Enabling people to govern themselves(The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2:Governance 
Prelims level: Sustainable Development Goals
Mains level: Functions and responsibilities of the Union and the States, issues and challenges pertaining to the federal structure, devolution of powers and finances up to local levels and challenges therein

Context: 

• Governance systems at all levels, i.e. global, national, and local, have experienced stress as a fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. 
• Architectural flawshave been revealed in their design. 
• Breakdowns in many subsystems had to be managed at the same time — in health care, logistics, business, finance, and administration. 
• The complexity of handling so many subsystems at the same time have overwhelmed governance. 
• Lockdowns to make it easier to manage the health crisis have made it harder to manage economic distress simultaneously. 
• In fact, the diversion of resources to focus on the threat to life posed by COVID-19 has increased vulnerabilitiesto death from other diseases, and even from malnutrition in many parts of India.

A mismatch is evident:

• Human civilisation advances with the evolution of better institutions to manage public affairs. 
• Institutions of parliamentary democracy, for example, and the limited liability business corporation, did not exist 400 years ago. 
• Institutions of global governance, such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, did not exist even 100 years ago. 
• These institutions were invented to enable human societies to produce better outcomes for their citizens. 
• They have been put through a severe stress test now by the global health and economic crises. 
• The test has revealed a fundamental flaw in their design. 
• There is a mismatch in the design of governance institutions at the global level (and also in India) with the challenges they are required to manage. 

Interconnected issues: 

• The global challenges listed in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, which humanity must urgently address now, are systemic challenges. 
• All these systemic problems are interconnected with each other. 
• Environmental, economic, and social issues cannot be separated from each other and solved by experts in silos or by agencies focused only on their own problems. 
• A good solution to one can create more problems for others, as government responses to the novel coronavirus pandemic have revealed.
• Even if experts in different disciplines could combine their perspectives and their silo-ed solutions at the global level, they will not be able to solve the systemic problems of the SDGs. 
• Because, their solutions must fit the specific conditions of each country, and of each locality within countries too, to fit the shape of the environment and the condition of society there. 
• Solutions for environmental sustainability along with sustainable livelihoods cannot be the same in Kerala and Ladakh, or in Wisconsin and Tokyo. 
• Solutions must be local. 
• Moreover, for the local people to support the implementation of solutions, they must believe the solution is the right one for them, and not a solution thrust upon them by outside experts. 
• Therefore, they must be active contributors of knowledge for, and active participants in, the creation of the solutions. 
• Moreover, the knowledge of different experts — about the environment, the society, and the economy — must come together to fit realities on the ground.

A case for local systems:

• Governance of the people must be not only for the people. It must be by the people too. 
• Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, in 2009, had developed the principles for self-governing communities from research on the ground in many countries, including India.
• There are scientific explanations for why local systems solutions are the best. 
• Indian Constitution requires to devolve power to citizens in villages and towns for them to govern their own affairs.
• Several Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers were involved at some time in their careers with the evolution of community-based public health and the self-help group movements in Andhra Pradesh. 
• These officers see their role as ‘deliverers of good government’. 

Role of the district collector:

• Before Independence, role of District collector was to collect revenues and to maintain law and order. 
• After Independence, the Indian state took up a large welfare role, District Collector also became the District ‘Deliverer’ of government largesse. 
• It strengthened the image of a paternalist government taking care of its wards. 
• The District Deliverer’s task became complicated when the numbers of government schemes multiplied — some designed by the central government, and others by State government. 
• The schemes were managed by their own ministries and departments in the capitals, with local functionaries of those departments as the points of contact with citizens. 
• At a meeting of IAS officers in 2013 as to understand why government schemes were not producing enough benefits for people on the ground, an officer presented a list of over 300 schemes that were operational in her district. 
• The citizens did not know how many schemes there were and what they were entitled to.
• The pandemic has not passed yet, but evidence is emerging that some States in India, such as Kerala, have weathered the stormbetter than others.
• And some countries, such as Vietnam and Taiwan, better than others too. 
• A hypothesis is that those States and countries in which local governance was stronger have done much better than others. 
• This is worthy of research by social and political scientists looking for insights now into design principles for good governance systems that can solve problems that the dominant theory of government is not able to solve.

 Conclusion:

• The dominant theory in practice of good government is ‘government of the people, by the government, for the people’. 
• This has been the prevalenttheory in most States of India for too long. 
• The government has to support and enable people to govern themselves, to realise the vision of ‘government of the people, for the people, by the people’. 
• Which is also the only way humanity will be able to meet the ecological and humanitarian challenges looming over it in the 21st century.

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Prelims Questions:

Q.1) With reference to the OneWeb, consider the following statements:

1. OneWeb is a global communications company founded by Greg Wyler. 
2. The company is headquartered in Paris. 

Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

(a) 1 only
(b) 2 only
(c) Both 1 and 2
(d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer: A

Mains Questions:

Q.1)What are the flaws in both domestic and international governance institutions? What are the challenges they are facing and also explain its remedies?