Publication: Daedalus
Publication Date: 01-JAN-07
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Rotberg, Robert I.
Article Excerpt
Good governance is essential if citizens of nation-states or subordinate political jurisdictions are to maximize their inalienable rights as subjects, taxpayers, or mere residents of the polities to which they owe, or are compelled to pay, allegiance. From their greatest need, freedom from attack (security), to mundane but real needs, such as well-maintained roads and the availability of potable water, citizens look to their suzerains--their modern nation-states, provinces, municipalities, and so on--for high-quality performance. Where that high-quality performance--good governance--is delivered, citizens can go about their personal business and pursuits with enhanced expectations of success, opportunity, and satisfaction. Where bad governance prevails, however, citizens suffer increasingly severe consequences--death, injury, intensified morbidity, diminished personal accomplishments, lowered expectations of achievement, hunger, and sometimes starvation.
Numerous studies have asserted strong linkages between good governance and economic growth--at least at the national level. Good governance, they suggest, provides a platform without which sustained economic growth is extremely difficult. The data from several studies also show that economic growth in nation-states contributes to the possibility of good governance. There are sound reasons why both conclusions should, a priori, be correct. But those conclusions depend on what we mean by good versus bad governance, and what governance includes within its definition.
Better governance inhibits conflict, while poor government is conducive to intrastate tensions and civil wars. Indeed, new analyses of nation-state failure attribute it to governance errors that diminish a national government's legitimacy, reduce perceptions of its fairness, encourage out-groups to mobilize, and lead ultimately to internal war. It stands to reason that better governed nation-states would undergo fewer civil wars.
This proposition--that better governance, especially in the tension-filled developing world, reduces the frequency and intensity of conflict--reinforces the prior one: economic growth is more likely where there is good governance. War and turmoil and instability obviously inhibit growth--as in the...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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