Aiding governance in developing countries: progress amid uncertainties

Since emerging as a new donor enthusiasm in the 1990s, governance support has become a major area of aid to developing countries. The idea that remedying debilitating patterns of inefficient, corrupt, and unaccountable governance will unlock developmental progress appeals not just to aid providers but also to ordinary people throughout the developing world who are angry at unresponsive and poorly functioning states. Yet despite the natural appeal of improving governance, it has proved challenging in practice.

This paper looks to further the governance debate by detailing a number of key insights which it believes are fundamental to consider when considering improving governance in developing countries, and indeed represent the 'framework of an emergent but still tentative second generation of governance support'. These include:

• Governance deficiencies are often primarily political and cannot be resolved through technical assistance alone
  
• Fostering citizen demand for better governance is as important as topdown efforts aimed at improving the “supply” of governance
  
• Governance aid may be more effective at the local level than at the national level
  
• Despite the intuitive appeal of governance best practices, concentrating on locally determined “best fit” may be more productive
  
• Informal institutions are a central part of the governance puzzle and cannot be treated as developmental marginalia
  
• Governance concerns should be integrated into the full range of assistance programming
  
• Donor countries should address international drivers of poor governance
  
• Aiding governance effectively requires development agencies to rethink their own internal governance.

In summary the authors contend that operationalizing the second generation of governance aid has its own inherent challenges i.e. generating more and different types of knowledge, institutional inertia within aid agencies, the limits of donor leverage, and concerns about the appropriateness of more political interventions. Yet this document stresses that even partial success will be worthwhile in addressing the above criteria as it sees governance assistance as being at the heart of the development challenge.