Administering Or Governing: That Is The Question

In mid-May, Russia’s authorities created a new bureaucratic structure – the North Caucasus Development Ministry. The move came as no surprise: whenever a centralized system of governance is unable to resolve one or other issue, it resorts to creating a new administrative body vested with the responsibility to tackle it. However, in actual practice, such decisions often produce an eff ect diametrically opposite to the designers’ inten- tions – sometimes a new body begins a struggle for its place under the sun and embarks on a tug of war with earlier-established administrative structures in an eff ort to appropriate their functions, and to compete with them for resources. Thus, instead of improving the quality of governance and administration, the creation of new administrative and governance bodies frequently results only in their worsening.