We just started the third decade of the 21st Century. No doubt there has been progress and far-reaching transformations just in the last two decades in technology, communications, medicine, space exploration, and travel. Yet, one area that still poses challenges is progress in democratic governance. As still unresolved challenges such as poverty, inequality, discrimination, racism, conflict, and hunger, persist, the effect of democratic governance is being called into question. While these challenges facing governance are not necessarily new, today they are stronger and more pressing than in the past. Similarly, the relationship between government and citizens is evolving, as political communities have multiplied identities, needs, and aspirations. Moreover, demographic shifts, climate change, and socioeconomic transitions have structured a complex governance matrix, with new political attitudes, some old, others new. A key emerging challenge is the business of governing societies that are constantly evolving. While a more democratic wave of government swept the latter part of the 20th century and spread hope into the third decade of the 21st century, today whole societies are struggling to sustain static models of democratic governance and are sliding into more authoritarian models of governing. The non-democratic risks of a century ago remain today alive and well, and they have re-emerged in multiple ways, undermining collective interests, institutional mechanisms, and citizen representation and participation. The current unwavering trend at the start of a new decade of a new century begs the question; is the one-man tradition of control, once observed only in fewer places and thought to have been mitigated, now part of a wider political parlance across the world’s governance systems?
Read More “A New Caudillismo Sweeping the World’s Governance Systems?”
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