Dev Raj Dahal, FES, Nepal
Office
Conceptual Complexity
Modern governance—as a
system of norms, rules and institutions—enables national actors to
organize information, knowledge and capacities in order to formulate
joint policies and achieve goals. The goals of governance are:
national security, rule of law, public access to information, citizen
participation in civil bodies, delivery of public goods and conflict
resolution. The concept of governance marks a paradigm shift from
state-centric to society-centric regime. Horizontal macro actors of
governance are—the state, the market and all intermediary actors,
institutions, networks and movements constituted as civil society. The
vertical actors are: District Development Committees (DDC),
Municipalities and Village Development Committees (VDCs) and similar
forms of hierarchically designed sectoral units of various ministries,
departments and corporations.
Government is a territorial entity.
Governance, by contrast, is de-territorialized. Governance is a
coordinated regime and, therefore, its synergy can be captured through
proper communication, coordination, coherence, steering and collective
action of its actors under the vision defined by the Constitution of the
Kingdom of Nepal and various international regimes of which Nepal is a
member. Similarly, its normative means and ethical values are assessed
in terms of its performance, neutrality, transparency, accountability
and equity. Good governance enables citizens to have opportunities to
secure their basic needs, freedoms and rights through an access to
markets, assets, and economic goods and properly regulated civic
institutions so that poor and marginalized sections of the society can
realize their potential. Are the governance actors in Nepal sufficiently
cooperating to achieve their goals and deploying the normative means?
The Macro Governance Actors
in Nepal
Since the restoration of multi-party
democracy, there is a paradigm shift from bureaucracy possessing the
state’s essence to opening itself to market and civil society, universal
spirit of hierarchy and control to equality, flexibility and competition,
and faith in authority and confidentiality to democracy, transparency,
ownership, participation and subsidiarity. Ethical governance requires a
new equilibrium beyond legislative, executive and judiciary where the
state’s imperative of public order is matched with the market and civil
society’s aspiration for freedom, autonomy and internationalization.
Owing to growing political conflicts in the country and globalization,
the governance actors in Nepal face institutional deficiency in
providing public good and adapting to technological, sociological and
political change. Political crisis in Nepal has produced a political
culture of confrontation and deadlock, weakened the power of public to
live in civil coexistence and nurture their well-being. A proper balance
in governance actors and norm-governed action alone can prevent the
extraction of social surplus by their leaders. What is the nature of
governance actors in Nepal? Why the policies and institutions they adopt
do not support economic development?
The State: The state of
Nepal has lost legitimate monopoly on power and struggling to maintain
security, impose law and order, regain the periphery and restore its
capacity to pursue common good so that it is seen as a civil association.
Restoring this monopoly is important to overcome security, democratic
and development deficit and shape the “rule-based conception of ethical
life.” It is dependent on foreign aid, recognition and legitimacy. The
autonomy of state has been eroded by the growth of multiplicity of
societal actors sharing policy and decision domain. Due to growing
incongruence between the state (ruler) and society (ruled), inability to
contain rebellion and provide service delivery in the periphery, donors
call Nepal a “fragile state” and have accordingly defined the principles
for engagement. Only visionary leaders can minimize the political
differences, build consensus among the key actors for national action
and strengthen the constitutionalization of society, economy and polity.
The Market: The Nepalese
market is spatially fragmented. There are hundreds of pockets of small
markets unconnected to each other. This condition has defied the
national political economy of scale and increased difficulties of
collective action. The planners’ earlier belief in the infallible wisdom
of market to allocate goods and services and specialization has been
shattered as it remained too weak to support the pattern of cooperation
across national societies, modernize workforce and strengthen the
backward and forwards linkages of the political economy. The ideology of
state minimalism, espoused by Nepalese technocrats, limited the power of
the state to create security, penetrate society, formulate rules and
authority and seek the loyalty of citizens to polity. Corporate elites,
concentrated in urban areas, preside over a grossly inequitable division
of wealth that is both the source of their supremacy, disenfranchisement
of the mass of Nepali people and the crisis of public life. How can the
market serve as a meeting point for all when corporate elites are
disinterested in social responsibility and prefer to pursue class-blind
democratic values? Ethical governance requires a tab on the unrestricted
interplay of economic actors driven by self-interest and orients them
towards corporate ethics of serving public interests.
Civil society: The
horizontal series of groups in Nepal called civil society have been
regarded as a rational response to social change. Therefore, they are
tossed with huge responsibilities of promoting social justice without
thinking first their capacity to foster civic involvement and political
participation. Despite mushrooming growth of civil society, NGOs and
voluntary associations, cooperation between the state, the market and
civil society in Nepal is marked by general weariness, distrust and lack
of interest in collaborative problem solving. The societal
denationalization by civil society and the market forces has produced a
class of cosmopolitan citizens who are not obliged by what the notion of
citizenship loyalty entails in a democratic polity. This condition has
undermined the national ideology of the state and exonerated the market
and civil society from constitutional control. Moreover, hyper social
activism of civil society contributed to the decline of party politics
and eroded the capacity of leadership to inspire mass followers. The
government is now facing problem in projecting its policy making
capacity over the territorial sovereignty. National territory has become
too small for the markets and civil society to function and the
government and political parties have not developed any integrative
political response to this denationalization.
Public Administration
The society-centric governance
presumes that there are enough competing centers of power and competing
groups, enough citizens competing for influence over public policies and
the institutions of governance giving scope for participatory democracy.
But the hard question is to explore how democratic process itself is
situated within certain political relations, social and economic
division of labor, civil-military relations and their competition and
conflicts. Nepalese bureaucracy cannot be divorced from this reality.
This has posed a problem for civil servants to remain neutral, seek to
pursue institutional interests and manage to bring social and collective
goods to the citizens. Autonomy of public administration from special
interest groups of society is possible with highly selective
meritocratic recruitment, long-term rewards for career improvement, fair
penal system and a system of rule of law.
Public administration is an
executive part of the state. The legality of public administration in
Nepal springs from the separation and balancing of powers among
executive, legislature and judiciary, the justification and application
of norms and binding administrative power to the interest of citizens in
common. This means its integrity, impartiality and honesty in
performance are crucial indicators for good governance. The Constitution
obliges the state to protect citizens and leave all other activities to
self-regulating market forces except in the cases of poor, Dalits,
women, indigenous people and the marginalized requiring social justice,
access to opportunities and identity. Bureaucracy coordinates the
functions of the state and society and executes the “rules of the game”
governing public policies, elections, property rights and contracts.
Representative democracy defines
the basic norms of governance where bureaucracy is bounded by general
policies, structured by division of labor and hierarchical control and
reviewed for rough conformity to some principles and policies of the
state, constitution and laws. The administrative power has a statutory
basis approved by people’s representatives in a procedure by discussion,
consent, public opinion and constitutional legitimation. The expanding
nature of welfare state has added more power to bureaucracy in planning,
policy making and service provisions and their increasing control over
money, infrastructure development, technical expertise and information.
The governance reforms thus also required new checks, such as ownership
of clients, the use of ombudspersons, hearing of public grievances, and
citizens’ access to the conduct of public affairs.
The road map of governance reforms
articulated in Governance Act is a necessary but not a sufficient
condition to address the question of national integrity system that
plagues the functions of governance. System of political will necessary
to carry out reforms in Nepal is complicated by the legacy of
paternalism, discretionary authority and a political culture of
chakari and affno-manchhe thus de-motivating the
esprit decorps of civil servants and the exercise of rational
authority.
A number of reasons militate
against the accountability of Nepalese bureaucracy. First, despite
considerable growth in size and professionalism, civil servants are
finding it difficult to hold their job in high esteem. Second, symptoms
of institutional decay have occurred in which public officials
subordinate their dharma (institutional duty and authority) to
self-interest. Third, there has been an increase in the atrophy of their
morale and civic responsibility to serve the citizens. And, finally, de-motivation
of civil servants in both karya dachhata (ability) and
karya chhamata (capacity) has consequently led to a breakdown in
governmental performance. The culture of confidentiality has further
eroded the trust between the government and the governed and bred the
source of corruption. Only a free press grounded on the ability of the
state to guarantee citizens’ right to information, protected by
independent courts and a vibrant civil society makes the abuse of
governmental power absolutely intolerable and reduces the distortionary
effects of corruption and culture of impunity. Public access to
government information empowers citizens to make important choices and
to achieve a greater degree of transparency of governance actors.
Development and Delivery of
Public Goods
Globalization and ongoing conflict
have undercut the policy capacity of national state to pursue various
phases of human rights needs in Nepal—liberation, entitlements and
social opportunities. International community became equal stakeholder
of policy regime. As a result, development policies in Nepal are
negotiated with the donors and tailored to the strategic pursuit of the
“rational choice” followed by most of its development partners
regardless of the “political framework condition.” The rational choice
model is ahistorical, grounded in the neo-liberal ideology and does not
fully take into account the existing irrational, unresponsive and
tenacious obstacles to change. It also contradicts both social
rationality and Constitutional responsibility to create an open society
based on social justice, freedom and solidarity of capital and labor
mediated by class-neutral state.
Governance’s ability to muster
political will for institutional reforms and achieve targeted programs
for poverty alleviation embedded in Tenth Plan, MDGs and PRSP can be
realized only if the central functions of the state such as security,
order, welfare and rule of law are restored and linked to negotiated
conflict transformation. Economic performance is largely determined by
the structure of incentives, “public choices” accorded to the
stakeholders by the government and the delivery of basic services, such
as education, health, social welfare provisions, water and sanitation,
communication, technology and ecological resources underlined in Service
Delivery Guidelines. Persistence of chronic poverty in Nepal implies the
deficiencies of economic policies to trigger production revolution and
foster the social integration of Nepalese society.
If poverty alleviation is meant to
overcome powerlessness there must be a political will and strategy of
the political class. A political structure must be created in such a way
that right to livelihood is constitutionally guaranteed, poverty
alleviation becomes a participatory process, a new social contract of
the poor with the state is negotiated where the state serves as a
helping hand to them and root causes of conflicts are addressed in time
before they escalate into unmanageable proportion.
Conflict resolution
Conflict escalation implies
governance ineffectiveness. In Nepal, conflict is hierarchical situated
at the geopolitical (geo-strategic contest of great powers),
structural (between the state and CPN-M), manifest
(between the state and seven-party alliance) and latent
(between the state and societal forces) levels. Conflict is formed at
the societal level due to gaps between constitutional ideals of freedom,
equality and social justice and hard reality of inequality, bonded labor
and structural injustice. Due to a lack of proper management, the
underlying grievances of critical mass were articulated at the political
level, then militarized and finally escalated at geopolitical level.
Resolution of conflict demands proper study and suitable political
response to address the “root causes” of conflict. Resolution of
conflict in Nepal requires a transformation of the rationalist
conception of politics where power is pitted against power for survival,
supremacy and identity thus sidetracking the question of social justice.
Nepalese political actors must learn from the failure of power-mediation
approach of 1950 and 1990 where social contracts created their own
enemies and rendered democratic peace unsustainable. Hierarchical nature
of conflicts in Nepal entails multi-track and multi-step conflict
transformation strategies. This means peace building measures requires
simultaneous strengthening of security, order and welfare.
Ordinary citizens, working at the
grassroots level, are now coping with various types of conflict and
inventing the change process. But, they need full agents of
change—information, skills, organizations, networks and resources. To
change the structural causes of underdevelopment, the organization of
the poor must have critical mass of change agents to reform the
unreasonableness of political order that does not bring well-being,
freedom and identity and articulate a vision for things higher than
those offered by today’s government, political parties and civil
society.
Conclusion
Good governance in Nepal requires
the citizens to forge a single national identity, an identity sustained
by a democratic partnership among the state, the market, the civil
society and citizens. The greatest strength of polity lies in their
capacity to enlist the confidence of ordinary citizens to shape the
society and its vision. Without strengthening the national integrity
system and proper separation and devolution of power, transparent, just
and responsive governance cannot be realized. The tissues that link the
citizens to governance, such as legislatures, political parties, civil
society and a myriad of mediating social and economic institutions, now
require a coherence, trust, cooperation and collective action based on
human essence.
When Constitution, the only
governing plan of the nation, is made a contested site for power
struggle and interest groups of society reflect institutional biases of
their organizations, the only option left for bureaucracy is to act with
public-minded spirit and connect themselves with the values and
experiences of common people who are coping with various types of
conflicts and struggling to evolve norms based on their needs,
aspirations and reciprocity. This is the way to win the confidence of
Nepalese citizens and the development partners who believe that Nepal
ceased to become a developing country. At this critical juncture, the
responsibility of Nepal’s governing and opposition leadership lies in
steering the governance in right direction that is both inclusive and
visionary and satisfies both the needs of its citizens and the Spirit of
the Age.
Source: Comment made by
the author at a seminar exclusively organized by NASC for secretaries of
His Majesty’s Government of Nepal, July 11, 2005
The Telegraph.
[Taken from
Peace Journalism ]