The Politics of Successful Governance Reforms by Mark Robinson

Author:Mark Robinson [Robinson, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138979048
Google: 1yk8twEACAAJ
Goodreads: 42993421
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

Governance Reform and Institutional Change in Brazil: Federalism and Tax

AARON SCHNEIDER

Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, UK

The concept of governance is increasingly entering the practice and lexicon of development. This focus is not completely new. Decolonisation during the post-World War II period removed foreign-controlled coercive authority from the South, and the challenge of constructing authoritative, effective, and legitimate institutions rose high on the development agenda. For Huntington and others writing at the time, ‘the most important distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government’ (Huntington, 1968: 1).

Current attention to governance is different, but it is plagued by some of the same problems. Most important is that we do not recognise change until it has already happened. As a result, we are forced to look backwards, after the fact, and attempt to compare successful cases. This creates obvious problems of selection bias, and in response we might try to identify cases of non-reform for comparison. Yet, this is extremely difficult; after all, one cannot know if a reform was meant to happen but did not. To get beyond this problem, the current paper explores two episodes of attempted governance reform in the same country over the same years: federalism reform and tax reform. In improving governance, the first reform succeeded and the second failed.

What does it mean to succeed or fail at improving governance? This is not an easy question to answer, as the concept of governance itself is essentially contested. Still, a workable definition for the purposes at hand builds on the notion of governance as state-building. Governance is ‘the manner in which the State exercises and acquires authority’ (Campos & Pradhan, 2003: 1). This can be disaggregated into two dimensions: capacity and accountability. ‘Capacity’ refers to the bureaucratic, technical, fiscal, and coercive authority of government leaders to impose their will on private and public actors. ‘Accountability’ refers to the mechanisms of linkage that allow ‘principals’ within society to monitor and control the actions of government ‘agents’. Changes in one or both of these dimensions constitute governance reform, and changes in both constitute an improvement in governance.

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