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This is the World Bank's blog on governance and anti-corruption. It aims at providing a space for debate and knowledge sharing on this critical field of development. | Learn more...

July 2008

Empowering people through Web 3.0 + Gen Y + m-governance

Submitted by Kaufmann on Thu, 2008-07-31 12:26

As the Fortune Brainstorm Tech near Silicon Valley was getting going last week, I contributed a blog entry on ‘Governance-on-the-Go’, or ‘GonGo’, emphasizing the need to move away from static  'e-government' towards the highly mobile citizen becoming center stage in the next phase of IT interface with governance.  The blog entry and the contributions I made during the BrainstormTech drew some discussion during the event and in the blogosphere, yet of particular relevance for me was what the rich gamut of contributions by others.  See for instance here, here, here, here, and here.

Global Coverage

212
The number of countries and territories covered by the World Governance Indicators, the 2008 version of which was launched on June 2008.
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GonGo for democracy: how mobile technology is changing the way grassroots organizations monitor elections

Submitted by Alfredo on Thu, 2008-07-24 14:35
The idea of GonGo (Governance-on-the-Go), raised a few days ago by Dani Kaufmann, has generated interesting comments and discussion. GonGo is also influencing the way people monitor elections in developing countries where weak capacity and the lack of freedom of speech and political will prevail. My initial thoughts are that there is a lot of potential to bring accountability and transparency to elections and democracy where civil society and simple technologies intersect.
 
A recent report of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) presents the cases of Indonesia, Palestine, Monte Negro, Albania, Bahrain, and Sierra Leona, where local organizations received “GonGo assistance” to monitor the voting-process. A combo of (i) cellphones, (ii) software of massive text messaging communication, and (iii) a lap-top empowered citizens to report on-the-go about the electoral outcomes, anomalies and fraud.
 

‘Governance-on-the-Go’, or GonGo: the citizen at the center of an IT-enabled governance breakthrough?

Submitted by Kaufmann on Tue, 2008-07-22 10:37

I am now at the Fortune BrainstormTech, which aims to relate innovations in technology to larger world problems it can solve. The event just started, featuring fascinating evening panels with tech leaders (here). One of the sessions I will co-lead tomorrow, with Ross Mayfield of Socialtext, is on governance. In this forthcoming interactive lab we will try to advance the discussion on the interface between ICT, governance and government. One contribution I will try to make is to distinguish between e-government and m-governance, and to ask for ideas on how m-governance can be taken to the next stage. 

For many years already, the IT revolution has brought about innovation supporting the modernization of the public sector, in industrialized and developing countries. The major advances took place into what’s called e-government, namely electronic government, or the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) by government agencies in the provision of public services and in interacting with their constituencies.

Fighting Corruption in the Water Sector -- 2 Success Stories

Submitted by Maria on Thu, 2008-07-17 14:28

Corruption in the water sector is a root cause of the global water crisis that threatens billions of lives and exacerbates environmental degradation, according to the new “Global Corruption Report 2008: Corruption in the Water Sector” released by Transparency International.

The World Bank Institute (WBI) is taking the lead in fighting this corruption in two Central American countries where both the World Bank’s Governance Indicators and the Corruption Perception Index of TI indicate that corruption is common in the public administration and the delivery of basic services including water.  A capacity-building program organized for both Honduras and Nicaragua in September 2007 has had a positive impact on how both users and practitioners look at this challenge.

From Assessment to Practice: Action Planning for Governance Reform

Submitted by Susana on Fri, 2008-07-11 19:23

Developing countries increasingly recognize the importance of monitoring governance in order to identify institutional vulnerabilities and take measures to strengthen the effectiveness of their governments. With that in mind, the World Bank Institute recently brought together 30 members of government and civil society from Benin, Burundi, Cameroun, and the DRC to learn from each other and the experiences of various countries with governance and anti-corruption initiatives -from assessment to implementation.

Through prolonged engagement via videoconference before meeting face to face in Kinshasa, DRC, the participants shared experiences about the challenges and opportunities they face for governance reform  and talked about how to harness the power of data to push reforms.

Daniel Kaufmann from WBI discussed the links between governance and growth and lessons learnt from an empirical perspective in Africa: even in a shorter term, African countries can benefit from improvements in governance and the control of corruption in the form of increases in income per capita, he pointed out.

How Citizen Feedback Strengthens Governance Reform in Francophone Africa

Submitted by Boris on Thu, 2008-07-10 16:31

Citizen feedback is helping many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa improve their overall governance and fight corruption. That good news was shared by some 90 representatives from government, civil society, the private sector, and the media from Francophone Benin, Burundi, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s capital of Kinshasa, and the DRC provinces of Bandundu, Katanga, and South-Kivu, who came together in Kinshasa to learn from each other and exchange their experiences.

 

 see video in French here

Don't rush to dismiss governance, it'll come back to haunt you

Submitted by Edouard on Wed, 2008-07-09 17:52

Noted Le Monde economic journalist Eric Le Boucher recently wrote that the sustained growth over several decades of East Asian economies with poor democratic governance, such as China, signals the demise of the values of democracy and humanism that the West inherited from Classical Greece and developed and advocated for the next 25 centuries. The worry is that the countries growing without democratic governance were championing a development model (he called it the “Chinese model”) that does away with democracy and good governance (the “Greek heritage model”).  His article, provocatively titled “the decline of white man”, takes a number of debatable shortcuts to make this point.

Recovering assets is a time-consuming effort

18
The number of years it took the Philippines to recover some 624 million dollars of money funneled away by former dictator Ferdinand Marcos into Swiss bank accounts, according to the launch report of the Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative (StAR), jointly piloted by the World Bank and the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime.
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