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This course enables students to explore the existing models of governance and understand how the concept of governance relates to corruption, good governance, clientelism, state capacity, rules of law and informal governance. In addition to reading academic literature, we will be looking at case studies of informal governance, both historic and contemporary.

In their 2012 Handbook of Informal Governance, Thomas Christiansen and Christine Neuhold have assembled a global collection of work on informal governance, understood in the vein of Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky’s conception of informal institutions as ‘socially shared rules, usually unwritten, that are created, communicated and enforced outside officially sanctioned channels’ (Helmke and Levitsky 2004: 727). They note that contributors attribute the adjective ‘informal’ to politics, arrangements, networks, institutions, organisations, norms, rules, activity or influence and often view the ‘informal’ by analogy with the formal. There are at least three separate usages of the ‘informal’ by the authors: first, the designation of the framework within which decisions are taken (institutions, organisations, networks); second, the identification of the process or procedure through which policies are made as being informal (politics, arrangements, activity); and, third, the classification of the outcome of any such process as being informal (rules, norms, influence) (Christiansen and Neuhold 2012). In our cases of informal governance, we observe that informal governance performs parallel functions of distributing resources, recruiting people, setting goals and rules, enforcing checks and balances and maintaining values (Ledeneva 2014; Baez-Camargo and Ledeneva 2017). The patterns of informal governance cannot be presumed to be a hidden part of the formal government. Informal governance has a ‘bottom-up’ logic (Bourdier’s le sens pratique) that eludes a researcher looking for analogies with formal governance exercised ‘top-down’.

Informal practices and norms often arise out of necessity, when scarcity of resources or the pronounced power imbalances ignite the creativity and agency of individuals to find practical solutions to their everyday problems. The functionality of informal solutions to pressing problems leads to their entrenched character. From the point of view of macro-level development outcomes, indigenous coping mechanisms become problematic if they promote the informal re-distribution of resources along particularistic criteria.

Frequently informal governance is associated with illicit or even illegal practices, especially corruption. The conventional assumption is that the problem lies in the incomplete implementation of reforms following the internationally recognised best practices, leading to continued efforts to tighten legal sanctions and strengthen accountability mechanisms. Recent research has uncovered a more complex picture where informal practices used by networks of political elites, business interests and citizens supersede formal legal prescriptions and, furthermore, legal reforms themselves are appropriated and utilised in informal ways. Patterns of informal governance include co-optation of supporters through distribution of rent seeking opportunities, control of adversaries by selective law enforcement, and camouflage of corrupt deals under a façade of official commitment to corruption control.

Informal governance however, does not need to involve illicit actions. In fact, social practices that convey feelings of gratitude, well wishing, hospitality or condolence are key to maintaining a harmonious social fabric and are not necessarily linked to poverty and inequality. The empirical evidence, however, indicates that in many contexts the enactment of such social practices -for example in the form of gift giving or the exchange of favours – seamlessly crosses over the public/private divide and in doing so actually throws into question the validity of conventionally accepted dichotomies that political science and other disciplines routinely utilise to frame major social, political and economic issues.

Our understanding of informal governance stems from the comparative analysis of empirical work in East Africa, Central Asia and Russia. Our evidence suggests that in most different settings identified patterns of informal governance are similar, widespread, and often perceived as more binding than the formal legal frameworks by state and non-state actors alike. Indeed, to all intents and purposes these constitute informal governance regimes that cut across variation in context. Thus, patterns of co-optation, control and camouflage can be found in all our cases. However, such informal patterns are often contextually bound, rarely explicitly articulated, hardly ever reflected in policy making but confirmed through the continued enactment of particular practices. These practices serve as bridges between formal and informal normative frameworks and are associated with a high degree of ambivalence: they mean one thing for participants and something else to onlookers. Being intertwined with relationships of reciprocity and trust, practices of informal governance is an outcome of the contradictory demands upon the occupants of a formal status. A theorisation of informal governance involves problematizing the ambivalent nature of these practices and finding the ways to incorporate the workings of the double standards and the agents’ perspective on informal governance. The key question for policy-makers is how to use the informal governance potential for achieving their goals, for supporting inclusive governance regimes and subverting those characterised by exclusion and particularity.

As part of the course, students work on contemporary literature on informal governance, concepts and theories of governance and national level governance indicators, monitored by the World Bank since 1996. These indicators include measuring six dimensions of governance: voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption.