ECKERT, BEHRENDS , DAFINGER | GOVERNANCE AND THE STATE

Governance and the State: An Anthropological Approach

Julia Eckert, Andrea Behrends und Andreas Dafinger

New regimes of governance today emerge in connection with the effects of globally
induced structural reforms, privatization and land or property reforms, and
transnational economic or legal integration. These affect local relations in a broad
range of settings. The comparative study of different cases requires a shared defini-
tion and a joint understanding of regimes of governance. In this contribution we as-
sess existing approaches and propose a definition and understanding of governance
that can be made useful for an anthropological analysis of processes of regulation,
ordering and distribution. We find that many of the existing approaches and theo-
ries to the study of governance are either normative teleological projects or centred
in European (or Western) situations of governance that do not allow for the adapta-
tion to different historical and regional situations. In this paper we provide exam-
ples from our own long-term anthropological research in West Africa (Burkina Fa-
so and Chad) and in India.

Governance as an analytical tool

For an approach that can be made useful for anthropological research we define
governance as the administration of access to and provision of rights, services and
goods that imply also the definition of categories of inclusion and entitlements that
are explicit or implicit in governmental practices. The concept of governance focus-
es our attention on processes of ordering and capacities of steering and allocation
in which various organizations have a claim. Increasingly new agents of governance
share in the administration of everyday life, in the organization of access to and
provision of services and goods. They all explicitly or implicitly involve themselves
also in the definition of rights and entitlements.
We would thus like to use the concept of governance to assess these different
processes of de-centralization and privatization, and the various practices of ex-
erting governmental power under one analytical concept. This concept of gover-
nance leaves behind conventional distinctions between state, civil society and the

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economy, between public and private and does not privilege one organization or in-
stitution, like the state, as the natural or right centre of governance. Rather, it
opens up the analysis of domination, rule or government to the interdependencies
between different actors that shape these, the processes within which constellations
of power between such governmental actors emerge and consolidate.
It is important to us to relocate the analysis of governance from the state or
government into a field shaped by various actors that produce specific govern-
mental regimes through interaction, not simply because we observe governance in
this sense to be more often than not conducted by both state and non-state actors,
but also because we feel it might further an anthropological approach to the state.
The concept of states at work (Bierschenk 2010) that Thomas Bierschenk devel-
1
oped together with his colleagues captures the constructed character of state insti-
tutions and the labour that goes in to them. Rather than limiting the metaphor of
the construction site to the ever unfinished and highly disintegrated bureaucracies
that resulted from the specific African paths of colonial and post-colonial history,
we suggest using this metaphor as a more general approach to the study of the
everyday production of stateness that is at the core of the idea of states at work.
While the reproduction of governing institutions in the practices of officials and cit-
izens has been recognized (e.g. Fuller/Harriss 2000; Gupta/Sharma 2009;
Hansen/Stepputat 2001; Mitchell 1999; Schlichte/Migdal 2005, 24), their actual
construction has rarely been addressed. The notion of States at work, by concen-
trating on how these state systems actually work and what effect they have on the
dynamic of governing, draws our attention to the ongoing construction work that
makes the state, the shaping that state institutions are subject to when used. In a
similar vein, Klaus Schlichte, Dietrich Jung and Julia Eckert used the term the Ar-
tifices of government to inquire into the specific formation and actualization of
state rule as the unintended outcome of social practices associated to the intended
use and appropriation of state resources and agencies (Schlichte et al. 2006). They
wanted to conceptualize the exertion of state authority as a process of complex so-
cial interactions and to address the importance of the social practices of individu-
als, collectives, organizations, of state and non-state actors. With the term artifice
they pointed to exactly that labour and craft, the workmanship that seems to be in-
volved in the banal, habitual, routinized functioning of what might be called the
2
real state at work, thus the everyday reproduction of forms of stateness through

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ECKERT, BEHRENDS , DAFINGER | GOVERNANCE AND THE STATE

the use and appropriation of state institutions.

The concept of governance is thus well suited both to understand different
specific forms of stateness, as well as to describe situations in which ordering is not
restricted to state, but can also not be captured by its other, traditional or lo-
cal/indigenous institutions. Such an opposition of traditional/local and state insti-
tutions would again presuppose a self-evident location of control and authority
either in the state or its other, the traditional, and an immanent oppositional rela-
tion. However, the relations between state and non-state agencies in governmental
regimes are not necessarily oppositional and competitive, but might be cooperative,
hierarchical, complementary or simply parallel. The emergence of governance
regimes in which non-state organizations play a major part may establish them-
selves independently or can be part of policies of devolving governance tasks to
non-state actors as issued by state administrations and international organizations.
The autonomy of the individual agencies within such constellations can differ; the
state is not necessarily the one that regulates the relations among the others. The
state, and its various agencies, however, are often deeply involved in the production
of specific governmental regimes, and thus in the drawing of its own boundaries
and limits. With the concept of governance we aim to analyse the field of interac-
tions that shape regimes of governance and the effect they have for different sec-
tions of society in terms of access and distribution, inclusion and exclusion. Under
current conditions this more often than not necessitates an enquiry also into the
role of the state, as outlined above.
The processes of political and social integration of refugees in the Chadian-
Sudanese borderland, examined by Andrea Behrends, for example, demands an ap-
proach that can account for the plurality of actors and institutions involved in gov-
ernmental activities. These are local state institutions like the prefecture or police
brigades, the military, rebel groups, representatives of various ethnic groups - pres-
ent in the region or in exile - and international organizations and NGOs. Each of
these organizations relates to different but specific sections of the local population
depending on their categories of target groups: they might be one specific ethnic
group, all people officially classified as refugees or internally displaced, or all na-
tionals. Each of these groups also has different means of access to resources and
they possibly compete over them. The concept of governance here opens up the per-
spective for the question of how the relation between the various governmental

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bodies also shapes the relations between different social groups.

In the Indian megacity of Mumbai, matters of adjudication, law and order,
crime and security are administered not only by state institutions such as the courts
or the police but also by welfare oriented NGOs, the heads of local branches of po-
litical parties, community leaders with effective alliances in the governmental ap-
paratus, leaders of organised crime groups as well as the police in roles beyond
their official mandate. The operative legal order in the city is more often than not
determined by the interaction of these various institutions: They define legal insti-
tutions in their practices and through the frames of interpretation they offer for
claims to rights and entitlements; they act on the specific interpretation and en-
forcement of a legal framework and themselves set rules and practice sanctions. Ju-
lia Eckert looks at the emerging configuration of these actors and traces the
processes of how they were shaped by the (democratic) competition amongst polit-
ical contenders. She examines how they affect the organization of the state and
ideas of citizenship, and how they delimit security and belonging differentially for
different sections of society.
Andreas Dafinger works on governmental and non-governmental organiza-
tions and administration in Western Africa: many of these institutions offer new
economic, political and judicial resources. These organizations promote agribusi-
ness, provide administrative positions, and implement institutional bylaws - most
of which crosscut and overlap local practice of resource access and distribution.
Newly provided resources like water wells, dispensaries and schools, often bring
their own mechanisms of distribution, access rules and their own mediation au-
thorities, and provide new options for agents in the local social and political field.
As providers of these services and goods, the state and non-governmental organiza-
tions also compete with traditional institutions, whose established distribution and
conflict resolution mechanisms often fail to integrate these new forms of resource
access and distribution control. The anthropological approach explores how indi-
vidual actors and groups manoeuver between existing normative backgrounds and
newly established forms of social control. This approach describes institutions and
policies as the result of individual, yet concerted action. In the case in question,
non-governmental, national and international organizations all operate within the
states legal framework, in many cases pioneering the states rule of law. The re-
vised 1994 land legislation in Burkina Faso, as one example, had only been put into

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ECKERT, BEHRENDS , DAFINGER | GOVERNANCE AND THE STATE

practice by international development organizations in an attempt to restructure

agricultural production systems (Dafinger and Pelican 2006). In the arena of every-
day politics, the bylaws of these organizations are as powerful as the national legis-
lation. At the same time many of the development agencies are powerful interna-
tional actors with their own global agendas and with budgets easily exceeding what
a large part of developing countries receive in foreign investments. (British based
Oxfams annual [2010] income of 575mio US$ was significantly higher than what a
3
majority of sub-Saharan states have received in foreign direct investment).
This invokes the question as to which degree multinational organizations are
actually bound by the respective national legal frameworks within which they oper-
ate, and to which extent they can negotiate regulatory autonomy or legislative
changes fitting in with their interests. Critical governance studies address these is-
sues and the factors that constitute such possibilities. The degree and mechanisms
of organizations accountability toward their donor constituency are a major con-
cern in this field.
Likewise, critical governance studies consider the reach of what has been
termed project law, the factors contributing to effective non-intervention by state
agencies, as well as regulatory and legal gaps that emerge in new constellations of
legal pluralism produced in such constellations of governance (cf. Benda-Beck-
mann et al. 2009).
The three case studies sketched out here span a wide thematic, regional and
historic range; at the same time they overlap in their question of the states role as
an actor in these unfolding processes.
They look at the different actors involved in these changes (including govern-
ment, administration, NGOs, local elites, international organizations) and they ad-
dress the different scales of governance (not only local, regional, or global etc. but
also material and discursive). They each investigate how different governmental
regimes affect different sections of society (local or national) differently by either
changing channels of distribution, by introducing new categories of entitlements
and rights, or by re-configuring the relations between actors involved in govern-
mental practices. All three studies examine the processes in which relations among
various institutions of governance are shaped and they use the analytical concept of
governance to look at steering capacities beyond the state and government and at
how these capacities are constituted.

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Approaches to the study of governance

a) Good governance

As has been abundantly highlighted, governance as a concept has been used to de-
fine certain standards of Good governance. Good governance as a policy tool
advocates specific governmental regimes, that is, specific divisions of labour be-
tween state, local community, trans-national or international and private (busi-
ness) organizations as most beneficial for the efficient management of national
welfare. It proposes to be about the rational management of public affairs. Such
policies in as much as they are connected to incentives and sanctions of monetary
or market access, reconfigure (and intend to reconfigure) constellations of the ac-
tors involved in governance. Conditional ties are connected to aid, which regulate
the transfer of agency to (sometimes newly and specifically created) non-state or
international bodies. These conditions are also meant to directly influence govern-
mental decisions of resource allocation.
This is the case in Chad, for example, which, in the process of turning into an
oil exporting country in 2003, was given a credit by the World Bank to finance the
building of a bi-national pipeline. This was connected to the demand for democrati-
zation and the condition that money flows gained from oil returns would be moni-
tored by independent NGOs (Pegg 2005). When the first returns were used by
Chads president Idriss Dby to buy weapons for the ongoing civil war the World
Bank installed an independent commission to watch over the organization of the
entire project and report suggestions for its improvement and organization to the
World Bank, the consortium of oil companies involved in the building of the
pipeline and the government of Chad (Guyer 2002). A Revenue Management Law
was passed by the Chadian regime to guarantee that the oil revenues were used in
the way intended by the World Bank and to have the distribution of oil related
funds overseen by an independent committee. Rather than being effective, howev-
er, it mirrored this commissions main preoccupation, which was the Chadian
regimes ambiguous desire to keep a balance between its internal support of militia
or ethnic groups on the one hand and on the other hand to create an outside ap-

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ECKERT, BEHRENDS , DAFINGER | GOVERNANCE AND THE STATE

pearance of international cooperation and good governance. Almost ten years af-
ter the first extraction of crude oil in Chad, it turned out that much of this process
was flawed. In spite of the Revenue Management Law the temporal development of
the pipeline building and oil extraction process was much faster than the instal-
ment of supervisory institutions and the planning of social infrastructure. Thus the
Chadian regime not actually intending to provide for transparency in spending
procedures had already let much of the money pass through channels hard to re-
cover for the overseeing committee once it was ready to operate (Ndika 2005).
Anthropological analysis also needs to scrutinize the unintended outcomes of
good governance policies. One example of the more subtle levels of good gover-
nance schemes are the incentive structures that privilege specific forms of social
organization over others, i.e. giving preference to types of existing administrative
organization that are considered more compatible with state administration and
other institutions.
While such preference for state-like local political organization has its roots in
the colonial practice of indirect rule, post-colonial principles of good governance
generally propagate a more participatory approach. Local communities are encour-
aged to organize around forms of open civil organizations and corporations as
counterparts for administrative politics. Dafingers studies redraw how Burkina Fa-
so encouraged the formation of administrative communities as counterparts for the
states and civil organizations in the wake of decentralisation and administrative re-
form. The aim was to incorporate local forms of leadership, along with newly em-
powered marginal groups and other local social units into the national administra-
tive and political sector, and achieve an even distribution of economic and political
resources. The official parameters defining such administrative communities tend
to privilege territorially conceived political organization over non-spatial types of
communal organization. Farmers generally attain a higher visibility for state and
civil organizations than mobile or dispersed herding communities.
Assessing criteria of good governance and assessing the success of good gov-
ernance practice cannot be left to the governing institutions alone. Anthropology
offers the tools to study developmental policies and related policy requirements
beyond their explicit self-declared goals and puts a special emphasis on seemingly
unintentional processes. Alongside the impact of specific economic models on ad-
ministrative organization, these (so called) conditionalities are likely to affect

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relations between various state and non-governmental organizations on a far

broader scale. An anthropological analysis of governmental regimes will also have
to address the question of how these regimes are particularly structured by policies
and practice of good governance and similar concepts.
As a part of critical governance studies, good governance narratives will have
to be explored under aspects of the realization and reification of policy concepts,
their interaction with regimes of distribution and access, but also with regard to the
social lives of such policies and the economic and institutional power behind the
normative concepts which are embedded in such policies. These processes of reifi-
cation and realization of policy concepts, as well as the categories that become oper-
ative in their implementation are particularly relevant with respect to changing def-
initions of entitlement and communal/national inclusion and with regards to the
interplay between social organization and the organization of governance.

b) Governmentality

In searching for a basis to criticize such normative concepts of good governance as

well as neo-liberal economics and its governmental effects, Foucaults concept of
governmentality has provided a framework for ethnographic investigations. To
Foucault government by the state is only one specific form of governing. He under-
stands his more encompassing concept as an overall mentality regarding the art of
governing. The importance of the state and state-based governance is downgraded
in favour of a notion of power that is constituted through society in networks and
alliances, including state, non-state or semi-state actors. It stresses the importance
of the active subject as the entity through which and by means of which power is ac-
tually exercised beyond traditional state boundaries (Morison 2001: 288). The
term government in connection to this understanding thus implies the involve-
ment and willing cooperation of each individual subject, participating in their own
governance (ibid.: 289), whereby governmentality as Foucault defined it in an
interview at a later stage of his life stands for the whole range of practices that
constitute, define, organize, and instrumentalize the strategies that individuals in
their freedom can use in dealing with each other (Foucault 1997). Foucaults con-
cepts have been applied mainly to western states and citizens. But recently a grow-
ing number of studies on non-western societies have begun to use the Foucauldian

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notion of governmentality as ranging across national boundaries or national fields

of influence. While humanitarian and development aid agencies are some of the
most likely research fields for this kind of long-distance government (Mosse 2005),
recent studies have also focused on security measures surrounding resource extrac-
tion sites, where externally driven forms of governing are meant to guarantee un-
hindered production (Sawyer 2004; Barry 2006).
Escobar, following Foucault, has also been looking for alternative views on the
distribution of power. He shows how international development and humanitarian
organizations historically made and continue to make and unmake the third world
by fixing and controlling the terms by which development is measured and the ways
it is countered. He comes to the conclusion that by controlling and countering sup-
posed underdevelopment, the third worlds condition is actually perpetuated (Esco-
bar 2006). His work is an example for Foucaults notion of power, which, as Harvey
points out, is not ultimately located within the state, but in infinitesimal mecha-
nisms, which each have their own history, their own trajectory, their own tech-
niques and tactics being invested, colonized, utilized, involuted, transformed,
displaced, extended etc. by ever more general mechanisms and by forms of global
domination (Foucault 1972 quoted in Harvey 1989: 45).
Still, doubt exists as to how far Foucaults European based historical deduc-
tions can actually be applied to regimes outside these contexts: in a broad interpre-
tation, all forms of social organization and social control, and most forms of rule
rely to some degree on the conduct of conduct rather than direct coercion; under-
stood in this way, governmentality would be coterminous with social control, a
rather unsatisfactory breadth of the concept. In her study on the effects of improve-
ment strategies in Indonesia, Li (2007) aims to narrow down and operationalize
Foucaults concept of governmentality. With power often operating at some dis-
tance, she claims that people are not necessarily aware of how their conduct is
being conducted (ibid.: 6). For an anthropological analysis of governance, Li thus
decided to focus on individuals involved in devising particular interventions and
programs of improvement. Engaging in their routinized practices, we agree with
Li in maintaining that it is these practices an anthropological research on gover-
nance and power should follow (ibid: 6).
The analysis of genealogies of governmental reason or the dissection of gov-
ernmental technologies account for the actual processes within which they become

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effective. Anthropology permits to complement such histories of the present with

a perspective that also analyses the ways and processes, in which such social tech-
nology and knowledge is put to use, the transformations they undergo in practice,
their failures, and the contradictions that arise out of the contingent interactions of
various strategies and agendas. Earlier studies of governmentality have given little
attention to conflicting interests and practices even within one governmental or-
ganization, nor to the effects of their incoherence and thus the specific configura-
tion of practices that come to play in a specific field at a specific time. Following the
above mentioned more recent studies, we consider governmental regimes to be
shaped also by the unintended consequences of these interactions and thus focus
on the practices and interactions of various actors. Having established this, the ex-
ploration of the production of governmentalities remains an important subject,
both within western types of governance regimes, and with regard to transnational
governance regimes, developmental or security policies and their categories of so-
cial organization, efficiency and operative frameworks.

c) A processual and practice approach

We share, however, the emphasis of several anthropological studies for a combina-

tion of structural and choice-based approaches. We consider it important to ad-
dress clearly the actors behind changes in governance regimes and particular
strategies, without identifying certain regime outcomes with particular interests
but rather with the aggregation and the unintended effects of their interaction.
This focus on the actors and the aggregation of their strategies appears as a
major advantage of the anthropological approach that allows us to relate observable
micro-political interactions and dynamics to processes observable at a larger scale
of social organization. Therefore, we focus in our use of the concept of governance
on actors, their relations and how these have evolved historically, and the inten-
tioned and unintended outcomes of their interactions.
The study of how strategies of agents are shaped and redefined in the local dis-
course not only contributes to the understanding of specific local settings but, more-
over, offers an approach to the configuration of transnational policies. Strategies
that prove successful in the interaction with local and transnational actors in a
specific setting may be employed in other cases. The remodelling of organizations

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ECKERT, BEHRENDS , DAFINGER | GOVERNANCE AND THE STATE

policies can thus not only be interpreted as the result of centralised decision
processes, but also as the outcome of specific local constellations (Rottenburg
2009).
This idea of governance as shaped in its specific form by the interaction of var-
ious organizations and groups, by their various interests and their power relations,
but also by the unintended outcomes of their interaction implies that governmental
regimes are most likely always subject to change precisely because they are pro-
duced in the interaction of various actors. As an example of such unintended out-
comes actively produced by various actors we would like to return briefly to the
Revenue Management Law proposed by the World Bank as a mechanism to counter
the resource curse in Chad. Not only did it produce very different kinds of civil so-
ciety and advocacy groups who now counter the national governments action by
recurring to the internationally devised law, but the Chadian regime also made use
of the law in its own interest: in order to justify, in a later amendment, the inclusion
of security as part of the measures for which to spend oil money and thus, effec-
tively, to justify the purchase of heavy arms and artillery for its own defence against
rebel groups.
As a general statement, we advocate a practice oriented approach that also
considers apparent stability of specific governmental regimes as a process that is ac-
tively produced by those involved. The governance concept therefore also opens up
a perspective that moves beyond assumptions that consider power to be imbued
and situated in specific positions which still prevail in much thought on governmen-
tal issues. Rather, we consider it necessary to trace the production of certain power
relations, their persistence and possibly their specific forms of transformation.

The role of the state (different regimes of governance)

Such an approach does not make any presumptions about the specific role of the
state or various state agencies in such governmental regimes. A preliminary classi-
fication allows to differentiate three patterns, which see either a (partial) retreat
(departure) of the state, an arrival of state institutions and regulation, or the state
as a persistent but internally changing actor. Each of these major categories may
be further differentiated and on the empirical level boundaries between the ideal
types will be blurred. They have normatively been valued differently by different

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theoretical approaches. Processes of privatization have been seen either as a sign

of or a solution to state crisis; which specific processes of privatization or de-etati-
zation, of retreat, arrival or structural changes of the state contribute to better
management, and which lead to disintegration have not always been evaluated
unanimously.
The effected shifts in the role of the state will differ depending on the context
in which they occur and might mean even the simultaneous or incorporated forms
of these processes, i.e. the simultaneous withdrawal and increased relevance of the
state. We seem to find evidence in our material for paradoxical processes regarding
the role and relative significance of the state, that is of the state increasing its role
by devolving tasks to non-state actors.

a) retreating states

The processes of the formal or informal devolution of governmental competences of

the state to alternative organizations can take at least three principal forms:

a) the devolution of the states productive and distributive tasks to private or-
ganizations like charitable organizations or commercial enterprises that pos-
sibly devolve informally also regulation as much as it is inherent in distribution
and production;
b) the formal decentralisation and devolution of regulatory tasks in specific
fields, be they of the kind of personal status regulations or the devolution of re-
gulation for and jurisdiction over the internal affairs of corporations, but also
of development projects and international NGOs.
c) The third process is the independent establishment, or persistence of parallel
centres of governmental authority that wield control over specific territories,
specific groups of people or specific economic spheres and they do not stand in
a subsidiary, complementary relation to the state but in a parallel and autono-
mous one.

We observe that many of these processes affect certain configurations of govern-

mental regimes simultaneously, and affect each other: internationally driven and
financed policies to relocate certain governmental tasks (like education, health care
or adjudication) out of state institutions, for example, often lead to their appropria-

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ECKERT, BEHRENDS , DAFINGER | GOVERNANCE AND THE STATE

tion by private or community organizations that were not target of the initial
policies, but that are strengthened in their governmental significance thereby also
in other fields of governmental activity.
Frequently such autonomy and the associated ruptures of the integrity of the
ideal type modern state, and thus signs of its failure, have been seen in the estab-
lishment of sub-state local fiefdoms of (neo-) traditional authorities, big men,
warlords, or etc. (Trotha 2000; Humphrey 1999; Schlichte/Wilke 2000). But in-
fringements on state sovereignty have been associated also with the autonomy of
trans-national corporations and their regulatory autonomy and recently also with
the project law established by international development organizations (Benda-
Beckmann 2001; Risse et al. 2000). Many countries, but most dramatically in post-
socialist contexts, have seen state monopolies fall that were taken over by semi-
state and non-state organizations. These organizations fill the vacuum a retreating
state leaves behind. These processes can be but are not necessarily intended by the
governments involved. The states presence or absence, withdrawal or arrival might
also affect different sections of society differently, and might actually mean less ac-
cess to state provisions for some groups, and at the same time more access to these,
or more control by state agencies to others. In the Chad research project, for exam-
ple, one party to the recent armed conflict had good access to state institutions like
the prefecture and police brigade on the Chadian as well as the Sudanese side of the
border. This access served them in questions of land-use or ownership of land and
other legal or economical claims. The other party to the conflict had less access to
and therefore less trust in agencies of the state on both sides of the border and thus
came to rely on services provided by non-state organizations such as international
agencies and NGOs, which previously had been given the right to operate in the re-
gion by the central state, but soon developed their own legal and institutional struc-
tures on the ground (Behrends 2007; 2008; Behrends & Schlee 2008).

b) arriving state (the vertical expansion of the state)

Decentralization of state power and the appearance of new non-state governance

agents do not always mark the states retreat, nor necessarily decrease its impor-
tance as a local actor. In many cases we witness that new non- and semi-govern-
mental organizations pioneer the implementation of administrative norms and

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state regulation in fields where national institutions had so far been of only margin-
al relevance. Subsistence livelihoods in remote rural areas, as well as informal eco-
nomic activities in urban areas are major fields for organizations which, despite
their civil character, still operate within the legal and political framework of the
state. Many actively propagate national rules and regulations, and often explicitly
aim at the transition of local, informal, or subsistence based livelihoods into formal
social and business practice.
Slum dwellers organizations or garbage recycling schemes are only some of
the attempts to permeate the formal-informal boundaries, promoting for full citi-
zenship rights of the marginalized urban poor, and pushing the state into areas
that have very much been excluded from its infrastructural and administrative
schemes. Rural areas witness the arrival of the state often in more legalistic terms.
In most West African states, land legislation had been of no practical relevance for
rural communities. Until recently, a landed gentry allocated access rights based on
rules of kinship and residence; the fact that the state was legally the allodial
landowner was simply deemed relevant by and in fact unknown to a majority of
the population. Only when non-governmental organizations set out to restructure
local production systems from the mid 1990s onwards, have national titling
schemes become a viable option for individuals and rural communities. By giving
up its exclusive claim and allocating limited property rights to these local groups in
the course of privatization programs, the state created incentives for local groups to
adapt to the administrative framework and get registered as administrative units
within the territorial state. Dafinger has described how in Burkina Faso develop-
ment organizations have used land reforms and titling schemes to create distinct
economic zones and separate different modes of production, resettling parts of the
population. As a result, everyday conflicts significantly declined, bringing down the
opportunity costs of agro-pastoral cohabitation (such as crop damage or injuries to
cattle). At the same time these organizations offered juridical and administrative
services, safeguarding the rule of bylaws, regulating land allocation, decisions over
crop types and cattle quota. The local population became subject to a blend of na-
tional legislation and de facto civil-organizational jurisdiction. Donor organizations
further support this process by focusing on such these communities in providing
new economic and political resources, such as bore holes, or health and education
institutions, reifying nationally recognised forms of community organization. To

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focus on the arriving state, i.e. the increasing vertical expansion of the state into
matters of everyday life through third agents, permits to adequately describe the
range of possible changes in the role of states in governance regimes. Civil organi-
zation, here, in its Hegelian guise, complements and builds, rather than competes
with the states alleged responsibilities.

c) structural changes persisting state organization

The emergence of new agents of governance may see yet a third pattern, the persist-
ence if not increase of the states importance through controlling processes of de-
volvement. While specific tasks that the state used to handle are being outsourced,
the state and its institutions maintain control and regulate access to these fields of
governance. Such control may however be exercised not by the government or the
state as an integrated organizational complex, but by specific state agencies:
The concept of the state as an integrated entity has long been abandoned or
reformulated as an effect in itself (Mitchell 1999). When not examining this par-
ticular effect of a seeming coherence of the state, social anthropologists, if at all
addressing the state, have examined the practices and relations of different state
agencies, focussing on their strategies and roles among the actors that shape gover-
nance regimes. The paradoxical processes of simultaneous withdrawal and increase
of state presence, for example, could be examined also by analysing the emerging
institutional compositions of stateness, as well as the alliances that are formed be-
tween different state agencies and specific social groups. What is of interest, and
becomes accessible through a concept of governance is the question what role
which particular state agencies play, how they interact with specific para-state and
non-state institutions, and how this shapes a specific configuration of stateness. In
urban India, for example state governance is characterized by different forms of the
division of labour in different geographic areas, relating to different segments of the
population, or to particular fields of governance such as law making, adjudication,
infrastructure, service delivery, etc. Different state agencies enter into different
forms of alliances, cooperative or competitive relations with various non-state
agencies involved in governmental activities, such as NGOs, residents associations,
local politicians, leaders of organized crime groups or other local strongmen. The
state is often deeply involved in the so-called informal, in the shaping of alliances

28
 EthnoScripts

and cooperations, and thus in the drawing of its own boundaries and limits. This
results not necessarily from an integrated strategy but evolves from possibly con-
tradictory strategies of different state and non-state actors. The competitions and
contradictions between and within different state agencies are constitutive of the
alliances that they form with different non-state actors; these determine the shape
that the state acquires.
In urban India, the police appear firstly as one of the critical institutions
which mediate the relations of various centres of authority. They are the middle-
men between party bosses and leaders of criminal gangs; they determine the scope
of action of competing organizations, such as NGOs, self-help associations or local
party offices. The police have thereby also a significant role in organizing access of
ordinary citizens to state and non-state agencies. Secondly, within this system of
graduated sovereignty (Ong 2000: 57) different segments of the populations are
subject to different modi of power (cf. Nuijten and Lorenzo 2009); the police and
their legally sanctioned coercive force - as well as their not legally sanctioned forms
of violence - have been present most prominently to the large section of the Indian
population which live in circumstances defined by aspects of illegality. In urban In-
dia the ones who are present for the police most immediately, and for whom in turn
the police are present on a regular basis involving themselves in their every con-
cerns, are those living or working in the urban slums. They are the ones who en-
counter the police most often and in the most varied of issues. In India we can ob-
serve in many ways what Neocleous (2006: 23) has considered the original concern
of the term police, namely the question of the poor and the potential threat posed
by the new class of poverty to the emerging structures of private property.
This points towards a general trajectory of Indian state organization that sees
a devaluation of the distributive and productive role of the state and the agencies
concerned with the latter, and an increased importance (also in terms of budgetary
allocations) of state agencies of control and security. The domestic adoption of re-
cent international discourses on security (e.g. the war on terror) have made possi-
ble the expansion of executive powers in various legal reforms, and has thus recon-
figured the relations between different state agencies.
Histories of such state-configurations will provide also a denser picture of
state organization than dichotomies like that of the weak vs. the strong state can
provide. Only then can we conclude about the influence of different state models or

29
ECKERT, BEHRENDS , DAFINGER | GOVERNANCE AND THE STATE

state situations on local modes of governance, and the relations between govern-
mental regimes and specific organizations of the state system.

Conclusion

The concept of governance provides us with an analytical tool to examine the

changing character of states and the increasing impact of national and transnation-
al organizations that have become a major issue in social anthropological research.
Existing approaches are only partially apt to explain and describe the heterogeneity
of governmental regimes and their effect on social life. A concept of governance that
can be made useful for comparative anthropological research focuses on various
loci of capacities of steering and ordering, and on the processes that constitute such
capacities. It examines the relations between and interactions of different organiza-
tions that co-operate in, compete over, or operate autonomously in the administra-
tion of allocation and distribution of rights and resources. It traces the impact of
governmental categories on social organization. The strength of a (social) anthro-
pological approach to governance is that it allows to relate a micro-level study with
an analysis of trans-nationally produced policies and to describe specific govern-
mental regimes as the result of intended and unintended consequences of the inter-
actions of different actors within local, national or global political arenas.

Notes

1
http://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de/projekte/StatesatWork_neu.html
2
ibid
3
http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-developmentindicators?cid= GP
D_WDI

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The authors are former senior research fellows at the Max-Planck Institute for So-
cial Anthropology, Halle.

Julia Eckert is Professor for Political Anthropology at the University of Bern,

Switzerland. She specializes in legal anthropology, the anthropology of the modern
state, conflict theory, and social movements. Her current research interests are in
the anthropology of crime and punishment; changing notions of responsibility and
liability; security and citizenship.
Andrea Behrends is an assistant professor in anthropology at the University of
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Andreas Dafinger is a social anthropologist and has worked on local politics and de-
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Economics of conflict, looks into the politics of ethnic conflict in the development
context.

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