Public sector governance

The Bank’s increased attention to governance since the early 1990s has naturally brought with it calls for robust measures that enable us to specify what exactly we are trying to improve in this area and how well we seem to be doing it.  Overall, however, the consensus on the centrality of good governance to development is yet to be matched by agreement on good indicators for it.

What is good governance, and how should we measure it?  What impact does governance have on growth?  Even if good governance predicts positive outcomes over the long term, what effect does it have in the short term?  Dani Rodrik, well-known development economist and head of Harvard’s graduate program in public administration and international development, raises as many questions as he answers in this blog post; a recent article in The Economist addresses similar issues.  There’s a lot of interest these days in the question of how to best define and measure governance -- we’ll write more about this in the coming weeks.

For over a decade, the World Bank has emphasized the centrality of good public sector governance and anticorruption efforts in achieving sustainable development impact in low- and middle-income countries.  But more recently the Bank has widened its analytic and operational lens on governance to include what is being called the “demand-side” of governance.  What does this mean, and what are the implications for Bank work in its client countries?

The Bank recently conducted a global consultation process as part of the preparation of its new Governance and Anticorruption (GAC) strategy.  Two core insights emerged from these consultations that form the basis of the new emphasis on the demand-side of governance: