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Towards Better Governance by the G-20: Learning from the ‘Missing’ ggg-8 Countries
By Kaufmann | March 27, 2009 2 Comments »
Consider a very different “group-of-8” countries: Botswana, Chile, Mauritius, Uruguay, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore and Switzerland. Do they have any relevance for the G-20? Hardly, at first. None of them are invited to the London G-20 Summit next week. They are not G-20* members, since neither their economic size nor their population are large enough, and they lack the global “systemic significance” of most G-20 members. None of them belongs to the EU. This particular “group-of-8″ in fact does not really exist as a formal body.
But there is a neglected rationale for the leaders of the G-20 to pay attention to this particular set of uninvited countries. Like the G-20, they comprise a rather diverse group of developing and developed countries from different regions of the world. But, unlike most of the G-20, this group of eight countries have exhibited high quality of national governance.
No country is perfect, obviously. Each one in this group of 8 smaller industrialized and emerging economies has its own challenges. But overall their quality of governance (and recent trend in performance) exceeds those of the Group-of-20, and to an extent even those of the powerful, formal, and elite Group-of-8…
This does matter. Not just because failures of governance, corruption and capture (among key nations within the G-20) caused the current global crisis. A focus on governance also matters because concrete lessons can be applied to forward-looking initiatives from the good governance experiences from this group of 8 small countries (in short the ‘ggg-8′ for this ‘good governance group’ of missing countries– not in caps, since they are small, and not a formal group…).
This ggg-8 is uninvited to the G-20 Summit. But their experiences and lessons ought not be ignored. Some of these lessons are covered in my short article contribution to a Brookings compendium covering many themes relevant to the G-20, being released now just before the London Summit on April 2nd.
* The official members of the G-20 are: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, and, as its 20th member, the European Union. The Netherlands and Spain are expected to join the upcoming London Summit on April 2nd, and the following international organizations will also be present as observers: NEPAD, ASEAN, UN, World Bank, IMF, and FSF.
Topics: Aid Effectiveness, Corruption, G-20, Measurement Frontiers, capture, financial crisis | | 2 Comments
April 7th, 2009 at 5:43 am
[...] now moved on to the of Brookings Institution and his blog, the Kaufman Governance Post. Here’s an example of his work: Daniel picks a ‘Good Governance Group of 8’, (ggg-8) made up of Botswana, Chile, [...]
April 22nd, 2009 at 3:27 pm
[...] Artig sak fra Kaufmann (en tidligere Verdensbankmann som nå er blitt Brookings-mann). Han mener at G-20-landene var feil miks av kompetanse for å løse verdens styringsproblemer. De som burde få innflytelse, er landene som har vist at de er god på nettopp styring, eller governance, som det heter på nynorsk. [...]