Governance and the Rhetoric of International Development

Abstract

It has become a truism, of late, to characterize governance as one of the buzzwords in the vocabulary of international development. In a sense, the acceptance of the importance of governance, defined as ‘the formation and stewardship of the formal and informal rules that regulate the public realm, the arena in which state as well as economic and societal actors interact to make decisions’ (Hyden, Court and Mease, 2004: 16), is remarkable against the background of dominant definitions of development in largely economic terms. The governance concept has gained currency in circles of interna-tional development only since the mid-1990s. Despite earlier attention to problems of governance at the World Bank scene, as in a report on the crisis in Africa in the 1980s that was published in 1989 (World Bank, 1989) and a discussion paper on governance of 1991 (World Bank, 1991), the Bank’s anal-ysis of development issues remained staunchly focused on ‘macroeconomic fundamentals’ until well into the 1990s, as exemplified in the so-called Asian Miracles report of 1993 (World Bank, 1993).The real turn in the debate came a little over ten years ago. First, newly appointed World Bank President James Wolfensohn started to emphasize the importance of taking a ‘holistic’ view of development, taking on board a set of non-economic variables, such as ‘the essentials of good governance’, the regulatory framework for the market, social policies, infrastructure and environmental sustainability (Wolfensohn, 1998: 13-14). The second major impulse for the focus on governance came with the publication of yet anoth-er World Bank report, Assessing Aid (World Bank, 1998), usually referred to as the Dollar report, not because of its focus on the American currency, but because of the surname of its lead author, David Dollar. The claims of the latter report were by no means modest, as attested by its subtitle: What Works, What Doesn’t and Why. In the year when the Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy has published a major report on development poli-cies with the title Less Pretention, More Ambition (Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid, 2010), the use of such terminology, as if one had finally discovered the Holy Grail where so many others failed, sounds almost like megalomania.

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