ABSTRACT
‘Good governance’ has come to be used in international parlance since the early 1990s as an overarching concept for evaluating the quality of the world’s systems of social organisation, at all levels (local, national, regional or global) and in almost all spheres (state, corporate or civil society). It is accepted that the assurance of basic democratic values, such as respect for fundamental rights and the rule of law, should be accompanied by monitoring of other principles of good governance, such as transparency, accountability and participation. These latter are assumed to be common underlying principles of universal validity which can be used as a guide for decision-making when it comes to institutional design, organisational development or resource allocation. And the degree to which particular governance arrangements conform to these principles is, at least implicitly, assumed to be in principle measurable and comparable.
