Governance

The establishment of effective, transparent, accountable and democratic governance is considered a fundamental prerequisite to sustainable human development. In most developing countries, the “sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs” is faced with enormous challenges.

Particularly in Africa, effective governance was historically undermined by colonialism which disrupted traditional authorities, eroded existing balances of power, intercepted locally-owned social transformation, and yet did not establish new sustainable political systems. Many of these post-independence states remained weak or “virtual” from the start, lacking national consolidation, territorial penetration and effective executive bodies. During the cold war, these states were artificially nurtured by the superpowers, rendering local accountability and service delivery negligible. When external support particularly to African regimes faltered in the early 1990s, some opened up to the difficult path of democratisation, while others turned to only formal democracies or outright authoritarian rule, and a few collapsed.

Disbanded into an unwanted independence, the post-Soviet republics of Central Asia faced multiple challenges. They were challenged to build new state structures, to halt the decline in economic performance as well as in the educational and health sector, to clamp social fissures inherited or covered up by the Soviet regime and to redefine their interrelations. Generally speaking, conditions in and between the Central Asian countries deteriorated in all these areas and governments turned more or less authoritarian. Fighting in the Ferghana valley and the civil war in Tajikistan demonstrated that some successor states were on the verge of collapse and are still prone to crises, while the Afghan government collapsed completely and was replaced by warlordism, established in countless local fiefdoms.

On balance, governance in most of these fragile or collapsed states remains ineffective and overburdened with western notions of institutionalism. Informal networks, party cadres, traditional authorities, business cartels, warlords and other “big men” often hold the real power behind or next to the state. This has not seldomly resulted in the emergence of “hybrids” of formal and informal governance.

Conceptually, the research group combines two approaches. It examines governance with a marked focus on its actual evolution, process and delivery on all relevant levels. This is complemented with research on institutional arrangements for power sharing and democratisation, ranging from constitutional rights and electoral systems to various forms of autonomy, federalism and decentralisation. Our functional differentiation evolves around the security, political, administrative, and economic dimensions of governance. We place particular emphasis on the interdependencies and compatibility between the local, provincial/sub-national, national, regional and global level of governance. “Institutional bricolage”, especially between traditional and state authorities at any given level, is a key issue of our ongoing research.

On the conceptual level, the group is engaged in current debates on Human Security, Structural Stability and Good Governance. Special efforts are made to conceptualise governance under conditions of state failure, state collapse and in post-war societies.
Our empirical governance research covers diverse contexts in Central Asia and Sub-Sahara Africa. Despite differences in quality and scope, governance in all of these settings is confronted with a latent if not manifest tendency towards a violent conduct of politics. This leads the group to implicitly focus on security dimensions of governance, particularly the maintenance of a legitimate monopoly of force, rule of law and justice.
Beyond mere research, the research group is involved in policy advisory to government institutions, political foundations, NGOs and other research partners in the field of democratisation. Furthermore, the group applies and gains expertise in the course of election monitoring and observation missions in a variety of countries.

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