Freedom at Issue

Weekly Governance Links: South Asia Edition

Countries at the Crossroads covers all the South Asian countries except for India and Afghanistan. Pakistan is, of course, the country that has received the most press in recent weeks, but important changes have also been afoot throughout the year in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and even Bhutan.

With the declaration of a state of emergency and numerous arrests, the return of former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, and President Musharraf’s recent resignation as army chief, Pakistan is in the throes of its most significant turmoil in years. For a local perspective as events unfold, blogs authored by Pakistani students as well as the Pakistani Human Rights Commission provide updates on fast-changing conditions. For more detailed analysis, local NGO Pildat provides information on political rights and institutional development, such as this report discussing the achievements (or lack thereof) of the National Assembly that completed its term in November 2007.

Bangladesh is another country that has experienced a closing of political space in 2007, although the breakdown occurred in January, when the military took de facto control, with a civilian caretaker government nominally in charge. One of the main justifications for the takeover was rampant corruption, and a crackdown quickly followed. However, the Economist reports that the results have not been entirely satisfactory. For deeper background, a report from just before the military takeover describes one of the major elements of the problem: a highly politicized civil service. Meanwhile, a local blog helps keep readers abreast of the news, including the effort to recover from the recent catastrophic cyclone.

It has been another bloody year in Sri Lanka. Human Rights Watch in July provided an in-depth analysis of the conflict, while the Economist and Human Rights Watch have offered updates as the situation continues to appear bleak in November. On a different governance note, the Asia Foundation releases a surveyof the relative business-friendliness of various local Sri Lankan governments.

Nepal’s uneasy calm has remained largely in effect, but delays have occurred in moving the peace process forward. The International Crisis Group provides an analysis of the situation, while the Nepal Human Rights Commission’s October-November report is now available.

For all its improvements, Bhutan’s progress in moving away from monarchy to something nearer democracy remains uneven. A report by local journalists highlights continued press freedom concerns.

Finally, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's newsletter South Asian Perspectives provides useful information on developments in politics and governance on a monthly basis.

A Perfect Storm of Poor Policy

Reuters reports that overfishing along the African coasts has had a pernicious effect on fish stocks, harming local fishing economies and in some cases robbing communities of a critical source of protein. As the article points out, corruption is a key factor driving the problem:

[Report author Andre] Standing told IRIN that the problem did not "stem largely from rogue fishing companies who evade laws and break regulations with impunity", but "vested interests" that allowed this situation to occur, and that these "vested interests span not only foreign governments and inter-governmental organisations, but also African elected leaders and public officials."

The destructiveness of this sort of activity is difficult to overstate, especially for the severely impoverished areas that are most affected. Aside from the nutritional impact, what should be a sustainable resource is rendered unsustainable by the scale of fishing. Maintaining healthy fisheries is extremely difficult – witness the collapse of stocks in developed countries including the US. And in the African cases, the foreign actors – Taiwanese, Russians, Tunisians, and others – engaged in the practice do not have nearly so large a stake in maintaining healthy fisheries as do locals. Indeed, with fishing licenses purchased from corrupt politicians such a bargain, a tragedy of the commons arises – if the Japanese don’t hurriedly maneuver to gain access, the Spanish or Algerians will. To make matters even worse, the end value of the fish dwarfs the amount being paid for fishing rights. Very little of the fish is processed in the countries; rather it is caught and shipped to the fleets’ home countries for processing and resale. In Mauritania, for instance, only 12 percent of the catch is processed locally. Thus, the export of non-value added commodities so frequently assailed when discussing other extractive industries continues.

For poor countries, where decision making power all too often rests with venal politicians and bureaucrats, reaching solutions is highly difficult. Aside from the fundamental issue of corruption, fisheries management requires international coordination both with other governments and private interests, as well as highly technical monitoring projects, all in a region where harmonizing even between national and subnational governments can be uneven. As the article suggests, increased transparency might represent the best prospects for bringing order to this messy process:

"Efforts by civil society to improve transparency in the extractive industries and logging industries should be a source of inspiration here. In particular, the Publish What You Pay Campaign has helped put pressure on governments and companies to address corruption” [said Standing].

It can only be hoped that these efforts bear fruit quickly, for fish stocks can take significant time to recover. In the meantime, the situation serves as yet another stark demonstration of the breadth of damage that is caused by corrupt and short-sighted policymaking.

UPDATE: See also this report from MIT on the same issue

Picture by Michael Sarver found at MIT International Review

Bolivia Update

In light of the most recent developments in Bolivia, the picture accompanying the post below may no longer seem particularly appropriate. For a brief summary of events, see a not particularly informative BBC article here (and note that the absence of reporting on these events in other major media outlets, such as the NYT and Washington Post, is unfortunate). Although Bolivia has become skilled at teetering on the precipice of utter disarray and pulling back at the last moment, the current situation looks rather bleak. The government-aligned faction's decision to ram through its version of a new constitution by changing the assembly's voting rules and eschewing debate - or even a full reading of the new charter, according to most accounts - will only detract from the document's legitimacy. The opposition, for its part, is seeking to embrace its role as the victim (as described in this IPS article), but it is hardly blameless, having used the Sucre-as-capital and other issues to obstruct a forum in which it lacks a majority.

Both sides in the Bolivian conflict are suffering from a legitimacy problem. For MAS party/government/President Morales supporters, the old political class - a number of whose members are still present in the ranks of the opposition - is responsible for Bolivia's current poverty and historical exclusion of the indigenous from politics, and is now hoping to hold on its privileges despite President Morales' sweeping victory in 2005. Add in the obstructive tactics - which have at times been understandable but have certainly irritated MAS supporters - and the factors for a legitimacy issue are present. For the opposition, the government's attempt to impose a radically different system of government upon an area (the autonomy-hungry eastern lowlands) that has been the country's economic engine breeds resentment, and the manner in which the constitution has now been approved provides evidence for why the government cannot be entrusted with forging a "new" Bolivia.

International reaction, such as that of the UN, the State Dept., and Spain, has appropriately urged the two sides to step back, as they have done several times in the past four years. However, the Constituent Assembly has been acting as a magnifier of Bolivia's ever-simmering internal conflicts, and with strikes set for large portions of the country on Wednesday there is fear that situation could get worse yet. For ongoing information and analysis, the blogs linked to in the post below provide good coverage from different perspectives.

Two other quick notes: 1) Despite the tragic deaths in Sucre, the government's restrained response should be noted, especially in comparison to past government reactions to large-scale mobilizations. 2) Attacks on journalists, which have occurred in Bolivia during other protests throughout the year, have again been a problem in recent days. Regardless of how the current unrest shakes out, both sides in Bolivia, but particularly President Morales, should publicly emphasize that attacks on journalists are unacceptable.

Weekly Governance Links: Spotlight Bolivia

Photograph retrieved November 9, 2007, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online

Bolivia has been in the international spotlight in recent years due both to an extended political crisis that led to the resignation of two presidents and the historic 2005 election victory of the country’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales. In August 2006, a Constituent Assembly elected by the people began negotiations to try and reach consensus over forging a new identity for the country and a new structure for its politics and economy, all based around the idea of vastly enhanced levels of inclusion for the long-oppressed indigenous majority. Well over a year later, however, the Assembly has failed to produce consensus, and has in some respects magnified Bolivia’s internal conflicts, leading to a decline in support for its mission. There has even been discussion about closing the Assembly, or at least moving it from its current location in the city of Sucre. Below are some links to documents that shed light on the issues involved and how they affect various aspects of governance in Bolivia.

Two documents provide background on the Constituent Assembly and the critical issues of state structure and political and civil rights that will profoundly affect governance in Bolivia. The first is a report from the International Crisis Group from the end of August that, while even-handed, places a great deal of blame on the government for the impasse (which has only deepened since). A slightly different perspective is provided by a report from the Democracy Center, an NGO that operates out of the Bolivian city of Cochabamba. This report is less sympathetic to Bolivia’s opposition and instead highlights its calculated recalcitrance in the face of popular demand for change.

A document from the Andean Information Network describes the battle between President Evo Morales and the country’s highest judicial organs, the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court. This battle has been one of 2007’s major governance issues.

As the country has become increasingly polarized, one contentious area is the issue of press freedom. A Committee to Protect Journalists report details some of the current trends, while an IPS article describes efforts to reach agreement on ethical issues.

Economic governance, especially regarding property rights, has been a provocative issue under the MAS government. The Morales administration’s insistent moves to increase income from natural resources have effectively increased government revenue, but subsidies and slow investment rates are having a real effect on fuel supplies, according to the BBC.

Finally, four English-language blogs that are helpful for those who wish to follow events in Bolivia:

The aforementioned Democracy Center’s blog, which is sympathetic to the ruling MAS party’s aims but provides criticism when it is warranted.

Miguel Centellas, a political scientist whose blog more sympathetic to the opposition’s many concerns about the MAS’ reform project.

Miguel Buitrago, a Ph.D. student whose blog provides analysis and an array of interesting links regarding current events in Bolivia.

Bolivia Rising, which provides a strongly pro-government perspective.

Good Governance: Russia’s Achilles Heel?

Today’s Russia faces a paradox. Despite the extraordinary resources flowing into the state’s coffers, Russia’s institutions are not becoming more effective or responsive in delivering political goods to ordinary citizens. Stanford University professor Terry Lynn Karl’s “Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petrostates” explains why oil exporting states tend to have poor development outcomes.  Such energy rich states suffer from a number of pathologies that retard development and good governance.

A meticulously reported New York Times article on November 7 examines an issue that is emblematic of how poor governance in Russia is undercutting basic safeguards that should provide for citizens’ safety. Fires turn deadly in Russia to an astonishing degree in comparison with Western Europe and the United States. The piece notes that:

More than 17,000 people died in fires in 2006 in Russia, nearly 13 for every 100,000 people. This is more than 10 times the rates typical of Western Europe and the United States, according to statistics from Russia’s government, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States and the Geneva Association, a Swiss organization that analyzes international fire statistics.

As a recently released Freedom House governance assessment of Russia done by Stanford professor Kathryn Stoner-Weiss notes, President Putin has systematically marginalized key societal actors - including news media, independent business and policy institutes, and broader civil society - all of which keep the authorities honest. Rather than increasing his ability to govern, Putin’s program is eviscerating the very institutions that Russia needs to improve the quality of its governance and public policy decision-making.

The New York Times piece points to a host of factors feeding into the lethality of fires in Russia, among them “aging electrical and heating systems in public housing and rural homes; dilapidated firefighting equipment; and widespread violations of safety codes.”

The piece then focuses on the root of the challenge, linked directly to poor governance:

the effectiveness of reform efforts has been limited by the intractable national problems that have continued throughout Mr. Putin’s administration, including a pandemic of corruption and incompetence by officials, and a weak judicial system. For example, fire inspectors have latitude over how to handle fire code violations, and this authority is often abused, said Elena Panfilova, director of the Russian office of Transparency International, a private anti-corruption organization. “Pretty much nobody follows fire safety standards in Russia, but building owners and tenants negotiate bribes with fire inspectors,” she said. “It is common here. Everyone understands it.”

The big gaps in governance have real implications for ordinary citizens in Russian society. There are no shortcuts to improving the quality of governance. With oil edging toward $100 per barrel, the challenge of achieving sounder governance, paradoxically, is bound to become even stiffer in Russia, along with other post-Soviet petrostates.

Photo Credit: AFP via VOA News

Mo Ibrahim Index in Spotlight: Is Zimbabwe Better Governed Than Nigeria?

Several weeks ago, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation released the inaugural edition of the Index of African Governance. The index, sponsored by Mr. Ibrahim, a cell phone magnate and founder of Celtel, assesses Sub-Sahara's 48 states in five categories: safety and security; rule of law, transparency, and corruption; participation and human rights; sustainable economic opportunity; and human development. While the survey is a welcomed addition to the field, particularly given its comprehensive coverage of Sub-Saharan Africa, several methodology kinks need to be worked out before its rankings can be used as a more precise tool for comparing these states.

The index posits Mauritius, Seychelles, and Botswana as the best-governed countries in Africa, while the worst, not surprisingly, include Chad, DR Congo, and Somalia. Rather remarkably, however, Rwanda is ranked 19th, on the same level as Zambia and better than Mozambique. Perhaps even more puzzling is the assessment that Zimbabwe is better governed than Nigeria. Freedom House recently released in-depth reports examining governance in all five of these countries and our research is at odds with these conclusions.

Rwanda transitioned from dictatorship to nominal democracy after the 2003 elections, yet the ruling RPF party continues to hold power and exert overwhelming influence over political and civil rights. In the last three years, this dominance only increased (see the Countries at the Crossroads Rwanda report). There is no significant opposition, as most opposition leaders have been targeted for persecution. Neither the legislative nor the judiciary branches are independent of the RPF party or provide oversight of the executive. The government has also shut down or refused to re-register numerous nongovernmental organizations, and has similarly targeted independent media, using intimidation and arbitrary charges to shut down organizations critical of government actions. Given, Rwanda has stepped up its anticorruption efforts, but it is yet to be seen whether the reforms will cause any real, institutional change.

On the other hand, Zambia, although not without problems, continues to move incrementally down a path of improved governance. A new Electoral Act and last year's generally free and fair elections evidence Zambia's slowly maturing electoral institutions. The state generally respects the right of interest groups to organize (although tensions surfaced this year between the government and civil society over constitutional reform) and the civil society sector is vibrant. Despite troubles, many of which have to do with the lack of resources, the judiciary exhibits a fair degree of independence and the government generally complies with unfavorable decisions. Zambia is still a long way from becoming a consolidated democracy; however, our research suggests that it outperforms Rwanda in key categories such as government accountability, civil liberties, rule of law, and anticorruption and transparency (see the complete Zambia report).

Even more striking are differences between Zimbabwe and Nigeria. In Zimbabwe - a country that has, in fact, become a failed state - the economy is at the verge of complete collapse, its already dreadful human rights situation is deteriorating even further, and civic organizations are being continually suppressed, all while President Robert Mugabe's grip to power is becoming stronger. Over the past few years, the government has expanded its crackdown on the country's few remaining media outlets, using new strategies to jam radio broadcasts and limit internet freedom. All this as annual inflation reaches a whopping 11,000 percent, placing basic life necessities, such as food and clothing, out of reach for most of the population.

While Nigeria remains a highly problematic country, as evidenced by the widespread irregularities and violence during the April elections, its economic, political, and human rights conditions are certainly better than Zimbabwe's. The media is vibrant and enjoys a moderate degree of freedom, although the state does not shy away from using extralegal measures to suppress political criticism (still, not comparable to the levels in Zimbabwe). Likewise, Nigeria's civil society sector operates without many major impediments and has even made some strides in efforts to influence government, managing to make its voices heard on issues such as fuel hikes and some other legislation. Still, corruption and graft in Nigeria are deep and widespread, and the judiciary remains prone to bribery and political influence. However, in our view, Nigeria outperforms Zimbabwe in most of these areas.

What then explains Rwanda and Zimbabwe's better-than-expected performance on the Ibrahim Index? After taking a closer look at its methodology, it appears that at least a part of the surprising assessments could be attributed to the survey's coverage delay, as well as its inability to effectively capture issues such as minority rights and government transparency.

For example, while the absence of gender discrimination is an important component of the Participation and Human Rights category, other types of discrimination, such as ethnic and racial, are captured only indirectly, through measuring state adherence to various human rights conventions (in Rule of Law, Transparency, and Corruption). Hence, the states that do not protect rights of ethnic and racial minorities can arguably perform reasonably well in this category.

Moreover, the Rule of Law, Transparency, and Corruption category, despite its name, does not really have a direct measure for government transparency. In our view, government transparency is an important indicator of good governance and can be assessed by looking as the existence and effective implementation of freedom of information laws; the ability of state to ensure transparency, open-bidding, and effective competition in the awarding of government contracts; legislative review of the executive budget-making process; and the presence of detailed accounting of government expenditures - as is done in the Countries at the Crossroads survey.

Finally, like many other surveys, such as the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators and Transparency International's CPI, the Ibrahim Index suffers from a notable coverage delay. The recently released edition evaluates African governance only through the end of 2005.

Georgia on our Minds

Picture by AFP via Al Jazeera

With protesters taking to the streets in the largest numbers since the Rose Revolution of 2003, the durability of Georgia’s reforms are being closely scrutinized. In the Commonwealth of Independent States, where democratic governance is in painfully short supply, Georgia has taken on the role of a test case for the advance democratic reform. As a result, a range of audiences are paying particularly close attention to developments in that country. Despite the considerable hurdles of impoverishment (GNI per capita under $800) and the legacy of Soviet institutional culture, Georgia, a country of less than 5 million, has managed to propel itself to the 18th place (from 112th) on the World Bank Doing Business report and has also made demonstrable progress on corruption in Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index. Last month, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services raised its outlook on Georgia to positive from stable on strong economic growth prospects despite a challenging external environment.

An article in the New York Times touches on some of the reforms that distinguish Georgia within what it describes as “a region with a history of corrupt, brutal and autocratic governments.”

[The government] has set new standards for education, increased tax collection and revenue-generation, improved the readiness of the country’s once feeble army and repaired Soviet-era infrastructure to the degree that the country, once plagued by blackouts, now has a reliable electricity supply.

At the same time, the Times piece hits on the criticism that represents a key obstacle to institutionalizing democratic governance, namely that there is no established and credible counterweight to the current leadership: “opponents accuse [President Saakashvili] of hoarding and abusing power, and of running the nation through a clique that will neither tolerate dissent nor engage in dialogue with the opposition.”

Georgia, along with Ukraine, is the only non-Baltic former Soviet republic to achieve a meaningful degree of progress on key governance reforms. As the turmoil of the last days makes abundantly clear, however, bringing about the next, more mature set of reforms will be an enormously difficult task.

Weekly Governance Links: Middle East and North Africa Edition

The topic of presidential succession in Egypt, always a sensitive issue, has received a mini-flurry of attention in recent weeks, with articles in the Washington Post and the New York Times. For an Egyptian perspective, an article from the Al Ahram Center.

Institutional weakness is a common feature of the nations featured in Countries at the Crossroads as well as (to a greater or lesser degree) nearly all developing countries. An article in Lebanon’s Daily Star discusses the pressing need for institutional reforms in the Middle East.

Although women’s rights remain problematic in many countries in the developing world, in no region are women more legally discriminated against than the Middle East.  A BBC article notes that the weakness of the law against honor killings in Syria is one factor behind the continued occurrence of this heinous crime.

Although the internal conflict in Algeria has been vastly reduced in scale since its peak in the 1990s, the country still suffers from more terrorist attacks than most in the region. The Economist describes the problem, while the government’s attempt to address root causes is addressed in this article, which notes that President Bouteflika blames “weakening of patriotism, a loss of identity and cultural spirit, the breakdown of fundamental social values and a lack of hope for improvement.” Lack of political freedom is not part of the problem, apparently.

A Brookings Institute report on the effects of democracy promotion notes that “After twenty years, Arab regimes have become proficient at containing and disarming democracy promotion—if not exploiting it for their own purposes.”

Finally, for ongoing monitoring of developments in Middle Eastern governance, the Carnegie Endowment’s Arab Reform Bulletin provides a useful tool.