What we talk about when we talk about governance

The word "governance" was made up by the donors.  In most countries I have worked in there is no satisfactory translation for the word governance.  Indonesians sometimes use the expression "tata pemerintahan yang baik" but that's such a mouthful that most people, regardless of how little English they actually know, end up just sprinkling the English word governance into their Indonesian sentences.  I can't tell you how many times in governance seminars, governance workshops and governance conferences in all of the countries I have worked in, someone invariably stands up, takes a self-satisfied sigh and says, "And what exactly do you mean by the word governance?" Before I came to the World Bank, I taught political science for years at Columbia and Harvard and yet I never came across the word governance in any serious academic literature (and to this day, you will rarely find the term in any major political science journals).  And yet here I am in Jakarta as a "Governance Adviser."

What has become quite clear to me working in the field is that governance is a donor word to talk about a lot of concepts and realities that are quite familiar to everyone -- politics, power, the state, influence -- but which donors are not supposed to get involved in.  Governance is, therefore, a politically neutral  way to refer to  politics. For what is "the manner by which authority is obtained, transferred and exercised" (a common definition of governance) but simply another way of saying politics. Is there such a thing as governance divorced from politics? Is there a technocratic science of governance that is somehow not a function of the political process?  Conceptually, it doesn't make sense.  And I can tell you that in practice, governance reform is all about politics and power. (Of course, economic reform is all about politics and power too, but that could be the subject of a whole other blog entry).

By referring to governance, we are holding out the hope that there is indeed some politically neutral characteristics of the manner by which authority is obtained, transfered and exercised and that this can be influenced by donors. Fat chance. Sure, there are principles of transparency and accountability that can be applied to many different situations and contexts. But the act of governance reform is inevitably a political act, contingent on the political process with implications for the dynamics of power and influence across individuals, groups and institutions.

Okay, so what harm does it do to make up a concept like governance and pretend that it is somehow not a placeholder for politics and power? Well, it misleads those working in the field to believe that governance reform is all about a set of technocratic best practices and monitorable indicators that can be applied in just about any context to produce concrete outcomes in terms of transparency and accountability.  Anyone working in the field knows how best practices when adopted can be manipulated by underlying power dynamics to produce distorted outcomes.  Anyone working in the field knows that most governance indicators conceal massive measurement errors (about which precious few are explicit in defining). Anyone working in the field knows that governance reforms are rarely, if ever, technocratic reforms, but are used by clever (and sometimes, not so clever) politicians as a way of winning support, building or breaking coalitions and reshaping the dynamics of political influence.  Therefore, all governance reforms have political motives and are shaped by political boundaries.  By talking about governance as opposed to politics, power, and influence, we talk around the very dynamics that will drive (or thwart) change. This is the donors' dilemma.

Does this mean that donors must get involved in politics to affect governance reform?  Of course not.  There are very few countries in the world, even the heavily indebted countries, where donors have that much clout.  Again, anyone working in the field knows that those days are long gone. Politicians and powerholders will engage in governance reform in response to their own political interests, not because of the influence of donors. But our assistance on governance reform must be based on a sophisticated understanding of these political dynamics.  And that means a very different way of working on technical assistance than donors have done in the past.

I hope this blog can be a forum to discuss some concrete experiences of governance reform and the political dynamics that drive them, so we can better understand the realities of governance reform. In this blog, I'd like to confront about this dilemma by talking about actual experiences of governance reform and encourage others to do the same.