Governance and the state: revisiting the concepts and theories of state capacity

In contemporary political science literature, governance has been defined as the process of making authoritative collective decisions. In this regard, while the state plays an important and irreplaceable steering role in the governance process, its governing capacity will depend very much on its power to bond different state institutions and major socio-economic actors together in the pursuit of collective interests. As a result of the growing importance of non-state actors such as business sector and civil society in the governance process, modern governance is not simply the imposition of control and directive from above, it is about managing the interaction between state and different socio-economic constituents. From this perspective, understanding modern governance means understanding the nature of the relationship between the state and major societal actors in the pursuit of collective interests. In this chapter, we will first provide readers with a general picture of the concepts of state and the various dimensions of state capacity. We will then draw upon contemporary governance studies to discuss the importance of managing the interactions between the state and major socio-economic constituents in the process of governance. Then we will introduce the various theoretical approaches to state capacity and examine the important enabling conditions that shape the capacity of the state to govern, including “political autonomy”, “embedded autonomy”, “governed interdependence” and “state-society synergy” and “forging coalitions”. On the basis of these theoretical discussions, we will articulate a new conceptual framework which argues that the capacity of modern states to govern largely hinges on its ability to forge a stable and broad-based governing coalition on the political foundations of state autonomy and state embeddedness. All in all, the theoretical discussions on governance and state capacity in this chapter will provide a solid foundation for the development of a new theoretical perspective for re-examining the post-1997 Hong Kong governance crisis in the next chapter.