Governance and Values in Contemporary Public Service

Abstract

Governance, especially good governance, has become a frequent topic of analysis and debate over development and other policies in the past few years (Aktan and Ozler, 2008;Brinkerhoff and Goldsmith 2005;Weiss 2000). In the process, scholars have found that there is often a disconnect between formal governance structures and procedures and actual decisions, as “pre-existing and deeply embedded understandings and practices survive and continue shaping the way people are ruled” (Brinkerhoff and Goldsmith, 2005). This tension between new institutions and unwanted old practices has been called “the problem of institutional dualism in international development” (Brinkerhoff and Goldsmith, 2005). The position advanced here with regard to public service ethics is that it, too, suffers from its own institutional dualism, resulting in a wide gap between what might be termed de jure ethics and de facto ethics, and that recognizing, let alone narrowing, this gap is a function of our capacity not only to reconcile our disparate definitions of good governance but to infuse such a reconciliation into actual practice. As Brinkerhoff and Goldsmith (2005) ask, who can disagree with accountability, responsiveness, and transparency as attributes of good governance, or disagree with arbitrariness, injustice, and abuse as attributes of poor governance? The challenge lies in contextualizing these qualities, clarifying the values underlying our choices, and reifying those values in the organizations and networks that determine the outcomes of those choices (Pollitt, 2003).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.