From the Northern Triangle to Northern Europe: How Good Governance Can Rescue Central America

Neil Shenai ()

Chapter Chapter 1 in Escaping the Governance Trap, 2022, pp 1-30 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are stuck in “governance traps” in which economic informality, violence and insecurity, state capture and corruption, and a lack of state capacity limit their ability to meet the needs of their populations. The governance trap is defined as a path-dependent equilibrium in which weak states with contested authority fail to penetrate civil society and achieve self-sustaining economic growth, resulting in states that under supply political order and economic opportunity. This governance trap framework rests on several propositions. First, the state is an autonomous organization that has a monopoly over the legitimate use of force in a given territory. Second, the Northern Triangle countries have weak states due to their contested monopoly of violence and thus, improving their governance will require improving their Weberian stateness. Third, state capacity is a composite of the mix of activities pursued by the Northern Triangle countries (their “scope”) and their ability to penetrate civil society autonomously (their “strength”). Fourth, some strength-scope combinations are better geared toward promoting high-quality governance than others. Fifth, because institutions exhibit path dependence, successful reforms will likely require strong, multi-year long commitments. Sixth, it is possible to “get to Denmark” with the right set of reforms, political will, and timely help from international partners.

Keywords: Getting to Denmark; Governance trap; Max Weber; Northern Triangle economic reform; Path dependence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-99023-7_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030990237

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-99023-7_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().