• Login
    View Item 
    •   OpenDocs Home
    • Institute of Development Studies Research Repository
    • IDS Research
    • View Item
    •   OpenDocs Home
    • Institute of Development Studies Research Repository
    • IDS Research
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Informal Local Governance Institutions: What They Do and Why They Matter

    Thumbnail
    Download
    Main article (537.6Kb)
    Date
    2016-05-09
    Author
    Khan Mohmand, Shandana
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Impact
    Abstract
    There is growing scholarly and policy awareness of the fact that public authority is rarely exercised only by the state. In fact, a host of actors and institutions – some visible and recognised, others invisible and less obvious – exercise authority over and regulate the everyday life of local populations across large parts of the world, with important implications for public policy. While we recognise more and more that such actors and institutions take on various governance-related functions within local communities, our understanding of the role that they play is fairly limited and, possibly because of this, our discomfort with them is often fairly high. This paper represents an effort to deal with this gap. It is led by a central puzzle – as the incidence of electoral democracy has increased across the world, we would expect to see an accompanying formalisation of governance through the consolidation of public authority within institutions of the state. This has not happened. Instead, we find that the role and importance of informal local institutions that take on governance functions has increased and that they are a central component of ‘multicentric’ governance in large parts of the world. Why is this so and how do these informal institutions sustain and perpetuate the local public authority that they exercise across multiple domains? I provide a number of explanations for the persistence of such institutions in large parts of South Asia, Africa and the Western Balkans. Our interest in these informal local institutions is practical and policy-oriented, and I use empirical evidence from a decade of primary research in South Asia and the Western Balkans to draw a boundary around a set of institutions that we call informal local governance institutions (ILGIs).
    URI
    https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/11587
    Is part of series
    IDS Working Paper;468
    Rights holder
    Institute of Development Studies
    Rights details
    http://www.ids.ac.uk/files/dmfile/IDSOpenDocsStandardTermsOfUse.pdf
    Collections
    • IDS Research [1594]

    About OpenDocs | OpenDocs Policy | Help | Contact Us | Send Feedback | Disclaimer and Cookies
     

     

    Browse

    All of OpenDocsCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Statistics

    Most Popular ItemsStatistics by CountryMost Popular Authors

    About OpenDocs | OpenDocs Policy | Help | Contact Us | Send Feedback | Disclaimer and Cookies