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Journal of Development Studies

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'Good Governance': The Rise and Decline of a Policy Metaphor?

M. Doornbos Available online: 29 Mar 2010

To cite this article: M. Doornbos (2001): 'Good Governance': The Rise and Decline of a Policy Metaphor?, Journal of Development Studies, 37:6, 93-108 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/713601084

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Good Governance: The Rise and Decline of a Policy Metaphor?

M A RT I N D O O R N B O S

I. INTRODUCTION

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For over a decade, the notion of good governance has served as a general guiding principle for donor agencies in demanding adherence from recipient governments to proper administrative processes in the handling of development assistance and expecting them to put in place efficient policy instruments towards that end. At the present time, indications are that donor references to the good governance notion as a way of trying to induce changes in the institutional environment in recipient countries may have had their longest day, making room for new preferred patterns of interaction between donors and selected recipient countries on the aid front. The present study aims to explore the conditions under which the criterion of good governance first became adopted as a donor policy metaphor and now seems likely to get eclipsed. Particular attention will need to be given in this regard to successive shifts in the relevant policy thinking within the World Bank. As a background, it should be recalled that around 198990, all of a sudden the good governance concept became prominent on the international aid front. First launched as a donor discourse, it came just as unexpectedly as the fall of the Berlin Wall which happened only a little earlier, and in fact the two developments may not have been entirely unconnected. Before that time, aid agencies and other development institutions had not been in the habit of approaching their programme relations with counterparts in terms of criteria of good governance. Nor had, for that matter, the term governance constituted part of the vocabularies used in political science courses at European and American universities in the decades before. To be sure, the word had a dictionary existence, but as such it primarily carried seemingly outmoded legalistic

Martin Doornbos, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. The author would like to thank John Martinussen and Daniel Fleming of the Graduate School of International Development Studies at Roskilde University and an anonymous referee for their useful comments on an earlier draft of this study. The Journal of Development Studies, Vol.37, No.6, August 2001, pp.000000
PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

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connotations, such as in respect of the governance of an estate or a philanthropic foundation. These were the kind of bodies that had boards of governors whose institutional role required a designation rather grander than administration, less business-like than management, and having their political concerns handled discreetly but firmly. But then, all at once, the notion of good governance was there, now to refer to the way in which whole countries, or cities or provinces for that matter, were being governed, or to be governed. Contextually, rather than intrinsically, it soon transpired that any references that were made through it somehow pertained to states and other entities in the South, rather than in Europe or North America from where the concept was being (re-)launched. Moreover, with the adjective good added to it, it became unmistakably clear that the concept of good governance could be used to invite judgement about how the country, city or agency concerned was being governed: it enabled the raising of evaluative questions about proper procedures, transparency, the quality and process of decision-making, and other such matters [Doornbos, 1995]. Looking back now at the ten-year interval since the launch of the good governance discourse, it has been striking to see how in virtually no time the term governance, retrieved from a lingering, obscure existence, became a household word figuring on top of the list of concerns of aid agencies, governments, researchers and the media. As is often true with new buzz-words, though, there is as yet hardly a consensus as to its core meaning, and less and less of a common idea as to how it could be applied more concretely. Still, it is there and it has gained a key function by virtue of its capacity all at once to draw attention to a whole range of (often largely unspecified) issues concerning processes of public policy-making and authority structures. In that sense it rapidly appealed to the imagination of analysts as well as practitioners, and became a focal point for intellectual as well as for policy discourses. Today, some ten years after its rebirth, several questions appear to have continuing pertinence with regard to the use of good governance as a policy metaphor:1 What exactly does it mean? Is it a universal concept or does it vary from context to context? What meaning does the World Bank attach to the term? Is that a useful conceptualisation? What critique does it invite? What handle does it offer when judging countries in connection with the allocation of aid funds? Is it in any case right or proper to make aid conditional on good governance? By posing conditionalities in terms of practices and structures for good governance, changes in the latter respect will be (partly) externally determined. Again, is that right; and why or why not would that be the case? A reflection on the origins and evolution of the good governance idea,

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especially as regards its use as a reference point in donor-recipient discourses, must ask why it emerged at the time it did and what has, since then, been its track record. Moreover, one may well ask whether it is likely to keep drawing the same level of attention as it has done hitherto. It is these two tasks which constitute the objectives of this contribution.
II. THE ELASTICITY OF THE GOVERN A N C E CO N CEP T

In terms of its scope and potential coverage, the notion of governance had an a priori attractiveness from a perspective of global policy-making as it could refer to complexities entailing a good deal more than (sound) administration or management, namely the element of political structuring and the handling of this, while at the same time including the administrative-managerial dimension. Though evidently not to be equated with politics, let alone political leadership, it thus none the less opened a window for a focus on how politics or the political process was conducted and embedded within larger structures. Significantly, in the dichotomous manner in which for years many practitioners and theorists had been used to think about politics and administration, there had earlier been hardly a single word connecting these two spheres distinct yet closely related and overlapping as they are. Part of the terms appeal was indeed that it seemed to be able to fill that need. Curiously, though, while thus in principle comprising a political dimension, in actuality the use of governance on the donor front soon seemed to imply a certain depoliticisation of political processes. Yet it should be born in mind that the term itself, while pointing to a general area of common interest, hardly carries a specific meaning. Rather, its intrinsic open-endedness, vagueness, and inherent lack of specificity tend to generate a good deal of searching and debate as to what is or should be its proper meaning, prompting multiple efforts to appropriate it and define it in particular ways and directions.2 Nor is such lack of specificity particularly surprising: an elastic term like governance, rather than constituting a concept in its own right, is more like a flexible carrier which can be used to convey varying combinations of messages or consignments, though largely remaining within the same general trade specialisation. Thus, there has so far been a fair amount of oscillation in the usage entertained; in this process, also, broadly two streams of definition have been emerging, one a policy-oriented one and second, a more academic one [McCarney, 1999]. It is beyond the scope of the present analysis to deal with the academic stream of writing on governance, on which a substantial body of literature has developed (see Hyden and Bratton [1992] and Leftwich [1994]). Suffice

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it to say that the academic stream has been largely concerned with developing a better understanding of different ways in which power and authority relations are structured in different contexts thus focusing on different modes of inter-penetration of statecivil society relations. Notions of governance rapidly found their way into academic usage following its adoption in donor circles and in recent times have stimulated lively discussion on various aspects of the themes they denote, that is, pertaining to both forms and practice of the exercise of power. One advantage it has here, as Goran Hyden once remarked, was that it does not prejudge the locus of actual decision-making, which could be within the state, within an international organisation or within some other structural context [Hyden, 1992: 6]. In that regard a concept of governance facilitates new analytical pursuits into the exercise of political power, unhindered by formal boundaries, and may fit discourse analysis, embedded structuralism, Marxism and mainstream thinking alike. Indeed, political scientists and sociologists, as increasingly also economists, today could hardly do without the term. In contrast, the donor-directed and policy-oriented discourse on governance has rather been focused on statemarket relations and more specifically on state structures designed to ensure accountability, due processes of law, and related safeguards. There has naturally been a certain amount of interaction between the two discourses, which can be fruitful as long as both sides remain open to it. But obviously the basic purposes have been different, the academic discourse being primarily oriented towards better analysis and understanding of the institutional linkages between state and society in different contexts, the donor-driven discourse rather being geared towards enhancing policy effectiveness and conceptually preparing the terrain for policy intervention. The guiding motive in this interventionism, some would say, has been towards the establishment of new global-institutional patterns of hegemony, through a disciplining, in a Foucauldian sense including the governance of self of state and policy structures in individual countries to conform to the norms set by the global institutions. There are indeed intriguing overlaps, though also differences, between notions of governance and Foucaults governmentability. However, historically derived social and economic structures, or the specific needs and potential of particular countries, have not figured much as points of departure in the respective policy designs. One of the key aims in this regard has been the creation of state-market mechanisms in developing country contexts that have been characteristic for Western liberal-capitalist systems. As noted already, the impetus for a renewed interest in having a concept of governance did not first originate in any academic context, but from

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amongst the circle of international donor agencies, the World Bank in particular. Increasingly they had felt a need for it, though a different one from that of the academic interest. To better appreciate this, it will be instructive to recall the transitions and expectations occurring at the global level at the time.
III. GOOD GOVERNANCE AND POLI T I CA L C O N D I T I O N A L I TI E S

With the demise of the cold war, the paramount urge this had created to organise the world in opposite camps had come to an end. Until that moment, the firmer, that is, the more strong-handed, the client states concerned, the easier it had often appeared for global powers and institutions to conclude alliances and aid relations with them. Authoritarianism and dictatorships had been thriving during those years, although in the late 1980s donors had already begun to attach certain conditions to the granting of development aid. But following the fall of the Berlin wall there no longer was much of a need to get the support from, or give support to, regimes with a dubious track record in the handling of their own internal affairs, including human rights issues. Instead, time had come when it seemed quite justified, and when there appeared no more constraints, to set conditions to, and prescriptions for, the manner certain client states should be going about the management of their governmental affairs. A new chapter of conditionalities, that is, of internally directed political conditionalities concerned with the structuring and operation of recipient countries institutions, was being opened. This, however, required a suitable conceptual framework enabling and justifying such interventions. Until this time, political conditionalities per se had by no means been unknown: in fact they had been of the essence of many client relationships built up during the cold war. Political support for the West, or for the then so-called East bloc, in the UN, in the field and in other fora, had been a key condition for material and other upkeep of the regimes concerned. As long as this situation obtained, however, these basically externally-oriented conditionalities did not specify how the governments concerned should structure their administration and policy-making processes, what priority they should assign to certain policy initiatives, or how they should handle a whole range of other matters that might typically come up for policy dialogue. The new, post-cold war generation of political conditionalities were aimed to do exactly that. The new idea was to establish a grip on recipient developing countries handling of policy processes, and on the basic manner in which government and its constituent political processes multi-partyism or other would be structured. National sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs, for long held in high esteem in

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international politics, were met with increasing impatience. In World Bank circles at the time, there was an acute awareness that one was about to step into sensitive matters, as its then President Barber Conable put it. Still, in his words, If we are to achieve development, we must aim for growth that cannot be easily reversed through the political process of imperfect governance [Conable, 1992: 6]. In 1991, when the Bank for the first time devoted part of its Annual Development Economics Conference to the good governance theme, the anticipations as to what this might come to imply in terms of the Banks future agenda were indeed quite high, and in principle comprised nothing less than a reform of politics in aid-dependent countries [Summers and Shah, 1992]. To be able to raise conditionalities of political and administrative reform, however, some new standard or set of criteria was called for. It is here where the notion of good governance came in, somehow broad enough to comprise public management as well as political dimensions, while at the same time vague enough to allow some discretion and flexibility in interpretation as to what good governance would or would not condone. In the donor world led by the World Bank the re-invention of the notion of (good) governance thus figured as a necessary instrument enabling the launching of a new generation of political conditionalities. Significantly, the Banks own, already key role in this respect, soon became further enhanced through the adoption of this line, as individual donor countries were not always certain as to what could be subsumed and demanded, and what not, under good governance. They thus often felt more secure in going multilateral, that is, accepting the World Banks lead and signals in the matter (see Uvin [1993: 67]). For the World Bank itself, none the less, venturing into these new areas in a way was ironic, as its statutes had prohibited it to enter into political lines of action. When the new line of activities under the label of governance cum political conditionalities suggested itself, and were proposed and elaborated by Bank staff, the Banks governors pondered long as to whether the strictly nonpolitical line should be maintained or broadened. The outcome was to maintain it, and indeed in its own successive definitions of the concept the Bank then for several years kept to a strictly non-political view of governance. Already, there were significant differences in this regard between the staff papers presented at the Banks 1991 Annual Development Economics Conference, which departed from a broader understanding that was explicitly inclusive of the political dimension, and the published versions of the same papers.3 Only about six years later, with the publication of its 1997 World Development Report [World Bank, 1997], which included a certain re-appraisal of the role of the state and attention for matters like citizen participation, the Bank by implication moved again to a somewhat

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broadened, though still essentially a-political, conception of governance [Martinussen, 1998a]. None the less, the Banks earlier repositioning had also entailed adoption of a formula which allowed it to play a pivotal role in the donor-recipient country relations concerned. While henceforth in its own dealings with loan-recipient countries it had to stick to strictly non-political, financial accountability and transparency notions of governance, the Bank would accept the role of secretariat for various donor consortia stipulating what political conditionalities would need to be met. In principle this placed the Bank in the strategic position of being able to convey political conditionalities set by the respective consortia to the recipient countries concerned, and subsequently to monitor their implementation, without compromising its own, non-political mandate [Gibbon, 1993: 556].
I V. U N I V E R S A L I T Y A N D G L O B A L I S AT I O N

It is useful to place the construction of an intervention-oriented good governance agenda within a broader perspective and look at some of its implications. In particular, there are two rubrics under which the emergence and evolution as well as the possible eclipse of notions of good governance might be considered further. There is first the question of how universal are standards of good governance put up by the Western donor community. In regard to this, as already noted, the standards in reality in the first place do not seem to go very deep; thus, it could be argued, their universality may not reach very far either. More important, standards of good governance in principle are conceivable within different sociocultural and political contexts, and would constitute a rich field for comparative political anthropology or political science. But in actual fact it is unlikely that the worlds donor community would borrow its standards from comparative political anthropology or from other socio-cultural contexts. Rather, donor standards are likely to be derived from the way donors are used to perceive and handle the world around them, that is, from their own particular and cultural perspective, even though they may be presented as having universal value. Historically and across countries at the present time there are numerous different ways in which state-society relations and processes for public policy-making that is, governance structures have been given shape. Some of these may be considered good, others bad; judgements will vary. Most or all societies are likely to score good and bad judgements for different aspects of their policy performance; again, what one opinion, from one background/experience, will consider positively, may be looked upon critically elsewhere. Besides, comparative judgements are almost

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inevitably about form, rather than about substance/practice. One and the same form may be handled well, or badly. If certain standards or practices are now advocated globally, this cannot be because they are intrinsically universal but because the donor world would like to see them being taken up for universal adoption presumably because this might make life easier for donors. If donor-conceptualised standards of good governance were to be more fully elaborated and insisted upon, it would thus almost certainly imply an insistence on Western-derived standards of conduct to be adopted in nonWestern politico-cultural contexts. This is neither new nor particularly surprising, yet it remains important to recognise it for whatever it is, namely a confrontation of different practices and cultural premises [Martin, 1992: 15]. It is in this regard also that one may note a basic distinction between academic and donor discourses on governance. An academic discourse, at least if it is inspired by some cultural sensitivity [Ter Haar, 2000: 13], presumably would take cultural variation as its point of departure, and would try to better understand the merits and demerits of different configurations of governance in different contexts. Donor discourses by contrast are likely to depart from just one general notion of governance, and to demand abiding by it. Related to this is the role which implicit or explicit insistence on good governance might take on in globalisation processes. Globalisation of course has numerous facets, but one particular one is the way in which state functions seem to get gradually subsumed under broader transnational institutional constructs. This plays in all parts of the world, though rather differently so in the developed West as contrasted to the developing South, and the pattern is not unlike the way in which commodity production functions are being rearranged in globally integrated chains. If an emerging good governance agenda were to be actively pursued, then in the final analysis it would constitute one more, potentially key, instrument by which a Western-derived institutional globalisation would be furthered. Whether or to what extent that could become the case is a matter of further debate and analysis, and is likely to point particularly to the need to come to grips with evolving patterns of interaction and confrontation between different sets of norms and practices [Doornbos, 2000].
V. PRINCIPLE AND PRACTICE

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In retrospect, the early 1990s may yet come to be viewed as one of the high points in good governance thinking. A broad set of interrelated concepts were formulated that delineated areas of concern with policy structures and processes, and more specific issues were put forward for reform in the

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context of aid packages with conditionalities attached. Thus the dismantling of over-developed state structures in Third World countries seemed in easy reach, while multi-party democratisation just appeared to be waiting for an external nod and encouragement (see Srensen [1995]). Carrotquality conditionalities, it was anticipated, would help induce these various transformations, thus bringing about a wholesale overhaul of the developmental state that had been typical for the cold war era. International expectations were quite high as to what the good governance idea could point to and what the formulation and application of political conditionalities might be able to accomplish. In short, the climate of the time, particularly as perceived from the heights of global institutions, was one full of promise regarding the potential for creating and directing a better, and more governable, world. When putting principle into practice, however, some significant shifts soon became noticeable. Basically, the idea of posing political conditionalities had sounded easier in theory than it would turn out in reality. Not surprisingly, in many countries there was a willy-nilly reception of and compliance with various donor-instigated projects for political reform [Bayart, 1993]. These projects and proposals were bound to affect stakes in local political processes and balances of power, which the actors concerned would not readily give up. Transparency of political processes and the idea of level playing fields did not easily match with prevailing political cultures and configurations of power, nor to lend themselves to translation into practical terms. Step by step the anticipated applicability of conditionalities for good governance began to shrink. Two aspects in particular are worth noting in this respect. First, one broad area for international good governance attention in the immediate post-cold war situation was that of democratisation and multipartyism. In the early 1990s the launch of the good governance theme, then still conceptualised in its broadest possible fashion, in fact became partly focused on the call for multi-partyism. There was then much discussion about this, and there still is some, but it did not change much. Some authoritarian regimes skilfully transformed themselves into dominant parties within facade-type multi-party systems, as in Kenya or Ethiopia, demonstrating their resilience as political machines. Others continued, possibly with as little, or as much, by way of development collaboration contacts as they had before. Yet other countries, like Uganda, struggled to get recognition for an alternative to multi-partyism, arguing that multipartyism as it had evolved in the Western experience did not necessarily constitute the sole route to democratic political processes, or to good governance for that matter [Mugaju and Oloka-Onyango, 2000]. All in all, this particular dimension of the governance theme does not

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seem to have lived up to the expectations that had come to be raised about it. Besides, as already noted, the World Bank had taken a lead in deemphasising the political dimensions of governance in its own dealings with aid-recipient countries from an early point onwards. Inasmuch as multi-partyism and democratisation (irrespective of whether these two categories should be seen as equivalents) constituted key aspects of the political dimension of the international good governance agenda, thus calling for political conditionalities to redress and restructure the political processes concerned, they rather seemed to be quietly slipping into the background. Second, one of the original intentions with the good governance agenda had been to enable donors to question aid-recipient countries policy structures and processes, and to get them to alter these according to universal criteria and conditionalities as set by the donors. How feasible or how universally valid this approach would actually be could be questioned, given the enduring definitional obscurities; none the less, the idea was to ultimately try and transform what donors perceived as bad governance into good governance. Ten years after, the experience with setting conditionalities by and large appears to have become a sobering learning exercise: donors and observers recount many examples of lipservice and less than spontaneous implementation of conditionalities [Bayart, 1993] which should not be too surprising. Also, introducing policy conditionalities often meant inserting new, specific elements into highly complex processes and situations, leading up to new complexities for which donors and recipients would henceforth bear joint responsibility. In the process, donors ran the risk of themselves getting further enmeshed in the internal policy processes of recipient countries than they thought they had bargained for (see Harrison [1999] for an analysis of the Mozambican example). Against this background, moreover, attempts to measure the effectiveness of conditionalities did not produce particularly promising results, and themselves were rather problematic propositions to begin with. Second thoughts about the practicability of the conditionality instrument as a leverage thus began to preoccupy donors, along with recipients who naturally had had their own reservations about it. It is mainly in the context of new sectoral policy involvements on which several donors in recent years have opted to concentrate their aid, that organisational and policy guidelines are now being stipulated in relatively great detail.
VI. FROM CONDITIONALITY TO SE L E C T I V I TY

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Against the background of these experiences, the present tendency is to move from conditionality to selectivity, thus avoiding the burden of

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having to monitor attempts at amelioration of policy processes which require more attention and detailed knowledge than most donors, even the World Bank, can muster. In this connection, the recent so-called Dollar report (after its main author, David Dollar), Assessing Aid [World Bank, 1998], in putting forward the research finding that good performers (in terms of growth rates) are best able to absorb and utilise aid funds effectively, has come to provide a policy rationale for this new approach. Through reference to the scientific evidence presented in this report, selectivity can be advocated and rationalised as being the most cost effective and results-oriented donor strategy. Hence the keen interest with which this report has been taken up for discussion in various donor circuits [e.g., Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2000]. There have been serious criticisms regarding the reliability and relevance of the way these particular findings have been construed [e.g., Lensink and White, 2000; Van der Hoeven, 1999]. Yet to several donor agencies these may have appeared a lesser concern compared to the perceived operational advantages on which the report seemed to open a window. These lay in the experience to date that attempting to steer governance restructuring programmes from the outside have turned out to be far more complicated and laborious engagements than self-confident and optimistic aid agencies had first assumed they would be. Against these realities, an a priori interest to shift to a fresh approach that can relieve these agencies from these self-imposed burdens is likely to welcome any authoritative report that appears to provide a theoretical justification for such a move, as has been the case with the Dollar report.
VII. CONDITIONALITY REDEFINED: TH E D U T C H EX A M P L E

It is useful to ask what may happen to the notions of good governance and conditionalities in the light of these shifting insights and priorities. The recent Dutch policy reversal in favour of concentrating Dutch structural aid to a limited list of 19 (later 17, following the enduring Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict) aid-receiving countries with strong good governance records may be taken as an example, even though in its rigorous adoption of the principle of selectivity on the basis of good governance, the Dutch case still is fairly exceptional among Western donors.4 In the first place, paradoxically, the encouragement of good governance (through political conditionalities) itself figures no longer as an area of prime policy attention in this new scenario. Good governance is now assumed to be present to begin with, and has been elevated to one of the key criteria for selection to the status of most-favoured aid-recipient countries as far as Dutch aid is concerned [Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2000]. This is in contrast to Danish and other Scandinavian aid, for example, which has not

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been tied to this single criterion [Martinussen, 1998b]. But evidently, to take the existence of good governance as a criterion to decide which countries are qualifying for assistance and which are not, is something quite different from trying to demand improvements in terms of good governance as a conditionality to aid. In the new thinking, bad governance in principle will remain bad governance, unless the government concerned is so keen to qualify for Dutch or similarly conditioned aid that it will be motivated to first put its governance structures in order to meet the required criteria which seems unlikely. And even then, the question might arise again as to which criteria that would involve: on the side of donors as well as recipients, clarity as to what good governance would imply would be presupposed. But in reality that clarity still is difficult to obtain, as the word itself, magic as it may sound, in and of itself does not contain it. Rather than a step forward in thinking in terms of good governance, as the Dutch policy shift has been claimed to represent, it could thus well be regarded as a setback in the face of the problematic attempts to come to grips with the complexities of good governance as a policy objective conceptually and in practice. Thus one may justifiably ask what future is there for good governance as an operational concept in the context of aid policies. First, as it remains difficult to specify or to reach consensus about its contents, it would seem likely that good governance may continue to figure as a general, fairly open but vague term with which to register ones approval or disapproval of particular administrative/political practices or of actual governments, although somehow suggesting that there is a reference to particular higher standards in ones judgement. If this is to be the case, the label good governance becomes a political tool to justify and rationalise choices that are made on other, possibly arbitrary grounds. Again, the example of newstyle Dutch development aid, which has taken good governance as its criterion for selecting aid-deserving partners, may illustrate the relative arbitrariness involved: how in fact has one tested and examined the governance record of the countries finally selected, along with those nonselected? Assuming they were all interested to become candidates, selecting from well over a hundred potential candidate countries some 17 that would be particularly deserving, on the basis of their strong good governance records, to receive Dutch development aid, would be a task of truly momentous proportions. What instruments and expertise did the Dutch ministry of development collaboration employ to accomplish such a task? Developing a reliable comparative good governance record for even half a dozen countries would constitute no minor analytical and methodological challenges, let alone one that should theoretically include over half of the worlds states. The interested public has not learnt how this selection

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process was conducted, or by what criteria. Unless it is demonstrated otherwise, one cannot but assume that it is embassy notes and political expediency on the basis of which these choices have been made, for which in the end the label good governance then serves as a rationalisation. Whether that in itself constitutes an example of good governance remains a question. One sub-area that has usually come up for special attention in donorrecipient relationships under the heading of governance, meanwhile, is that of financial accountability. Indeed, one particular set of motivations for raising good governance on the agenda has undoubtedly arisen out of this area for understandable reasons. Quite possibly, when other, less tangible concerns have lost their immediate pertinence or selfevidence, or when donors sense they do not quite get a grip on them, it will be this hard core of financial accountability questions that keeps standing out as the core of good governance concerns. Often, therefore, one may already see good governance, transparency and accountability posing as a trinity of synonymous bullet points with particular reference to financial management. It seems quite possible that if in due course the broader notion of good governance would evaporate, due to its lack of tangible utility as well as in the light of the decline of the larger aspirations of re-constituting political systems, its exit may well be marked by increased emphasis on the more tangible issues of financial accountability which as a matter of fact it is any banks good right, if not obligation, to raise.
VIII. CONTEMPLATING ALTERNATIVE P R I O R I TI E S

The notion of good governance initially seemed full of promise as a donor policy concept and instrument. The question should be raised, however, whether it was strictly necessary and prudent for good governance and political conditionalities to be put forward as closely interlinked as they have been. If good governance (broadly defined, and allowing different interpretations of it) is considered a worthwhile objective, why attach conditionalities? Could one not have considered (and perhaps yet do so) development assistance programmes that would support such objectives, but without attaching conditionalities? What this would call for is a reversal of the relevant relationships concerned. It might be illustrated by the case of (ex-) Somalia, now without an overarching state framework but with initial efforts in different regions to establish basic government services, including Somaliland and the new state of Puntland in the Northeastern Region. At this time the new governments and various civic groups there would very much welcome help

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in their efforts to reconstitute a (different) kind of state structure(s), a very complex challenge indeed. But only few donors are prepared (and even then most cautiously) to give this any attention, while most prefer a wait and see attitude. If the Dutch position of good governance first, then aid, were to be followed in this case, these Somali efforts might not qualify in over a hundred years for anything like structural development assistance towards improved governance. Yet here is a case where needs are beyond dispute, and where assistance in creating some meaningful form of good governance would be eagerly accepted, though now constituting a goal in its own right rather than the fulfilment of a conditionality in order to qualify for other aid. In a case like this (and others like it), the question thus might be raised whether there would not be a validity in reversing the standard approach in our thinking about international development assistance, trying to see it in terms of recipientdonor rather than donor recipient relations? Illusory as this may seem at the present moment, such a reversal would in principle call for a situation in which donors would be available on demand, rather than being in command. In such an imagined situation, demanding countries (as an alternative expression to recipient countries) might be expected to take the initiative, basically saying, for example, this is our program for reconstruction, would you be willing to help? Supplying countries, which through some forum could pledge to be ready in principle to receive such requests, might respond by donating what they can afford, and what they believe constitutes a reasonable contribution. This would reverse a situation in which it is commonly donor governments which develop their programmes, preferences and priorities (and tend to revise them at an ever increasing pace), and where recipient countries can at most try and sort out how best they can fit in, or whether and how they can meet the criteria, all within the latest donors preoccupation. The idea would require a good deal more flexibility and adjustment to become available on the supplying side admittedly difficult from the point of view of budget control but, above all, allow demanding or requesting countries to regain a sense of overall command over their own policy formulation and policy integration.
IX. CONCLUDING REMARKS

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Notions of good governance, in association with political conditionalities as a handle for donor intervention, have formed the corner stone for a series of interlocking policy criteria and initiatives that have been prominent on the international aid front for about a decade. Bestowed in the post cold war era with high expectations as to the broadened political

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policy objectives with respect to aid recipient countries they might help accomplish, it has increasingly become apparent that these expectations have been rather overstretched and that this particular ensemble of donor policy concepts and instruments is now on its retreat. Posing political conditionalities as a leverage to induce good governance clearly did not work out as envisaged, and as a policy metaphor with these particular connotations the phrase has lost much of its appeal. Conceivably, the good governance policy metaphor might have had a different career path if donors had not attached political conditionalities to it. Today, new kinds of donorrecipient relations are increasingly being favoured, within which detailed agreements (with in-built, contractual conditionalities) with selected countries about the set-up and implementation of comprehensive donor-supported sector programmes are worked out, implemented and monitored. Notions of governance and good governance are likely to remain part of donor parlance, but no longer with the high expectations about the scope for intervention and political restructuring attached to them. Within the donor discourse, the notion of good governance has thus had quite a remarkable succession of connotations: at first representing a key objective in donor development and foreign policy in its own right, one or more donors now would like to treat it as a selection criterion for aid recipient countries, while more broadly it appears to be evolving into a general figure of speech without too much practical consequence.
NOTES 1. 2. 3. The questions that follow were formulated by the organisers of the workshop on Changing the Conditions for Development Aid: A New Paradigm?, University of Groningen, 6 October, 1999, at which a preliminary version of this paper was presented. For a perceptive discussion of some such efforts, see Ahrens [1999]. See, for example, the paper by Pierre Landell-Mills and Ismail Serageldin, Governance and the External Factor [Landell-Mills and Serageldin, 1991] and compare this with the version published in the Proceedings of the World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics 1991 [Landell-Mills and Serageldin, 1992]. It should be noted that apart from the key list of countries that have been selected for structural aid, Dutch foreign aid still includes various other (thematic) programmes for which good governance does not figure as a qualifying criterion.

4.

REF ERENCES Ahrens, Joachim, 1999, Towards a Post-Washington Consensus: The Importance of Governance Structures in Less Developed Countries and Economies in Transition, in Niels Hermes and Wiemer Salveda (eds.), State, Society and Development: Lessons for Africa?, CDS Report No.7, Groningen: University of Groningen, pp.1864. Bayart, Jean-Franois, 1993, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, London: Longman. Conable, Barber B., 1992, Opening Remarks, in Summers and Shah [1992: 56].

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Doornbos, Martin, 1995, State Formation Processes under External Supervision: Reflections on Good Governance, in: Olav Stokke (ed.) Aid and Political Conditionality, London: Frank Cass, pp.371391. Doornbos, Martin, 2000, Assessing Institutional Interventions, in Martin Doornbos, Institutionalising Development Policies and Resource Strategies in Eastern Africa and India: Developing Winners and Losers, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp.25060. Gibbon, Peter, 1993, The World Bank and the New Politics of Aid, in Srensen [1993: 3562]. Harrison, Graham, 1999, Clean-ups, Conditionality and Adjustment: Why Institutions Matter in Mozambique, Review of African Political Economy, Vol.26, No.81, pp.323334. Hyden, Gran and Michael Bratton (eds.), 1992, Governance and Politics in Africa, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Landell-Mills, Pierre, and Ismail Serageldin, 1991, Governance and the External Factor, World Bank Staff Paper, Washington, DC: World Bank. Landell-Mills, Pierre and Ismail Serageldin, 1992, Governance and the External Factor, in Summers and Shah [1992: 30320]. Leftwich, Adrian, 1994, Governance, The State and the Politics of Development, Development and Change, Vol.25, No.2, pp.36386. Lensink, Robert and Howard White, 2000, Aid Allocation, Poverty Reduction and the Assessing Aid Report, Journal of International Development, Vol.12, No.3, pp.399412. McCarney, Patricia, 1999, Thinking about Governance in Global and Local Perspective: Considerations on Resonance and Dissonance between Two Discourses, unpublished paper, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto. Martin, Denis-Constant, 1992, The Cultural Dimensions of Governance, in Summers and Shah [1992: 325341. Martinussen, John, 1998a, The Limitations of the World Banks Conception of the State and the Implications for Institutional Development Strategies, IDS Bulletin, Vol.29, No.2, pp.6774. Martinussen, John, 1998b, Challenges and Opportunities in Danish Development Co-operation, in Bertel Heurlin and Hans Mouritzen (eds.), Danish Foreign Policy Yearbook 1998, Copenhagen: Danish Institute of International Affairs. Mugaju, Justus and J. Oloka-Onyango (eds.), 2000, No-Party Democracy in Uganda: Myths and Realities, Kampala: Fountain Publishers. Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2000, Afrika Notitie, The Hague: Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Srensen, Georg, 1995, Conditionality, Democracy and Development, in Stokke [1995: 392409]. Srensen, Georg (ed.), 1993, Political Conditionality, London: Frank Cass. Stokke, Olav (ed.), 1995, Aid and Political Conditionality, London: Frank Cass. Summers, Lawrence and Shekhar Shah (eds.), 1992, Proceedings of the World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics 1991, Washington, DC: World Bank. Ter Haar, Gerrie, 2000, Rats, Cockroaches and People Like Us: Views of Humanity and Human Rights, Inaugural Address, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. Uvin, Peter, 1993, Do as I Say, Not as I Do: The Limits of Political Conditionality, in Srensen [1993: 6284]. Van der Hoeven, Rolph, 1999, Assessing Aid and the Consequences for Developing Countries, paper presented at the workshop on Changing the Conditions for Development Aid: A New Paradigm?, University of Groningen, 6 Oct. 1999. World Bank, 1997, World Development Report, Oxford: Oxford University Press. World Bank, 1998, Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesnt and Why, Washington, DC: World Bank.

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