By the way, good governance occurs in developing countries and can be promoted by political leaders and civil servants. Unfortunately, discussions about how to ensure good governance in developing countries sometimes miss out insights on instances where good governance has occurred in these countries, thereby resulting to inadequate information about what that would look like.
I always thought that it was unlikely that all developing countries recorded bad performances on all developmental indices and wondered why such successes were rarely discussed. Thankfully, Professor Judith Tendler's Good Government in the Tropics remedied this. She rightly points out that generally categorizing countries in a certain developmental group without paying attention to the varying dynamics of performances will limit our ability to record and replicate successes in other sectors of the country when successes occur. Also, if we continue to believe that the public sector is the major problem, not a major solution, we will not invest in means of effectively motivating them to do their jobs. It seems that most policies focus more on the recipients of public services without consideration of how we can motivate civil servants to enjoy their work and aim to do better at it.
What stood out for me in this reading, especially with respect to chapter three was that the heroes of the drought response of 1987 were agricultural extension workers, who had always been available as government employees, but it was not until their work environment was altered by the actions of the government who motivated them by providing them with more powers to do their jobs without disruption by the political elites and amplified their positive results that tremendous results were recorded. Also, the frequent interactions the extension workers had with the people they served made them go the extra mile in their jobs and went a long way in strengthening the relationships they had with the communities.
I appreciated the role that the government played in enabling the civil societies and the people in the communities affected by drought, particularly with respect to promoting transparency and accountability on the part of the civil servants, facilitating collaboration among ministries that traditionally found teamwork difficult, and prioritizing projects that were most important to the masses. I believe that due to the nature of the work that the public sector does, it can learn more from the operations of civil societies, than from the private sector.
Despite the book’s attempt to tow a different path with respect to promoting the idea that good governance can occur in developing countries without the intervention of external forces, I believe that its three-way dynamic argument between the local government, civil society and central government shared strong similarities with the ideas of decentralization and supported the discussions on the need to motivate the public sector to be altruistic in discharging their duties. It also alluded to the idea that sometimes successes cannot be replicated or sustained due to interference of various political interest, and that sometimes good governance in developing countries come at a cost to government officials like Jereissati who ignore these interests.
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