Network Governance Vs Governing networks – A systemic risk: case study of Delhi local government (toll tax)

  Namrata Singh

Government today relies on a complex and interactive networking system. This network governance itself is based on dyadic inter organisational relationship between public, nonprofit and for profit actors. My paper shows how the complex arrangements of contractual providers to public policy has a high incidence of systemic risk. The empirical context of this paper is Delhi toll collection system over a period of 5 years. The study indicated that the government had a well developed contract management system for collection of toll tax but it did not consider the systemic risk when awarding individual contracts. With time the system concentrated the service provider into a handful of ‘big’ producers which in turn led to systemic failure when these ‘big’ producers failed and governance had limited absorptive capacity in the system. This raises two questions : firstly how network governance can ensure government funders to attend to systemic risk in contracted services and secondly, the implications for governments’ ability to meet statutory obligations to provide services. The case is unique because in a disarticulated state like Delhi its local governance highlights that the concept of metagovernance can help to avoid the misguided idea that networking governance drastically reduces the role of the government. On the contrary the crony networking of quasi-markets and partnerships of elected politicians emphasizes the need for governing the network. The case study tries to contribute to understanding the systemic risk of contracted services in network governance. Though the issue is understudied, potential for systemic failures are present in all cases of networked services. Second, it demonstrates the utility of using secondary affiliation network data to understand complex structures used to implement public policy

Keywords- urban governance toll tax

Unique Identification Number - IJEDR2202015
Page Number(s) - 92-95
Pubished in - Volume 10 | Issue 2 | May 2022
DOI (Digital Object Identifier) -   
Publisher - IJEDR (ISSN - 2321-9939)

  Namrata Singh,   "Network Governance Vs Governing networks – A systemic risk: case study of Delhi local government (toll tax)", International Journal of Engineering Development and Research (IJEDR), ISSN:2321-9939, Volume.10, Issue 2, pp.92-95, May 2022, Available at :http://www.ijedr.org/papers/IJEDR2202015.pdf