International Development seminar

Governance is a core concern of development, but this has tended to be focused on concerns with promoting state governance practices – the promotion of ‘good’ government in the interest of building and maintaining national regulatory structures that enable political and economic stability. Governance at the smaller scale, of organisations or enterprises, has not been given so much consideration.

This paper explores the importance of governance practice in development initiatives at the local scale.

The paper draws on 4 case studies of initiatives intended to support rural livelihoods associated with small scale fisheries in Solomon Islands and Timor Leste. National-level governance has been given considerable attention in both contexts following international intervention to address conflict in the early 2000’s, but there has been less attention paid to how local development initiatives intersect with the complex governance environments of both contexts, despite recognition that doing so is an important aspect of development strategy aiming at longer term security.

This paper proposes that the idea of plural governance could help to make sense of the complex governance environments in which rural livelihood enterprises exist. In the case studies we encounter several governance cultures at once, with overlapping jurisdictions and often contradictory norms and expectations.

Harnessing language of plurality assists us to sidestep the trap of normative viewpoints which insist that there is a ‘good’ and a bad’ way to govern, and under which many customary modes of governance are often labelled as undesirable or worse, as corruption.

Our investigation highlights some of the challenges of negotiating complex governance environments at the local scale, as well as drawing out lessons for how future rural livelihoods programs might prepare for engagement in these complex environments.