This paper has focused on the manner in which the good governance strategy has emerged as a means of putting limits on human rights advocacy.
The good governance agenda is a careful integration of human rights and growth-driven economic policy; not as incompatible projects, but as a necessary alliance for democratic and economic reform. This approach involves justifying rights within a laissez-faire economic and political
framework. I have stressed that by emphasizing the compatibility between human rights and laissez-faire economic policy, the good governance agenda underplays the constraints neo-liberal economic policy imposes on the realization of social and economic rights (or welfare entitlements/basic needs) in particular, and third generation rights associated with the NIEO, such as the right to development.
In other words, the good governance agenda serves as the Bank’s shorthand for measuring which parts of the human rights agenda are compatible or consistent with its financial and economic mandate. This requirement severely constrains the possibility that within the good governance agenda that alternative development policies promoted by human rights advocates and activists may come to be implemented. Such development policies offer grounds for those who support a human rights agenda in development to demand that welfare concerns be defi ned in terms of basic needs from the state and institutions of development. The good governance agenda, however, has changed the post-Second World War growth/distribution welfare state compromise by stigmatizing protective governmental interventions in the economy as necessarily inimical to economic growth and freedom.
As such, the explicit reference to human rights and demoralization in the good governance agenda needs to be understood in the context of good governance or neo-liberal economic restructuring, particularly its concern with demonstrating the adverse effects of governmental interventions in the economy. In this sense, the explicit reference to human rights in the good governance strategy invariably lends credence to the anti-statist neo-liberal agenda. Granted the history of abuses committed by developing states, the Bank’s instrumental cooperation of rights within the good governance agenda
lends moral credibility to the Bank in general. While the good governance strategy does not itself constitute a legally binding commitment that would compel the Bank to independently promote human rights, it does indirectly empower the Bank to use its economic leverage on developing countries by withholding the extension of credits to governments that default on internationally recognized human rights principles. However, historically the violations of human rights have not automatically triggered the exercise of this leverage. Instead, there has had to be a connection to the Bank’s economic and fi nancial mandate before this leverage was exercised.
Moreover, the Bank neglects to redesign the priority of economic development projects with the shift in focus from growth to equity. The key is that the effectiveness of aid on governance reform and on economic growth and human rights protection are two distinct elements. While aid might be ineffective in inducing and sustaining governance reform, it is effective in stimulating growth. Research discussed at a OECD seminar in January 2001 shows that there may be a positive relationship between aid and growth even in countries hampered by an unfavorable governing and human rights environment (Hansen and Tarp, 2000). For example, aid can affect poverty through channels other than economic growth by increasing aggregate savings and investment as “growth is not the only route to poverty reduction, nor is growth the only benefi t of aid” (Beynon, 2001: 2).
Actually, the good governance strategy challenges the conceptual foundations of the Washington consensus. Its emergence has given rise to what some analysts describe as a “post-Washington consensus” (Burki and Perry, 1998). One of its important dimensions is the recognition that politics matter for development. It suggests that sustaining development requires reforming not only the policies, but also the institutional framework in which
policies are formulated. It has become apparent that effective democratic institutions are urgently needed to complement macroeconomic policy changes, provide safety nets and assuage the adverse social consequences of structural adjustment programs. As Marco Feroni (2000) underlines, reforming foreign aid requires crafting genuine partnerships and processes for reaching agreement on priorities, procedures and reciprocal obligations toward specified objectives. In particular, the governance agenda compels development institutions and aid agencies to link economic assistance and political aid.
Nevertheless, the good governance strategy may also be regarded as a political compromise or avenue through which those who continue to lose out under the stringent neo-liberal economic programs seem to give consent to their control by the owners of the means of production. Human rights and political democracy, in so far as they have become a part of the conservative economic commitments of neo-liberal economic reform, are some of its primary instruments of legitimization, permitting individuals and groups (which lost out in the economic reform process) to press their claims regarding the allocation of resources and the distribution of output; even when the economic and political system is being shutout from addressing these claims. The good governance strategy, in short, plays a major role in managing and soothing the injustices and antagonisms of daily life now exacerbated by the implementation of neo-liberal economic restructuring.
However, paradoxically, the liberties protected by the commitments to human rights and political democracy in the good governance agenda also give these politically disenfranchised citizens liberties that they were often denied under the authoritarianism that accompanied the developmental theory of the 1970s and the 1980s.
Finally, if we trace back through human history, the efforts of international human rights advocacy has gained credibility based on its association with the real problems of those in poverty, of those economically dizadvantaged and of those struggling against political authoritarianism and repressive social conventions. For its part the good governance strategy places priority on developing countries and on programs of economic reconstruction, which are overtly intolerant of governmental activism in the economy and are hostile to worker and welfare rights, however at the same time committed to civil and political liberties, especially those of property and contractual freedom. This strategy became popular not just because it has proved to be an effective ally of the capitalists and the international order within which they operate, but also because it has simultaneously and perhaps paradoxically become associated with humanizing commitments.
Undoubtedly, this strategy brings the capitalist international order a measure of moral credibility without posing any fundamental challenge to it.
Consequently, the good governance agenda bears the imprint and support of transnational elites and interests, notwithstanding their commitment to visions of humanizing or ameliorating the problems of our present institutional contexts. As such, divesting ourselves of the notion that these institutions are indispensable is a useful place to begin. However, the local elite will, as ever, continue to police and constrain challenges to the status quo by allowing only those forms of transnational activists that do not go too far in their attempts of social change and economic reform.
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