Good Governance -- Concept and Pillars
What 'governance' adds to 'government', and the World Bank/UNDP pillars used to judge it.
Popularised by the World Bank (from the late 1980s, especially its 1989 report on Sub-Saharan Africa) and elaborated by UNDP's governance indicators in the 1990s.
Government is an institution -- the formal machinery that makes and enforces rules. Governance is a process -- how decisions are actually made and implemented, involving government, the private sector and civil society together, not government acting alone. "Good governance" judges that process against a set of normative standards.
Commonly cited pillars (World Bank / UNDP style)
- Participation -- all stakeholders, including the marginalised, have a voice in decisions.
- Rule of law -- fair legal frameworks, impartially enforced, including on human rights.
- Transparency -- decisions and their enforcement follow rules, and information is freely accessible.
- Responsiveness -- institutions serve all stakeholders within a reasonable timeframe.
- Consensus orientation -- mediating different interests to reach a broad agreement on what serves the community best.
- Equity and inclusiveness -- all groups, especially the most vulnerable, have opportunities to improve their well-being.
- Effectiveness and efficiency -- processes and institutions produce results that meet needs while using resources well.
- Accountability -- decision-makers in government, the private sector and civil society are answerable to the public and to institutional stakeholders.
Why it matters for administration
- Shifts the administrator's role from sole implementer to one actor among many (government, market, civil society) -- the idea of "steering, not rowing."
- Underpins India's own reform vocabulary -- the Right to Information Act, Citizens' Charters, e-governance, and the Second Administrative Reforms Commission's recommendations all draw on good-governance language.
- Criticised for being donor-driven and somewhat Western-centric in its original form -- a checklist that doesn't always fit every country's administrative history or capacity.
Answer-writing cue: don't just list the pillars -- show the government-to-governance shift in one sentence first, then use 3-4 pillars (not all eight) tied to a concrete Indian example such as RTI or e-governance, to keep the answer from reading like a rote list.
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