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Saturday, March 14, 2009

Guerrillas and Governance

Back to the American colonies in 1775.

Over the course of nearly 200 years, the colonies had grown from the equivalent of a handful of lemonade stands into a dozen or so franchises with new locations opening up in the undeveloped markets to the west. Since the appointed governors liked comfort and their delegates had few qualifications beyond their socio-economic status or their relationship to someone important, and since communication was so poor (or slow, which amounts to the same thing), governance was like the light of a lantern.

Close to the governor things looked good but you didn't have to get very far away before the light began to fade and things became less and less distinct. By the time a traveler left the last organized settlement, he had to be prepared to take care of himself.

The problem for the governors--and the leader back at empire headquarters--was that those people out there got to be pretty good at taking care of themselves and actually began to enjoy being out of sight and out of mind. When the leader needed to have better productivity from the empire, there was some push back.

The governors were under pressure to produce more and the workers out there on the boundaries were pretty satisfied with things the way they were. The governors asked the leader for more resources to improve their ability to govern. The leader sent in mercenaries to quiet things down and implement better governance, by which was meant to suppress dissent and put everyone back to work for the king.

Of course, the outsiders didn't know anything about the locally designed governance and stepped all over it because they only had one tool, force.

Enter the guerrilla. There are leaders everywhere and sometimes they have a vision for governance and the future. When the locals see a better life with the guerrilla governance than they do with their formally appointed governance, the guerrillas will eventually have their way.

There are many points to be made from this story but I leave them up to you. This is history, but it's also today.

The one point I do want to make is that governance has to work for the governed as well as for the empire and that replacing something that is poorly understood but seems to be working may, if it is not handled well, produce more harm than good.

As always, your comments are welcomed and appreciated.

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