If population concentrates as media and tools become increasingly decentralized, will regional authority outrank the national kind? Would a city-state set-up with public and private sectors vying to solve problems lead to improvements or greater inequalities–or doses of both? These are some of the hot topics in politics and development right now. The opening of “The End of the Nation State?” Parag Khanna’s New York Times Opinion piece:

“SINGAPORE — EVERY five years, the United States National Intelligence Council, which advises the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, publishes a report forecasting the long-term implications of global trends. Earlier this year it released its latest report, ‘Alternative Worlds,’ which included scenarios for how the world would look a generation from now.

One scenario, ‘Nonstate World,’ imagined a planet in which urbanization, technology and capital accumulation had brought about a landscape where governments had given up on real reforms and had subcontracted many responsibilities to outside parties, which then set up enclaves operating under their own laws.

The imagined date for the report’s scenarios is 2030, but at least for ‘Nonstate World,’ it might as well be 2010: though most of us might not realize it, ‘nonstate world’ describes much of how global society already operates. This isn’t to say that states have disappeared, or will. But they are becoming just one form of governance among many.

A quick scan across the world reveals that where growth and innovation have been most successful, a hybrid public-private, domestic-foreign nexus lies beneath the miracle. These aren’t states; they’re ‘para-states’ — or, in one common parlance, ‘special economic zones.'”