12 November 1998

Challenges and prospects of governance

by Pierre Calame

1.	The development of new forms of governance will be the foremost challenge of the next century.

2.	Traditional forms and exercise of democratic governance are being questioned throughout the world. Public action by the central government is the most affected by this crisis, as attested by the concomitant decentralisation and regional building movements across the world. This crisis has an impact on both action methods and the scale at which public action takes place.

3.	At all levels, the challenge of governance is to develop both more solidarity and interdependence, and more autonomy and diversity. The mechanisms used to achieve this can be likened to the “construction set of governance”.

4.	The policies used to transform action by the central government have generally failed for two reasons:

•	they are not conducted within a long-term framework even though they are designed to bring about a cultural change;
•	they aim at strengthening the duality between meaning and action, between political responsibility and administrative responsibility, thereby worsening the evil instead of healing it.

5.	Faced with these shortcomings, it was believed that technical modernisation would offer a viable solution.

6.	It is necessary to develop new types of relations between public action and society, based on the idea that the central government is part of society and does not limit itself to exercising its power over society. This is the sine qua non needed to make the authorities genuine partners of other economic agents at all levels of society.

7.	To nurture such a partnership, it will be necessary to:

•	assume that the know-how built up by the government authorities in the performance of their tasks helps make the world “intelligible”, and should be put at the service of the entire society;
•	lay the groundwork for a genuine dialogue with other players instead of talks with dignitaries only;
•	learn to run projects with other players and therefore to prefer strategies to structures, to distinguish between genuine projects and false partnerships built on mandatory co-ordination, and to build common representations and prospects instead of confronting diverging interests.

8.	Currently, public action mainly limits itself to laying down rules and standards. This amounts to an obligation of means. This is not the way to reconcile unity with diversity. It would be better to call for a obligation related to the results.

9.	The more complex a problem, the more important it becomes to work out satisfactory solutions based on democratic conditions and the less important are traditional mechanisms of choice between alternatives: it is necessary to shift from a procedural democracy to a process democracy.

10.	In the current globalised environment, the idea of autonomy, even autarky of local territories, becomes meaningless. By contrast, the prevailing social, economic, environmental and political crises make territorial management increasingly important: the territory is the basic building block of future governance.

11.	Traditionally, reflection on governance focused on governance within a given territory. Today, no major problem of our society can be treated at a single level. The links between levels of governance are becoming the key issue. The principle of active subsidiarity is the concrete tool needed to manage such links: unity constraints at any given level are reflected in obligations related to the results vis-à-vis every other level.

12.	The application of the principle of active subsidiarity has a significant impact on the practice of governance:

•	the power sharing principle laid down in French decentralisation laws needs to be replaced by the idea of shared responsibility. For example, as regards the struggle against exclusion, such shared responsibility can be reflected concretely in “local pacts” for employment and social cohesion;
•	for civil servants, the duty of relevance will become more important than the duty of obedience;
•	for the various players in society, implementation of the principle of active subsidiarity will make it necessary to develop discussion networks in order to circulate experience and to enable everyone to draw their own conclusions;
•	this principle also brings about another perception of relations between local and global situations.