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On Measuring Success WPF REPORTS number 36 Good Governance Rankings: The Art of Measurement Marie Besançon WORLD PEACE FOUNDATION FOUNDED 1910 THE WORLD PEACE FOUNDATION The World Peace Foundation was created in 1910 by the imagination and fortune of Edwin Ginn, the Bos- ton publisher, to encourage international peace and cooperation. The Foundation seeks to advance the cause of world peace through study, analysis, and the advocacy of wise action. As an operating, not a grant-giving foundation, it provides financial support only for projects which it has initiated itself. Edwin Ginn shared the hope of many of his contemporaries that permanent peace could be achieved. That dream was denied by the outbreak of World War I, but the Foundation has continued ever since to at- tempt to overcome obstacles to international peace and cooperation, drawing for its funding on the en- dowment bequeathed by the founder. In its early years, the Foundation focused its attention on building the peacekeeping capacity of the League of Nations, and then on the development of world order through the United Nations. The Foundation established and nurtured the premier scholarly journal in its field, International Organization. Since 1993, the Foundation has examined the causes and cures of intrastate conflict. The peace of the world in these decades has been disturbed primarily by outbreaks of vicious ethnic, religious, linguistic, and intercommunal antagonism within divided countries. The episodes of brutal ethnic cleansing that convulsed Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo are but the best known and most devastating of a rash of such attempts to oust rivals across the globe. Few places are immune from some variant of this internecine warfare, whether the immediate battles are over religion, language, appearance, or color differences. Thus, the Foundation is active in and studies the problems of Cyprus, Sri Lanka, and the Sudan, and has worked in and studied the prospects for democracy in Burma and Haiti. It has sponsored research on the role of non-governmental organizations in preventing conflict in ethnically divided societies. It has en- gaged in feasibility studies regarding the reduction of conflict in Africa by the creation of African crisis response forces. It has analyzed the use of preventive diplomacy in resolving ethnic and other intercom- munal conflicts. Its work on truth commissions demonstrates how that method of post-conflict justice- seeking can help prevent future internal conflicts. The Foundation has examined how the United Nations should manage its peace building responsibilities. Intercommunal conflict often becomes civil war and, in some cases, leads to failed states. The Foundation has actively researched the causes of state failure, and how best to reinvigorate and manage the resuscita- tion of wounded states. Contributing to widespread killings in intercommunal conflicts, civil wars, and imploding states is the easy availability of small arms and other light weapons. For this reason, the Foundation engaged in a long-term examination of the small arms problem, and how its licit and illicit trade should be addressed. The Foundation has also analyzed the connection between conflict diamonds and civil war. Part of the task of the Foundation is to resolve conflicts as well as to study them. The Foundation’s work in Congo, Cyprus, Burma, Sri Lanka, Haiti, the Sudan, Zimbabwe, and all of Africa has resolution of conflict as its goal. It has sponsored a detailed study of negotiating the end of deadly conflict within and between states. It is also engaged in an analysis of the successes and failures of African leadership. GOOD GOVERNANCE RANKINGS: THE ART OF MEASUREMENT MARIE BESANÇON WORLD PEACE FOUNDATION WPF PROGRAM ON INTRASTATE CONFLICT AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION, JOHN F. KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT, HARVARD UNIVERSITY Cambridge, Massachusetts 2003 BOARD OF TRUSTEES Richard H. Ullman, Chairman J. Brian Atwood Peter D. Bell Lincoln P. Bloomfield Catherine E. C. Henn Philip Khoury Thomas M. O’Reilly Kenneth A. Oye James M. Shannon John Shattuck Anne-Marie Slaughter Frederick G. P. Thorne Paul Van Slambrouck Robert I. Rotberg, President Copyright © 2003 WORLD PEACE FOUNDATION 79 John F. Kennedy St. Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 Tel: 617-496-9812 Fax: 617-491-8588 E-mail: world_peace@harvard.edu www.worldpeacefoundation.org All rights reserved CONTENTS Introduction 1 Why Measure Governance? 2 Theory/Policy 3 Subjective vs. Objective Approaches 4 Current Efforts and Future Objectives 5 Appendix 11 Participants 35 Books of the World Peace Foundation (since 1980) 37 Reports of the World Peace Foundation 39 Dr. Marie Besançon was a post-doctoral fellow with the In- ternational Security and Women and Public Policy Programs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard Univer- sity, 2002-2003, and now holds a post-doctoral fellowship with the Program on Intrastate Conflict, Kennedy School. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Claremont Graduate School af- ter becoming interested in international relations while research- ing media coverage of terrorism for the Committee on Media Accountability, and through her association with the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies. Prior to her graduate work at Claremont, Besançon worked for the Center for Ulcer Research and Education at UCLA and the Los Angeles Veterans Hospital. She is a member of the board of advisors for Sentia Group, Inc. and the advisory board for the Olive Cosby and Kermit R. Mason Memorial Scholarship Fund. WPF Report 36: Good Governance Rankings 1 Introduction Governance is the delivery of political goods—beginning with security—to citizens of na- tion-states. Good governance results when nation-states provide a high order of certain political goods—when the nation-states perform effectively and well on behalf of their inhabitants. Rotberg says that nation-states “exist to provide a decentralized method of delivering political (public) goods to persons living within designated parameters….” and “it is according to their performances—according to the levels of their effective delivery of the most crucial political goods—that strong states may be distinguished from weak ones...”1 The social contract between ruler and ruled embodies effective delivery of these political goods—and what this hierarchy of crucial political goods entails is based on so- cietal norms and beliefs. The hierarchy of political goods begins with the supply of security, especially human security. A well governed nation provides: rule of law; political and civil freedoms; medical and health care; schools and educational instruction; roads, railways, the arteries of com- merce; communications networks; a money and banking system; a fiscal and institutional context within which citizens can prosper; support for civil society; and a method of regulat- ing the sharing of the environmental commons.2 Together, the management, supply and de- livery of some or most of these goods constitutes governance, and the extent to which nation- states do or do not so perform can—at least in theory—be measured. Tackling the issue of measuring governance was the premise of a meeting of scholars, data experts, clients, donors, and policy makers at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, in May 2003.3 Participants granted that implicit and impressionistic measuring of governance already occurs within the policy and donor communities, and among academicians—such as the criteria established under President The ideas presented in this paper reflect the author’s interpretation of an amalgam of opinions voiced by the participants in “The Conference on Measuring Governance” sponsored by the World Peace Foundation and the Program on Intrastate Conflict, Conflict Prevention, and Conflict Reso- lution at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in May, 2003, as well as her own. The paper does not necessarily reflect the individual participants’ personal philosophies, nor is it to be taken as containing their direct quotes unless indicated. Footnotes are meant to give credit to participants who initiated certain discussions or sparked specific ideas. 1 This formulation follows Robert I. Rotberg, “The Failure and Collapse of Nation-States: Break- down, Prevention, and Repair,” in Robert I. Rotberg (ed.), When States Fail: Causes and Conse- quences (Princeton, 2004), 2–5. 2 Ibid., 3–4. Daniel Kaufmann’s definition of governance is less detailed, but similar, in Kauf- mann, Aart Kray, and Pablo Zoido-Lobaton, Governance Matters (Washington, D.C., 1999), 1–2. 3 This Report draws upon the formal discussions of the Kennedy School meeting, and upon a de- tailed summary prepared by Deborah West of the deliberations of the group. 2 WPF Report 36: Good Governance Rankings Bush’s Millennium Challenge Account. However, the conferees at the Kennedy School explored the possibility of replacing implicit measures with explicit ones more useful to decision makers and donors, and to encourage better governance throughout the devel- oping world. Rotberg, who convened and chaired the meeting, indeed stated that objec- tively measuring governance could lead prescriptively both to improving “the welfare of the peoples of the developing world” and to an increase in the rigor with which govern- ance in Africa, Asia, and Latin America is discussed by the policy making and research communities in the G8, and by civil society in the countries concerned with improving their governance.4 Why Measure Governance? In this era, nation
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