From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Tue Apr 17 2007 - 08:48:42 EDT
Patrick, As regards the concept of "governance". Why for example wouldn't they simply talk about "government" ? There is a substantive issue at stake here. The term "governance" comes into play, because the accountability of institutional entities of any kind has become problematic, due to e.g.: - increasing separation of the ownership and the control of enterprises or institutions that may operate globally. - the enormous growth of financial intermediation - the gross output of corporate entities is often larger than that of national economies, giving the corporates big political influence. - fusions of government organisations with business organisations - it is no longer clear that national governments really can, or do, govern important areas of society, and corporates + NGO's effectively begin to perform a governing role. There are all sorts of more or less waffly definitions of "governance", but the essence of "governance" is, that you have to police the managerial leadership of an organisation, so that they do what they are mandated to do, and not something else. Why would you talk about "good governance" rather than "good management" - well, basically, because the concept of governance applies both to state, para-state and non-state organisations, and they way they operate together as a bloc. In other words, it applies both to elected staff and appointed staff, both to staff that works by a legal mandate and staff that works according to a business plan or an advocacy role. In addition, governance suggests not so much the task of management itself, but the overseeing (supervision) of management, to ensure it does its job properly. Fighting corruption is fine, but if the very structure of your institutions makes genuine accountability practically impossible anyway, then your fight against corruption is rather futile. Jurriaan
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