Co-governance between government and civil society in asia: Institutionalization without collaboration

The collapse of the garment factory complex Rana Plaza on April 24, 2013, killed 1,129 workers and exposed the serious failure of governance in Bangladesh. The malfunctioning relationship among the government, garment factory owners, and labor unions damages the potential for Bangladesh's economic and social development. The Bangladesh government excluded labor unions from the garment factories and collaborated with the owners. The collapse of Rana Plaza proved that such exclusion is counterproductive. The Bangladesh government is setting up institutional arrangements such as the Public Private Partnership (PPP) by involving CSOs and other social and private actors, but little has been done to make the PPP work substantively. CSOs cannot perform well if the institutional setting is hierarchical, since they need autonomy to collaborate with the government. It is paradoxical that the government rarely offers a soft institutionalization, even though the Bangladesh government wants collaboration with CSOs.