In an era of numerous government reorganizations and reforms, governance has become the latest catchword in public administration theory and practice. This suggests that modern states have undergone a metamorphosis: they are no longer managed by governments that maintain order and facilitate collective action, but are led by mechanisms that do not necessarily rely solely on government authority and approval. Kooiman (1993, p. 4) explains governance as follows:

As Chapter Two will reveal, governance is fraught with problems, the most pressing of which appears to be a lack of clarity about its actual meaning. This is compounded by its application as an alternative approach to governing, which may be particularly problematic as it causes unintended side effects to reorganization processes involving private, public, and voluntary organizations (Greca 2002; Salamon 2002, p. 12). As a concept and framework for analysis, governance has received theoretical and empirical attention from public administration scholars in the Anglo-American and Continental European traditions (Kooiman 1993; Pierre and Peters 2000; Peters 2002; Salamon 2002). Yet, it has rarely been applied to specific countries outside these traditions or to particular policy domains.

Thus, this book attempts to analyse the liberalizing process of an illiberally democratic system, namely, Singapore, by focusing on governance changes and practices pertaining to state-society relations in the past fourteen years (1990–2004). The argument is that such relations are crucial for understanding the ongoing process of state formation and reconstitution outside the formal structures of power. The book examines the contextual, organizational and sectoral factors that influence this relationship in the area of environmental and nature conservation policies. Existing studies on state-society relations in Singapore have discussed these relations with regard to political opposition in the mid-1990s (Rodan 1996), general conceptualizations of these relations (Koh and Ooi 2000), the dynamics of citizens’ participation in the policy process (Ho 2000), and the activities and public participation of Southeast Asian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in various areas of policy (Lee 2004). The chapter on Singapore in this last study was simply a revision of Koh and Ooi's earlier work on conceptualizations (Koh and Ooi 2004).