THE 'good governance' motif has started to dominate public debate in Pakistan. The general argument is that our fledgling democracy is teetering on the brink of failure due to 'bad' governance and rampant corruption.

Some critiques start from the premise that the Pakistani people attach no special value to democracy and are interested only in the eradication of poverty and corruption. Democracy and socio-economic emancipation are thus construed and constructed as independent from each other.

Such an argument may seem very rational: who would disagree that there is an urgent need to eradicate poverty and corruption. However, the history of ideas suggests that noble and rational concepts are as susceptible to political instrumentality as sinister ones. This is especially the case with ideas that have strong moral underpinnings such as corruption and good governance.

To begin with, we should not forget that most of the elected civilian governments in the 1990s were dismissed on allegations of bad governance and corruption. Similarly, it was the rhetoric of good governance that Gen Pervez Musharraf employed to justify his coup and the subsequent institution of 'guided' democracy after the 2002 election.

The term 'good governance' came into vogue in the 1990s. Two historical happenings of that period must be highlighted to contextualise the origin and growth of the idea of good governance. First, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ideology of neo-liberalism became triumphant across most of the world. Secondly, through the 1990 many societies in the South were experiencing what has come to be known as 'the third wave of democracy'. Dictator after dictator left power under the new world political geography.

At this juncture of modern history, the concept of good governance served the needs of the international financial institutions and wider donor community. It allowed them to intervene directly in the domestic political sphere of debtor countries, which they were otherwise prohibited from doing under international law. They justified their political interventions by claiming that most of the economic problems of debtor countries were the result of politically induced market distortions, a weak civil society and unbridled corruption.

Crucially, donors' prescriptions to redress these three 'structural' problems revolved around a reduced role for government in economic management and social welfare provision.

By talking about good governance rather than state restructuring, multilateral banks and aid agencies successfully lumped together all contentious matters of political economy under a relatively neutral heading and further couched them in apolitical technical language. As it turned out, the actual implications of the good governance agenda in the form of institutional reforms in transition democracies in Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa were profoundly adverse.

These debtor countries were compelled to pursue almost predetermined economic restructuring programmes including liberalisation of trade and financial markets, downsizing and privatisation, balancing of budgets and removal of subsidies. Practically, the focus shifted from politics to policy.

New democratic regimes were most often pitched against the emergent powers of civil society. The impression given was that a strong civil society required a weak government lest the latter suppress the former and ostensibly prevent the flowering of genuine democracy. Accordingly, international donors started to channel large amounts of funds to NGOs while bypassing governments.

Moreover, the otherwise complex term 'civil society' was sanitised in a way that explicitly excluded political parties and other political associations from the larger civic sphere. This artificially created separation between the civil and political was nevertheless easily bridged when the need arose. A pertinent case-in-point was the co-option of a number of eminent NGOs leaders into Gen Pervez Musharraf's cabinet in October 1999. Like military dictators, these 'civil society' leaders took the plea that their decision would strengthen grassroots democracy.

Last but not least, new democratic regimes encountered a plethora of anti-corruption crusades under the guise of good governance. The most well-known anti-corruption initiative came in 1993 when ex-World Bank employees founded Transparency International and began the publication of their annual corruption perceptions index (CPI).

Whilst CPI generates notable publicity, it has been widely criticised on several accounts. First, it defines corruption as “the abuse of public office for private gains”, thereby explicitly excluding corporations who do most of the bribery. Second, it measures perceptions rather actual incidents of corruption. Third, most surveyed persons belong to business classes and middle management groups.

Inasmuch as they are inseparable from the political economy of aid the concepts of good governance and corruption have been increasingly instrumentalised for political ends. The term 'governance' refers to the way political power is exercised and legitimised in the public sphere. It is, therefore, constructed primarily on the terrain of power. Hence, the categories of democratic, dictatorial and authoritarian forms of governance.

However, the discourse on good governance explicitly ignores the question of how we should understand power relations with a view to changing them. Rather, it presents itself as a moral paradigm, simply distinguishing between the good, the bad and the evil. It not only has limited conceptual or analytical value but it is, at best, a policy/propagandist tool in the hands of the historically powerful to undermine democratic forms and struggles.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.