphold that a world government capable of controlling nation-states. However governance is not identical with government and governance underlies the current order among states and gives direction to the disputes posed by various problems. In fact, governance without government is preferable to governments that are capable of governance. The present era of fast and widespread global change, the constitutions of national governments and their treaties have been destabilized by the demands and greater consistency of ethnic and other subgroups, the globalization of economies, the beginning of broad social movements, the shrinking of distance by information technology, and the rapidly increasing of global interdependencies caused by AIDS, toxic waste, drugs, and terrorism. To a great extent depends on how the uniqueness of the global system is professed: either as the continuing supremacy of states or states as a part of a superior new order. The reconstituted global order may take years to mature. Rosenau reminds that "the explosion of governance without government, poses huge new disputes to citizenship in the evolving universal order. More and more people will have to prefer between directing their loyalties to systemic order or sub systemic independence. The disappearance of national borders and the emergence of regional states are evident towards this goal. The same borderless experience is taking place in North America: as national borders disappear between Canada and the US. The advantage of forming a southern California region state is quite obvious, and discussion is going on for sharing a San Diego-Tijuana international airport. Singapore has become the capital of ASEAN and its trade base has stretched into parts of Malaysia and Indonesia. Walter B. Wriston, former chairman of Citicorp, observes that the information revolution is overwhelmingly bullying to power structures of the world, since the nature and powers of the sovereign state are being changed and compromised in basic ways. Pressures on authoritarian governments for freedom and human rights will rise. As power ever more resides in the people, the world will become more complex, and people will live in a kind of global democracy. Information technology is driving nation-states toward collaboration with each other. It has shaped a new world fiscal standard, an information standard that replaced the gold standard. There is no technique for any nation to opt out of the Information Standard (Morrison, 2003). From the humble origins as precise types of state-interest group relations, policy network advances have developed in a series of stages, with the appearance of network typologies, inter organizational studies and expanded frameworks. To understand and judge network approaches, it is necessary to study their attainments relative to their aspirations. Such an analysis shows that each phase has seen expansion of the scope and ambitions, as approaches have sought after to offer not just images, but also description and different forms of explanation. Continuous expansion has allowed network approaches to be adjustable, but the result has been an increasing gap between their aims and achievements. Determining the appropriate scope and ambitions for network approaches depends on the choice of their fundamental purpose and role, together with their relationship with substantive hypotheses and models (Thatcher, 1998). Well-organized governance regulates jurisdictions to the trade-off between the merits and vices of centralization. Large jurisdictions have the virtue of developing economies of scale in the stipulation of public goods, allowing for more competent taxation, make possible more efficient redistribution, and enlarging the defensive scope of security and market exchange. One of the major criticisms of centralized government is that it is not sensitive to varying scale efficiencies from policy to policy. Economies of scale are more likely to set the production of capital-intensive public goods than of labor-intensive services since economies apart build up from distribution costs over larger outputs. In multi-level governance, jurisdictions can be custom-designed with variation in mind. With centralized government it is not well suitable to lodge multiplicity. Ecological conditions may vary from area to area. Requirements of citizens may also vary across regions within a state, and if one takes such quality into account, the optimal level of power may be lower than economies of scale read out. In brief, multi-level governance allows decision makers to regulate the scale of governance to reflect heterogeneity. There two types of flexible multilevel governance. Type I governance is federalism, which is concerned with power sharing among a limited number of governments. Federalism is mainly concerned with the association between central government and a level of non-intersecting sub-national governments. The unit of study is the individual government, rather than the individual policy. According to Wallace Oates, dean of fiscal federalism, “the traditional theory of fiscal federalism lays out a general normative framework for the assignment of functions to different levels of government and the suitable economic instruments for carrying out these functions” (1999, 1121) The type II is an alternative form of multi-level governance in which the number of jurisdictions is vast than restricted; in which jurisdictions are not united on just a few levels, but operate at numerous territorial scales; in which jurisdictions have specific charge rather than general-purpose. Here jurisdictions are projected to be flexible rather than fixed. This notion is most important among neoclassical political economists and public choice theorists. In Type II governance, numerous, independent jurisdictions execute discrete functions. This leads to a governance system where each citizen is served by different public service industries. The main benefit of multi-level governance lies in its scale flexibility. Its chief cost lies in the operation costs of coordinating multiple jurisdictions. The coordination quandary confronting multi-level governance can be simply stated: To the extent that policies of one jurisdiction have spillovers for other jurisdictions, so coordination is necessary to avoid socially vicious outcomes. Second-order coordination costs increase exponentially as the number of relevant jurisdictions increases (Hooghe and Gray, 2003). Above discussion and analyses by various scholars demonstrates the clarity of governments vs. governance. The differences between the two systems are well explained and the virtues of governance over government are emphasized. The future is aiming at a global government where there are no boundaries of nations and the powers and economy is shared between numerous independent jurisdictions to carry out discrete functions and responsibilities. The realization of this goal may take time but one can look ahead and hope for better governance. References Held, D, McGrew, A, Goldblatt, D and Perraton, J. (1999) Global Transformations; Politics, Economics, Culture. Cambridge: Polity. Hooghe, Liesbet and Gary Marks (2003) ‘Unravelling the Central State, but How? Types of Multi-Level Governance, American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 2, pp. 233-243. Magnette, P (2003) ‘European Governance and Civic Participation. Beyond Elitist Citizenship?’, Political Studies, Vol. 51, pp. 144-160 McLaverty, P. (2002) Civil Society and Democracy. Contemporary Politics 8(4), 303-18. Meehan, E. (2003) From Government to Governance, Civic Participation and ‘New Politics’; the Context of Potential Opportunities for the Better Representation of Women. Centre for Advancement of Women in Politics, School of Politics, Queens University Belfast. ISBN No: 0 85389 853 7 Morrison, J.L. (2003). Global Change in Governance and Sovereignty. originally published in On the Horizon, 1992, 1(3), 10-12. Peterson, J. (1997) ‘The European Union: Pooled Sovereignty, Divided Accountability’, Political Studies, 45 (3), 559–78. Peters, G.B. and Pierre, J. (1998) Governance without Government? Rethinking Public Administration. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Vol. 8. No. 2, pp. 223-243. Rosenau, James N. and Ernst-Otto Czempiel (1992) Governance without Govern­ment: Order and Change in World Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Scharpf, F. (1998) Governing in Europe, Efficient and Democratic. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sloat, A. (2002) Governance: Contested Conceptions of Civic Participation. Scottish Affairs (39). Thatcher, M (1998) ’The Development of Policy Network Analyses. From Modest Origins to Overarching Frameworks’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 389-416 Weiler, J. H. H. (1999) ‘To be a European Citizen: Eros and Civilization’, in The Constitution of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Read More