An ecology of governance: rethinking the state and political community

This chapter engages with the question of the co-existence and entanglement of profoundly different, often incommensurate forms of governance and social order in the context of state formation. It does this through a focus on the state in Timor-Leste. It does not address the operation of state institutions or political elites, however; nor does it describe the everyday workings of governance. There are varying and overlapping bodies of practice, frames of reference and ways of being in Timor-Leste. The focus of this discussion, however, is the cohabitation of those ways of understanding socio-political community, the person, economic exchange, mutual obligation, and sources of order, power and authority that are embedded in modern state governance with those that flow from broadly customary or kin-based forms of social order.