Professor (Dr) Saundarjya Borbora
Vice Chancellor, ICFAI University Nagaland
Good governance is believed to be an important element for economic development and has been recognized as a means to faster economic growth and improvements in human development indicators. It is a fact and empirically tested that better governance, by and large, correlates with better eco¬nomic performance and higher incomes. Good governance for development is now universally recognized, it stands at the core of governance and administrative reforms undertaken in developed as well as developing countries. At the 2005 UN World Summit, the leaders focused on the importance of good governance for sustained development and eradication of poverty and hunger. Accountability, transparency and participation of the citizenry are some of the central pillars of governance. However, good governance can mean different things to different countries and can have different implications when it is used as a guiding framework for development policy and administrative reforms. Since each country or region has a different context of governance, it faces unique governance challenges. Therefore, it is important that the concept of good governance is understood in the context of each country and region to find indigenous and pragmatic solutions to its unique problems of governance within the framework of universally accepted values.
The paradigm of governance has evolved in developed countries with stable democratic political system and free markets, the application of the concept of good governance to developing countries that are at different development stages may have unintended and serious consequences for the citizens especially poor. The good governance agenda of international development agencies tends to be generic, imitative, and ambitious and it largely fails to take account of the institutional and developmental context of developing countries. Recognizing this problem, Merilee Grindle (2004) has argued for good enough governance for poverty reduction and reform in developing countries. The concept of ‘good enough governance’, though still in its infancy, represents a strong case for contextualizing or indigenizing the notion of good governance in the developing world to set realistic and achievable reform objectives for each country.
Traditionally, the term ‘governance’ was understood as synonymous to government. In recent years, the term governance has acquired a new meaning. Governance now refers to new processes, methods, or ways of governing society where government is one of the actors in the process of governance along with civil society and the private sector. The government has to steer, support, and guide as opposed to command and control, direct provision of public services, and to act as a standalone institution of governance. The development approach has changed over the years and today the focus is on human development, creating better opportunities. The concern for good governance in developing countries is born out of donors’ frustration with ineffective management of aid coincided with the shift from government to governance in developed countries.
Good governance gradually became a popular phrase incorporated in policy and administrative reforms of developing countries largely supported by international development agencies. Despite a lack of consensus on the definition of governance it has guided the reform agenda in many developing countries. Developing countries draws basically on two distinct but overlapping views on governance originating from the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program. The World Bank defines governance as “the manner in which power is exercised in the management of a country’s economic and social resources”. It has identified three aspects of governance: (1) the form of the political regime; (2) the process by which authority is exercised in the management of a country’s economic and social resources for development; and (3) the capacity of governments to design, formulate, and implement policies and discharge functions. The World Bank has its own methodology of assessing the quality of governance popularly known as Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI). The six indicators used in the latest governance assessment are: (1) voice and accountability, (2) political stability, (3) government effectiveness, (4) regulatory quality (5) rule of law, and (6) control of corruption. These six dimensions cover the political, economic and, institutional aspects of governance.
UNDP defines governance “as the exercise of economic, political, and administrative authority to manage a country’s affairs at all levels”. It comprises mechanisms, processes and institutions, through which citizens and groups articulate their interest, exercise their legal rights, meet their obligations, and mediate their differences. This definition clearly identifies three governance arenas: political, economic, and administrative.
A large number of individuals and institutions both national and international defined governance in their own perspectives but the essence of governance is about defining and prioritizing public goods, institutional mechanisms and structures for delivery of those public goods, and processes by which such structures and mechanisms operate. It focuses on articulation of interests by various stakeholders, especially those who are excluded and the marginalized. It recognizes that differences among various interests around public goods, and the preferred modes of delivering the same. It lays emphasis on negotiated and dialogical approaches to dealing with those differences. Despite different interpretations of governance and methodological challenges to assess the quality of governance, there is a general consensus among researchers, policy makers and donors that governance does matter and indeed good governance is imperative for development and poverty reduction. It is being increasingly felt that the application of the concept of good governance to developing countries poses a challenge at the implementation level, mainly due to its ethnocentricity and its different official versions. Concepts such as decentralization, citizen engagement, lean public service, privatization, autonomy, public-private partnership may work well in developed countries but may not produce the same outcomes in developing countries where the majority of poor people look towards their government for fulfilling their basic needs.
Governance is based on the assumption that bureaucratic and democratic norms of behavior are well entrenched in society’s formal and informal institutions. This implies that formal institutions which are deliberately structured in political, administrative, economic and social sphere are all governed by democratic and bureaucratic norms such as rule of law, accountability, equality, rationality, competition, efficiency, and participation since these are also the cultural values.
Governance, as a central theme in public affairs, calls for reallocation of governing power between government, market, and civil society. With the notion of governance, boundaries between public and private, government and civil society are getting blurred. Command and control are being substituted with incentive-based tools of governance. Governance, it should be stressed once more, is based on universally accepted values such as participation, accountability, transparency, efficiency, decency, and fairness. These values are based on the notions of liberal democracy, free market, and bureaucracy that are not compatible with the cultural context of many developing countries. Therefore, application of the concept of governance needs to be carefully applied and indigenized.
