1. DANGEROUS IDEAS Naomi Hossain in GOVERNANCE and DEVELOPMENT
Presentation to the
CARE Governance Programming Framework workshop
London, April 2011
Introduce self – political sociology perspective on poverty/development
IDS – connections to both groups associated with governance research
But part of neither- 5 years in Bangladesh grappling with how an NGO deals with governance in its programming, in a challenging context

2. Rethinking governance
Bad governance as pathological
Better governance as citizen participation
Effective governance as public authority
Unruly politics as anti-governance

3. Bad governance as pathological
Bad governance as the failures of formal rule-based institutions
Measured against the distance from OECD style Weberian institutional ideals
Move to political economy thinking – more than naming the gridlock of elite interests?
Corruption hysteria
Bad governance as in essence the failures of formal rule-based institutions
In practice, a great deal of governance thinking and programming in development remains strongly framed by OECD standards
Assumption that the destinations are the kinds of Weberian institutions that OECD countries believe they have
Welcome move to ‘political economy’ analysis in the past decade – but where does this lead to? A gridlock of elite interests? Where in fact can aid actors intervene? Does it merely highlight the marginal role of even the biggest bilateral actors in a world that is increasingly complex, in which governance is increasingly understood to be networked and multi-level, and where aid donors and INGOs have relatively less leverage than they have ever had?
The west in general but aid agencies too, more than slightly hysterical and/or racist about corruption and governance failures – (examples from the sociology of aid relations, ‘verging on the cretinous’)

4. Better governance as citizen participation
Efforts to support citizen participation and strengthen accountability do work…
… but they take time and patience (do donors and INGOs - and citizens themselves - have the patience?)
And can go wrong
It helps to work across multiple levels (including the personal)
And to build constituencies and capacities over time

5. Effective governance as public authority
A focus on function not form – what is working? Why is it working?
State-society interactions as central (public authority does not reside in the state)
Elite incentives can be shifted
Informal institutions and relationships matter

6. Implications for INGO policy & practice
Supporting more effective and accountable governance takes time (recognise intermediate outcomes)
State-society interactions as central (public authority does not reside in the state; strengthening civil society is not always the answer)
Governance is multi-level (programming should work across tiers and networks)

7. Unruly politics as anti-governance
Emerged out of recognition that effective political action by the powerless breaks rules and norms
Not about the hungry angry masses –about underlying political ideologies that mark limits of popular tolerance
Might be revolutionary – more usually merely a corrective to the rules of the political game
The ‘dark matter’ of governance
Effective action often the excess – not captured by formal representative modes or rules and so on
My own work – an interest in how potent a weapon rudeness and shame (the weapons of the weak) can be in extracting a rough kind of accountability (particularly useful for women)