Progress in Development Studies 9, 3 (2009) pp. 249–55 Ã Progress report Putting good governance into practice I: the Ibrahim Index of African Governance Conor Farrington Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EN, UK. I Good and bad governance Good governance is…the single most important factor in eradicating poverty and promoting development. (Kofi Annan, 1998; cited in Rotberg and West, 2004: 11) In recent years, academics and political practitioners alike have become more aware of the importance of governance in the context of poor nation development (Rotberg, 2004; Collier, 2007). While definitions of governance vary in scope and content, most entail that the term ‘governance’ encompasses both citizen participation in government and the delivery of key goods and services by governments. The World Bank, for instance, defines governance as the ‘traditions and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised for the common good’, while the European Commission understands governance as ‘the state’s ability to serve [its] citizens’ (UNDP, 2004: 8).1 On this general basis, ‘bad’ governance came to be defined in the 1980s (by the World Bank and related institutions) as both unrepresentative government and inefficient non-market economic systems. Poor countries © 2009 SAGE Publications were castigated for ‘personalisation of power, endemic corruption, and un-elected and unaccountable governments’ (Bøås, 1998; cited in Weiss, 2000: 801). ‘Good’ governance was then defined as Western-style democratic government and neo-liberal, free-market economics, coupled to a ‘rolling back’ of the (welfare) state (Power, 2003). Recent debates have moved beyond this definition to emphasise democracy’s need for supportive institutions and processes such as impartial judiciaries, transparent public agencies and meaningful citizen participation (Weiss, 2000). In economic terms, development scholars have long recognised that the adoption of neo-liberal reforms in poor countries has constrained welfare spending, imperilled livelihoods and thrown marginal sectors into destitution (Cole, 2005). Accordingly, contemporary good governance debates largely reject the Washington Consensus notion of a minimalist, non-welfare state in favour of an approach that strikes a more sustainable (and humane) balance between the private and public sectors (Weiss, 2000). Good governance, that is, has ‘moved away from a visceral dismantling of the state… [It] is less about jettisoning state institutions 10.1177/146499340800900305 250 Putting good governance into practice I than improving and reforming the functioning of [such] institutions’ (Weiss, 2000: 803). Good governance has become a more demanding concept in the sense that more conditions must be met – more institutions and processes must be in place – before the label of ‘good governance’ can be applied. These debates have served to highlight further the plight of those who suffer from ‘bad’ governance: if many poor countries already performed badly in terms of the minimal (neo-liberal) understanding of good governance, their quality of governance is likely to appear yet more troubling in light of the more demanding good governance stipulations outlined above. Accordingly, the ‘timely, critical and worthy endeavour’ (Rotberg and West, 2004: 11) of improving developing world governance assumes ever greater urgency (and difficulty) as good governance is reconceptualised in more stringent and demanding terms. On some accounts, the crucial task of improving poor nation governance can be facilitated by the use of indices that quantify the quality of governance (UNDP, 2004; Rotberg, 2004). This progress report – the first of three reports on governance indices – introduces the Ibrahim Index of African Governance, one of the most recent (and most ambitious) efforts to put the concept of good governance to work in this way. While this essay explicates the conceptual and methodological architecture of the Index in a non-critical manner, the second report will foreground the issue of citizen participation in general (and electoral participation in particular) in order to evaluate both the underlying philosophy and the methodological design of the Index. On the basis of this discussion, a number of extensions to the Index will be suggested to allow for the evaluation of electoral processes at sub-national (for example, municipal or provincial) levels. The third and final report will argue that significant forms of citizen participation increasingly take place in ‘new political spaces’ – local-level spaces for citizen engagement distinct from both electoral democracy and non-state social mobilisation – before proposing additional measures to allow for the evaluation of these new modes of citizen involvement. The various posited extensions to the Index are designed to allow for more precise, fine-grained analyses of governance quality both between and within individual countries, thus avoiding the perennial indexical pitfall of treating unlike cases alike. II Measuring governance: the role of indices For Harvard political scientist Robert Rotberg, independent, reliable and comprehensive indices that rank individual countries according to the quality of their governance can serve a number of indispensable purposes in the context of efforts to improve poor nation governance. Firstly, rankings of government performance could meet the political scientific goal of establishing which countries are well or poorly governed, especially if such indices could be brought to focus on government performance in terms of ‘outputs’ rather than ‘inputs’ (Rotberg, 2004; Rotberg and West, 2004).2 (Moreover, indices that provide disaggregated data – such as the Ibrahim Index; see below – would allow political scientists to test hypotheses concerning the relationships between different aspects of governance. Such investigations could shed much light on contested issues such as the relationship(s) between citizen participation and governmental service delivery.) Secondly, such rankings could help to direct policy reform by highlighting nation-states (and, again with disaggregated data only, governance areas within nation-states) in which the most urgent improvements are needed. As Rotberg and West remark, ‘[t]he experience of existing ranking systems for nation-states, or of credit rating systems for countries, indicates that such a carefully detailed report card system would indeed concentrate the minds of governments and their leaders, and lead at least to some of the desired ameliorations’ (2004: 1). Progress in Development Studies 9, 3 (2009) pp. 249–55 Conor Farrington 251 Such information, moreover, would be useful not only to governments wishing to put their house in order, but also to civil society leaders and international donors. And thirdly, reliable rankings of government performance could help citizens themselves to bring their governments to account by providing independent and internationally respected ‘score cards’ of governance performance that can be accessed and utilised by ordinary people as well as political scientists. As a recent report states, ‘[t]he ability to demand and exercise accountability implies power’ (McGee et al., 2003: 18); consequently, governance indices, interpreted as instances of extra-governmental accountability, could make a real difference to citizen empowerment. Overall, Rotberg concludes that independent, reliable rankings of governance performance could ‘compel countries to recognise that governance counts, that good governance is measurable and bad governments can no longer hide, and, helped by an independently produced score card, provide both the carrot and the stick for positive change’ (2004: 72). However, on Rotberg’s account, all existing indices of international governance – such as those of the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, Freedom House and Transparency International – suffer to varying extents from three serious weaknesses that largely preclude them from serving these purposes. First, Rotberg suggests that current indices base their conclusions largely on perceptual data – such as citizens’, experts’ and politicians’ perceptions of governance – rather than other, perhaps more objective, kinds of data. However, since perceptual data is often unreliable, he suggests that governance indices would do better to use ‘objective’ data: ‘[g]overnance is something capable of being measured quantitatively – otherwise it doesn’t have any meaning’ (Harvard University Gazette, 2007: 14). Second, many existing indices tend to focus on specific elements (or combination of elements) of governance – such as peace and security, corruption, political participation, human rights and sustainable development – rather than governance in general (Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008b).3 Some indices, such as the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators project, do address governance in a more broad-based fashion. However – and this is the third weakness that Rotberg identifies with existing indices – these more broad-based indices, while allowing in most cases for cross-national comparisons of various kinds, largely omit to rank countries according to their overall governance performance. They fail, that is, to provide ‘clear, simple data and country rankings…that anyone can use to understand how well their government … is doing relative to others in a given year’ (Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008b: 29). Consequently, non-ranking indices might unnecessarily hamper the ability of citizens to use indexical data and results as levers or tools to hold their governments to account. Thus, according to Rotberg, currently available indices of governance are inadequate in terms of their data sources, their restricted understanding of governance and their failure to rank countries by performance. III The Ibrahim Index of African Governance In an attempt to remedy these deficiencies, Rotberg and other political scientists at Harvard University have recently developed the Ibrahim Index of African Governance (Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008b). The Index, which is sponsored by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation,4 aims to fill the gaps left by existing governance indices by providing a comprehensive, objective and quantifiable method of measuring governance quality in subSaharan Africa. The Index focuses on this region of the developing world because the Mo Ibrahim Foundation was specifically founded to support the attainment of good governance in Africa. However, this geographical restriction does not entail that the Index is Progress in Development Studies 9, 3 (2009) pp. 249–55 252 Putting good governance into practice I inapplicable elsewhere, as should be evident below. The Index is ‘comprehensive’ in three important senses. Firstly, as the first attempt explicitly to rank all forty-eight sub-Saharan countries5 according to governance quality, the Index is (regionally) geographically comprehensive.6 Secondly, the Index is comprehensive because it seeks to measure governance ‘broadly defined’ as the delivery by the state of several kinds of core political goods (including citizen participation) rather than (as with other indices) focusing on particular aspects of governance such as electoral freedom, living standards and so forth. The Ibrahim Index evaluates governance on the basis of five Basic Categories (BCs) of these core political goods: 1. Safety and security7 2. Rule of Law, transparency and corruption8 3. Participation and human rights9 4. Sustainable economic opportunity10 5. Human development11 These five Basic Categories (BCs) diversify into fourteen Sub-Categories (SCs) and fiftyseven Sub-Sub-Categories (SSCs), leading to an ‘enormously complex’ Index that is ‘enormously rich in terms of data’ (Harvard University Gazette, 2007: 13). In each SC, SSC indicators of various kinds are used to analyse and evaluate a wide variety of data. These indicators are then aggregated to produce an overall score for each country in terms of the delivery of core political goods – and, therefore, governance performance – in states in sub-Saharan Africa. These scores are then used to rank all forty-eight countries in that region. Since some SSCs use continuous scales (for example, 0–100) while others use threshold (grouping) measurements (for example, each case is awarded one of five possible values), the process of producing a single composite score for each country requires data normalisation. This is carried out on a yearto-year ‘improvement comparisons’ re-scaling method, such that the minimum value for each SSC across all years of Index application – the Index is currently applied retrospectively to data from 2000, 2002, 2005 and 2006 – is assigned a score of ‘0’ while the maximum value across all years receives a score of ‘100’. (Thus, the data themselves determine the maximum and minimum values for each SSC, serving to avoid skewing measurements for SSCs – such as literacy measurement SSCs – in which data tend to occupy a smaller range). For each SSC in each country in each year, the score is then calculated as follows: ⎛ ⎞ xct − MIN( X ) SSCCT = 100 × ⎜ ⎟ ⎝ MAX( X ) − MIN( X ) ⎠ where xct is the raw value for that SSC for country c in year t and X describes all raw values across all countries for that SSC across all available data sets (Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008b: 22). (Since high values indicate good performance in some SSCs and bad performance in others, this sum is subtracted from 100 where appropriate, to ensure that the best performers always receive the highest values and vice versa). The scores for each SSC for each year are then used to calculate in turn an average score for each SC (the sum of SSC scores divided by number of SSCs), an average score for each BC (the sum of SC scores divided by number of SCs), and an average score for each country (the sum of BC scores divided by number of BCs). The five BCs are equally weighted in this process,12 as are all the SSCs and all but two of the SCs (the SCs national security and public safety, which comprise the safety and security BC13). A third sense in which the Index is claimed to be ‘comprehensive’ is its authors’ claim of universality for their understanding of good governance, stating variously that ‘All citizens of all countries desire to be governed well’ and that ‘Good [governance] means the supply Progress in Development Studies 9, 3 (2009) pp. 249–55 Conor Farrington 253 of …core political goods, whatever the culture and whatever else the government might undertake’ (Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008b: 7; 28). In a partial recognition of institutional, political and socio-cultural diversity, the Index authors note that ‘the objective standards of good governance may be reached in different ways in different countries,’ and that ‘there is no cookie cutter template for good government beyond performance’ (Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008b: 29). However, they assert that good governance standards do not vary across cultures: ‘What matters is that some basic political goods are provided’ (Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008b: 29). This theoretical universalism supports an analytical universalism, such that the Index’s analytical schema (according to the Index authors) is equally applicable in any location whatsoever: ‘the Index can be used anywhere – in Boston, Cambridge, New Jersey, any place in the world’ (Harvard University Gazette, 2007: 13–14). That is, the Index is not adapted in any specific way to social, cultural, political or economic specificities found only in sub-Saharan Africa. Good governance, moreover, is not only understood as consistent across cultures; it is also understood as susceptible to objective and repeatable quantitative measurement. With regard to objectivity, principal Index author Rotberg states that ‘[g]overnance is not some aesthetic, or some anecdotal or impressionistic, view, as some seem to think… It’s not a ‘style.’ Governance is something capable of being measured quantitatively – otherwise it doesn’t have any meaning’ (Harvard University Gazette, 2007: 14). In this context, Rotberg and Gisselquist (2008b: 8) emphasise the uniqueness of the Ibrahim Index in terms of its use of objective data (‘hard numbers’) wherever possible, and its use of ‘objectively measured’ data where ‘hard numbers’ are not available. 14 With regard to repeatability, Rotberg and Gisselquist claim that the measurement of the delivery of core political goods, if done correctly, can be ‘verified and reproduced by others’ (Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008b: 28). This feature of the Index purportedly supports the contention of the Index’s authors that the Index is universally applicable. In addition to these claims of comprehensiveness, objectivity and repeatability, the Index also aims for comprehensibility and transparency. In order for the Index to enable citizens to hold their government to account, the Index (as mentioned above) would have to provide ‘clear, simple data and country rankings…that anyone can use to understand how well their government or another is doing relative to others in a given year’ (Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008b: 29). Accordingly, the authors took care to ‘emphasise relative simplicity as compared to other methods’ in order to augment ‘the ease with which they could be understood by non-statisticians’ (Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008b: 21). In terms of transparency, the Index authors state that they have sought to be ‘as transparent as possible’ (Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008b: 29). Consequently, the Index web pages contain a wealth of information concerning data collection and statistical methods used in addition to downloadable files containing relevant data sets. To conclude, the Ibrahim Index purports to embody a conceptually and geographically comprehensive, objective, quantifiable, repeatable and transparent survey of sub-Saharan African governance performance in the form of comprehensible and accessible rankings. In the words of Mo Ibrahim (founder of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation), the Index ‘[shines] a light on governance in Africa, and…[makes] a unique contribution to improving the quality of governance. The Ibrahim Index is a tool to hold governments to account and frame the debate about how we are governed’ (Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008a). The next two reports in this series of three notes on governance indices will place these ambitious and farreaching claims under the microscope in order to suggest various extensions to the Index. Progress in Development Studies 9, 3 (2009) pp. 249–55 254 Putting good governance into practice I Notes 1. It should be noted that many definitions of governance also make reference to the increasingly significant roles of civil society and private sector organisations in terms of service delivery and, thus, governance. The preface to a recent book states, correctly, that ‘governments, private enterprise, and civil society organisations…have come to be seen as institutions of governance’ (Rizvi and Bertucci, 2007: ix). However, as this paper focuses entirely on the role of (national and sub-national) governments, the governance roles of non-governmental, civil society and private sector organisations are bracketed. 2. The rationale for focusing on outputs – or outcomes – rather than inputs arises from the fact that inputs may or may not result in appropriate performance; especially (but not exclusively) in the developing world, good intentions and financial promises do not always lead to concrete benefits for citizens. A focus on governance outcomes brackets the issue of promises and intentions and foregrounds the issue of government performance with regard to concrete benefits for citizens (Rotberg, 2004). 3. It should perhaps be noted here that the lack of comprehensiveness that Rotberg criticizes in other indices may reflect an understandable desire for theoretical and analytical parsimony (see, for example, Munck and Verkuilen, 2002). 4. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation is a not-for-profit nongovernmental organisation that aims to improve African governance (Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008a). 5. The forty-eight countries that make up the region of sub-Saharan Africa are: Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. 6. The Index authors note that other surveys (such as Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, the UNDP’s Human Development Report, and Freedom House’s Freedom in the World) have surveyed all forty-eight sub-Saharan countries, but that they have done so without the broad-based concept of governance promoted by the Ibrahim Index (Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008b). 7. This BC incorporates the Sub-Categories (SCs) of National Security (including measures of numbers and intensity of armed conflicts, government-sponsored 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. civilian deaths, numbers of refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced persons, and access to small arms) and Public Safety (incorporating measures of violent crime levels; Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008b: 31–70). This BC incorporates the SCs of Ratification of Critical Legal Norms (including measures of ratification of international human rights conventions, the presence of international sanctions for human rights violations, and laws on contracts and property rights), Existence of Independent and Effective Judicial Systems (including measures of judicial independence, courts efficiency and national contract enforcement institutions efficiency), and Corruption (incorporating perceptual measures of public sector corruption; Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008b: 71–104). This BC incorporates the SCs of Participation in Elections (including measures of electoral freedom and fairness) and Respect for Civil and Political Rights (including measures of respect for physical and civil rights, number of journalists killed annually, press freedom, and gender discrimination; Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008b: 105–40). This BC incorporates the SCs of Wealth Creation (measured by GDP per capita and economic growth), Macroeconomic Stability and Financial Integrity (measured by annual inflation rates, government budget deficits and surpluses as percentage of GDP, reliability of financial institutions, and ‘the overall business environment’), ‘The Arteries of Commerce’ (including measures of road network density, availability of electricity, number of mobile telephone subscribers, and numbers of computer and internet users), and Environmental Sensitivity (measured by the Environmental Performance Index; Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008b: 141–86). This BC incorporates the SCs of Poverty (including measures of Percentage nationals living on less than $1 per day, Percentage nationals living below national poverty line, and income inequality), Health and Sanitation (including measures of life expectancy at birth, infant mortality, maternal mortality, undernourishment, immunization levels, HIV and TB levels, access to qualified healthcare professionals, and access to potable water), and Educational Opportunity Levels (including measures of adult literacy (both generally and among women), primary school completion date (both generally and among girls), pupil/teacher ratio, progression from primary to secondary schools, and the ratio of female to male students in primary and secondary schools; Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008b: 187–268). Various statistical experiments using different weightings of the five basic categories (as opposed to the equal weighting used in the published Index) indicated Progress in Development Studies 9, 3 (2009) pp. 249–55 Conor Farrington 255 the ‘strong’ result that best and worst performers were similar across all weighting methods (see Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008b: 22–25). 13. The rationale behind this weighting is that insufficient data were available for the Public Safety SC, and that it would be more accurate to weight National Security (where data were ‘comparatively robust’) twice as much as Public Safety (Rotberg and Gisselquist, 2008b: 24). 14. Rotberg and Gisselquist defined ‘objectively measured’ data as ‘systematically derived scores that could be replicated by other researchers following the same approach’ (2008b: 8). References Cheema, S.G. and Rondinelli, D.A. editors. 2007: Decentralizing governance: emerging concepts and practices.Brookings. 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