Governance

The performance of government is dependent upon the strength of its institutions and other social organisations, political sensitivity to local pressures and the efficacy of curbing corruption

Good Governance or Improved Governance

Rahul Sarin

If politics is the art of the possible, then governance is all about how to make it work. But, often the two clash and conflict with each other, leaving the objective of good governance unrealised. In the pursuit of the ideal, the immediately achievable goals and objectives are also lost sight of. The political trade-offs and priorities of the real world tend to dominate realties and realisation quickly dawns that all good things cannot be pursued simultaneously. It is the contextual realities that drive the agenda and not the lofty goals of good governance. The goals of good governance can never be advanced when government promises action, which is neither politically acceptable nor bureaucratically feasible. Ultimately, what matters is what you can deliver and not what you proclaim.

Good Governance
Good governance is not a panacea for development. It offers only a strategy and a platform on which sound polices can be evolved and implemented. The performance of a government is dependent upon the strength of its institutions and other social organisations, political sensitivity to local pressures and the efficacy of curbing corruption. With the changing role of the state and the rising expectations of the citizens, a paradigm shift seems to be inevitable. Pressures are mounting to shift from the status quo comfortable mode of governance to a more demanding mode. This is so because citizen expectations and aspirations continue to grow and there are pressures for ensuring greater openness, transparency and accountability in governance.

A reality check in India reveals that while governance is worsening, GDP growth has continued at about 8 per cent for the last four years. The levels of corruption are rising, crime is increasing, and extremist activity has spread to as many as 156 districts. The quality of public services seems to have deteriorated further. According to the World Bank Development Policy Review, 2006, a doctor in a primary health centre in Delhi is less competent than the one in Tanzania and is likely to recommend harmful treatment in 50 per cent cases. Teacher absenteeism is rampant and class V students in five states cannot read class II level of textbooks. Water supply in the national capital of Delhi is only for four hours, for two-and-a-half hours in Bangalore and for one-and-a-half hours in Chennai as against 24 hours in Jakarta and Colombo.

India has the largest number of poor, illiterate and malnourished people in the world. More than 250 million people go to bed hungry every night. One third of Indian women are underweight and 40 per cent of low birth babies are born in India. Fifty seven million children under five are undernourished. India's undernourished children have even surpassed the rate of Ethiopia at 47 per cent. Further, six out of every seven Indian women are illiterate. The cities, too, are beset with mushrooming growth of slums and squatters. Mumbai, with 12 million slum dwellers, has the dubious distinction of being the slum capital of the world.

However, governance levels have shown remarkable improvements in certain areas. The empowerment of the panchayati raj institutions, the increased participation of civil society and the Right to Information Act have generated new expectations and pockets of excellence. Economic reforms, perhaps, account for the most significant improvements in governance. The opening up of the economy and competition has led to ample and easy access to better delivery and greater accountability. A study by McKinsey Global Institute (2007) indicates that India's economic growth has fuelled growing consumerism in the country. Average household incomes are expected to triple over the next two decades and India will becomes the world's fifth largest consumer economy by 2005, as against the twelfth position as at present. The growth in private incomes and slackening population growth is likely to encourage the rise in consumption levels.

The challenges of governance in India need to be addressed at two levels. At the central level, the challenges are the provision of an enabling and conducive investment climate and management of the macro-economy to sustain a long term non-inflationary growth path. At the state level, the challenge is to ensure the provisions of public good and improvements in the delivery of services. For this, the states need to shed the activities that are best done by profit and non-profit organisations and only ascertain the compliance of standards and excellence in these areas.

Strategic improvements in governance

As the good governance agenda grows to unachievable levels, the challenge is for reformers and researchers to shift the focus on how to leverage improvements in governance. After all, governance is all about putting the administrative, political and financial structures in order for maximising the benefits of the people. By thinking strategically, priorities need to be set which enhance efficiency, effectiveness and responsiveness of actions undertaken; which identify the pacing or sequencing of reforms, which assess what reforms are easier to undertake or produce results in the short term; and under what conditions particular reforms are most likely to have the desired impact.

Setting priority is, essentially, a political process. The more open a political system, the greater is the likelihood of conflicts and contests in setting priorities and agenda of action. Priorities can be set only by reconciling the perspectives of different interest groups, building coalitions and evolving a broader consensus. They cannot be driven by only technical solutions or donor determinations. Sometimes, it is the political payoffs of a reform which determines their adoption, like the taking up of a reform which produces immediate and tangible benefits in the short term. Political tradeoffs for undertaking governance reform as against other reforms, like poverty alleviation, education, health and infrastructure, also need to be contended with. Conflicts, challenges, and dilemmas need to be squarely countenanced. The key to enabling improvements in governance is to make the good governance agenda less overwhelming. Research and strategic analysis can assist in sifting the essential from the non-essential, the primary from the secondary, the long-term from the short term, and the more important from the less important.

The implementation of the whole gamut of the good governance agenda is an insurmountable task in itself. Even the very task of implementing a considerably reduced agenda for enabling strategic improvements in governance is also fraught with challenges and difficulties. The endeavour here is to make the whole exercise manageable and implementable, based on contextual realties. Recognising that undertaking reforms is inherently a political process, strategic analysts would urge to focus on improvements in performance. More so, developing counties are particularly vulnerable to reversal of reform on account of resistance in public arena or within the bureaucracy. Analysis has also shown that there are certain characteristics of reforms or policies, which make them particularly vulnerable to resistance. They often work as flash points and the degree and the manner of their operation is really the key to the successful implementation of reforms or policies.

It is just essential to reformulate the objective and focus on the reform agenda, which is particularly suited to the contextual realties and needs. This must be facilitated by widespread consultation, research and analysis. This will enable identifying a mangeable, reduced agenda and its pacing and sequencing. Deeper analysis and learning from the lessons of other countries can provide valuable insights in this regard. What is important in firming up of the reform agenda is making a connection with the reformulated goal and focusing attention on it. By doing this, all attention, energies and resources and political capital can be brought to bear on realising those objectives, which are determined to be more critical than others.

Learning from what works well and why in the country and building upon it, is another important part of this strategy. Research and analysis can assist in identifying the factors and drivers of better performance. Such an exercise can identify the kind of reforms that have a better chance of succeeding and the conditions under which they are more likely to succeed. The secret of an effective strategy for improving performance is to determine the priorities strategically. This is a most difficult task as it involves making choices between the long term and the short term measures, the feasibility and administrative capacity aspects, and the political pay offs and tradeoffs entailed.

While the alternatives to government action may well be fully explored and adopted, it is clear that the role of the public sector can never be undermined or substituted. Improvements in public service delivery have been facilitated by innovative approaches in recent development practice. Some of the innovations which have worked well are: outsourcing and contracting; delegation; community engagement in development planning and budget management; and NGOs taking on activities which governments are unable or unwilling to provide. But it is also necessary to recognise the limits of these innovative approaches. Such services, by their very nature, tend to be limited in scope and application, and are best only short-term solutions. What is even more crucial is the realisation that alternative approaches can never be a substitute where governments have failed or abdicated their responsibility to provide public good like peace, security, law and order, and basic regular services like health, education and infrastructure. Another aspect which needs to be reckoned with is that these alternative approaches tend to be politically threatening and need to be carefully adopted in the overall strategy of implementing the reform agenda.

Conclusion
These are no easy solutions or technical fixes for good governance or improved governance. But one perspective which clearly stands out is the theme of empowerment. When people are given the opportunity and an enabling environment for developing their own avenues of livelihoods and a role in the delivery of public services, improvements in governance become spontaneous. However, the very notion of empowerment has a strong tendency of being politically threatening. It entails a shifting in the balance of power. It means letting go of the centralised system of governance to a more participatory, grassroots-led system of decision making and a greater responsiveness to the needs of the people. It further means that there must be transparency, clear accountability and freedom of right to information.

There is another aspect of managing reforms that merits greater attention. Development practices have shown that reforms will not necessarily lead to gains unless governments work consciously to create an enabling environment for generating a demand for reforms and thereafter supply the reforms in response to that demand. This has been demonstrated in many countries of different sizes, different income groups and different political regimes. However, one lesson that emerges clearly is that in order to undertake a sustainable agenda of reforms, the trick is to convert an economic virtue into a political virtue as well. Experience, on the contrary, indicates that however alternative this recipe may appear, ultimately when the reform agenda emerges, it tends to lose most of its economic virtue and sheen, having necessarily to account for political tradeoffs, political pay offs and the pressures of contextual realities.

The underpinnings of a political economy invariably tend to dominate the public decision making process. Therefore, an agenda of reform can only emerge after a reconciliation of conflicting interests of individuals and groups and the emergence of a broad and acceptable political consensus.

Rahul Sarin was Secretary, Union Ministry of Personnel