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Debate
In defence of the good government paradigm
Letters
Multiple tension in Palestine
Latin America turns left
02/2006 |
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[ Dirk Messner, German Development Institute ]
Two stages of good governance
Donors made good governance a development paradigm in the mid-1990s. However, it seems increasingly questionable whether donor nations adhere to these principles themselves. The US Congress is currently being shaken by a sleaze scandal – and President George Bush is well known for loosly interpreting the law. If Jacques Chirac didn’t enjoy immunity as president of France, the judiciary would be trying him for corruption. Germans, too, have become used to headlines dealing with bribes.
On the other hand, the dictatorial People’s Republic of China has had the biggest development success in the past few decades. Dirk Messner, the director of the German Development Institute, sticks to the good governance paradigm nonetheless.
Is governance really as important as the international debate would have us believe? Apparently, there are serious problems even in rich countries.
Governance is important even though some industrial countries do fall short. However, we also see how institutional structures for self-regulation work. That does not always happen right away. For instance, it is clear that competition between political parties in the US is picking up again, courts are once again doing their job, and the media have returned to critical reporting after the phase in the wake of September 11, 2001, in which the Bush administration basically enjoyed total immunity. Industrial countries have a great ability to heal themselves.
Do we need legitimate political institutions or an economy not hampered too badly by corruption?
Those are basically two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, good governance is an important prerequisite for dynamic economic growth. On the other hand, a society that cannot get out of economic doldrums will also face a political crisis of legitimacy. Both phenomena are closely related.
In the past 20 years, China has made spectacular progress – without democratic governance.
When we talk about poor countries on the road to modernisation, we need to distinguish between a broad definition of good governance and a narrow one. In the narrow sense, there will be no economic progress without good governance – and now I am talking about rights of ownership, rule of law and a level of corruption low enough to make administrative action predictable. All of this holds true for China. To some extent that is due to the one-party system, which ensures personal and institutional continuity. In contrast, if we are constantly dealing with instability and changing officials, corruption can become an incalculable burden on the economy. On the other hand, experience shows that states are only able to ensure good governance in the broader sense of the term, which includes democracy and the political freedoms of expression and association, once they have reached a certain level of development. Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore are examples in case.
In that sense, India is worse off than China because governments often change after elections, making
corruption harder to calculate.
You are referring to an idea common in Africa, Asia and parts of Latin America – the idea of a development dictatorship being superior to democracy. My answer is that authoritarian regimes do not normally promote development. In most cases, elites reap all economic benefits because, in the absence of checks and balances, the mechanisms of personal enrichment take over. India is an interesting exception because its democracy is fairly well established despite all its problems and although the country is very poor. But this cannot be said of most poor countries. And as Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen has pointed out, India’s democracy has protected the country from catastrophes because no government stands a chance of staying in office in the case of a famine. 20 million people starved to death in China because of Mao’s “great leap forward”. That catastrophe resulted from the dictatorship of the party still in power. However, the environment for economic development has improved gradually over the past 25 years. It is interesting to compare Chile and Argentina in this respect – two dictatorships, guilty of brutal violations of human rights. In Chile, the atrocities went along with “good economic” governance and high growth rates, whereas Argentina also suffered because the corrupt regime wrecked the economy, enriched itself and pursue destructive business policies.
So an authoritarian regime focussing on growth can turn out to be effective?
Yes, there is such a thing as an economically successful authoritarian regime. But that does not mean that political liberalisation is wrong. We should not cast doubt on the principles of good governance, nor should we forget that the political freedoms that are part of the broad definition of good governance are important normative goals in their own right. They are not simply means serving economic development. We want people to be free, to form organisations, to express themselves and to be able to take control of their lives.
Nonetheless, many Asians would insist that Chinese dictatorship, once embarked on fighting poverty, has made much greater progress than did Indian democracy.
That does not prove that authoritarian rule automatically leads to economic success any more than democracy does. What we do see, however, is that countries that make progress on the road to development regularly fulfil the criteria of good governance in the narrow sense – and that democratic progress often ensues after a phase of crucial economic development. So there is no reason to abandon the principles of good governance.
Questions by Hans Dembowski.
Prof. Dr. Dirk Messner
is the director of the German Development Institute.
dirk.messner@die-gdi.de
http://www.die-gdi.de
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