Governance: The Concept and Its Dimensions

Abstract

Governance, as the term came to be used since the 1980s and the 1990s under the influence of the neo-liberals, is about a minimalist state. It seeks a state rollback on the ground that state is inherently inefficient when compared with the markets. Apart from this, since then other versions have developed, which led one commentator to say that so numerous are the definitions of governance that it has become analytically an intractable construct. This article presents its subject matter in three sections. The first section focuses on the semantics; it underlines the need to distinguish between the conventional and the neo-liberal usages of the term governance. The second section, which forms the bulk of the present article, discusses the five strands that collectively form the complex whole we call governance. The third and the concluding section contrasts the positivism of the neoclassical economics and new institutional economics, from which the neo-liberal governance paradigm is shaped, with the normative orientation of the classical school of administrative thoughts that dominated the discipline of public administration during the first fifty years (the 1887–1937 period).