• Country initiatives of assessing governance
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Country initiatives of assessing governance

This paper focuses on the challenges for making governance assessments nationally owned, which is a requirement under the Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness. The author says that making governance assessments nationally-owned does not necessarily imply that government controls them or that they become unmanageable instruments trying to cater for every stakeholder group. They must serve a purpose that is sufficiently narrow or specific that it can be achieved. However, in doing so a number of challenges arise which are conceptual, political, institutional and operational.

Conceptually, the paper notes, although the concept of governance has been around for almost two decades, it is still problematic for at least three reasons:

• Definitions vary among users
• The concept tends to become a catch-all concept subsuming too many activities.
• Its normative content reflects one particular model of conducting public affairs
• The paper considers three key political challenges:
• Choice of approach: is improving governance a matter of filling a void or is it building on what exists on the ground?
• The role of external agencies: do they interpret national ownership as being satisfactory as long as government takes a lead and commits itself to improved governance or do they strive to reach out to actors in society as well?
• The attitude of the partner government: is it ready to be inclusive and open or does it prefer to treat governance issues as its own domain?
• Institutionally,
• first, assessments carried out by international agencies to meet their own programmatic objectives are deemed to be of little relevance to governance reform in partner countries;
• second, narrowing the concept of governance to fighting corruption not only limits the scopeof what the concept is all about but it also stigmatizes it in a negative fashion.

Regarding the operational challenges, the paper notes that while governance assessments aimed at ranking countries on a universal scale are likely to remain influential, those designed and carried out locally have their operational problems. They tend to become overwhelming for both those who are expected to carry out and those asked to participate.
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