The United Nations’ Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals should make “good governance and effective institutions” a specific goal, according to a statement signed by nearly 200 organizations from around the world.
The working group now in the process of developing Post-2015 Sustainable Development was urged to:
- Establish a specific goal to “ensure good governance and effective institutions”
- Include as components of this goal a clause to “ensure people enjoy freedom of speech, association, peaceful protest and access to independent media and information” and to “guarantee the public’s right to information and access to government data”
In May 2013, a UN advisory panel recommended that a future development agenda include goals on strengthening governance and right-to-know. (See previous FreedomInfo.org report.)
The development of sustainable development goals is modeled after the Millennium Development Goals adopted by UN member countries in 2000 that set 15-year goals for reducing poverty, improving health and strengthening environmental sustainability.
“It’s crucial that the UN recognise the broad base of support for including media freedom and access to information as essential elements of the new development agenda. Creating open governments is a fundamental prerequisite to ensure meaningful development” said Thomas Hughes, Executive Director of Article 19, one of the organizers of the joint statement with 197 signatories announced Feb. 3.
In addition, Article 19, an international free express organization based in London has published a position paper with “targets and indicators” for promoting the right to information and protection of civic space.
Contrasting View
Another perspective on whether to have a stand-alone governance goal was offered in a blog post by Marta Foresti, who leads the Politics and Governance program at the Overseas Development Institute, a UK’s independent think tank on international development and humanitarian issues. She argues for a “wider strategy.”
There are three reasons why governance is not a stand-alone issue, Foresti wrote:
1. Much of the debate on a governance goal focuses on how to measure it rather than on whether it will make any real difference.
2. Governance needs to be on the agenda in other sectors too, not just as a stand-alone issue.
3. The debate on national-level transparency and accountability misses broader issues of global governance.
She concludes:
I hope the OWG does not just provide recommendations or options for a ‘governance goal’, but rather that it seizes the opportunity to set out a much more ambitious (and politically savvy) strategy for putting governance at the heart of a future global strategy. This would require getting a much wider group of people on board, in the north as well as south, and looking beyond the usual governance approaches and measures. Action on governance will require participation at all levels, engaging more than the usual suspects of governance organisations, experts and campaigners (me included!).
Defending Governance Agenda
Also weighing in was Nathaniel Heller of Global Integrity, who wrote in defense of governance as a priority.
He began:
In recent weeks, a number of leading voices within the international development movement – including the billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates as well as development economist Chris Blattman and tech-for-development expert Charles Kenny – have come out arguing that corruption and governance efforts in developing countries should be de-prioritized relative to other challenges in health, education, or infrastructure. Their basic argument is that while yes, corruption is ugly, it’s simply another tax in an economic sense and while annoying and inefficient, can be tolerated while we work to improve service delivery to the poor.
The reality is more complicated and the policy implications precisely the opposite: corruption’s “long tail” in fact undermines the very same development objectives that Gates, Blattman, and Kenny are advocating for.
He concluded:
Rather than sacrifice anti-corruption and transparency efforts at the altar of development, a better approach is to embrace transparency’s “force multiplier” effect as a development goal in and of itself, much as we do now with education. After all, no one has ever died directly from being stupid, but we’ve come to appreciate the catalytic role that education plays in the development causal chain. The same goes for transparency and anti-corruption.
But a first order of business is to improve the data we have available to better demonstrate these linkages. The Gates-funded research mentioned above is one example, but huge work remains to build the evidence base; there’s simply no data available in many countries or on many dimensions of governance and transparency to answer core questions around impact and return on investment. A number of leading civil society organizations that already generate some of this data are exploring ways of better collaborating to fill the gaps, but much more needs to be done, including bolstering national statistical offices inside of governments in the global South.
We need this new data to help answer the data driven skeptics in the development field. But until we have it, let’s not rush to throw the transparency baby out with the development bathwater.
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