Informal governance involves socially shared values and structures that are created and enforced outside of formal/official systems to arrange for community needs and services. In Bangladesh, examples of informal governance include credit societies, garbage collection, mosque/school management, dispute resolution, and responding to emergencies. Informal governance relies heavily on social capital, which is the trust and networks that allow people to cooperate voluntarily. However, social capital has declined in Bangladesh due to issues like political divisions, central dependence, and lack of community spirit. Reforms are needed to local government and build social capital, such as participation, devolution, and capacity building.

1. Informal Governance
Definition
• Do-it-yourself or self-help services or development activisms arranged by a
community of people
• No precise set-up
• Both a one-time affair or could be a continued endeavor
• Doesn’t have adverse effects on others
• In the nonappearance of central initiative, self-help services turn out to be
more noticeable
• Can occur within or outside and in partnership with formal governance
along with CG agencies, LG bodies and NGOs

2. Contd.
-‘Informal governance involves socially shared values, usually unwritten,
that are created, communicated, and enforced outside the officially
sanctioned channels.’ (G. Helmke and S. Levitsky, 2004)
-Formal structures are straight resultant from the state doing ordained
activisms.
- Informal structures are not based on any rules or statutes but
endeavor to determine people’s ordinary life requirements and meet
essential needs through social interactions between them. (ibid)
- Informal local governance system has been noticed in South Asian
countries, and some cases in Africa and Latin America.

3. Viewpoints on IG
IG is a means of decision-making that is
-un-codified, non-institutional and where social relations play vital
role.
IG generates innovative space to solve problems and search
mechanisms, new possibilities and constructs confidence and faith
between crucial actors.
IG leads to more responsive problem solving and shared commitments.
-Network society augments informal governance based on partnership

4. Bangladesh Context
Bangladesh has occurrences of informal governance. Those comprise
• Establishment of credit societies
• Organize garbage collection
• Formation of apartment committees/associations
• Arrange community-security actions
• Establish and manage the followings:
mosques; graveyards; educational institutions; health services; clubs;
libraries, tree-planting; hats and bazars;

5. Contd.
• Clearing water hyacinth
• Organize cultural activities, sports, games, burial services
• Provide scholarships to meritorious students
• adjudication through shalish relating to family matters, land disputes,
physical clash, fatwah etc.,
• Community action against drug addiction
• Action against hooliganism
• Provide volunteer traffic services
• Community-protests against the poor services (of WASA, Titas, DESCO
etc.,) and institutional corruption
• Respond to emergencies and natural calamities,
• Collectively control flood, river erosion and irrigation works

6. Avenues of Informal governance (IG)
• Where IG is a continuation of past traditions like village shalish
• Where formal governance has broken down or very weak or failed to
protect the people.
• Formal governance may not reach an area owing to physical barriers. e.g.,
hills ,remote areas, islands and the like
• IG to respond to emergencies, and natural disasters like flood, drought,
cyclones, epidemics, river erosion earth-quakes, out of fire, or influx of
refugees
• Formal bodies like LG encourages IG to flourish
• NGO’s innovative approaches like micro credit activities
• Formal and informal governance can coexist
• IG opens new frontiers as a forerunner

7. IG and Social Capital
• IG depends largely on social capital formation
Definition of social capital:
• People’s propensity to work together voluntarily based on trust and
reciprocity.
• Human capital is individually owned
• Social capital is rooted in the network of human relations within the
community

8. Social capital: Scholars’ views
• Robert Putnam (1993) describes social capital as arrays of social
relationships that expediate people to organize actions for realizing
desired objectives. He also (1995:67) explained social capital as sorts
of social organization for instance networks, norms and social trust
that enable coordination and cooperation for shared
benefits/paybacks(in Krishna 2003)
• Fukuyama says social capital entails ‘networks of social relations
which are characterized by norms of trust and reciprocity’ (Stewart W
& Richardson, 1998)
• Narayan and Cassidy (2001) outline the features of social capital as
‘group characteristics, togetherness, everyday sociability,
neighborhood connections, volunteerism’ and the like

9. Contd.
Features:
-Certain set of informal values shared by members of a group that
permit cooperation among them
-Capacity to address and resolve problems that are common
-Social relations producing productive benefits
Social capital thus contains ingredients like resources rooted in social
structure, interconnectedness, access to social resources by concerned
individuals and use of such resources for common good through goal-
directed activities

10. Social capital is on decline in Bangladesh
• Long period of colonial rule
• Several rounds of military rule
• Presence of disruptive, authoritarian and intolerant actions
• Confrontational political culture
• Central dependence
• Ideological and institutional erosion
• Self-centeredness and lack of community spirit, jealousy, distrust
• Patron-client relations

11. Contd.
• Extreme politicization
• Division on party lines
• Local leadership is coopted into unhealthy process
• Bad community-based dealings
• Problematic to put up with self-help undertakings over a long period
time

12. Way out
• Reforms in the local self-government system
• Participation
• Devolution
• Capacity building
• Dissociate MPs from the LSG affairs
• Erect appropriate track for constructing social capital
• Source: Kamal Siddiqui et al