Abstract
The term governance, after its emergence in the 1980s, has led to different conceptions, connotations, and contested understandings. Its wide and diverse uses make it seem all inclusive as well as vague. This chapter recaps some of the popular concepts of governance in political and administrative sciences. These are governance as good governance, governance as policy implementation, governance as institutional trust, governance as quality of government, governance as network, and governance as institutions. Some of these concepts have been used by the authors of this volume, at the macro-level, to analyze the implementation of national policies, as well as at the micro-level, to understand and conceptualize the meaning of governance in local service delivery in three South Asian countries—Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. The context of South Asia in general and these three countries in particular reflects a type of hybrid governance that combines not only the above-mentioned concepts of governance but also the paternalistic culture of South Asia, which can lead to informal but also trusting relations between institutions and society. The final part of the chapter introduces the individual authors’ contributions to the book.
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Notes
- 1.
In 2019, 100 countries were democracies (electoral + liberal democracy) compared to 80 countries which were either closed or electoral autocracies. In 1997, the number of democracies was 38 (electoral + liberal democracy) while the number of closed or electoral autocracies was 117. In the case of South Asia, most were closed autocracies (five out of 8 countries) in 1997, while none in 2018 (Source: Lührmann et al. [2019]. V-Dem Dataset v9, Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. https://doi.org/10.23696/vdemcy19 accessed 19.12.20).
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Jamil, I., Dhakal, T.N., Haque, S.T.M., Paudel, L.K., Baniamin, H.M. (2021). Understanding Governance in Three South Asian Countries. In: Jamil, I., Dhakal, T.N., Haque, S.T.M., Paudel, L.K., Baniamin, H.M. (eds) Policy Response, Local Service Delivery, and Governance in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66018-5_1
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