What governance means: its definitions, its levels, and how it differs from government, administration and management

What this chapter is for

The last chapter told the story of the word. This one teaches what the word means today, which is the first thing almost every question in this paper expects you to say. You will learn the definitions an examiner rewards, who gave each and when, and what each one includes and leaves out. You will also learn the parts that every definition is built from (the people and bodies who take part, the rules they follow, and the way decisions are made and carried out), the ways governance is organised, the levels at which it happens, and how it differs from government, administration and management. By the end you should be able to define governance from a named source, draw its parts, and set it beside the neighbouring words without mixing them up.

The chapter is long, so here is its map. The first three sections set out what governance is and the definitions in order. The next three take it apart into its actors, rules and processes, its six arenas and its three modes. Then come its levels, the line between governance and its neighbours, and corporate governance. The last part brings the idea to Pakistan, gives its critics and clears up the common confusions.

Defining governance is the most common single task in this paper. CE-2018 asked you to “define and describe Governance”, CE-2019 to set public governance beside corporate governance, CE-2023 to distinguish governance from administration and management, and CE-2016 to define global governance.¹

Before you start

The words

• Governance. The way decisions about a shared matter are made and carried out, by whom, under what rules, and how those who decide answer for it. This chapter is about its definitions.
• Government. The offices that hold the state’s power: in Pakistan the Federal Government of the Prime Minister and the Federal Ministers, and a Provincial Government in each province.
• Actor. Anyone who takes part in a decision or in carrying it out: a ministry, a company, a union, a newspaper, a citizen.
• Formal rule. A written rule with the state’s force behind it: the Constitution, an Act of Parliament, a regulation, a court order.
• Informal rule. An unwritten rule people still follow: a custom, a habit of office, a family or tribal expectation, a way things are “always done”.
• Public realm. The space where public decisions are made and argued over, which belongs to no single person.
• Civil society. The organised life of citizens outside the government and the market: associations, trusts, unions, professional bodies, the press.
• Network. A set of organisations, public and private, that work on a problem together without one of them commanding the rest.
• Hierarchy. An order in which each level commands the one below it, as a ministry commands its departments.

The places

• The Federation, the provinces and the local governments of Pakistan, the three tiers that the Constitution creates.
• The United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF and the UNDP, the international bodies whose definitions you will quote.
• The European Union, where scholars first studied governance that runs across many levels at once.

The story in plain words

1. Governance is broader than government. It covers everyone who shapes a public decision, not only the ministers.
2. Each body that uses the word defines it for its own purpose. The World Bank stresses how a country’s resources are managed. The UNDP stresses authority at every level. Scholars stress rules and networks.
3. Every definition is made from the same three parts. They are the actors, the rules, and the way decisions are made and carried out.
4. Governance can run through orders from the top, through markets, or through networks of partners.
5. It happens at many levels at once, from a village council to the United Nations.
6. Governance sets the rules. Policy-making chooses what to do within them. Administration carries policy out. Management runs a single office or project.

1. What governance is, seen in one school

Take one government primary school in a village in southern Punjab. On paper it belongs to the provincial School Education Department. The Constitution’s Article 25A makes it the state’s duty to provide free and compulsory education to every child from five to sixteen, the provincial Cabinet approved the school budget, and the department appointed the head teacher and the staff.¹⁸ That is government, and it is the strongest force in the school’s life.

Now look at who else decides whether the children actually learn. The district’s education officer decides how often the school is inspected and how quickly a vacant post is filled. A school council of parents and local people may decide how a small grant is spent on repairs. An NGO may run an evening reading programme. A private publisher prints the textbooks. The local member of the assembly may press for a new classroom, or for a favoured teacher’s transfer. The parents decide whether a daughter keeps coming after the age of ten. Some of these people act under written rules. Others act under unwritten ones, such as the custom that a teacher’s posting is arranged through a word in the right ear.

Whether that school works is a question of governance. It is not answered by naming the department. It is answered by looking at all of these hands, the rules written and unwritten that guide them, and the way their decisions are made and carried out. When a newspaper writes that “governance failed” in a district’s schools, it means exactly this. The whole arrangement did not deliver, even if every official did their narrow job.

From this one school you can already draw the three things every definition of governance contains. There are actors, the people and bodies who take part. There are rules, formal and informal, that shape what they do. There are processes, the way decisions are reached and then carried out, or not carried out. The section on the parts of governance takes each of these in turn. Before that, the next two sections give the definitions you must know, and the main ways scholars use the word.

2. The definitions, one by one

There is no single agreed definition of governance. Each body that uses the word has defined it for its own work, and an examiner expects you to know the main ones, to quote them exactly with their owner and year, and to say what each one stresses. They are given here in roughly the order in which they appeared.

The lenders and the United Nations

The World Bank’s definition of 1992 is the one most often quoted. Governance is “the manner in which power is exercised in the management of a country’s economic and social resources for development”.² The last chapter told how the Bank reached this wording and why it left out the form of political regime. Notice what it stresses. It speaks of power, and of the management of a country’s resources. It is a definition made by a lender, about the use of money and assets.

The Commission on Global Governance gave the widest definition in 1995. Governance is “the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs”.³ It names no state at all. A village managing its pond, a company managing its shareholders’ money and the world managing the ozone layer all fit inside it.

The United Nations Development Programme published its definition in January 1997.⁴

Governance can be seen as the exercise of economic, political and administrative authority to manage a country’s affairs at all levels. It comprises the mechanisms, processes and institutions through which citizens and groups articulate their interests, exercise their legal rights, meet their obligations and mediate their differences.

The UNDP then says governance “has three legs”. Economic governance is the decision-making that affects a country’s economic activities and its relations with other economies. Political governance is “the process of decision-making to formulate policy”. Administrative governance is “the system of policy implementation”.⁴ The UNDP also says plainly that governance “encompasses the state, but it transcends the state by including the private sector and civil society organisations”.⁴ So its definition has three things the World Bank’s lacks. It includes political authority, it reaches “all levels”, and it names the citizens and groups who take part.

The UN’s commission for Asia and the Pacific, UNESCAP, wrote the simplest definition, in a short note that many textbooks reproduce. Governance means “the process of decision-making and the process by which decisions are implemented (or not implemented)”.⁵ The words in brackets matter in a country such as ours. A decision announced and never carried out is also part of governance, and often the largest part. The same note says “Government is one of the actors in governance”, and that the word can be used for corporate, international, national and local governance alike.⁵

The World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators, first published in 1999 and now updated every year, use a different form of words. Governance is “the traditions and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised”.⁶ The stress has moved from the use of power to the lasting rules and customs that stand behind it.

The IMF, in its diagnostic of Pakistan in November 2025, gave its own definition. Governance is “the system of rules, practices, and processes by which a country manages its economic and social resources for development”.⁷ It keeps the World Bank’s focus on a country’s resources, but builds the definition from rules, practices and processes. It adds a warning that fits Pakistan exactly. When corruption becomes deeply entrenched, it “can distort or even replace formal governance systems, effectively becoming the dominant mode of decision-making”.⁷

The scholars

Goran Hyden and Julius Court, writing for the United Nations University’s World Governance Survey in 2002, gave the definition that FPSC’s examiner paraphrased in CE-2018.⁸

Governance refers to the formation and stewardship of the formal and informal rules that regulate the public realm, the arena in which state as well as economic and societal actors interact to make decisions.

Read it in pieces. Formation is the making of rules. Stewardship is looking after them, applying them and changing them when they stop working. The rules are both formal and informal, written laws and unwritten customs. They regulate the public realm, the space where public decisions are made. In that space state, economic and societal actors all take part. Hyden and Court said they chose a definition that “focuses on the importance of rules rather than results”.⁸ Their reason is the best one-line explanation of governance you will find. The old question of politics, Harold Lasswell’s “who gets what, when, and how?”, is now joined by another, “who sets what rules, when, and how?”⁸

Anne Mette Kjær, whose book Governance (2004) is the first title on FPSC’s reading list, sums the scholars up in one sentence. Governance “refers to something broader than government, and it is about steering and the rules of the game.”⁹ Elsewhere in the book she puts it shorter still. Governance “refers to the setting, application, and enforcement of rules.”⁹

R. A. W. Rhodes, the British scholar whose six uses of the word you met in the last chapter, gave his own definition in 1997. Governance “refers to self-organizing, interorganizational networks characterized by interdependence, resource exchange, rules of the game and significant autonomy from the state.”¹⁰ This is the narrowest of the scholars’ definitions in one sense, because it is about networks only, and the broadest in another, because it places governance partly outside the state’s control.

Gerry Stoker, another British scholar, did not give a one-line definition. In 1998 he set out five propositions about what governance involves. It involves “multi-agency partnerships, a blurring of responsibilities between public and non-public sectors, a power dependence between organizations involved in collective action, the emergence of self-governing networks and the development of new governmental tasks and tools.”¹² The first Part-I question of CE-2026 tested the second of these, asking for “a key feature of modern governance”, with “Blurring of boundaries between public and private sectors” among the options.¹

Narrow and broad, side by side

These definitions differ most in how much of governance they place beyond the state. Figure 1 lays them along a line from the narrowest to the broadest.

In an answer, give two definitions from different ends of the line, and say what separates them. “The World Bank (1992) defines governance as the manner in which power is exercised in the management of a country’s economic and social resources for development. The UNDP (1997) widens it to the exercise of economic, political and administrative authority at all levels, through the state, the private sector and civil society.” Two sentences, two owners, two years, and a point of comparison. That is what a definition worth marks looks like.

3. Four ways the word is used

Why are there so many definitions? Hyden and Court gave the clearest answer. Four groups of people took the word up in the 1990s, each for its own work, and each bent it to its own needs.⁸ Knowing the four groups lets you explain the disagreement instead of only listing it.

The first group is public administration. Its scholars noticed that real problems (pollution, a disease, a failing school) no longer fit inside one department’s boundary, and that solving them needs many organisations, public and private, to work together. For them governance is purposeful action “to guide, steer, and control society”, carried out through the patterns that grow up between those organisations.⁸ Rhodes’s networks and Stoker’s partnerships belong here.

The second group is international relations. Its scholars study a world with no government above the states, where order still exists because states agree on rules, treaties and regimes. For them governance is the process by which many actors in the international arena produce new norms and rules for working together.⁸ Global governance belongs here.

The third group is comparative politics, the scholars who compare the political systems of different countries. After the end of communism they studied how countries moved to democracy and made their regimes legitimate. Hyden’s own early definition, in 1992, comes from here. Governance is the “conscious management of regime structures with a view to enhancing the legitimacy of the public realm”.⁸ Here governance means the rules of the political game itself, the constitution and the laws that decide how power is gained and used.

The fourth group is the international development agencies, the World Bank, the UNDP, the ADB and the rest. They adopted the word, Hyden and Court say, “to suit their own programmatic needs”.⁸ They want governance they can measure and improve with a loan or a project.

Hyden and Court arranged the four on two lines. One line runs from governance as steering and control to governance as rules. The other runs from governance as a process that unfolds over time to governance as an activity that someone deliberately does. Figure 2 places the four groups on those lines.

Use this when a question asks why governance is hard to define, or when it asks you to “critically examine” one definition. The World Bank’s definition is a development agency’s, made for steering a country’s resources with loans. A political scientist’s definition is about the rules of the political game. Neither is wrong. They answer different questions.

4. The parts of governance, actors, rules and processes

Every definition above, however worded, is built from three parts. The village school showed all three. This section takes them one at a time, because an answer that names and explains the three parts shows the examiner that you understand the idea and have not merely memorised a sentence.

The first part is the actors. The UNDP groups them into three domains, the state, the private sector and civil society.⁴ The state includes the political and public bodies, from Parliament and the Cabinet to the civil service and the courts. The private sector includes firms of every size, from a bank to a market stall. Civil society includes the citizens’ own organisations, such as associations, unions, trusts, professional bodies and the press. UNESCAP adds a point that every Pakistani reader will recognise. Some actors are informal and some are harmful. It names “kitchen cabinets”, the informal advisers around a leader, and in cities “organized crime syndicates such as the ‘land Mafia’”.⁵ Governance includes them, because they shape decisions, even though good governance tries to remove their influence.

The second part is the rules. Formal rules are written and enforced by the state. They include the Constitution, the laws, the rules of business, the court’s orders. Informal rules are unwritten but just as real. They are customs, family and tribal obligations, and the settled habits of an office. Hyden and Court built their definition around both, and their CE-2018 echo asks you to describe governance as the management of “formal and informal mechanisms”.⁸¹ The two kinds can work together or against each other. A custom of consulting elders before a public decision can strengthen the law’s legitimacy. A custom of appointing relatives can hollow a merit rule out from inside. Pakistan’s Constitution itself recognises the tension. Article 8 declares void “any law, or any custom or usage having the force of law” that is inconsistent with the fundamental rights.¹⁸ The formal rule is set above the informal one, but the informal one is acknowledged to exist.

The third part is the processes, the way decisions are made and then carried out. UNESCAP’s definition is made entirely of this part, the process of decision-making and the process by which decisions are implemented, or not.⁵ The UNDP’s three legs divide it further, into political governance that makes policy and administrative governance that carries it out.⁴ A good answer follows a decision through both stages, because governance often fails between them. A policy announced in Islamabad and never applied in a district is a failure of process, not of the law.

Figure 3 puts the three parts together. Read it as one sentence. Actors, guided by rules, make and carry out decisions through processes.

Accountability, the last box, is not in every definition, but it is in every good answer. Governance asks not only who decides and how, but how those who decide answer for what they did. The chapters on accountability teach it in full.

5. The six arenas where governance happens

Hyden and Court went one step further. They asked where, inside a country, the rules of governance are made and applied, and found six arenas. Each arena has its own function and its own rules.⁸ Figure 4 draws them around the public realm, with the institution in Pakistan that each one points to.

The six arenas follow the path of a public issue through a country. In civil society, citizens become aware of an issue and raise it, through associations, protests, the press. In political society, the parties and the assemblies combine many demands into a policy. In government, the executive makes the policy. In the bureaucracy, public servants carry it out. In economic society, the state and the market deal with each other, through regulators, licences and contracts. In the judicial system, disputes are settled.⁸

The value of this picture is that it lets you say precisely where governance is strong or weak. A country can have a free press (strong civil society) and slow courts (weak judicial arena), or an able civil service (strong bureaucracy) under unstable governments (weak executive arena). When a question asks about governance in Pakistan, this gives you six places to look and six paragraphs to write, each with its own evidence.

6. Three ways of governing, hierarchy, markets and networks

Governance can be organised in three basic ways, and every real country mixes them. Scholars call them hierarchy, markets and networks. The American scholar Mark Bevir describes modern reform as “a mix of hierarchies, markets, and networks, with the choice between them depending” on the task.¹⁴ Figure 5 draws the three.

In a hierarchy, decisions run down a chain of command. The Constitution gives the Federal Government its authority, the Prime Minister and the Cabinet decide, a division issues instructions, and a department carries them out. Hierarchy is clear about who is responsible, and it is how most of Pakistan’s state still works. Its weakness is that it is slow, and the people at the bottom often know the problem better than those at the top.

In a market, the state buys, sells or contracts instead of doing the work itself. A province may pay a private company to collect waste, or a federal body may auction a licence. The market’s strength is that competition can lower cost and raise quality. Its weakness is that a contract is only as good as the officials who write and watch it. The chapter on privatisation and partnerships takes this up.

In a network, organisations that need one another work together without any one of them in command. A provincial health department, the WHO, a vaccine supplier, mosque committees and a volunteer group running a polio campaign together are a network. Rhodes’s definition is about this mode, “self-organizing, interorganizational networks”.¹⁰ Its strength is that it draws in resources and knowledge no single body has. Its weakness, as Stoker warned, is that when everyone shares the work, no one is clearly to blame when it fails.¹²

The point to take into the hall is that governance is not one of these modes. It is the whole mixture. The government that governs well is the one that chooses the right mode for each task, keeps hierarchy where clear responsibility matters, uses markets where competition helps, and builds networks where no one body can do the job alone.

7. The levels of governance

Governance happens at many levels at once. UNESCAP lists corporate, international, national and local governance, and the UNDP’s definition reaches “all levels”.⁵⁴ Figure 6 draws the levels a citizen of Pakistan lives under, from the nearest to the furthest.

The inner three rings are Pakistan’s own, and the Constitution creates each of them. Article 90 gives the executive authority of the Federation to the Federal Government, made up of the Prime Minister and the Federal Ministers.¹⁸ Article 137 gives each province executive authority over the matters on which its Provincial Assembly may make laws. Article 140A requires each province to “establish a local government system and devolve political, administrative and financial responsibility and authority to the elected representatives of the local governments”.¹⁸ The Constitution’s own definition of “the State”, in Article 7, takes in all three. It names the Federal Government, Parliament, the Provincial Governments and Assemblies, and the local authorities empowered to tax.¹⁸

The outer two rings are made by agreements between states. When Pakistan signs a treaty, joins a regional body or agrees a programme with the IMF, rules made beyond its borders reach the citizen at the centre. The 2025 IMF diagnostic, carried out at the government’s request inside an IMF programme, is an example of global governance shaping national reform.⁷

Scholars call this arrangement multi-level governance. Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, who did most to develop the idea, describe “the reallocation of authority upward, downward, and sideways from central states”. Upward means to international bodies, downward to provinces and local councils, sideways to agencies and private partners.¹³ They found two types. In Type I, authority is divided among “general-purpose, nonintersecting, and durable jurisdictions”, like Pakistan’s federation, provinces and districts, each covering a fixed territory and many tasks. In Type II, authority goes to “task-specific, intersecting, and flexible jurisdictions”, bodies set up for one job that may cross the borders of the others.¹³ A water authority for a whole river basin, or a body that runs one city’s transport across several districts, is Type II. Pakistan has mostly Type I governance, with Type II bodies added where one task crosses a border.

Federalism, devolution and local government each have their own chapters later in this subject. Here the point is only that governance is never at one level. An answer on Pakistan’s governance that speaks only of Islamabad has looked at one ring of five.

8. Governance, government, administration and management

Four words on four levels

CE-2023 asked for the “distinctive features of Governance, Administration and Management”.¹ The three words are often used loosely as if they meant the same, and the examiner is testing whether you can keep them apart. Add government, and you have four words to set in order.

Start with government. Gerry Stoker puts the traditional meaning clearly. Government refers to “the formal institutions of the state and their monopoly of legitimate coercive power”, and it “is characterized by its ability to make decisions and its capacity to enforce them.”¹² Government is a body, such as the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, or the Chief Minister and the provincial cabinet. Governance is the wider activity that this body takes part in with others.

Administration is the carrying out of government’s decisions. Woodrow Wilson, in the essay of 1887 that founded the study of public administration, put it in words still quoted in every textbook. Administration “is the most obvious part of government; it is government in action; it is the executive, the operative, the most visible side of government”. Later he gives a sharper definition. “Public administration is detailed and systematic execution of public law.”¹⁵ The civil servant who issues a domicile certificate, runs a district or audits an account is doing administration.

Management is running an organisation to reach its goals with the people and money it has. Henri Fayol, the French engineer who first set it out as a body of knowledge, wrote that “To manage is to forecast and plan, to organize, to command, to co-ordinate and to control.”¹⁶ A hospital’s medical superintendent who plans the duty roster, organises the wards and checks the stores is managing. Management is found in every organisation, public or private, large or small.

Hyden and Court’s ladder

Hyden and Court set these words on a ladder of four levels, and their ladder is the clearest way to answer the CE-2023 question.⁸ Figure 7 draws it.

At the top, the meta level, is governance. Its activity is politics in the widest sense, the making and keeping of the rules of the game. Below it, at the macro level, is policy-making, choosing what to do within those rules. Then comes public administration, at the meso or middle level, whose activity is the programme that carries a policy out. At the bottom, the micro level, is management, whose activity is the single project.⁸

Take one example down the ladder. The Constitution’s Article 140A, which says each province must have elected local governments, is a rule of governance.¹⁸ A province’s decision to hold local elections and give councils a share of its budget is policy. The local government department’s programme to train councillors and transfer funds is administration. The work of one district officer running one union council’s office is management. Each level depends on the one above. Excellent management cannot save a programme built on a bad policy, and no policy can work if the rules of governance let it be ignored.

Hyden and Court give an analogy worth using in the hall. Governance “is to policy and administration what the road is to a car. The nature of riding in it depends on the quality of the road on which it moves.”⁸ A good driver in a good car still has a hard ride on a broken road. That is why governance comes first.

9. Public governance and corporate governance

CE-2019 asked for the difference between public governance and corporate governance.¹ The two share a word because they share an idea. Someone must steer an organisation, and someone must check the steering. They differ in almost everything else.

Corporate governance was defined by the Cadbury Committee in 1992 as “the system by which companies are directed and controlled”.¹⁷ Bevir describes it as “patterns of rule within businesses”.¹⁴ It is about the relations between a company’s shareholders, who own it, its board of directors, who direct it, and its managers, who run it day to day. Its central worry is that managers may serve themselves instead of the owners, so it builds checks such as independent directors, audited accounts, published reports, votes at the annual meeting.

Public governance is about how a country, a province or a city is steered. Its owners are the citizens, its directors are the elected representatives, and its managers are the ministers and civil servants. Its central worry is the same in shape, that those who hold public power may serve themselves instead of the public, and its checks are elections, Parliament, the courts, the Auditor-General and a free press. The table sets the two side by side.

The commonest weak answer to this question says that public governance is “for service” and corporate governance “for profit”, and stops. That is half true and earns half marks. Say that both are systems of steering and checking, then show how they differ in whom they serve, who steers, what checks the steering and what is at stake.

10. Governance in Pakistan, from the Constitution down to the village

Every part of this chapter can be found in Pakistan’s own arrangements, and an answer that turns to Pakistan should use them.

The formal rules begin with the Constitution. It creates the three Pakistani levels of governance, the Federation, the provinces and the local governments, and gives each its authority, as the section on the levels of governance showed. Article 99 requires the Federal Government to make rules “for the allocation and transaction of its business”, and those rules are the written rules of the federal hierarchy.¹⁸ Every ministry, division and department works within them.

The actors include all three of the UNDP’s domains. The state is the Parliament, the four Provincial Assemblies, the Federal and Provincial Governments, the civil service and the courts. The private sector ranges from the large banks and manufacturers to the small traders of every bazaar. Civil society includes professional bodies such as the bar councils, the trade unions, charitable trusts, and the press and television. An answer on any governance problem in Pakistan should ask what each domain contributes and where each one falls short.

The informal rules matter as much as the formal ones. A jirga or panchayat may settle a dispute faster than a court. A sifarish, a word in the right ear, may decide a posting before the written rule is read. The IMF’s diagnostic of 2025 named the danger plainly. Entrenched corruption, it said, can “distort or even replace formal governance systems”.⁷ The Constitution’s answer is Article 8, which voids any custom or usage that overrides the fundamental rights.¹⁸ Good governance, in Pakistan’s case, is largely the work of bringing informal practice into line with formal rule.

The state’s own view of why this matters was given in the last chapter. Pakistan Vision 2025 calls governance “the central pivot” of the national objectives.¹⁹ When you write about Pakistan, start from that view, name the parts and the levels where the problem lies, and propose a remedy that works inside the state’s own rules.

11. The critics of the broad definition

The broad definition of governance, the one that reaches beyond the state, has its critics, and a question that says “critically examine” expects you to know them.

The first criticism is that the word has become too broad to mean anything precise. If governance is “the sum of the many ways” anyone manages common affairs, as the Commission on Global Governance put it, then almost everything is governance, and the word stops telling you what to look at.³ Rhodes called the term “popular but imprecise”.¹¹ The answer is not to drop the word but to define it each time you use it, and to say which actors, rules and processes you mean.

The second criticism is that the broad definition mixes a description with a wish. Hyden and Court warned that governance had been “far too closely associated with a specific liberal-democratic agenda”.⁸ A definition should describe how a country is steered, good or bad. When the word is used as though governance itself meant participation and transparency, description has slipped into prescription. Keep the two words apart in your answers. Governance describes, and good governance judges.

The third criticism is Stoker’s own. Governance spread over many hands has “weak normative underpinnings”, a “tendency to facilitate blame avoidance and scapegoating”, and “inadequate accountability mechanisms”.¹² When a project run by a ministry, a contractor and an NGO fails, each blames the others and the citizen cannot tell whom to hold responsible. The CE-2026 paper asked exactly why accountability becomes more complex in governance arrangements, and the option that fits Stoker’s argument is “Authority is dispersed across multiple actors”.¹

The fourth criticism comes from those who see the state’s role underplayed. In Pakistan, as in most developing countries, the state is still the actor with the law, the budget and the police. Talk of networks and partners can hide that, or can be used to excuse the state from duties only it can perform. Kjær’s own summary keeps the balance. Governance is broader than government, but it is still “about steering and the rules of the game”.⁹ The steering is still mostly the state’s.

12. Where the definition stands now

The definitions are converging. The newest ones, from the World Bank’s indicators and the IMF’s diagnostic of Pakistan, are built around rules, institutions and processes rather than around power alone.⁶⁷ That is close to what Hyden and Court and Kjær argued two decades ago. A definition in an answer today is safest when it names the rules, the actors beyond the state, and the way decisions are made and carried out.

The idea of levels has also become settled. The UN’s Goal 16 asks for “effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels”, using the UNDP’s phrase.²⁰ In Pakistan, the question of how authority is shared between the Federation, the provinces and the local governments remains live, and it is examined in the chapters on federalism and devolution.

What has not settled is the balance between the state and the other hands. Some still argue that governance should mean less state and more market. Others argue that the failures of the last decades, from financial crises to pandemics, have shown how much depends on a capable state. For a CSS candidate the sound position is the state’s own. The state remains at the wheel, and good governance asks it to steer well, with the private sector and civil society as partners.

13. What students mix up

Governance and government. Government is a body, the offices that hold the state’s power. Governance is the whole process of steering, in which the government is the strongest but not the only actor. “The governance of Punjab passed a budget” is wrong. The Government of Punjab and the Provincial Assembly passed it.

Governance and good governance. Governance is neutral. It describes how a country is steered, well or badly. Good governance is a judgment that it is steered well, against standards such as accountability, transparency and the rule of law. Do not define governance by listing the marks of good governance.

Governance, administration and management. Governance sets the rules (meta level). Administration carries out policy through programmes (meso level). Management runs a single office or project (micro level).⁸ They are nested, not the same.

The World Bank’s and the UNDP’s definitions. The World Bank (1992) speaks of “power” and “economic and social resources for development”. The UNDP (1997) speaks of “economic, political and administrative authority” at “all levels”. Candidates often put “political” into the World Bank’s definition. It is not there, and the last chapter explained why.

Rhodes’s six uses and Stoker’s five propositions. Rhodes (1996) listed six uses of the word. Stoker (1998) set out five propositions about what governance involves. Keep the numbers with the right names.

Type I and Type II multi-level governance. Type I is general-purpose authority over a fixed territory, like a province. Type II is a task-specific body whose area can cross other borders, like a river-basin authority.¹³

14. What FPSC has asked

These questions test this chapter directly.¹

• CE-2016, Q6. “Define Global Governance. Discuss its significance and explain the emergent need of growing interdependence between international states in global context.”
• CE-2017, Q5(A). “Concept of governance stems from the basic idea of formal orchestration of material and human resource for a prosperous and harmonious society. How do you look at some of its fundamentals as given below”, with four parts on accountability, ethnonationalism, hybrid organisations and action research.
• CE-2018, Q2(a). “Define and describe Governance as formation and management of the formal and informal mechanisms that regulate the public realms.” (8 marks)
• CE-2019, Q2. “Identify the main differences between ‘public management’ and ‘private management’; and between ‘public governance’ and ‘corporate governance’.”
• CE-2023, Q8(a), a short note. “Distinctive features of Governance, Administration and Management.”
• CE-2026, Part-I, Q1. “A key feature of modern governance is:” with the options “Strong ministerial control”, “Policy making through command and control”, “Blurring of boundaries between public and private sectors” and “Elimination of bureaucracy”.
• CE-2026, Part-I, Q2. “Accountability in governance arrangements becomes more complex because:” with the options “Elections are eliminated”, “Authority is dispersed across multiple actors”, “Bureaucracies become smaller” and “Legal systems lose relevance”.

The CE-2018 question is Hyden and Court’s definition in the examiner’s own words, and the CE-2023 note is their ladder. The two Part-I questions of CE-2026 are Stoker’s propositions and his dilemma of accountability.

15. Facts to take into the examination hall

16. What loses marks on this topic

A definition with no owner. “Governance is the way a country is run” earns little. “The UNDP (1997) defines governance as the exercise of economic, political and administrative authority to manage a country’s affairs at all levels” earns the marks for a definition.

One definition presented as the only one. The examiner knows there are many. Two definitions from different ends of Figure 1, with a sentence on what separates them, show understanding.

Defining governance by good governance. “Governance means transparency, accountability and participation” defines good governance, not governance. Define the neutral word first, then the standards if the question asks.

Treating governance, administration and management as synonyms. CE-2023 asked for their distinctive features. An answer that uses the three words in turn to say the same thing gets nothing. Use the ladder.

Leaving out the informal. CE-2018’s question named “formal and informal mechanisms”. An answer that describes only laws and institutions has answered half the question. Name the informal rules and say how they help or undermine the formal ones.

Writing about Pakistan as though it had one level. When the question turns to Pakistan, show the federal, provincial and local levels, and say which level the problem sits at.

17. A worked answer plan

We will plan an answer to CE-2019, Q2, for 20 marks. “Identify the main differences between ‘public management’ and ‘private management’; and between ‘public governance’ and ‘corporate governance’.”

Step 1. Read what the question asks. There is one command word, identify the main differences, applied to two pairs. The question is not split into marked parts, so give the two pairs roughly equal space. Each needs definitions first and then differences point by point. The 28.5 minutes of writing time give about 14 minutes to each pair, and about 700 words in all at 25 words a minute.

Step 2. Decide your position. In both pairs, the public and private sides share a purpose (running an organisation, steering and checking it) and differ in whom they serve, who controls them and how they are checked. Say this once in the opening and hold it.

Step 3. Plan the parts.

1. Opening. One sentence that frames both pairs: management is running an organisation to its goals, and governance is the system that steers it and checks the steering. Public and private versions of each share that purpose but differ in whom they serve and who holds them to account.
2. Public and private management, defined. Fayol’s definition of management, then public management as running public organisations under public law (Wilson’s “detailed and systematic execution of public law”), and private management as running a business for its owners.
3. Their differences, point by point. Goal (public interest against profit). Owner (citizens against shareholders). Rules (law and the rules of business against company policy). Scrutiny (Parliament, audit, courts, the press against the board and the market). Measure of success (services and outcomes against profit and share value). Pakistani example: a district health office and a private hospital in the same city.
4. Public and corporate governance, defined. The World Bank (1992) or the UNDP (1997) for public governance. Cadbury (1992) for corporate governance.
5. Their differences. Use the six rows of the table on public and corporate governance, in prose or as a short table.
6. Close. Both kinds of governance answer the same question, who checks those who steer, and Pakistan needs both: strong corporate governance for its companies and state enterprises, strong public governance for its state.

Step 4. Check the plan against the question. Both pairs are defined from named sources. Each has its differences point by point. There is a Pakistani example. Nothing wanders into good governance or the theories, which this question does not ask for.

What to remember from this chapter

• Governance is broader than government. It is the way decisions about shared matters are made and carried out, by the state and by others, under formal and informal rules.
• Know the definitions with their owners and years: World Bank 1992 (power and resources), Commission on Global Governance 1995 (all the ways public and private manage common affairs), UNDP 1997 (economic, political and administrative authority at all levels), UNESCAP (decision-making and implementation, or not), WGI (traditions and institutions), IMF 2025 (rules, practices and processes), Hyden and Court 2002 (formal and informal rules of the public realm).
• The definitions differ because four groups took up the word for different work: public administration, international relations, comparative politics and the development agencies.
• Every definition is built from actors (the state, the private sector, civil society), rules (formal and informal) and processes (decision and implementation).
• Hyden and Court’s six arenas are civil society, political society, government, bureaucracy, economic society and the judicial system.
• Governance runs through hierarchy, markets and networks, and every country mixes them.
• It happens at many levels. Pakistan’s Constitution creates three (federal, provincial, local, Articles 90, 137 and 140A), and regional and global agreements add two more. Hooghe and Marks call this multi-level governance, of Type I and Type II.
• Governance (rules) sits above policy-making, administration (programmes) and management (projects). Wilson: administration is government in action. Fayol: to manage is to forecast, organise, command, coordinate and control.
• Corporate governance is “the system by which companies are directed and controlled” (Cadbury, 1992). Public governance steers a state for its citizens.
• Critics say the broad definition is vague, mixes description with prescription, blurs accountability and can underplay the state.

Check yourself

Answer each from memory before you open it.

1. Give the UNDP’s definition of governance of 1997, and name its three legs.

2. CE-2018 asked you to describe governance as “formation and management of the formal and informal mechanisms that regulate the public realms”. Whose definition is the examiner echoing, and what are its key words?

3. Name the three parts every definition of governance is built from, with an example of each from Pakistan.

4. Set governance, policy-making, public administration and management in order, and say what each one does.

5. What is the difference between Type I and Type II multi-level governance? Give an example of each.

6. Name three differences between public governance and corporate governance.

7. From the last chapter: why did the World Bank’s definition of 1992 leave out the form of political regime?

8. From the chapter on how to sit the paper: when a question names two concepts to compare, what must you do before comparing them?