Modes Of Governance
A Theoretical Discourse

By Mukti Rijal

GOVERNANCE has attracted debates and theoretical inquiries these days. It is being established that malgovernance or bad governance is responsible for social and political problems the states are facing these days. Improvement in governance is believed to reform distortions and bring the anomalies to order.

Critical

A theoretician on governance claims that a single penny invested in development can go to improve the living conditions of the people if governance is efficient and effective. The same theoretician argues that governments could never govern if the people in their organisations, their families, their groupings of all kinds- were not self governing. This means that local governance or self governance is very critical to make the governance system effective .

Spinoza, one of the great philosophers of our time writes, " Men should be governed in such a way that they do not regard themselves as being governed, but as following their own bent and their own free choice in their manner of life; in such a way, then that they are restrained only by love of freedom, desire to increase their possessions and the hope of obtaining the offices of state".

Theoreticians and researchers have classified governance in different ways. Some tend to use governance as synonym of state. The hierarchical governance is the first type of category often used by experts and researchers. It is the classical parliamentary model of the European states characterised by the constitutional rules for election, Parliament and government. According to this model of governance, the role of state is to govern society on the basis of political preferences. The elected parliamentarians are viewed as the architects of the society. The role of the citizen is to elect the politicians and between elections to act as subjects.

Public Organizations in this model of governance are organised in such a way that the political control of the administrations' loyalty is made efficient. It believes in neutral bureaucracy but fails to achieve it. As a result, the orientation of Public organisations is towards vertical top-down relations and control is carried out using hierarchy and rules internally as wells as externally.

There exists another model of governance called the autonomous governance. In this type of governance one of the roles of state is safeguarding values. The role of public organisations is not neutral. They are expected to actively guarantee and sustain certain values. Autonomy can be brought about in several ways. Firstly autonomy can be secured through legal rules and secondly autonomy can be secured by subscribing to basic values. Organisations belonging to the autonomous type of governance are not actively left without external control. However, control can be carried out through socialisation and peer group evaluations based on norms and knowledge.

The third type of governance is the negotiating governance that is based on the idea of real politik. The state is not regarded as an autocratic agent that has a free hand to impose all its decisions on citizens. The state is up against many interests. The role of the state is therefore to negotiate between different interests. Apart from the concrete tasks that have to be performed, an important aspect of the negotiating state is that of reproducing and developing patterns of influence which can facilitate political integration and stability.

Another model of governance, according to theoretician, is the responsive state. This model builds on the idea of the single individual's recognised demand for concrete goods and services. Although the public organisation can be structured in many ways. The basic orientation is downwards to the user . And the basis principle is bottom up that is opposite of the hierarchical state.

Responsive

The basic quality of democratic governance is reponsiveness and autonomy. In Nepal we have multiparty democratic system which means that we should strive to create a responsive and responsible state. We are still governed by the hierarchical mode of governance in which citizens are yet to be behaved in a responsible and effective manner. We should attempt to make our governance a fully responsive system.

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