Governance in Post-Conflict Settings

This paper explores the major streams of thought on governance and the way this concept has been implemented in state collapse and post-confl ict reconstruction settings. Ever since the term emerged in development thinking, governance has been translated by dominant offi cial and academic literature into sets of neutral sounding technical functions describing administrative effectiveness of state institutions. In contrast to these highly management-oriented policy discourses, state-society literature presents a more political or power-oriented approach. This alternative stream of writing focuses largely on developing a better understanding of the different state-society relations and the way in which power and authority are structured in various social contexts. In this perspective, a growing number of scholars portray war and situations of state collapse as systems of social transformation, which can result in alternative forms of legitimacy and authority. This paper argues, however, that it are exactly these forms of informal local governance that are often neglected, forgotten or not even noticed when state reconstruction and general development projects are put into practice