Improving national governance

Description

Improving national governance involves strengthening institutional frameworks, enhancing transparency, and ensuring accountability in public administration. The strategy focuses on implementing effective legal and regulatory systems, promoting citizen participation, and combating corruption. By fostering responsive and inclusive decision-making, it aims to remedy inefficiencies, reduce misuse of resources, and build public trust. Practical actions include civil service reform, digitalization of government services, and establishing independent oversight bodies to ensure fair and effective governance.

Context

In recent years governance has come under strain in both industrialized and developing countries, albeit for different reasons. Whereas in the former countries the causes may be traced to the changing norms of political and economic life, in the latter the related problems have been intensified by the sharp contrast between the growth in social demands and the capacity of the institutional framework -- including the institutions of the state, the private sector and the civil society -- to satisfy them. Governance and appropriate systems of government have also emerged as an area of concern for international development organizations, in the wake of the realization that many projects supported with external financial and technical resources failed to yield the anticipated rates of return. One reason was that investments were made in highly distorted policy environments, which prevented benefits from materializing.