ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in this book. Promoting participatory governance as an iterative process of self-transformation emerges as the form of governing putting to work categorical changes in Western knowledge production. Once the observable political shifts in the discourse and practice of democracy promotion are linked up with epistemological developments. The significance of the rise of the social for international policy-making fully comes into view. As this study has elucidated, the implications of the shift from democracy promotion as institution-building for the purpose of political modernisation to democracy promotion as civil society support undergirded by the idea of political liberalisation are much more multilayered than it might appear on the surface. Without the constitutive power of intervening into conditions as they are, with the aim of radically changing these, societal realities simply spilled onto the public space created by liberal-representative institutions.
