Governance as an Emergent Compromise

Abstract

Abstract Governance is always an emergent compromise produced by “the complex web of unfolding transactions and processes” in which bureaucrats must operate. Compromises between the formalizing imperatives of modernization and the flexibility of bureaucratic agents to adapt to social and organizational constraints are essential to shaping the patterns of coordination and regulation that make up governance in the Pakistani electrical power sector. Discretion, and the opportunity for idiosyncratic outcomes it entails, is unavoidable, yet it can be exercised with a sense of social responsibility or for narrowly construed personal gain. Examples of both are presented here. This chapter argues that the capacity of individual bureaucratic agents to choose among multiple courses of action—and go beyond their formal bounds—can serve the organizational mandate of public good provision better than the pursuit of modernization in terms of increasing formality.