As Robert Gregory tries to tell
us about the difference between Governance and Government and gives the new
concept of these according to new standards .In this he formulated these ideas
as dispersal and fragmented and decentralized state authority. The involvement
of civil society in every field of life whether they are governmental or non
governmental bodies and trying to pursue the people’s problems in daily life. He
has discussed about whether governance is bad or good but it depends on the
outcomes of which they support or enhance. There is an ongoing relationship
between means and ends, process and result.
Diamond says about the bad dimension of Governance, that Good governance does
not paint a glittering picture of society but according to him Governance has
just bad impact due to democracy which only favors the elite class. Governance
does not affect the condition of people but it is full of corruption,
squandering, abuse of power and use of unfair means during electoral process. It
does not respond to the massive social agenda or reduce inequality or poverty.
He has given the examples of different countries like Philipines, Bangladash and
Nigeria.
Rothstein discarded the six elements of WGI and argues that quality of
government, is neutrality in the use of political power and favours the
parsimonious procedural conceptualization as there was ambiguity in the idea of
governance. if the quality of how the state manages to govern society is
considered to be a true of good governance‘ than how access to power is
organised in a representative democracy.Rothstein concluded that, Representative
democracy is not a safe cure against severe poverty, child deprivation, economic
inequality, illiteracy, being unhappy or not satisfied with one‘s life, infant
mortality, short life expectancy, maternal mortality, access to safe water or
sanitation, gender inequality, low school attendance for girls, low
interpersonal trust or low trust in Parliament.He has given the examples of
countries like Britain, the United States and New Zealand,where over the past
couple of decades Governance is changed and he might have added high levels of
income inequality to this list.
Rothstein has identifies two ideas of governance, one is participatory
governance which focuses collective thinking of public in decision making either
as a complement or an alternative to the system of representative democracy .The
second idea is called the political economy approach to governance. This idea
was emerged after the research on development and growth on the third world
countries.
The World Governance Indicators has measured governance in various countries on
the basis of six measures including; voice and accountability, political
stability and absence of violence effectiveness of government regulatory quality
rule of law and control of corruption.These dimensions tells abo replacement and
monitoring of Government ,formulate effective policies and last one deals with
the social and economic interaction among citizens and institutions. And Beside
WGI there are various international organizations has developed the measurements
according to the performance of different countries both globally and regionally
including the Transparency International‘s Corruptions Perceptions Index (CPI),
the Asia Foundation‘s Economic Governance Index, the OECD Better Life Index, the
UNDP‘s Human Development Index, the Fund for Peace Failed States Index, the
Economist Intelligence Unit‘s Democracy Index, the World Justice Project Rule of
Law Index, the Open Budget Index, the Freedom House Index of Press Freedom, the
UN Industrial Development Organization‘s Competitive Industrial Performance
Index, and the Reporters Without Borders‘ Press Freedom Index.
There is a lot of criticism on WGI done by different locality .critics says that
these indexes are result of simplistic reductionism. The first criticism is that
good governance is a broad concept and it cannot be reduced to a single index
number because the sources and information on which these indicators are based
can be different in different countries. Second criticism was on the idea of neo
liberalism that these idexes are ideological and ahistorical. they do not
recognize the importance of historical, cultural and political forces which have
actually shaped the present form of governance and can definitely have a great
role in its future structure. Other criticizes the WGI on the ground that these
six measures are not enough for measuring good governance as the public
financial management can differ in different countries. The six dimensions of
the WGI do not in fact measure different things, but that each of the indexes
reflects the perceptions of the quality of governance more broadly. Similarly,
the ambiguity of the idea of good governance gives rise to tautology .In
response to these criticism the writers of the WGIs have offered detailed and
refuses these and other criticisms
Grogery has also discussed the emerging criticism on social science and social
criticism which is keeping a balance as there is qualitative more than
quantitative analysis of good governance which shows that how a country
experiences the different level of corruption and in this example of New Zealand
is given , New Zealand is considered to be one of the less corrupt country in
the world and the WGI indicators since 1996 has shown that there has not been
occurred much changes in the indicators with the exception of Political
stability’s indicator that reached to peak in 2004 and then dropped again in
2008.There is a lot of information but less understanding and less trust which
will create more problems .These contradiction in the comparative assessment of
good governance quantitative data tends to drive out qualitative assessment of
good governance.