From Classification to Clarity: Why Governance Needs a Taxonomy

Government departments organise their work around schemes and responsibilities, but citizens experience problems that often cross those boundaries. In this opinion article, Dr. Annapoorna Ravichander explains how governance taxonomy can connect policies, institutions and outcomes, using malnutrition, air pollution and education as examples.

Governance has a curious problem. We have never had so much information, so many schemes, so many dashboards and so many institutions working on public problems. Yet, sometimes, the problem itself seems to slip through the cracks.

Why? Perhaps because governments often organise themselves around departments, while citizens experience problems.

For example, take malnutrition. Is it only a food problem? Or is it also about maternal health, sanitation, drinking water, income, education, childcare and behaviour? The answer, of course, is all of these, but each of these areas may belong to a different department, programme or level of government. This is where an apparently technical idea called taxonomy becomes surprisingly relevant to everyday governance. Taxonomy simply means organising something into categories and sub-categories while understanding the relationships between them. It is more than making a list. It helps us see the bigger picture.

A Problem does not belong to one Department

India’s experience with nutrition offers a useful illustration. Malnutrition is a problem with many causes and therefore cannot be addressed by distributing food alone. India’s POSHAN Abhiyaan explicitly recognised this and made convergence between departments a central part of its approach. Nutrition-related interventions involve health, women and child development, sanitation, drinking water, food and other sectors. But the implementation experience also revealed the difficulty of making convergence work on the ground. NITI Aayog’s monitoring reports noted that discussions in some convergence meetings remained generic, lower-level committees had limited power to address financial and operational gaps, and multiple departments were often working with different data-reporting structures and platforms.

That is not necessarily a failure of individual officials. A district official may know perfectly well that a malnourished child needs more than a nutrition supplement. But the official may still be working within a system in which one department controls nutrition services, another controls health, another water and sanitation, another local infrastructure and another social protection.

Everyone may be doing their job but yet the problem remains bigger than the sum of those jobs. This is where a taxonomy could help. Instead of looking at malnutrition as a scheme or departmental responsibility, it could be mapped as:

Problem → Causes → Policy objectives → Interventions →........

© News9Live