Incomplete Citizenship of the Plantation Community: Access to Governance Institutions and Public Service Delivery and other grounds and need to work in accordance with what is stipulated in the law and policy (Rothstein and Teorell 2008; La Porta et al. 1999). The two influential World Bank publications entitled Voices of the Poor: Can Anyone Hear Us? (Narayanan 2000) and Performance Accountability and Combating Corruption (Shah 2008) clearly demonstrate the influence of the above factors on citizens’ access to governance in general and provide detailed account of diverse societies in particular where institutional and political factors continue to inhibit deserving communities from gaining access to legally mandated public services and social citizenship rights as rightful citizens. In this light, this chapter aims to explore the impact of the legal form of citizenship in accessing governance and legally mandated public services from the quality of government perspective and to examine how far and in what manner institutional variables influence access. In this backdrop, the chapter poses the question like this: in which ways did legal citizenship and institutional variables influence the Plantation Community’s access to legally mandated public services in Sri Lanka? The central argument of the chapter is that provision of legal citizenship alone has not much improved the status of access to governance and social citizenship due to the low quality of governance structures in the country. This argument helps elucidate the significance of public institutions and their institutional working and attitudes in shaping access to social rights and governance in the Plantation Community. In other words, in some instances, the formal legal system or laws might have ensured equal status of rights, but the practice may be 25

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