Returning to Our Roots: “Good Government” Evolves to “Good Governance”

• Author: James L. Perry,Gjalt de Graaf,Cor van Montfort,Zeger van der Wal
• Date: 01 January 2014
• Published date: 01 January 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12164

Symposium

Editorial

Returning to Our Roots: “Good Government” Evolves to “Good Governance” 27

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 74, Iss. 1, pp. 27–28. © 2014 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12164.

public management decisions. In recent years, the

attention to good governance has also been criticized.

Grindle (2010), for instance, has characterized good

governance as an “inf‌l ated idea.” Choudry (2002)

tells us, “Good governance is a serious contender for a

prize for the best example of Orwellian doublespeak.”

Such dismissals leave us empty-handed, however, in

our attempts to mitigate or cope with value tensions.

It is easier to agree on what constitutes bad govern-

ance than on what good governance is. Within the

literature, there is an extensive debate about how good

governance should be def‌i ned.

Should it be about procedures only (like most

def‌i nitions of representative democracy) or

should it also contain substantial policies and

outcomes? Should the concept be universally

applicable worldwide (like the UN Declaration

of Human Rights) or should it be relativized

to dif‌f erent cultures? Should the concept be

equated with administrative and economic

ef‌f‌i ciency or should it be understood as some-

thing that explains such ef‌f‌i ciency? Should

good governance include how well those who

govern represent those who are governed, or

should it be about the capacity to steer society?

(Rothstein and Teorell 2012, 17)

Usually, organizations employing the good governance

concept def‌i ne it by constructing a wish list consist-

ing of rules, processes, and behaviors of governments

(Bevir 2009; Brinkerhof‌f and Goldsmith 2005). As

Kettl (1993) claimed, government’s fundamental

challenge in serving the public interest is to balance

the pursuit of dif‌f erent—and inevitably contradic-

tory—standards. Trade-of‌f s between valued principles

are thus the inevitable fate of any design proc-

ess (LeGrand 2007). Ideas of ef‌f ective operational

structures, for instance, could be in breach of the law.

Especially in volatile times characterized by budget-

ary restraints and dynamic stakeholder expectations,

public decision makers face trade-of‌f s between con-

f‌l icting and contradictory public values and interests.

 erefore, we believe that a compelling way to think

about “good governance” is as the ability to manage

tensions between conf‌l icting or contradictory public

In this issue of Public Administration Review, we

present a symposium about good governance that

takes us back to our roots, but also forward to our

future. For most of the twentieth century, beginning

with the Progressive movement, “good government”

represented a meaningful aspiration for people who

were dedicated to the betterment and ef‌f ective opera-

tion of public institutions.  e substance and rhetoric

of the twentieth century is increasingly being replaced

today by new conversations about “good governance.”

What constitutes good governance? We generally

subscribe to a simple principle: good governance is

that which contributes to the good of society. Good

governance, as a concept, traditionally has been used in

the context of development and developing countries.

It has been common for poorer countries to abide by

“good governance principles” in order to get aid from

the International Monetary Fund or World Bank

(De Graaf 2013). Yet the idea of good governance is

increasingly applied to modern nation-states struggling

to f‌i nd new (multiactor and multilevel) approaches to

public governance (Rhodes 2007). It is this shift that

may explain the recent growth of scholarly interest in

a wider application of the good governance concept.

As the traditional institutions of government no longer

def‌i ne “what works” and “what is right,” questions

about the quality of governance automatically return

to the center of public and academic attention.  ese

questions touch on the ef‌f ectiveness and ef‌f‌i ciency of

governance, as well as elements of ethics (integrity),

democracy, and legitimacy.

 e concept of good governance is both appealing and

annoying. It is appealing because it widens the scope

of public performance evaluation. Whereas the New

Public Management movement focuses mainly on

questions of ef‌f‌i ciency and output, good governance

writers refer to a richer and more extensive landscape

of relevant public values and performance parameters.

Such broad ground, however, is also annoying: it is

not easy to attend to a multitude of good governance

criteria in practice. Moreover, many oft-mentioned

“global” good governance values such as voice and

transparency, rule of law, and government ef‌f ective-

ness (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Mastruzzi 2007) may

be conf‌l icting or contradictory in public policy and

Returning to Our Roots: “Good Government” Evolves to

“Good Governance”