Good Governance: Framework, Issues, Working Plan and Strategies of Nepal

1. Introduction

Governance is the government’s ability to make and enforce rules. It is also to deliver services regardless of whether that government is democratic or not. If it is conceptualized simply then it is the process of decision-making and the process by which decisions are implemented or not. It also can be in different forms, such as- corporate governance, international governance, national governance, local governance, new public management governance (NPM), and others. However, there is a difference between governance and good governance. Not every government is counted as a good government because of the actions they make. Governance is the exercise of political power to manage a nation’s affairs, where good governance also involves an efficient public service and legal framework to enforce contracts. According to Rhodes, there are some shared characteristics of governance.

 · Interdependence between organizations. Governance is more than government, covering non-state actors and changing the boundaries between public and private.

· Continuing interactions between network members, caused by the need to exchange resources and negotiate shared purposes.

· Interactions rooted in trust and regulated by rules.

2. A Framework for Assessing Governance

Governance has emerged as one of the main themes of international development. If governance matters, so does the need to assess key aspects in a systematic matter. However, given the many political and technical challenges, governance assessments need to be operationalized in careful ways.

Based on reviews of the extensive literature, our work clusters the rules that seem to matter into six main arenas of governance activity:

·         Civil Society - rules affecting the way citizens become aware of and raise issues in the public

·          Political Society - rules shaping the way issues are combined into policy by political institutions

·         Government - rules affecting the way policies are made by government agencies

·         Bureaucracy - rules determining the administration and implementation of policies

·         Economic Society - rules regarding state-market interactions

·         Judiciary - rules defining the resolution of disputes and conflicts

It also outlines six principles for assessing governance. The first three are particularly relevant to the way state actors relate to citizens, while the last three are more specific to the operations of the state itself.

·         Participation - the degree to which affected stakeholders are able to sense ownership and involvement in the political process

·         Fairness - the degree to which rules are applied equally to everyone in society

·         Decency - the extent to which rules are handled without humiliating or harming people

·          Accountability - the extent to which political actors are perceived as responsible to the public for what they say and do

·         Transparency - the degree to which rules about openness and clarity are upheld in the public realm

·         Efficiency - the extent to which rules enhance effective use of scarce resources without incurring waste or delay

These principles are universal in the sense that they are respected in different societies all over the world (even though, they may at times contradict each other in practice). The WGA initiative puts forward a framework for assessing governance that focuses on these six principles and six arenas. They provide a comprehensive overview of the full task and disaggregate it at the same time into manageable units that can be treated independently but also in common with the others.

Governance Model : The WGA Framework for Assessing Governance

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Source: World Governance Survey

3.  Government to Governance

If government is about the arbitration of how scarce societal resources are allocated, governance is about the contestations around how resources are actually allocated. Kooiman (2003:4) distinguishes between “governing” as “the totality of interactions, in which public and private actors participate, aimed at solving societal problems or creating societal opportunities” and governance as “the totality of theoretical conceptions of governing”. Thus governing may be defined as the process through which the contestations and interactions among the competing actors are settled. Under the umbrella of governance there have been numerous discussions since the early 1980s among policy makers and social scientists alike on collaboration, cooperation, and coordination on the account of increased interdependencies among actors in markets, networks, and hierarchies. The discussions on the changing mode of governance may be grouped into two main camps. First, there are those who view the emphasis on collaboration, cooperation, private-public partnerships, and so forth as a product of an ideological shift toward neo-liberalism and a move away from the conception of the state as the provider of welfare and the convener responsible for social cohesion. Second, there is a view that the informalization of formal state functions signifies a move toward a mode of "cogovernance" wherein actors in civil society are able to engage more in matters of public policy than they did during the period immediately following the Second World War until the early 1980s. The first camp views the change in governance characteristics as a move toward less democracy while the second camp sees at least a potential for increased democracy and civil engagement in matters of policy and social development.

Table 1: Common and Significant features in Definitions of "Governance"

In the policy making domain governance is often described as the exercise of authority and control by a multiplicity of private and public interests. This view of governance seems prevalent in most official definitions of the term. For example, a cursory look at the more formal definitions of governance yields a series of key words (Table 1) that point to governance as how actors organize themselves.

The European Commission uses the term “Good Governance” to refer to a system of governing whose intentions are consistent with the common good of the Member States and the European Community as a whole. The Commission’s vision is based on the five political principles of openness, participation, accountability, effectiveness, and coherence. Furthermore, these principles are to be maintained through the “institutions” of the European Union’s governance system (Table 2)

Table 2: European Commission's Principles of "Good Governance"

What is most striking in the Commission’s definition of good governance is the emphasis on the role of institutions as entities that are largely viewed as being “up there” and, at least currently, insufficiently within the reach of ordinary citizens. As such, this view of governance seems concerned primarily with minimizing bureaucratization and hierarchy. Thus the intent of the White Paper on European Governance (CEC 2001) is to make these formal institutions – which are increasing in size and number – more accessible, accountable, and relevant to the general populace and to retain a higher degree of relevancy, credibility, and legitimacy in the average person’s mind. The White Paper’s necessary but exclusive focus on formal institutions overlooks the important role played by other, less formal, institutions in European governance, particularly in policy formation and implementation.

Table 3: Common and Significant Features in Definitions of Good Governance

There are other definitions of good, or democratic, governance that implicitly point to the importance of informal institutions. Table 3 highlights the keywords and summarizes some of the key characteristics of such definitions of good governance. An illustrative example is provided by the UNDP, which defines governance as “the exercise of economic, political and administrative authority to manage a country's affairs at all levels. It comprises the mechanisms, processes and institutions through which citizens and groups articulate their interests, exercise their legal rights, meet their obligations and mediate their differences”. Other international organizations, e.g., the World Bank, USAID, offer similar definitions of governance for the common good.

4. Issues, Working Plan, Program and Strategies of Nepal - Good Governance

It has been proved from the national and international experiences that the multidimensional development can be moved forward in the state when people can be guaranteed for good governance by making public service delivery effective, increasing transparency, participation, accountability, predictability and legitimacy in the operation of state management and development affairs. Therefore, it is necessary to make service delivery effective by making necessary reforms in the administrative areas and guaranteeing the people for good governance. In this context, the efforts have been continued to translate the basic principles and assumptions of good governance in practice through the formulation and implementation of laws (legislations) including Good Governance (Management and Operation) Act, 2007, Civil Service Act, 1993, Local Self-Governance Act, 1998, Corruption Alleviation Act, 1992, Public Procurement Act, 2007 and Right to Information Act 2007.

The emphasis on good governance is expected to produce result-oriented and effective management of service delivery and implementation of projects / Programmes thereby correcting the weaknesses in practical field. For the enhancement of good governance, participatory economic development is stressed to strengthen monitoring and evaluation system, to make decision making procedure and public expenditure pattern more responsible and transparent, to implement effectively decentralization at local level and to enforce administrative mechanism to be efficient, capable, responsible and effective. The working capacity and reliability of local bodies will be enhanced to mobilize local resources through decentralization. Transparent bases of projects selection, prioritization and transparency in their implementation will be followed strictly to upgrade effective implementation of development Programmes. Priority will be given on the utilization of new technology, productivity and enhancement of work efficiency and population management to implement above mentioned four strategies effectively and to make their cumulative effects positive and high to achieve the target of the plan. Participatory development process will be encouraged by managing active participation of private sectors, non-government sector and civil society along with public sectors and local agencies to reduce poverty through socio-economic transformation of rural areas.

4.1. Issues of Governance

·         Lack of effective implementation of the legal provisions related to the operation of public services

·         Lack of measurable standards for the objective evaluation of the employee's performance

·         Lack of transparency in decision making process, centralized decision making system, ambiguity in the allocation of responsibilities

·         Lack of effective mechanism to discourage the irregularities and the interference of non-administrative sector in administrative sector etc. are the problems prevailing in the field of good governance

4.2. Policy and work plan

·         Interact and co-work with various stakeholders and civil societies in order to make the political and high managerial leadership aware of and committed to the reform process.

·         Initiate the process of improving performances of certain ministries; in addition, involve civil society in the performance evaluation of agencies that deliver public services.

·         Prepare an individual civic charter of each administrative units working at the central and at the local level.

·          Encourage non-governmental organizations, community organizations and institutions, users' groups and the private sector in delivering services and materials to the people.

·         Turn over the tasks performed by the central level agencies to the local bodies as many as possible. Adopt the policy on contracting out non-core services.

·         Set the service standard of and the annual performance improvement plan of the agencies that directly deliver services to the people.

·          Adopt the policy on promoting transparency in and responsibility for the performances of the government agencies.

·         Adopt the further effective policy on recruiting and promoting civil servants based on their merits in order to make the civil service effective, in addition to making training job-oriented. Implement a transparent policy on the transfer of civil servants for making the civil servant transfer system effective.

·         Adopt the policy on implementing an Affirmative Action Plan for increasing the women's participation in the civil service.

·         Make improvement in the technique of examinations given to recruits for increasing the job efficiency of Public Service Commission.

·         Prepare a long-term policy on the salary of civil servants making structural changes in it.

·         Adopt the policy on proper sizing of the civil service reviewing the number of civil servants required and cutting off the unproductive staff positions for making the civil service clean and prompt

·         For the total system of good governance, legal provisions will be developed against currency laundering, and anti-corruption strategy will be formed. The institutions like Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authorities and National Alertness Centre will be strengthened.

·         Strengthen the monitoring and evaluation system for monitoring and evaluating the implementation of policies, programs and projects to complete them at the estimated cost and time, and to achieving the anticipated results in quantity and in appropriate quality.

·         Link the human right program with the national development program based on the available resources for implementing the commitments made to human rights in various international forums, and for effectively protecting and promoting human rights mentioned in various international conventions and ratified by Nepal, and fundamental rights provided by the Constitution of Nepal of 2047 (1990).

·         Place emphasis on development of necessary basic services, institutional aspect and manpower for making the quality jobs of preparing new human rights laws and refining the prevailing human rights laws, and for making these laws pursuant to the international standard.

·         Develop physical infrastructures and institutional capacity of law courts, and develop manpower required for them.

4.3. Good Governance Program

a)       Develop ability and leadership of the reform process

b)       Increase the financial efficiency of civil administration

c)       Enhance efficiency and motivate civil servants

d)       Honesty, corruption control and transparency

e)       Improve job performances of government agencies

4.4. Strategies for Good Governance

·         Prepare the foundation for necessary legal and institutional reform by clearly defining the relation between political sector and administrative sector and by making the administrative processes and functions fair, easy, lean, transparent, participative and clearly predictable and create the environment for people to perceive good governance.

·         Apply the processes of electronic governance system in the administrative works of the agencies by setting the long-term objective of making paperless government.

·         Strengthen and reform corruption control related legal system and administrative structure congruous to the commitment made by international community through the international convention against corruption.

·         Make public service delivery fair, transparent and effective ensuring the environment to receive qualitative public services fairly, compatibly, legally and timely by the targeted groups.

·         Make the public service inclusive making the provision of providing equal opportunities for service entry to the eligible and interested individuals of all classes and communities.

·         Devolve/delegate the administrative authority to the agencies closest to the common people for such sorts of functions for which they are capable.

·         Develop administrative capacity to make the public policy formulation, implementation and evaluation process effective.

·         Make the monitoring and evaluation process of administrative and development functions effective.

·         Make the implementation of the performance-based employee reward and punishment policy effective making the employee's performance evaluation objective.

·         Make necessary reform on the various aspects of human resource management including the employees' appointment placement, transfer, promotion and determination of compensation predictable so that they could be made predictable legal and congruent to the fundamental norms of motivation.

·          Regulate, monitor and enhance the capacity of private, co-operatives nongovernment and civil society organizations, involved in the functions of quality determination, production and distribution of public services and commodities.

Concluding Remarks and Way Forward

From GDRC:

Recent economic and social developments have increased attention given to the role that good governance plays in achieving social and economic development.

·        Public management reforms have been a key factor in improving capacities of OECD countries to address issues such as budget deficits; external pressures on competitiveness, not least as a result of growing globalization; perceived lack of public confidence in government; growing needs for services; and increasing demands for better and more responsive services.

·         There is also a growing recognition that the current world financial crisis stems from weaknesses in the institutions of governance, and that durable solutions to this crisis need to address these governance problems.

Systems of governance affect the performance of the state in executing its core functions and through this, the performance of countries in meeting their major economic and social goals.

·         Governments create the conditions for functioning of markets, operation of private firms, strength of civil society, and welfare of communities and individuals.

·         The quality of governance is recognized as fundamental to ensuring the quality of life of citizens.

·         In its own right, good governance is important as a determinant of the sustainability and strength of democracies.