ABSTRACT
Crucial to an optimization of performance potentials at the micro-, macro-, and mesolevel are the control and governance capacity of government and forms of social organization which make it possible to mobilize the creativity potentials of various social actors. Economic modernization and the development of systemic competitiveness cannot succeed without appropriate social structures. Many DCs were until recently characterized by centralist political decision-making processes and bureaucratized, inefficient government apparatuses with a low level of governance capacity, overlaid with rentist-corporatist structures which permitted privileged groups to effectively realize their particularist interests. These power-pervaded and encrusted political structures corresponded with forms of social disintegration and fragmentation that were characterized by the exclusion of broad segments of the population as well as by political and social polarization.
