| Abstrakt: |
The chapter defines the term governance and to place it within a historical and theoretical context. The term good governance, at least as a reference to a more or less specifically defined set of ideas and policies, originated in a 1989 World Bank document entitled Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth. Within the context of this seminal document, the notion of good governance was strongly associated with the types of structural adjustment policies that the World Bank had been advocating for many years: reduced state intervention in economic decision-making. The argument was that adherence to sound economic development policies would, in itself, help to promote the appropriate political environment for sustainable economic growth. The corpus of ideas and sets of policies that make up good governance has undeniably been the predominant development paradigm of the last decade, and has had an extraordinary and arguably unprecedented, impact throughout virtually the whole of the developing world. The theoretical linkage of economic liberalization and structural adjustment with increased democratization coincided with two extremely significant historical circumstances. The first was the decline and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, which had long served both as the model and as the most forceful advocate of the heavily statist paradigm. The second was the apparent failure of the statist paradigm in many developing countries, which had come to be plagued during this period by endemic inefficiency and corruption on the part of state bureaucracies, increasing foreign debt exacerbated by world economic conditions and a host of other serious structural problems. |
