Measurement of Governance

Conceptualization must always precede measurement, so before we begin to think about measuring governance we will need to be sure of the meaning of the concept itself. This sequence of intellectual activity is especially important for a complex concept such as governance, which involves multiple actors and multiple activities and has been subject to considerable intellectual debate. In its most fundamental conceptual sense, governance means steering the economy and society toward some collective goals. This function traditionally has been allocated to the formal institutions of government, and although contemporary conceptions of governing tend to emphasize the importance of nongovernmental actors in governance, the public sector must remain a central focus for steering. This central role for the formal institutions of government is especially important when the measurement of success and failure in governance is a central concern. Unless there is a clear set of goals against which to compare outcomes and achievements, there can be no means of assessing governance. In this way, the governance literature in the social sciences is similar to the implementation literature; without a clear target for implementation, it is almost impossible to assess the success or failure of implementation.

Any conception of governance must, however, also have some sense of the dominance of the political and must recognize the role that governing plays in building and maintaining legitimacy for the political system as a whole. Thus, scholars (and practitioners) may want to measure the formal achievement of policy goals through the processes that have been developed for governing (involving private-sector actors to [Page 555]varying degrees) and the political consequences of those policy outcomes. In transitional regimes, building governance capacity may be especially important for legitimating the political system and will need to be at the center of any measurement of governance. Even for more completely institutionalized systems of governing, the effectiveness of the political systems is important for maintaining the confidence of citizens, and hence, becomes a central concern for governance.

Although it is relatively easy to define governance at a conceptual level, moving from the level of ideas to the level of operationalization and measurement is substantially more difficult. Even if the goals being pursued in governance were unambiguous, it might still be difficult to determine whether governance was successful or not. How close to the stated goals must programs approach to say that governance has been successful? Likewise, if there are unintended consequences of policies used to reach goals, how are they to be weighed against the achievement of the stated goals? And given the political nature of governance, how open and democratic does the process need to be, or how much does corruption need to be reduced, to claim that “good governance” has actually occurred, or has been successful?

Even if we could develop the nominal classifications—governance, nongovernance—moving to ordinal or interval levels of measurement would be even more problematic. Thinking in those terms, however, is important for making the governance literature more compatible with most contemporary social sciences that emphasize quantitative methodologies and rigorous measurement of the key concepts. As long as discussions of governance remain almost entirely at the verbal level, they are not likely to become central to the social sciences, although certainly the capacity of a society to govern itself is a key concern for both the social sciences and for real societies.

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