Overlapping authorities: Governance, leadership and accountability in contemporary Vanuatu
Overlapping authorities: Governance, leadership and accountability in contemporary Vanuatu
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权力重叠：当代瓦努阿图的治理、领导力和问责制
DOI：
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发表时间：
2013
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
W. Morgan
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
W. Morgan
国际发展机构越来越关注
International development agencies are increasingly paying attention to the
challenge of improving governance outcomes in the Pacific region. Studies have
been completed exploring ways to augment ‘state building’ and a number of
donor-funded projects have been established with the aim of improving civil
society leadership as means of holding governments accountable. This paper
explores some of the contemporary discourses of ‘good governance’ and
‘developmental leadership’ that have informed recent development praxis.
This paper then situates recent thinking about leadership in the unique and
complex context of Vanuatu—a young post-colonial state encompassing
culturally and linguistically diverse communities scattered across an archipelago
of 83 islands. In Vanuatu today, orthodox and universal prescriptions for ‘good
governance’ need to be understood as they interact with a particular lived
experience of hybrid modernity in which Western notions of rationality and ethics
co-exist with resilient indigenous ways of knowing and being. Unique and
localised systems of community governance and dispute resolution remain central
to people’s lives, alongside introduced models of church leadership and even
more recent systems of state government.
This paper explores areas of tension and compatibility between contemporary
systems of kastom governance and dispute resolution, and models of leadership
and accountability that constitute the nation state (and its corresponding rule of
law). These are not abstract considerations. In 2013 the Vanuatu government
signalled a willingness to give the Ombudsman’s Office new ‘teeth’ to prosecute
leaders for breaches of Vanuatu’s constitutionally mandated Leadership Code. At
the same time, donor organisations like AusAID and the World Bank are
implementing programs aimed at strengthening kastom governance in
communities across the country. This paper reflects on these developments and
poses questions about how Vanuatu citizens and civil society organisations might
hold leaders accountable across distinct but overlapping realms of authority
attributed to kastom leaders and state lawmakers.