Governance Reform: Bridging, Monitoring, and Action

Developing-country governance and its monitoring have risen to the top of the development agenda. This mounting interest is in response to compelling evidence that links governance to development performance-policy quality, public service provision, the investment climate, and the extent of corruption.

'Governance Reform: Bridging, Monitoring, and Action' lays out a broad framework for analyzing and monitoring governance in developing countries. It identifies fourteen core indicators for governance monitoring—both broad measures of overall patterns and specific 'actionable' measures that can be used to guide reforms and track progress.

The book also summarizes good practices for reforming public bureaucracies and checks and balances institutions (including parliaments, the justice system, media and information, and local governance); highlights improvements in transparency as a relatively low-cost and low-key way of deepening government accountability to civil society; and suggests ways to complement top-down reforms with approaches that focus directly on improving service provision and the investment climate (such as strengthening the bottom-up accountabilities of service providers to communities, firms, and citizens).

'Governance Reform' has no universally applicable trajectory of change. Rather, the aims are: to find country-specific entry points for reform which have development impact in the short-term; to address binding public management constraints, and to help build momentum for further change.