A four-day conference organised by CEESP in collaboration with the Social Science Research Council, New York, brought together leading thinkers on the subject of governance in August 1999. The objective of Beyond Governance, which took place in Murree, Pakistan, was to apply an emerging understanding of governance to a concrete issue – within a regional context – in this case South Asia. Through a selection of papers and extracts of papers presented in Murree, Policy Matters examines the issue of governance from a number of different perspectives, leading with a critical examination of the concept of governance and its current uses, extracted from a longer paper by Professor Matthias Finger. The special importance of both the concept and the practice of governance stems from the fact that globalisation has profoundly altered the premises of and the ground-rules for traditional nation-state politics. As traditional, local, national and international political institutions are no longer adequate to meet the challenges created by the process of industrial development, ‘governance’ emerges as a new concept, directly related to the process of globalisation.
