All the major political parties in Guyana are committed to further constitutional change to improve constituency participation and parliamentary and local government autonomy. Yet, ten years since the last constitutional reform, progress has been extremely slow and much is still left to be done. This is largely because in bi-communal societies, governments are suspicious of measures that will give additional authority to those communities they do not control. The still incomplete constitutional reform agenda is not however my immediate concern. Here I will briefly give examples of experiences of executive power sharing, in both the developed and developing worlds, so that we may grasp its scope, nature and usefulness and be able to conceptualise, and possibly construct, a system that suits our specific condition.
Two preliminary clarifications: firstly, executive power sharing governments may or may not be coalition governments. Shared governance is the result of pre-election institutionalised formal or informal arrangements to share executive authority. By this understanding, the PNC/United Force coalition of the 1960s is not an example of shared governance. Secondly, the following should indicate that many factors – history, leadership capacities,
