1 ‘ Bad Governance ’ or the Development of Political Underdevelopment ?

The paper is about the paradigms we could employ to understand what is often termed ‘bad governance’ in the global South – the relatively low effectiveness and accountability of many states. The first part is a bit polemical, and perhaps takes too seriously the problem of finding a minimally coherent and useful definition of globalisation. I suggest that the concept of globalisation is not a very productive entry point into thinking about the issue, and may indeed be positively misleading. This is not because I want to make any variant of the argument that ‘internal factors matter more than international forces’. To the contrary, I argue that bad government stems principally from the ways in which Southern states have been created and political authority shaped through economic and political interactions with the wealthier countries of the North and the international political and economic networks dominated by the North. The concepts of late political development – or even the development of political underdevelopment – are more useful ways into understanding these processes, and better enable us to make policy-relevant arguments.