Governance: Solving or Reproducing Inequalities

Abstract

Socio-economic and political inequalities in the world are not fortuitous. They usually are the product of inequity, i.e., structural causes that unevenly attribute roles, distribute benefits and burdens, and create skewed conditions of access to resources. Understanding the workings of governance-how institutions operate, how actors can exert power, and how allocation patterns take shape-behind the reproduction of inequalities is key to solving them. This task is particularly imperative in sustainable development governance (or any specific sector therein, such as the bioeconomy), where the promotion of social equity is a principled part of it. Drawing from institutions theory and studies on power and distributive justice, this chapter develops a conceptual framework to analyze how (in)equity gains shape. It advances the idea that short and long feedback loops link various elements of governance. Agent power configurations are related to the institutional milieu, as are the distributive outcomes of governance and agents' material capabilities that, in turn, help them shape institutions in their favor. The chapter unpacks each of these governance elements to show why inequality is so hard to address, while also offering a lens to analyze and eventually tackle its "lock-in" nature. Keywords Equity • Institutions • Power • Agency • Access and allocation • Governance architectures The Inequity of InequalityAs income and wealth inequalities rise to their highest levels in decades in OECD countries-while persisting in much of the developing world-fairness debates have become increasingly common in the social sciences and beyond. As an illustration, Oxfam has noted that the combined wealth of the world's 22 richest men is larger than that of all the women in Africa (Coffey et al. 2020). Relative easiness to measure makes income a common focus of attention, but inequalities are multi-dimensional. There are social inequalities related to differences and imbalances across genders, races or classes, cultural inequalities between social groups, and political inequalities in terms of capacity to influence social norms and decision-making processes. There are also other dimensions of economic inequality, besides those of wealth and income,