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There is growing recognition of the need for new approaches to the ways in which donors support accountability, but no broad agreement on what changed practice looks like. This publication aims to provide more clarity on the emerging practice.
PART V CRITICAL APPROACHES.
Is democratic governance good for economic prosperity? Does it accelerate progress towards social welfare and human development? Does it generate a peace-dividend and reduce conflict at home? Within the international community, democracy and governance are widely advocated as intrinsically desirable goals. Nevertheless, alternative schools of thought dispute their consequences and the most effective strategy for achieving critical developmental objectives. This book argues that both liberal democracy and state capacity need to be strengthened to ensure effective development, within the constraints posed by structural conditions. Liberal democracy allows citizens to express their demands, hold public officials to account and rid themselves of ineffective leaders. Yet rising public demands that cannot be met by the state generate disillusionment with incumbent officeholders, the regime, or ultimately the promise of liberal democracy ideals. Thus governance capacity also plays a vital role in advancing human security, enabling states to respond effectively to citizen's demands.
This book outlines the importance of political institutions in achieving good governance within a democratic polity.
Going beyond democratic theory, March and Olsen draw on social science to examine how political institutions create and sustain democratic solidarity, identities, capabilities, accounts, and adaptiveness; how they can maintain and elaborate democratic values and beliefs - and how governance might be made honorable, just, and effective. They show how democratic governance is both preactive and reactive - creating interests and power as well as responding to them - and how it shapes not only an understanding of the past and an ability to learn from it, but even history itself. By exploring how governance transcends the creation of coalitions that reflect existing preferences, resources, rights, and rules, the authors reveal how it includes the actual formation of these defining principles of social and political life.
Democratic Governance examines the changing nature of the modern state and reveals the dangers these changes pose to democracy. Mark Bevir shows how new ideas about governance have gradually displaced old-style notions of government in Britain and around the world. Policymakers cling to outdated concepts of representative government while at the same time placing ever more faith in expertise, markets, and networks. Democracy exhibits blurred lines of accountability and declining legitimacy. Bevir explores how new theories of governance undermined traditional government in the twentieth century. Politicians responded by erecting great bureaucracies, increasingly relying on policy expertise and abstract notions of citizenship and, more recently, on networks of quasi-governmental and private organizations to deliver services using market-oriented techniques. Today, the state is an unwieldy edifice of nineteenth-century government buttressed by a sprawling substructure devoted to the very different idea of governance--and democracy has suffered. In Democratic Governance, Bevir takes a comprehensive look at governance and the history and thinking behind it. He provides in-depth case studies of constitutional reform, judicial reform, joined-up government, and police reform. He argues that the best hope for democratic renewal lies in more interpretive styles of expertise, dialogic forms of policymaking, and more diverse avenues for public participation.
After more than a century of assorted dictatorships and innumerable fiscal crises, the majority of Latin America's states are governed today by constitutional democratic regimes. Some analysts and scholars argue that Latin America weathered the 2008 fiscal crisis much better than the United States. How did this happen? Jorge I. Domínguez and Michael Shifter asked area specialists to examine the electoral and governance factors that shed light on this transformation and the region's prospects. They gather their findings in the fourth edition of Constructing Democratic Governance in Latin America. This new edition is completely updated. Part I is thematic, covering issues of media, constitutionalism, the commodities boom, and fiscal management vis-à-vis governance. Part II focuses on eight important countries in the region—Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. Already widely used in courses, Constructing Democratic Governance in Latin America will continue to interest students of Latin American politics, democratization studies, and comparative politics as well as policymakers.
Traditionally, American government has created detailed, formal procedures to ensure that its agencies and employees are accountable for finances and fairness. Now in the interest of improved performance, we are asking our front-line workers to be more responsive, we are urging our middle managers to be innovative, and we are exhorting our public executives to be entrepreneurial. Yet what is the theory of democratic accountability that empowers public employees to exercise such discretion while still ensuring that we remain a government of laws? How can government be responsive to the needs of individual citizens and still remain accountable to the entire polity? In Rethinking Democratic Accountability, Robert D. Behn examines the ambiguities, contradictions, and inadequacies in our current systems of accountability for finances, fairness, and performance. Weaving wry observations with political theory, Behn suggests a new model of accountability—with "compacts of collective, mutual responsibility"—to address new paradigms for public management.
Deliberative democracy is well-suited to the challenges of governing in the Anthropocene. But deliberative democratic practices are only suited to these challenges to the extent that five prerequisites - empoweredness, embeddedness, experimentality, equivocality, and equitableness - are successfully institutionalized. Governance must be: created by those it addresses, applicable equally to all, capable of learning from (and adapting to) experience, rationally grounded, and internalized by those who adopt and experience it. This book analyzes these five major normative principles, pairing each with one of the Earth System Governance Project's analytical problems to provide an in-depth discussion of the minimal conditions for environmental governance that can be truly sustainable. It is ideal for scholars and graduate students in global environmental politics, earth system governance, and international environmental policy. This is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project. For more publications, see www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance.