Governance, Good

The concept of good governance has multiple meanings, but it most generally refers to a standard or model for how states or other political entities should govern and be governed. This usually includes a long list of normative principles to which these entities should adhere, such as transparency, accountability, inclusiveness, effectiveness, and impartiality. Quite commonly, good governance is defined in terms of its antonyms—that is, by referring to phenomena that indicate its absence, such as corruption, nepotism, favoritism, particularism, or patrimonialism. Within policy circles of the developmental aid community, the concept has been used as an agenda for reform of developing countries, such as civil service reforms, securing property rights, or installing judicial independence. Within the academic community, where close synonyms such as institutional quality or quality of government have been developed, the concept has been systematically linked to several highly desirable outcomes, most notably economic growth and long-term development.

The concept was first launched by the World Bank in the late 1980s and early 1990s in a series of reports that sought to develop a new strategy for aid conditionality. Previously, the Bank had refrained from taking political criteria into account in its donor policy. By demanding that recipient countries adhere to the agenda of “good governance reforms,” this stance was changed. By the late 1990s, the concept started to surface on the research agenda of several academic fields in the social sciences, most notably in economics and political science. To a considerable extent, this development was propelled by the appearance of empirical measures, or worldwide governance indicators, made publicly available by the World Bank Institute.

To apprehend the scope of meanings attached to the concept, a series of distinctions is needed. First, good governance may be defined in terms of what it is (as a good in itself) or in terms of what it is good for (e.g., good for economic development). The former may be called an internal definition and the latter an external (or functionalist) definition of good governance. In the internal case, some properties of the governance system of a country must be singled out in advance, together with a notion of why these properties make the system better or of a higher quality. This could, for example, be the idea that good governance is to be equated with the rule of law. Countries abiding by this principle are then considered to have good governance, regardless of whether the rule of law leads to other desirable consequences. In the external case, empirical scrutiny is required to determine what properties of the system are considered to be good, namely, those that are found to exert an influence on some preferable, external outcome. In this case too, rule of law might be considered to be part of good governance but only to the extent that rule of law can be shown to influence, for example, economic growth or other desirable phenomena.

Second, good governance may be defined in terms of procedures or policy content. Procedural definitions refer to regulatory principles, codes of conduct, norms, or other value-laden criteria that constrain the forms in which politics may be conducted. Definitions demanding certain contents, by contrast, require certain policies to be enacted by the political system, such as market deregulation or state privatization.

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