Making Sense of Democracy and Governance in the Asia-Pacific

This chapter introduces the dubious nexus between good governance, democracy and development by tracing the evolution of these concepts in modern times. It raises the essential purpose of the book, that is to question their relationship across a variety of country cases and themes that address the theoretical tension between governance and democracy in order to illuminate how this tension is played out in political and civil societies across the Asia-Pacific region. Although (liberal) democracy and good governance have replaced legitimacy and effectiveness in the modern era, people in the Asia-Pacific still have their own criteria for what constitutes political legitimacy, and polling data consistently shows that government effectiveness is the major driver of what they understand to be ‘governance’. Indeed, the role of civil society, political society, and governance in the region has been quite different from what has commonly been assumed within the international community.