The Silences of International Development Frameworks and ‘Good Governance’

The post-Cold War international development architecture (agreements, priorities, modalities, concepts and discourse) facilitated the entrenchment of the authoritarian regimes in Uganda, Ethiopia and Rwanda. This chapter surveys the outcomes of global summits on development in the first decade of the new millennium. Collectively, these contributed to an international development consensus on a new form of donor-recipient partnership, one in which recipient countries enjoyed greater ‘ownership’ of their development programmes, on the need for revamped aid disbursement modalities, and increased flows of Western technical assistance and financial resources. Significantly, the global objectives and targets agreed in the Millennium Development Goals were largely restricted to human development indicators, with no attention given to progress on democracy and political and civil freedoms in aid-recipient countries. The chapter also tracks the rise of the concept of ‘good governance’ as a development objective, how it was defined, how it informed the development priorities pursued and indicators tracked, and how good governance came to be understood in apolitical terms. One of the consequences was further relegation of the quality of political governance to the sidelines, with good governance circumscribed to improvements in the capacity of aid-recipient countries to plan, deliver and account for development progress, assisted by increased Western aid.