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- Convenors:
-
Anuradha Joshi
(IDS)
Katrina Barnes (Oxfam Great Britain)
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- Formats:
- Papers Mixed
- Stream:
- Governance
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 29 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Understanding public authority and legitimacy is an emerging challenge for strengthening inclusive governance in fragile and conflict affected contexts. This panel focuses on understanding what public authority means for people's lives and our thinking about how governance 'happens' in reality.
Long Abstract:
Estimates suggest that by 2030, more than eighty percent of the world's poorest will be living in contexts characterized by fragility, violence and conflict, in which they experience governance from and through multiple sources of public authority beyond the official state. We know a range of non-state actors matter: armed groups, rival political factions, religious leaders, informal/traditional institutions. Transitions from such contexts to relatively stable, institutionalized states is fraught with challenges for people as well as institutions of authority. This panel invites paper presentations from researchers and practitioners exploring the issue of complex governance environments: specifically, how is public authority generated and legitimized in these settings. What does authority look like in these settings? What kind of governance practices play out where public authority is contested and diverse? How accountable are non-state forms of public authority? Which forms are seen as legitimate? What conditions enable people to act collectively and shape the social contract? Papers or short visual presentations are particularly welcome if they are based on empirical cases or speak to the conceptual challenges of working with diverse set of public authorities in these contexts. We also encourage short stories, films, poems and other media that offer new insights on these issues.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 29 June, 2021, -Alex Shankland (Institute of Development Studies) Salvador Forquilha (Institute for Social and Economic Studies - IESE) Lucio Posse (Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Económicos - IESE) Egidio Chaimite (IDS (Institute of Development Studies), University of Sussex)
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on ‘governance diaries’ research in Mozambique to examine how a long history of armed violence has shaped the sources of authority and legitimacy and the meanings of empowerment and accountability mobilised by citizens seeking greater responsiveness in the provision of public goods.
Paper long abstract:
Over the past fifty years, the history of Mozambique has been marked by recurrent cycles of armed violence. From the anticolonial war in the early 1960s, through the civil war between the late 1970s and early 1990s, to the post-electoral political conflicts and the recent jihadist insurgency, armed violence has been one of the most present features in the process of state building in Mozambique. As a result, the path of violence has deeply affected institutions and public authority not only from the point of view of legitimacy, but also with regard to public goods provision, as people experience governance from diverse sources, beyond state institutions. Drawing on extensive field work in two provinces (Tete and Nampula), this paper explores the use of governance diaries methodology to investigate the interactions between poor households and authority, probing on how they view the multiple institutions that govern their lives and how they conceptualize authority itself. It examines the implications of the limited opportunities for the poorest and most marginalised to secure direct access to holders of public authority, and their consequent reliance on a range of intermediaries. It also looks into the sources of authority and legitimacy and the meanings of empowerment and accountability and interrogates the way empowerment and accountability are mobilized in fragile, conflict and violence-affected settings like Mozambique.
Getu Demeke Alene (Wageningen University and Research) Han van Dijk (Wageningen University) Jessica Duncan (Wageningen University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper shows how state governance and development apparatus/practices evolved and consolidated out of the mobilization and deployment of vectors and forces of Somali clanship in the implementation of community-based social protection programme in the Somali pastoral peripheries.
Paper long abstract:
Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) is a “transformative” social protection programme that couples food security with social security. Underpinning PSNP’s “transformative” role is its community-based approach, focusing upon the institutions and values of community to be participatory and responsive to the realities and interests of local communities. PSNP uses community-based targeting and public work activities. These roles, in the nomadic Somali pastoral context, are played by clanship (clan leadersship and/or institutions). However, based on ethnographic fieldwork in three pastoral villages of Ethiopia’s Somali region, this paper, shows how the mobilization and (re)deployment of the vectors and forces of clanship – for the implementation of PSNP – paradoxically opened up spaces for the expansion of conventional state governance and development apparatuses to the Somali peripheries based on the logic of a sedentary order-of-things. Clan leaders – in implementing PSNP – unwittingly, (re)organize their clan governance system in the way it supports the expansion of state bureaucratic power and institutionalization of state governance and development practices. Hence, clanship-based PSNP implementation has become an “effective” technology of extending state power to pastoral peripheries, and of shaping the lifestyles, settlement and livelihood of pastoralists. Instead of being an autonomous way of implementing PSNP, clanship has become a “new effective” mechanism of state control at a distance, that we call ‘government through clanship’.
Fariba Alamgir (University of East Angalia)
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic research focusing on contestations over landed property among the “Bengali settlers” in the Chittagong Hill Tracts region in Bangladesh, the paper reveals actual property practices, dynamic processes of authority and state constitution at the margin.
Paper long abstract:
The Bengali Settlement Programme was implemented as a state-building project and counter-insurgency strategy in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh in 1980s. Bengalis were brought to settle in CHT as loyal citizen of the state during the armed struggle carried out by hill political party for recognition of their land rights and identity. The findings show that although Bengalis received land title from the government, their land titles and property in land are considered not secure. Analysis of land disputes among the Bengalis in a settlement village reveals that property relation within the settler community is contingent on varied forms of rules (statutory and non-statutory), practices and sources of authority (formal and informal). While many land dispute cases are taken to district magistrate court, research shows significant role played by the military authority (at informal military court) and local leaders (at ‘bichar’/ social court) in defining property. It reveals how the leaders’ authority is intricately connected to the army’s approval, their political connection and access to the state institutional actors. It traces, historically, changes and continuities of a militarized land relation in a territory where the state’s control over land is contested. The army exercises informal authority in land control in coalition with the Bengali leaders who were primarily selected by the army authority as a medium to communicate and control the Bengali settler population. The paper highlights the importance of examining military control over land and constitution public authority in property formation in contested spaces.