The widening gap between state and society: the growing disconnection of the business sector from the local community

Similar to the British colonial period, business elites have been extensively incorporated by the post-colonial state into its advisory bodies and committees. Such a political formula is based upon the assumption that as in the British colonial past, the post-colonial state should be able to mobilize sufficient societal support for its governance and policy initiatives and accommodating societal challenges by relying on the support of co-opted business elites. However, the post-1997 political developments indicated that it is just wishful thinking to hope that the post-colonial state could still count on the co-opted business elites to mediate its relationship with the local community after 1997, in the light of the fact that the business sector is generally too vulnerable and powerless to accommodate the political challenges of the civil society. The increasing public challenges to the state-business alliance has become the last straw for the political support base of the post-colonial state and pushes it into serious crises of governance. In this chapter we are going to trace the development of civil society and examine how the rise of civil society activism in the post-1997 era has posed important challenges to the state-business alliance. The central argument of this chapter is that the old practice of co-opting business elites into the state machinery, as inherited from the colonial era, is no longer effective in furnishing the post-colonial state with sufficient capacity to accommodate the waves of “growing citizen participation” in the policy process after 1997. In the face of the increasing challenges from the civil society, the post-colonial state struggles to establish broad societal support for its policy initiatives and to mediate statesociety relations by relying on its business allies. As a result, the governing capacity of the post-colonial state is seriously undermined by the growing level of state-society conflicts and the political support base of the state-business alliance has become increasingly fragile and vulnerable.