The World Bank - Working for a world free of poverty

Syndicate content
A blog about Governance and Development for All

About us

Welcome

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...

China

"140 chars is a novel when you're being shot at"

Submitted by Tanya on Wed, 2009-07-01 09:20

-courtesy: @chadelund Quote of the day- #iranelection

In a previous blog entry, I wrote about how Web 2.0 is improving governance, with or without the help of the government in question, and irrespective of whether the country is developed or not.

Throwing traditional wisdom to the winds, the Web 2.0 story is continuing to unfold in a way that was not predicted by researchers and experts of the development community and outside.   When I last wrote my blog entry on this issue, it was specifically to explore how Bangladeshi citizens, independently of the government, NGOs, or media were sharing their experience of the BDR mutiny and its results.  This shone a light into the situation in Bangladesh to many who would have been otherwise left in the dark about the BDR revolt.

Then Iran happened.  The situation in Iran has many interesting parallels with Bangladesh and the BDR revolt – both related to the citizen-fuelled proliferation of news, occurring independently of the Government, and in Iran, even inspite of the opposition of the Government.

When blogging becomes an issue: worst places to be a blogger

Submitted by Alfredo on Tue, 2009-05-19 18:29

Blogs have changed the way people put into practice concepts such as voice and freedom of expression.  In a matter of minutes, anyone who has access to a computer with internet connection can create a blog and start posting ideas, experiences, opinions, pictures and videos that will be become available to more than 1.5 billion internet users in the world.

Also, blogs' features enable two-way communication and interaction between users, very different to the "static" dynamic of traditional websites. Most important, people can do all of these things at no cost.

However, the expansion of the blogosphere has also triggered negative reactions, especially in environments where censorship and control of information still prevail. Touching on several of these reactions, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) launched a special report in which it highlights the "10 worst countries to be a blogger."

 

Who won the Beijing Olympic Medal Race?

Submitted by Kaufmann on Wed, 2008-08-27 13:41

 
There is such an obsession with rankings.  And being at the top in medal standings seems so important to so many.   So much so that larger issues got overlooked during the Olympics. 

And in spite of such obsession, nobody seems to get the medal ranking race straight.  Who really won?  Hard to tell, for unsuspecting reasons.  Lets see.

For starters, the media in the US tends to show us tables which rank countries according to the total medal count.  That puts the US at the top, having accumulated 110 gold, silver and bronze medals, against 100 medals for China.

 Officially, the IOC tries not to officially rank countries, but their tables list countries ranked by their number of gold medals (see Sydney and Athens’ results).  Following this criterion, as it is common in the much of the rest of the world, China comes out clearly on top, with a total of 51 gold medals, against only 36 for the US.

Eyes Wide Open? Olympics, Netizens and Web Governance

Submitted by Kaufmann on Fri, 2008-08-15 08:46
A week has elapsed since the opening of the Olympics. China (along a few other countries), is showing that they are also a world athletic power to reckon with. But I was also making the point in my previous blog entries that the Olympics (or the August lull…) should not give license to governance going on leave for a while… So I brought up Russia vs. Georgia, Pakistan vs. Taleban at the Afghan border, Zimbabwe leader vs. his people, and likewise in Darfur. And in the last blog entry here I only very briefly mentioned China’s internet censorship issues during the Games.
 
The complex internet censorship by the authorities in China, dubbed by many as the “Great Firewall”, seems to be more aptly be characterized as “Net Nanny”, according to blogging and cites by Rebecca MacKinnon, a founder of Global Voices and expert on internet and blogging censorship issues (also  here).                                                                                                                                

Beijing Olympics and Governance: Eyes partially open?

Submitted by Kaufmann on Wed, 2008-08-13 17:20
The Russian invasion of Georgia, the leadership and human rights crises in Zimbabwe and Darfur, the coup in Mauritania, and even corruption in sports were some of the disparate problems touched in my last blog entry -- challenges which did not get any better over the past few days while medals continue to accumulate in Beijing. 
 
And I was not even trying to be exhaustive, so I did not mention other troubled spots right now, such as the hundreds killed in the ongoing and growing Pakistan-Taliban conflict in the Afghan border. Given how dire these current conflicts are, I was making a case for keeping our eyes wide open around the world, rejecting the notion that good governance can take a holiday at the time of the Olympics.

Beijing Olympics and Worldwide Governance: Eyes Wide Shut?

Submitted by Kaufmann on Mon, 2008-08-11 11:20

The majority of the world’s population watched the magnificent opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games. Many are sports fans, yet many wanted to witness China’s ‘coming out Party’, showcasing to all (in case some did not know) that China is a world power, and its people are capable of great things. One of the main themes in the ceremony, central to Chinese culture, was harmony (the Chinese symbol appears in the adjacent image).  Generally, the Olympics can be a venue for sportsmanship and festive get together among the community of nations, though, as we know from Berlin and Munich, there can be a rather dark side as well. 

The very tight control exerted by Chinese authorities on every organizational and daily life detail in Beijing means that nobody is dubbing these as the ‘fun Olympics’. Yet the opening ceremony did receive universal media accolades over the weekend, and pointed to the seven years of painstaking organization that went into it by the authorities.  

‘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.

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.