The GOVERNANCE blog

The December e-newsletter is now available.  The lead item: In January, Governance celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary.  Open access to the lead commentary in issue 25.1 is now available.  Charles Kenny asks: Does governance matter?  “History isn’t everything,” says Kenny, “and weak governance is neither unfixable nor an insurmountable obstacle to progress.”  Kenny is senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and author of Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding (Basic Books, 2011).

This note was prepared as the introduction for a special issue on the effects of the financial crisis that will be published by Governance in January 2012 (25.1).  Read more about contributors to the special issue here.  These introductory comments are the sole responsibility of the special issue editors, David Coen and Alasdair Roberts.  Download this article in PDF.

By David Coen and Alasdair Roberts. The papers contained in this special issue were produced as part of a project organized by Governance, the School of Public Policy at University College London, and Suffolk University Law School. The contributors met first at a roundtable in Boston in 2009, and then at a second roundtable in London in 2010. Their assignment was to consider how the financial crisis of 2007-2008 was likely to change policy and institutions in their respective fields of interest.

In the first months of the crisis that began in 2007-08 it was not clear that it would have any significant long-term effect on the conventional wisdom about governance. No doubt, the financial sector had been badly shaken; but there were optimists who thought that it would quickly right itself. Many policymakers thought that the broader economic consequences would also be limited. Prime Minister Gordon Brown believed in 2008 that the British economy would recover in six months, according to former chancellor Alistair Darling.

This early optimism was unfounded. Three years have passed since the moment of panic, and the full consequences of the crisis have still not been realized. Major economies are stagnant, the solvency of major banks remains in doubt, and even countries teeter on default. Public institutions whose solidity was unquestioned in 2006 are now besieged. Trust in major leaders has declined, governments have collapsed, and voter polarization has increased. Protests and riots are once again commonplace in western capitals. The easy consensus on policy which typified the last years of the age of liberalization — roughly, the three decades from 1978 to 2008 — has collapsed. The rationale for delegation to regulatory authorities and state retrenchment has been called into question as governments grapple with a stream of crises. Read the rest of this entry »

In recent writings about governance reform, says Harvard University professor Merilee Grindle, “recipes are out.  So are ‘one size fits all’ and idealized end states.”  In the current issue of Governance (24.3, July 2011), Grindle says that scholars and practitioners are moving to a new emphasis on “situationally-determined responses to specific problems.”  But this new approach has its own challenges: Can we prove that contextually-sensitive diagnostics are actually more effective?  Can new methods be explained easily to important constituencies?  And how will this new approach mesh with the political imperative to have a simple, compelling story about reform?  Read more: Open access to the commentary.

Good governance may be crucial for development, says Nathalie Delapalme, Director of Research and Policy at the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, but better data is crucial for achieving good governance.  Delapalme provides the lead commentary for the current issue of Governance (24.1, January 2011):  African governance: The importance of more and better data.  She describes the lack of reliable and timely information about the delivery of public services in many African nations.  Lack of data inhibits the Foundation’s ability to assess the quality of governance, compromises policymaking by governments, and undermines efforts to gauge aid effectiveness.  The dearth of data is a “major challenge”, says Delapalme, that “cuts across the entire spectrum of African governance.”  Open access to the commentary here.

The relationship between democracy and good governance is “more tenuous than we like to admit,” says Pratap Bhanu Mehta, President of India’s Centre for Policy Research, in the lead commentary for the new issue of Governance (23.3, July 2010).  But Mehta examines one neglected factor that might improve the prospects for good governance: an increase in the scale of government spending.

In India, Mehta argues, increased state expenditure has improved voters’ attention to governmental performance; changed the structure of corruption in beneficial ways; and allowed government to invest in stronger accountability instruments.  “A growth in state capacity,” Mehta concludes, “can, to a certain extent, mitigate the ill effects of unaccountable government.”  Download Mehta’s commentary for free.

Nathalie Delapalme, Director of research and policy for the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, will contribute the lead commentary for the January 2011 issue of Governance.  The Foundation is committed to supporting African leadership that will improve the economic and social prospects of the people of Africa.  Delapalme was previously a French senior civil servant and  specializes in Africa and development policies. Her most recent position was Inspector General at the Inspection Générale des Finances.

Individuals who take a new subscription to the print version of Governance in April 2010 will receive a complimentary copy of Kishore Mahbubani‘s book, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, published by PublicAffairs in 2008.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, President of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, writes the lead commentary for the July issue of Governance (23.3).  “Indian politics,” says Mehta in his July commentary, “has been undergoing two subtle but pronounced shifts that may have larger lessons for the politics of democratic accountability.”  Mehta is the co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Politics in India (Oxford University Press, 2010); co-author of Public Institutions in India: Performance and Design (Oxford University Press, 2005); and author of The Burden of Democracy (Penguin Books, 2003).

Happy new year!  Governance begins 2010 with a new design.  This is the first redesign of the journal since its launch in 1988.  Celebrate the new year by enjoying free access to all content in the new issue, 23.1, throughout January.

The new design includes a new feature at the start of each issue: a short commentary by a leading scholar or policymaker on a critical question of governance.  The first commentary is by Paul Starr, Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs at Princeton University.

“The fundamental problems of democracy are not susceptible to technological solutions,” says Starr. In the current environment, “it will be a struggle just to maintain some of the minimal conditions of political accountability that democracy requires.”  Download Professor Starr’s commentary, “The Liberal State in a Digital World,” for free.