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The rise of the modern state extended direct rule, in which central authorities assumed ever‐greater responsibility for governing all the territory within the state's boundaries. Although direct rule made all individuals increasingly dependent on the centre for the provision of public goods, at the same time it threatened the power of local authorities. To legitimize the new order, central rulers embarked on state‐building nationalism that aimed to transform multinational states into national ones.

Chapter 4 explores the processes through which institutions struggle for a place in the democratic order and how they achieve and lose primacy and autonomy. It attends to why it is difficult to find a form of political organization that is perceived as normatively best and also sustainable, securing a stable equilibrium between central government and partly autonomous institutions. The analytical value of ‘autonomy’ as detachment from politics and the apolitical dynamics of change assumed by many New Public Management reforms are questioned, and the interplay between central authority and institutional autonomy is interpreted as an artefact of partly decoupled inter-institutional processes involving the struggle for power among interdependent and co-evolving institutions that are carriers of competing yet legitimate values, interests, behavioural logics, and resources. The issues are illustrated by the cases of public administration and the public university.

This chapter discusses the regulation of groundwater. It covers national level initiatives which include the establishment of the Central Groundwater Authority and model groundwater legislation. It then discusses state groundwater laws and rainwater harvesting.

This chapter describes the internal administration and foreign relations of the Mauryan empire under the reign of Aśoka. It explains that the establishment of the Mauryan state ushered in a new form of government, that of a centralised empire. Under this regime, the king had the central authority, and he not only defended social usage according to the traditional concept of kingship, but could also make his own laws. It was because of this increased power of the king that the Mauryan centralised monarchy became a paternal despotism under Aśoka. This chapter describes the Mauryan state's relationship with Kalinga and Ceylon. It suggests that Aśoka's relationship with Ceylon was not purely political, because though there may have been a considerable exchange of missions, Ceylon remained an independent kingdom.

This chapter describes how the transfer of the Negrín government from Valencia to Barcelona resulted in a political fallout between the regional and central authorities. After the events of May 1937 ended, discontent smoldered over the retention of police authority by the central government. The transfer caused plenty of complaints, which the presence of obtrusive central government authorities and the PCE had only added to, and all these sparked the fierce regionalist sentiments of the Catalans. The presence of the SIM also exacerbated tensions. Regional autonomy was foremost in the Catalans' minds, yet Negrín was not interested—instead insisting on a unified Spain, especially in light of a mutual interest in defeating Franco.

Civil service can be managed based on one of the two types of administrative systems. The centralized system is built around central control over personnel matters such as recruitment, promotion, transfers, training, salary, grading, productivity, and performance evaluation. The decentralized system holds civil servants accountable for the outputs they produce as well as the outcomes they deliver. India uses the centralized system, which it inherited from the British. Focus on controlling the personnel usage is the key feature of such a system. This chapter proposes a system that combines the best of both the centralized and decentralized administrative systems but in which substantial management powers are vested in the line departments and executive agencies. It also discusses disciplinary proceedings for civil servants, personnel management in executive agencies and ministries/departments, and the Draft Civil Services Bill 2009 that calls for the creation of a Central Civil Services Authority.

This chapter explores the struggle to build a national system of public health administration, which was now thought of in terms of coordinating the relations between central and local authorities. It focuses on the midcentury debate on sanitary centralization and competing ideas regarding the merits and proper management of local self-government. It argues that reform entailed acknowledging an administrative inheritance that, from the 1830s onward, stretched back over centuries. The problem was that there was no agreement on quite what this historical inheritance amounted to and whether progress entailed rejecting it, working with it, or even reclaiming it more fully. The politics of public health was made of different readings of the past, as put in the service of different visions of the future.

This chapter focuses on protection and conservation of one of the most important sources of freshwater in India—the groundwater. The existing legal framework on groundwater consists of instruments at the Union and state levels. The first section of the chapter covers instruments that are the basis of the most important regulatory institution at the Union level, the Central Groundwater Authority. Given the fact that a number of states have enacted a separate law to govern groundwater, the second section reproduces instruments to demonstrate different models adopted by different states. Over the last few years, a few initiatives have been taken by the central government to propose Model Groundwater Bills to encourage state governments to reform groundwater laws. The third section reproduces the latest draft of the Model Groundwater Bill that indicates the future direction of the groundwater legal regime in India.

The central factor that eventually transformed ancient Indian society into a medieval society was the practice of land grants. The brahmanas were granted villages free from taxes which were collected by the king from the villages. In addition, the beneficiaries were given the right to govern the people living in the donated villages. Royal control was eroded through the payment of government officials by land grants. There is a distinct evolution of the landlordism and devolution of the central state authority by the seventh century. The important change in the agrarian economy is noted. The decline of trade led to the decay of towns. There was an increasing divine hierarchy in post-Gupta times. The Bhakti cult spread throughout India. Bhakti meant that people made all kinds of offerings to the god in return for which they received the prasada or the favour of the god.

This chapter looks at conservatism in post-Soviet Russia, particularly during the 2010s when there arose a “conservative turn” in Russian politics and society. This was associated with a revival of the Russian Orthodox Church, centralization of political authority, growing Russian nationalism, increased tensions between Russia and the Western world, and socially conservative legislation. These phenomena have made Russian conservatism a matter of considerable contemporary importance. The chapter describes multiple types of conservatism and shows that what all these groups have in common is support for a strong centralized state and belief in the need for Russia to protect its sovereignty and develop in an organic fashion, befitting its national traditions. Despite all the differences, as in previous eras, Orthodoxy, a belief in a strong central authority, and variations of nationalism remain at the core of Russian conservatism.

This chapter discusses the assumption that devolution has been an important tool for the accommodation of Basque difference in Spain. It studies the main arrangements and rationales for Basque devolution and looks at the nature of modern devolution and its implications for political conflict in the Basque Country. This chapter also lists the primary actors, important issues and disputes in Basque politics, and emphasises the characteristics of Basque relations with central state authorities.

Civil servants in India are frequently transferred from one position to another, presenting a major problem in terms of governance. To make matters worse, short tenures have made it difficult to hold civil servants accountable for their performance. Short tenures are a regular feature of both the lower echelons and the higher civil services such as the Indian Administrative Service. The transfer of civil servants is used by politicians as a main instrument to control the bureaucracy and, thus, as a means for surplus-extraction from the clients of the bureaucracy. The Draft Civil Services Bill 2009 has proposed the creation of a Central Civil Services Authority to be responsible for fixing tenure for all civil service posts under the central government.

Over the course of the mid-nineteenth-century wars, the dominant powers (Britain, the U.S., Russia, and Qing China) came to espouse a surprisingly similar orientation toward legitimate statehood. While the liberation wars of the late-eighteenth century witnessed the creation of many new republics, by midcentury those republics and the empires that had survived pursued greater central authority. Although sometimes at odds with liberal rhetoric of the age (especially among reforming Republicans in the U.S.), these actors recognized the importance of coercion of violence to maintaining their states. The victory of centralized authority, whether it took the form of empires or republics, reinforced the power of established states and of organized, aggressive defense of that order.

This chapter focuses on protests against unequal policies of controlling and allocating natural resources in Bolivia. These protests have surfaced through social movements against policies, which result in unequal distribution of water and natural gas resources. Corrupt governments and authorities have failed to bring natural resources under a central authority. Much of the country’s rural and urban water resources have been controlled by local groups, and many transnational groups and agencies are engaged in developing and managing its portable water and irrigation systems. Resource governance in Bolivia will be unable to achieve the same level of success as the North Atlantic states due to the impact of these factors. Unstable economic and political conditions in the country have also rendered legal and institutional frameworks incapable of governing and managing natural resources efficiently.