ABSTRACT
If the causes of the Asian crisis can indeed be traced to laxity of regulation, to cronyism and corruption and to the inability of some countries to manage their economic affairs properly, the prima facie solution to those problems would appear to lie in effective new legislation and in managerial and bureaucratic reform. The prescriptions of international and regional agencies, in particular, very often carry with them urgent, but implicit, messages of the need for such change. The public sector reform agendas of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), less frequently, however, provide specific blueprints for the kinds of changes that they would like to see introduced. Instead, they talk in vague and general terms of the need for good governance and of values associated with it, such as accountability, transparency and openness, assuming perhaps that, if these values can permeate the political system, bureaucracies will also undertake appropriate reforms. The Asian crisis came at a time when international agencies had moved formally, if not always in actuality, from the strict requirements of a structural adjustment approach to a potentially looser, ‘softer’ governance approach to providing aid, loans and recommendations on public sector reform. The crisis, it will be argued, provided ample support for the proponents of both approaches and induced a kind of institutional schizophrenia where the belief in the appropriate solutions derived from structural adjustment, at least as far as public sector reform was concerned, was often wrapped in the language of good governance. 1
