| Chapter 1: | Jamaican Governance and Citizen Politics in Context |
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and transparency, protect the environment, and create room for greater citizen participation. By definition, then, the capacity of a state to adequately meet these expectations is what defines good governance in the mind of the average citizen.
Although these variables represent a good yardstick by which to assess the performance (and nonperformance) of the state, they are essentially limited on two counts. First, by privileging the state as a provider, it is assumed that governance resides exclusively with the state and its institutions. In its most generic interpretation, governance is the exercise of political, economic, and administrative authority in the management of a country’s affairs at all levels (United Nations Development Programme, 1997, p. 5). Political management accords monopoly power to the state but insinuates that governance is also taking place at other levels besides that of the state. Indeed, drawing on the pluralist paradigm of world order, the territorial state is today increasingly seen as just one among many sites of social relations and authority (Collins, 2004; B. Ferguson, 2003; Mason, 2005; Rapley, 2006; Rosenau, 1990; Strange, 1996). Based on this notion of “scattered hegemonies” (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994), institutions as wide ranging as those of global governance to the transnational third sector—religious movements, social movements, civic associations, indigenous or tribal groups, and criminal organizations—represent public and private alternatives to sovereign state authority. In short, authority alternatives can be located just about anywhere that human groups interact and make rules. These authority alternatives have the potential to not only contest the state but also undermine its authority and, in some cases, oust it.
Second, the recent incorporation by the United Nations of the private sector (the market) and civil society in contemporary processes of governance or in power sharing arrangements with the state also reflects the current widening of the definition of governance (United Nations Development Programme, 1997). Governance is hence understood as the complex mechanisms, processes, and institutions through which citizens and groups articulate their interests, mediate their differences, and exercise their legal rights and obligations