Re-embedding Governance
The structural disconnection between bureaucracies and real territories
Author: Monica Bianco, Ecosystems Cooperation advisor -CRF Italy
Abstract
The institutional architecture of development cooperation often operates without meaningful connection to the territories it seeks to transform. Despite discourse on localization, inclusion, and place-based policy, cooperation systems remain governed by bureaucracies that function through standardized procedures, exogenous agendas, and abstract geographies. This article explores the structural disconnection between administrative apparatuses and real territories, drawing on theories of territorial governance, state restructuring, and institutional isomorphism. It argues that the failure to embed cooperation in specific territorial ecologies results not only in inefficiency but in a deeper erosion of sovereignty, democratic capacity, and systemic learning.
Introduction: A Crisis of Anchoring
Contemporary development governance is marked by a paradox: while claiming to support local development, it increasingly detaches from the places it addresses. Projects are formulated in capital cities or donor headquarters, filtered through calls for proposals and selection committees, and implemented by technical units operating in isolation from broader territorial institutions.
As Jessop and Brenner argue, “the rescaling of statehood under globalization has decentered the national and the local alike, replacing them with functional governance regimes decoupled from territory” [1]. What emerges is a form of placeless governance: spatially indifferent, procedurally rigid, and operationally fragmented.
This disconnection is not accidental. It results from a specific historical evolution of public administration, cooperation financing, and political economy, which this article seeks to unpack.
The Rise of Abstract Bureaucracy
Modern bureaucracies emerged to ensure neutrality, predictability, and legal-rational legitimacy in state action. Weber’s classical model emphasized impersonality, hierarchy, and formalized procedures as guarantees of equity and efficiency. But in international cooperation, these same traits have been amplified and abstracted, producing institutions that function according to internal codes rather than territorial feedback.
Pierre and Peters note that “public governance increasingly prioritizes vertical accountability to funders and political principals over horizontal responsiveness to local publics” [2]. In multilateral cooperation, this tendency is reinforced by the pressure to standardize: calls must be comparable, evaluation must be ‘objective,’ and procedures must minimize discretion.
The result is a logic of isomorphic compliance—where form prevails over context, and innovation is punished unless legible to external auditors.
Institutional Isomorphism and Managerial Templates
The concept of institutional isomorphism, developed by DiMaggio and Powell, explains how organizations across sectors begin to resemble each other not because of efficiency, but due to shared pressures: coercive (from funders), mimetic (to appear legitimate), and normative (from professional standards) [3].
This dynamic is particularly evident in development cooperation. Ministries, universities, NGOs, and municipalities adopt similar formats, procedures, and jargon to compete for international funding. Territorial specificities are reduced to background sections in project proposals. Complex local dynamics are flattened into stakeholder matrices and risk registers.
As Tania Murray Li notes, “development projects construct ‘target populations’ as blank slates, ready for intervention, rather than as historical subjects embedded in political relations” [4]. Territory becomes a container, not a system.
Territorial Governance: The Missing Layer
The literature on territorial governance highlights the importance of embedded institutions, multi-actor coordination, and spatially anchored strategies for development. As Barca argued in his report for the EU, “effective development requires place-based policy that mobilizes endogenous potential and addresses spatial injustice” [5].
Yet most cooperation systems lack a territorial governance layer. Projects are managed vertically, with little integration across sectors, scales, or time horizons. Local governments are often bypassed or instrumentalized; universities are treated as training providers, not knowledge anchors; civil society is included as a checkbox.
This undermines the capacity for territorial intelligence—the ability to read systemic dynamics, coordinate across domains, and generate long-term learning. Without this layer, cooperation becomes serial, fragmented, and reversible.
Bureaucratic Politics and the Governance of Visibility
A further distortion comes from the political economy of bureaucracies themselves. Institutions often compete not to solve problems, but to survive, grow, and increase their visibility within the funding ecosystem.
James Scott, in Seeing Like a State, described how administrative rationality leads to simplification: “officials attempt to make a complex reality legible by reducing it to categories they can control” [6]. In cooperation, this leads to the prioritization of what can be counted over what matters. Territories are valued for their absorptive capacity, not for their systemic needs.
As Olivier de Sardan observes, “governance in aid contexts often becomes a theatre of compliance, where actors simulate alignment to protocols while pursuing divergent logics” [7]. This decoupling deepens the gap between governance as performance and governance as transformation.
Disconnection as Structural Condition
The disconnection between bureaucracies and territories is not a temporary dysfunction—it is a structural feature of the system. It reflects deeper contradictions between the logic of funding flows and the logic of place-based development. The more standardized, competitive, and audit-driven cooperation becomes, the harder it is to design institutions that are territorially rooted, inclusive, and adaptive.
This affects not only outcomes, but democratic legitimacy. As Wagenaar and Healey argue, “when governance becomes disembedded from place, it loses its capacity to generate trust, deliberation, and long-term commitment” [8].
Without anchoring in real territories, cooperation risks becoming a technical ritual—efficient in procedure, but disconnected from substance.
Conclusion: Toward Re-embedding Governance
Reconnecting governance to territory is not a matter of decentralization alone. It requires new institutional forms: hybrid, embedded, participatory, and learning-oriented. It demands that cooperation systems recognize territory not as a backdrop, but as a living system—historical, ecological, cognitive, and political.
As long as bureaucracies remain placeless, their capacity to support systemic transformation will remain limited. Re-embedding governance means designing institutions that can think, feel, and act with the places they claim to serve.
References
- Brenner, N. & Jessop, B. (2005). “Territorialism and the rescaling of statehood.” In Spaces of Neoliberalism, Blackwell.
- Pierre, J. & Peters, B. G. (2000). Governance, Politics and the State. Palgrave Macmillan.
- DiMaggio, P. J. & Powell, W. W. (1983). “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields.” American Sociological Review, 48(2).
- Li, T. M. (2007). The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Duke University Press.
- Barca, F. (2009). An Agenda for a Reformed Cohesion Policy. European Commission, DG Regio.
- Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press.
- Olivier de Sardan, J.-P. (2011). “The Eight Modes of Governance in Development Aid.” IDS Bulletin, 42(6).
Wagenaar, H. & Healey, P. (2015). The Real Social and the Social Real: Realist Approaches to Policy and Governance Research. Routledge.
