Broader Participation and Effective Governance
A second major challenge facing the region is to find a sustainable balance between broader participation in public decision-making and effective governance. This challenge is not be limited to those countries in the region with Western political institutions. All countries in Asia, whether their political forms are communist, authoritarian or democratic, are struggling with the challenge of governing more open political systems. As ever larger numbers of people benefit from improved education and health services and rising incomes, still fragile governments will face mounting pressures to accommodate new interests and demands. They will have to deal with these pressures while struggling to achieve and maintain effective control over widely separated disparate parts of their countries.
Rapid economic growth will help generate the resources needed for development. But rapid growth also undermines the reciprocal obligations inherent in the vertical relations between landlord and tenant, moneylender and borrower, and old and young. These relationships will be replaced by more impersonal, horizontal interest groupings that may well weaken consensus and encourage polarization. At the same time, new dependencies will be created. The farmer whose crops are irrigated by an electric pump is dependent on the provider of electricity. And, the provider of the electricity knows that the farmer will not sit idly by if his electricity is turned off.
Asian governments are under pressure not only to provide more economic and social benefits but also to distribute those benefits more equitably among their rapidly growing and increasingly demanding populations. They will have to struggle to meet these demands while also being urged to expand civil and political liberties. Meanwhile, nongovernmental groupings―voluntary agencies, community-based organizations, cooperatives, farmer associations―will play increasingly important roles. They will provide services, mobilize individual initiative, link local needs with public resources and meet other tasks earlier seen as the responsibility of government, family or clan.
As societies become more developed, integrated and interdependent, emerging middle classes―but also other groups based on caste, clan, gender, language, region or religion―will demand greater say in decisions which affect their incomes and livelihoods. And, they will organize to protect and advance their interests. At the same time, because weaker sectors of society have less influence, special measures will be needed to assure their voices are heard, their basic needs met, and their fights protected.
Meeting the needs of diverse sectors of society will require more open, accountable, diversified and responsive systems of governance. Will systems based on highly centralized, closed and elite-dominated decision-making processes be able to accommodate pressures for greater participation without undermining the stability necessary for development? The answer to that question will determine whether change in Asia is revolutionary, evolutionary, or paralyzed by―to use a phrase common in the United States―gridlock.
Tradition and Modernity
A third, closely related challenge Asia faces is perhaps less visible but not less important than the two just mentioned: how to reconcile the norms and values characteristic of rural, agrarian, subsistence societies with the imperatives of an increasingly industrialized, urbanized and media-ized world.
