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Projects: Measuring Governance |
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The
practice of good governance distinguishes successful democratic nations from those many
states which do little for their people. Governance is the delivery of a number of
critical public goods to citizens: security, rule of law, political freedoms, an enabling
framework for economic performance, education, health, and so on. Where a regime fails to
perform—fails to provide reasonable quantities and qualities of essential public
goods—it is governing poorly. But can the nations of the world, particularly the
nations of the developing world, be rated according to how well they govern? Is it
desirable, and possible, to develop a set of rankings of countries with the best governed
at the top and least well governed at the bottom? Could such a ranking system, analogous
to that developed by Transparency International for corruption, encourage countries to
attempt to govern themselves more effectively? Ranking nation-states according to how well they govern is a goal of the Foundation’s continuing endeavors on this subject. One part of that work at the initial meeting, and in 2004, will focus on the extent to which non-subjective or only partially subjective measures can be created to measure governance. Objective measures will reduce the carping from target governments; measuring devices that rely on perceptions, or subjectivity, are always open to charges of bias. Robert I. Rotberg and Deborah L. West's Report, The Good Governance Problem: Doing Something About It, outlines a rationale for and a method of ranking the countries of the world according to the quality of their governance, suggests the establishment of a new non-governmental organization to oversee the process, and details how that NGO would create the rating system.
WPF
Fellow Marie Besançon’s Good Governance Rankings: The Art of Measurement,
WPF Report 36, examines the nature of the governance problem and the extent to which the
salient questions have been answered. She reports on the WPF-organized meeting at the
Kennedy School of Government that discussed these and other critical governance issues.
Her detailed analysis prepares policy makers to re-examine the criteria being readied for
the Millennium Challenge Account, and those being used formally or informally by several
national aid agencies. It also prepares policy makers to decide on the feasibility of
creating a robust method of comparing how one government performs against another.
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