The notion of ‘governance’ has now firmly replaced the notion of ‘government’ (the latter understood as top-down administration of society by a state staffed by ‘government officials’). Indeed, ‘governance’ has become the central normative foundation that guides people-oriented modern development – and so in Pakistan as well. A rational, secular, citizens-oriented, participatory and democratic modern nation state (staffed by ‘public servants’) is seen as the core backbone for a functioning and effective system to deliver state services, for transparency and accountability beyond corruption, for broad-based economic growth, and for securing peoples’ livelihood needs. Therefore, many attempts were and are being undertaken by the state, by civil society organisations and many international donors to improve relations between state and citizens (e.g. through decentralisation, participation), to broad-base development planning (e.g. stakeholder involvements; round-tables, consultation processes), to strengthen transparency (e.g. making judiciary more independent), or even to involve communities directly in the day-to-day management of the country’s productive assets (e.g. joint forest management; water users associations). All these efforts involve the development of, and agreeing on institutions, i.e. rules, regulations, and adequate enforcement mechanisms.
The present paper fully supports these efforts at modernising the relations between state and citizens. However, it also realises the challenges faced in improving ‘governance’ in Pakistan (and for that matter in many countries of South Asia). Research and media continuously report on the failure of state service delivery (e.g. in  case of emergencies like the recent floods; in everyday fields like schooling), the repeated failure of local governance structures, the shallowness of ‘stakeholder involvements’, the non-representativeness of modern civil society, or the donor-driven-ness of many governance-related measures. Why do these problems exist? Can they be solved by some technical or managerial interventions? The present paper argues that to answer this question, a deeper analysis of the meaning and implications of ‘governance’, beyond a purely instrumental reading of governance, is of utmost importance, and a crucial theme for contemporary social science.
Therefore, this paper takes the notion of ‘governance’ not as a normative fact, but as an analytical category, referring to the analysis of  the ‘complex process through which a plurality of societal actors aims to formulate and achieve common objectives by mobilizing and deploying a diversity of ideas, rules, and resources’ (Torfing 2010, emphasis UG). ‘Governance’ as an analytical category allows to ask for the processes (or lack of processes) through which societal actors (or only a selected few among them) formulate common (or partisan) objectives. Such an analysis is expected to throw light on why well-intended efforts at improving governance fail.
To illustrate this analytical approach, empirical insights gained by the author and members of the Pakistan Research Group around rural development, decentralisation, and natural resource use in the Malakand region of North-West Pakistan are used. Empirical findings highlight, among others, the disjuncture between governance as practiced, and ground realities. The paper details how developmental objectives are being formulated by far-away bureaucracies in conjunction with international donors (using a language of governance that reflects a contemporary neo-liberal and global understanding of state-society relations). The resulting plans and measures, though, are detached from the political-economic realities experienced by people at the local level. First, these plans and measures rarely reach even the ‘local state’ (Fuller and Harriss 2001, referring to the representatives of the state at the local level, e.g. foresters, agricultural extension staff). Second, many local people not only see their aspirations bypassed by the state’s plans and measures (as they were not consulted, or because their customary resource rights are ignored), but – as a consequence – they even fail to perceive of themselves as ‘citizens’. ‘Citizens’, though, are a fundamental prerequisite for modern ‘governance’, as is a ‘state’ that is accessible to people.
Based on these empirical insights, the paper argues that any technical or managerial efforts at improving governance (as for example advocated for by many international donors) will fail as long as the underlying preconditions are not addressed, i.e. the relation between ‘people’ and ‘the state’ – relations not according to a detached global discourse, but the concrete historical and political realities of Pakistan.
References:
Fuller C.J., Harriss J. 2001, ‘For an anthropology of the modern Indian state’, The everyday state & society in modern India, C.J. Fuller and V. Benei (eds. 2001), Social Science Press, New Delhi, India.

Torfing, Jacob 2010, ‘Governance’, Encyclopaedia of Political Theory, SAGE Publications online edition, <http://www.sage ereference.com/politicaltheory/Article_n191.html> accessed on 10 June 2011