The unit studies the ways in which governance in Bangladesh is organized and managed at international, national and local levels, the inter-linkages involved, the implications present, and the outcomes resulting. Central actors here are political parties, state and civil society organizations, elite groups and groups of the poor, bureaucracies, traditional authorities, donors, and individual citizens. The politics of their engagement with government and state is analyzed in research on aid policies, participatory and representative democracy, local practices of exclusion and marginalization, local government and service provision, the administration of local justice and security provision.