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Governance in developing countries: The challenge of multi-level governance
1. What is Governance?: Approaches to Defining Governance
In spite of the popularity of the governance discourse the concept remains ambiguous. Two
major definitions of governance have gained currency in the rapidly growing academic and
policy literature on the subject. In the most popular one, used by the World Bank and many
other United Nations institutions, governance is defined as ‘ the manner in which power is
exercised in the management of a country’s economic and social development’ (World Bank
1994: vii, see also United Nations Development Program 1997). Essentially, governance as
conceived by these multilateral organs, emphasizes leadership--the manner in which (state)
political leaders manage, use (or misuse) power --whether to promote social and economic
development or to pursue agendas that undermine such goals. This was made explicit in the
World Bank’s first application of the concept to Africa. Governance was regarded as the
single most important if not the sole cause of Africa’s underdevelopment (World Bank
1989:60). Well-governed countries are led by regimes in which rule of law, accountability,
transparency and the enjoyment of human and civil rights are allowed.
A second approach to defining governance focuses on the sharing of authority for public
management between state and non-state organizations. Jan Kooimans (1993: 2) and other
European researchers define socio-political forms of governing as ‘ forms in which public or
private actors do not separately but in conjunction, engage in problem solving together, in
combination, that is to say co-arrangements’. The school therefore views governance as
forms of multi-organizational action rather than involving only state institutions.
The definition used in this paper is closer to this second school of thought. Governance is
approached, as it had always been understood in the political science literature as the
fundamental rules, which regulate the relationships between rulers and the ruled, the rules-in -use
or constitutive choice rules, operating at deeper levels of analysis than collective and
operational choice rules (Kiser & Ostrom 1982, Ostrom 1990, Hyden 1992). The legal
community (Okoth Ogendo 1999) also refers to these constitutional rules as ‘ground-norms’.
Although primarily associated with the analysis of the state, governance is a generic term,
which can be applied to all forms of human organization--economic, cultural, religious or
military.
There are those who see in the governance debate a way of scapegoating the poor countries
for the failure of development—while completely ignoring some of the problems within the
international economic relations which have perpetuated old patterns of relationship between
weak and strong nations. On the other hand, some see governance as providing the crucial
opportunity to address issues of power inequality within national (and international) political
systems which some hope may help to improve institutional quality especially in developing
countries where ordinary citizens have a high distrust of governmental institutions and
actually work to undermine them (Narayan et al 2000, Ekeh 1975).
One significance of approaching governance as the fundamental rules of the political game is
that it facilitates the analysis of the high levels of asymmetry in the distribution of power and
other resources among different power wielders in society—those at the center as against
those in the periphery, between one region or locality and another and between individuals
who exercise power and those that do not. For an important difference between developed and
underdeveloped countries is in the concentration of power in central government agencies in
the latter groups of countries as we shall see in greater detail below.
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