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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...

Olympics

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.