The age of nonstate governance studies is upon us. Whether focused on insurgent groups, foreign militaries, international organizations, humanitarian actors, or private corporations, an increasing array of studies has begun to probe the contours of governance alongside or without the state.
A variety of scholarly disciplines, including political science, sociology, anthropology, history, economics, and international law, have stepped into the fray. Unsurprisingly, a division of labor has emerged. Drawing on examples from the past, historians have shown how alternate modes of governance coexisted and competed with the consolidated nation-state in the modern era. Political scientists and economists have focused on the performance of these alternate governance arrangements. Anthropologists dwell on the local by examining the interaction between “traditional” modes of social organization and national or international actors from the bottom up. And international law scholars take a top-down approach by focusing on the encounter between nonstate governance actors and international organizations and norms. What is the prognosis on these studies thus far?
To their credit, scholars have productively sought to escape the statist trap that limits the understanding of governance (and, hence, politics itself) to the formal role of governments. Studies have demonstrated that governance is not solely a concern for governments and that a variety of other actors can and do play important roles in “governing” daily life. However, thus far, few have tried to bridge the gap between the various disciplinary silos.
Governance Without a State makes an admirable attempt to do so, drawing on contributions from political science, history, and international law. It is successful in some regards but less so in others. Where it fails is in its inability to place these disciplinary approaches in conversation with each other in order to more fully explore the dynamics of nonstate or mixed forms of governance. As a result, it is unable to adequately capture the interplay of local actors with their national and international counterparts. Why is this important? Regardless of the level at which the nonstate actor of choice is operating—whether transnational like corporations or international organizations or local like insurgents and traditional leaders—governance studies are necessarily tied to the lived experiences of “constituents,” however defined (referred to here as the “governance collective”). But lacking the necessary data to assess the actual effect of nonstate governance on the ground, the volume feels incomplete.
What is missing is any sense of the texture of governance itself. Instead, much of the work focuses on identifying the scope conditions that make governance possible and the modalities that it will take. Less is said about the actual interrelationship between the constituents and the governance system. But understanding the nitty-gritty of negotiation between constituents and governance actors is a necessary next step, one that this edited volume move us toward, even if it does not get us completely there.
A key strength of the volume is its ability to provide workable and useful definitions of the subjects of analysis, specifically, “nonstate governance” and “limited statehood.” In contrast to many studies that presume a consolidated state in which the government enjoys total and uncontested control over territory, as well as the ability to make and enforce decisions, this one points to the inherent limits of statehood. This is a key advance away from the dominant mode of thinking about politics in much of the world, which tends to be framed by the weak/failed/collapsed state literature.
Limited statehood refers to politics “in those parts of the country in which central authorities (governments) lack the ability to implement and enforce rules or in which the legitimate monopoly over the means of violence is lacking, at least temporarily” (p. 5). The volume demonstrates that this is not a historical accident nor limited to the developing world, but potentially an omnipresent if understudied phenomenon globally. The authors point out that states ranging from Somalia to Brazil meet their definition of limited statehood, a condition covering fully 80% of the human population.
In the authors' usage, governance refers to “institutionalized modes of social coordination to produce and implement collectively binding rules, or to provide collective goods” through both structural (“institutionalized”) and process dimensions (“modes of social coordination”). As such, governance may refer to steering by the state (“governance by government”), but commonly includes governance via interactive networks of public and private actors (“governance with government”), as well as governance by nonstate actors (“governance without government”) (pp. 9–10). The latter two modes, which entail either a nonhierarchical commingling of public and private actors or just private actors engaged in intentional governance actions, are the focus of the volume.
The question that the authors attempt to answer is this: “Who governs for whom, and how are governance services provided under conditions of weak statehood?” (p. 4). The chapters make two assumptions about the nature of governance in areas of limited statehood. First, it will necessarily involve “non-state actors and non-hierarchical modes of steering including bargaining and forms of competition” (p. 2). And second, governance in areas of limited statehood will be characterized by what they refer to as “multi-level” governance, or the ways in which sovereignty is shared between private and public actors operating at the local, national, regional, and global levels.
In areas of limited statehood, it is impossible to disaggregate varying types of governance actors from the governance outcomes that their self-interested actions produce. Indeed, as my own work on insurgent governance demonstrates, it is the interrelationships of these varying actors that produce the divergent governance outcomes. For example, governance outcomes in rebel-controlled Sudan were shaped by the tense interaction between insurgents and nongovernmental organizations, whereas in Sri Lanka, they were shaped by the fraught cooperation between insurgents and the incumbent state. However, despite a discussion of this dynamic in the opening theoretical chapter, with each chapter focusing on a different category of actor, the volume fails to interweave the actions of different actors operating at multiple levels into a coherent understanding of politics in areas of limited statehood.
In addition, the inclusive interpretation of limited statehood encompasses a wide range of nonstate or mixed-governance practices. Drawing on examples from the text, the maximalist form includes situations such as South Sudan during the war where the state's presence was basically non-existent and non-state actors assumed most if not all governance activities. And its minimalist form includes politics within fairly consolidated states such as South Africa (Tanja Börzel, Adrienne Héritier, Nicole Kranz, and Christian Thauer). In addition, the chapters cover governance by the colonial state (Sebastian Conrad and Marion Stange), transnational regulatory regimes among private corporations in the developed world (Gunnar Folke Schuppert), public private partnerships such as the Global Fund in promoting health outcomes (Andrea Liese and Marianne Beisheim), the role of private capital during debt crises (Henrik Enderlein, Laura von Daniels, and Christoph Trebesch), statebuilding by international organizations (Ulrich Schneckener), and even how international law can promote ‘good’ governance (Bernd Ladwig and Beate Rudolf). But such a catholic approach, while useful in illustrating the extent of this phenomenon, also waters down the coherency of the analysis, forcing comparisons between states and governance constellations with drastically different levels of capacity.
With such an inclusive standard, I was often left wondering why any state was excluded from the analysis. Even within fully consolidated states, governance is not limited solely to the purview of the state. Indeed, robust nonstate regulatory regimes can and do emerge within countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. For example, in the United States, conflict among local, state, and federal authorities has left the regulation of marijuana open to the initiatives of growers and dispensaries.
The authors have little interest in presenting and testing hypotheses on non-state governance performance, and those chapters that attempt to do so illustrate the inherent difficulty of gathering and analyzing data on nonstate governance. Indeed, the very vagueness that defines modalities of governance in areas of limited statehood makes it hard to gather data on the quality of governance provided. More dramatically, it makes it difficult to define who the governance collective is or even designate the correct actors on whom to focus in assessing a particular governance network. Instead, the strength of the volume lies in both its definitional and conceptual work, which will undoubtedly influence how future scholars talk about and, ideally, test hypotheses, on the ways that nonstate and mixed governance actually function in practice.
