This book explores the relationship between bureaucrats and elected politicians in Bangladesh and discusses how this impacts governance and development in the country from an empirical perspective. It looks at the interplay of politics and bureaucracy in ancient societies, western democracies and in the developing world while highlighting the uniqueness of the Bangladesh experience and its indigenous contexts of local governance. The author presents a historical overview of the nature of political development, shift of regimes in Bangladesh, and the role of various agents and stakeholders. Through a detailed study, the book provides an analytical and theoretical framework to understanding the linkages between politics and bureaucracy, governance and development in South Asia and Bangladesh, with implications for geopolitics and economic growth. This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and students of political economy, development studies, public administration, comparative politics as well as to policymakers, bureaucrats, government bodies, and especially those concerned with Bangladesh.

Good policies are an important prerequisite of good governance, and any effort to change one is likely to affect the other. In emerging democracies, such as Bangladesh, a redefinition of roles and responsibilities of different actors in the policy and governing process can be noticed. This book identifies and analyses issues related to the making and implementation of public policies in Bangladesh over the last four decades (1972-2012). It explores the implications of the change that has taken place in policy and governance environment in Bangladesh. Focusing on several important sectoral and sub-sectoral polices, it examines the impact and limitations of the change. Chapters are structured into four parts: Public Policy, Bureaucracy and Parliament; Cases of Public Policy; Women in Governance and Public Administration; Ethics, Innovations, and Public Service Delivery, and the book is a valuable resource for researchers in the field of development studies, public policy and South Asian politics.

Since its Independence in 1971, Bangladesh has made remarkable progress in terms of reducing poverty levels, achieving high levels of economic growth over a sustained period of time, and meeting its Millennium Development Goals (MDG) targets set by the United Nations. With some justification, Bangladesh is considered an international development success story, and the country appears to be well on track to meet its policy target of becoming a middle-income country by 2021, the same year the country will celebrate 50 years of Independence. This book explores the central issue of Bangladeshi politics: the weakness of governance. The coexistence of a poor governance track record and a relatively strong socioeconomic performance makes Bangladesh an intriguing case which throws up exciting and relevant conceptual and policy challenges. Structured in four sections - Political Settlement, Elites and Deep Structures; Democracy, Citizenship and Values; Civil Society, Local Context and Political Change; Informality and Accountability – the book identifies and engages with these challenges. Chapters by experts in the field share a number of conceptual and epistemological principles and offer a combination of theoretical and empirical insights, and cover a good range of contemporary issues and debate. Employing a structurally determinist perspective, this book explains politics and society in Bangladesh from a novel perspective. Academics in the field of governance and politics in developing countries, with a focus on South Asia and Bangladesh will welcome its publication.

Analyzing Bangladesh's governance problems and drawing insights that will be relevant to other developing countries, this book sharpens our understanding of governance and suggests political and administrative reforms to improve governance and facilitate faster development.

This book adopts the multidimensional nature of innovation as its point of focus and offers a comprehensive analysis of contemporary governance issues in Bangladesh. Each chapter views those issues from its own disciplinary perspective, but all share a common focus on the current process in the governance of innovation. The authors show how the processes of innovation and public service delivery are influenced while there is simultaneously a striving for a digital Bangladesh. The book presents innovation as a complex phenomenon with multidisciplinary viewpoints affecting its governance. As well, new practices, developments, and empirical research are shown here. The aim is to point out the most persistent difficulties in public administration and public service delivery, with an emphasis on how to deliver public service in Bangladesh in a sustainable manner. Although significant transformations have been made recently for a better organized public sphere, public services still must be more closely in line with what citizens need rather than what service providers are prepared to deliver. This published work speaks strongly to a wide-ranging audience, from scholars of governance and innovation management to academics, researchers, and postgraduate students interested in public service delivery innovations in Bangladesh and South Asia. Indeed, the book serves as a text and valuable resource for postgraduate courses in politics, business administration, economics, political science, development, and governance in South Asia.

Governments fail to provide the public goods needed for development when its leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical advice or are unable to follow it, despite the best of intentions, because of political constraints. This report focuses on two forces—citizen engagement and transparency—that hold the key to solving government failures by shaping how political markets function. Citizens are not only queueing at voting booths, but are also taking to the streets and using diverse media to pressure, sanction and select the leaders who wield power within government, including by entering as contenders for leadership. This political engagement can function in highly nuanced ways within the same formal institutional context and across the political spectrum, from autocracies to democracies. Unhealthy political engagement, when leaders are selected and sanctioned on the basis of their provision of private benefits rather than public goods, gives rise to government failures. The solutions to these failures lie in fostering healthy political engagement within any institutional context, and not in circumventing or suppressing it. Transparency, which is citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions, can play a crucial role by nourishing political engagement.

This book explores the impact of Bangladesh's Local Government Act of 2009 on the functioning of the local governments or Union Parishads (UP), with a particular emphasis on people’s participation and accountability. Throughout the chapters, the authors review the existing legal framework of UP and its relation to social accountability, examine how much of the social participation is spontaneous and how much is politically induced, question the success of the Citizen's Charter and Right to Information acts as mechanisms for social accountability, and present suggestions to remedy some of the problems facing people's participation and accountability in the UP. This book fills existing gaps in the discourse by adding new information to the literature on development research and legal reforms in Bangladesh, specifically in how those legal reforms have led to strengthening or weakening people's participation in local government. The target audience for this book are students and researchers in Asian studies , international development studies, and public administration, as well as practitioners working in the local governments discussed.