Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Is Governance a Thing?

    This post is a reflection on governance as a concept.

    Much of my current research focuses on how governments operate (see e.g. here and here). By this, I mean something other than how governments are chosen or structured, and instead, how and why they relate to their citizens and make policy.* I have been slow to come around to this perspective, but what I am studying here is something called governance. Why have I been slow to come around to it? Because governance has to be the squishiest concept in all of the social sciences. Here is an actual conceptual definition of governance taken from the World Bank:

    governance…can be defined as the rule of the rulers, typically within a given set of rules.

    I am not making this up. My point is not that there is no conceptual or empirical research on governance…the exact opposite is true (see e.g. Jomo and Chowdhury [H/T @governwell]). The point is that we seem no further along in the governance debate than we were fifteen years ago, despite broad agreement that governance matters.

    I hope to make some theoretical and conceptual interventions into this literature. In doing so, I want to start from first principles: is governance a thing at all? I believe so, but to make such a claim, we must show that governance can be defined, conceptualized, and measured in non-trivial and non-tautologous ways.

    Kurtz and Schrank have a nice critique of the use of governance indicators to explain economic outcomes, and part of that critique is that our measures of “good governance”—often based on individuals’ perceptions of governments, rather than objective conditions or government practices—may simply reflect the outcomes that governance is meant to predict. This would explain, for example, why corruption perceptions after the Asian Financial Crisis worsened in countries that suffered from the crisis.
    corruption
    It is almost certainly not the case that Indonesia and Korea actually became more corrupt after 1997. More likely, the people responding to the surveys that create the indicators are more aware of corruption after its consequences were uncovered for all to see.

    But I want to go one step deeper. We need a definition of governance before we can conceptualize good governance. A conceptualization of governance that stands prior to good governance would allow us to understand what “not good” governance is.** And until we can conceptualize what governance is when it is not good, we will struggle to conceptualize what governance is more generally.

    Thinking this way immediately raises an interesting possibility: perhaps in practice, as an empirical matter, governance varies along multiple dimensions. I have found this a fruitful avenue of thinking: In this paper on governance in Java, I am very careful to specify that I am capturing variation in governance that should not be understood as good-vs.-bad. In fact, it is that realization that has prompted me to step back, to wonder if governance is a thing at all.

    Watch this space for more.

    NOTES
    * In fact, this is a central theme across my entire research portfolio, that the determinants of policy outcomes and political choices lie beyond the scope of exclusively institutionalist analyses.

    ** This is particularly important in reference to two of the most coherent definitions of good governance of which I am aware, Kaufmann et al.‘s “the norms of limited government that protect private property from predation by the state” and the Rothstein and Teorell (PDF) definition of quality of government as “impartiality in the exercise of public authority.” I like the clarity and coherence of these definitions—and recognize, too, that they are contested. But they both (1) leave underspecified what good governance is a form of, and (2) what governance is: it is a norm, a practice, or something else?

  • Thoughts on Southeast Asia and Regionalism

    I recently had cause to take a break from being a regular political scientist to write down some thoughts on Southeast Asian studies and the concept of region. Perhaps some readers will find these interesting.

    Decentering Southeast Asia

    The concept of “decentering” Southeast Asia refers to three interrelated ways of reconfiguring the study of Southeast Asia. Each reconfiguration challenges received understandings of how space, place, and geography define the scope of Southeast Asian studies, and brings the questions that animate Southeast Asianists into direct conversation with other world regions in new and exciting ways.

    1. Betweenness The earliest works of Southeast Asian studies conceptualized the region as a periphery, border, or frontier. Thus Southeast Asia as a coherent entity emerged only in relation to neighboring Indic and Sinitic civilizations, a fact which has invited critique for as long as Southeast Asian studies has existed. Nevertheless, the concept of Southeast Asia as “in between” remains a natural way to conceptualize the region. Problematizing the betweenness of so-called peripheral regions—a common Southeast Asianist endeavor—not only challenges these practices, it also raises interesting questions for scholars of Sinitic and Indic civilizations as well. Decentering Southeast Asia can ask how encounters with the periphery shape the center, inviting reflection on the construction of Sinitic and Indic civilizations in relation to their own borders (of which Southeast Asia is but one). It also suggests a reframing of these so-called centers as itself peripheral to their own border civilizations: Mongol, Arab, and European.
    2. Region Southeast Asianists are by necessity more aware of the construction of regional identities through the intellectual development of their field. Decentering Southeast Asia invites reflection on competing conceptualizations of region, capitalizing on new developments in world history, international relations, and political science that each imply different geographies for Southeast Asian studies. Four such regions that stand out in recent scholarship are Zomia, the Islamic world, the Indian Ocean world, and Oceania. Others which may prove useful include the Lusophere and Hispanosphere, Melanesia, and the Theravada Buddhist world. Southeast Asia is implicated in each of these alternate geographies, making the traditional region of Southeast Asia a particularly useful object for studying competing geographies and regionalisms.
    3. Jurisdiction The state has long been the organizing principle for Southeast Asian studies in the post-colonial era. Decentering Southeast Asia can also describe a process—common around the world, but particularly evident in Southeast Asia—of problematizing the boundaries of state authority. Efforts by the Thai government to shape the discussion of monarchy around the world, and by the Malaysian government to police the behavior of students abroad, are indicative of how governments are challenging their state’s borders as delimiting its jurisdiction. The reality of virtual political communities that span national borders further decenters the territorial state in Southeast Asia.

    As noted, these three ways of decentering Southeast Asia are consistent with broader intellectual developments across many disciplines, from history to political science. The distinctiveness of Southeast Asia is how thoroughly it is implicated in all of these discussions.

    –And with that, back to my regularly scheduled political science!