ABSTRACT
Good Governance has become the major buzzword in aid policy and development thinking today. It even seems to have dethroned Sustainable Development as the international policymakers’ mantra. Conceived within the World Bank, the concept has been embraced by the governments of Western countries and by the IMF as both a goal and a condition of official (development) assistance. To lending countries, Good Governance is first of all yet another element of conditionality for indispensable loans, and ultimately for their acceptance as equal participants in the global economy. The transformation of Good Governance from simply a goal to also a condition for development assistance, emergency credits and debt relief coincided with the substantial decrease of North-South redistribution by means of official development funding. It coincided as well with the international compliance of the left with the position that free markets are the primary tool for the development of what were once known as the Second and Third Worlds.
