Good Governance and Development in the Least Developed Countries

The paper highlights the conceptual limitations or lack of the clarity of ‘ good governance’ concept favoured by the donor community and debunks its central hypothesis that good governance causes economic growth. Good governance can mean many things and countries possessing features of good governance can be different both structurally and institutionally. Countries that are developed recently did not have the ideal features of good governance – these features evolved with economic growth. Donors should not impose onerous good governance conditions with the expectation that developing countries must all look the same in the image of the recent developed countries. Most poor countries do not have administrative and financial capacity to achieve these reforms or institutions; hence, the donor conditionality often becomes a recipe for failure. Therefore, the reform agenda should aim at strategic bottlenecks for development and enhance state capacity and capabilities to deal with these bottlenecks.