The terms governance and good governance are increasingly being used in development literature. The concept of governance is not new. It is as old as human civilization. Governance describes the process of decision-making and the process by which decisions are implemented (or not implemented). These procseses can include the political, economic, administrative, social processes and institutions by which public authorities, communities and the private sector take decisions on how best to develop and manage water resources. Different modes of governance include hierarchy (centralised/regulatory), market (competition) and networks (collaborative), and these have an impact on which forms of knowledge occur and dominate in important decision-making processes. Governance can be used in several contexts and scales such as corporate governance, international governance, national governance and local governance. In the context of governance in the face of ongoing global change, increasing attention is being paid to linked concepts of adaptation and adaptive management.
Common to many reviews pointing to good governance are elements of stakeholder inclusion, strategic thinking, accountability and fairness. Many of these key elements are also those that support social learning and lead to the development ofresilient communities. The links on this page focus on collaborative or networked governance forms:
Building capability by delivering results: Putting Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) principles into practice This paper by Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock proposes an approach based on four core principles, each of which stands in sharp contrast with the standard approaches. First, PDIA focuses on solving locally nominated and defined problem sin performance (as opposed to transplanting pre-conceived and packaged ‘best practice’ solutions). Second, it seeks to create an ‘authorizing environment’ for decision-making that encourages ‘positive deviance’ and experimentation (as opposed to designing projects and programs and then requiring agents to implement them exactly as designed). Third, it embeds this experimentation in tight feedback loops that facilitate rapid experiential learning (as opposed to enduring long lag times in learning from ex post ‘evaluation’). Fourth, it actively engages broad sets of agents to ensure that reforms are viable, legitimate, relevant and supportable (as opposed to a narrow set of external experts promoting the ‘top down’ diffusion of innovation).
From Government to Governance: A State-of-the-Art Review of Environmental Governance This report by Rob de Loë and colleagues presents a state-of-the-art literature review of current academic thinking regarding environmental governance, with a focus on considerations that are relevant to water management and water allocation. It acknowledges the enormous debate in the literature, and among practitioners, regarding how governance should occur in specific places. Nonetheless, the report points out that a general consensus is emerging that environmental governance should involve forms of group decision making that accommodate diverse views, that networks and hybrid partnerships among state and non-state actors are needed, that shared learning is critical, and that governance should provide opportunities for adaptability and positive transformation.
The contribution of network governance to sustainable development This paper by Tom Dedeurwaerdere provides a critical analysis of the concept of network governance and evaluates its use in implementing policies of sustainable development. In particular, he analyzes the network approach proposed in the European Commissionâ€™s White Paper on governance and its role in environmental policy integration. Relying on research on the concept of selforganization in complex adaptive systems, he shows the limits of a concept of network governance that is solely based on self-organization. On this basis, he argues to complete the current network approach to sustainable development with initiatives th