“Our concern is that we have little or no input from the developing world. Our indicators of what constitutes good governance are for the most part drawn from the perspectives of experts in the global North,” says Joseph Mensah, coordinator of York’s International Development Studies Program, who teaches in the Department of Social Science in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.

In an effort to rectify this issue, the Commonwealth Secretariat (ComSec) in London, England, invited Mensah to help facilitate a workshop held Jan. 18 and 19 in Accra, Ghana. Notable Ghanaian members of parliament and ministers, including the minister of foreign affairs, as well as business leaders, civil society organizations and academics took part in the discussions.

“Some of the Ghanaian government officials and MPs who participated over the two days plan to conduct similar workshops across the country to help educate citizens about the need for good governance and institutional efficiency,” Mensah says. He hopes ComSec can extend the exercise to other commonwealth nations in future.

To facilitate a comparative analysis among the commonwealth countries, ComSec narrowed its principles of good governance to five: Accountability, transparency, predictability, capacity and participation. The workshop aimed to determine what kinds of indicators influence these principles and how they apply to Ghana. A significant portion of the workshop focused on determining which of the five principles the country is lacking and which are represented.

“Right away, it became clear to me that the five principles emanated from the global North and they box other countries into a particular conceptualization of good governance that may not always be appropriate or applicable to their own national context,” says Mensah, who co-led the workshop with Roger Koranteng, a governance adviser for ComSec.

Some of the questions explored by workshop participants included: What is the relationship between good governance and development? Is the relationship between them one-way or recursive? Which indicators help create the principles of good governance identified by ComSec? Which principles do Ghanaians find more important, and which would they subtract or add to the five, based on their own national context?

Ghana was selected as the location for the workshop primarily in recognition of its recent successes in democratic governance. It is also home to the Ghana Institute of Management & Public Administration, which has a Graduate School of Governance, Leadership & Public Management well known for training many top-level managers and public servants in the West African sub-region.

Mensah will produce a report for ComSec based on the deliberations of the workshop. He will also conduct an intensive review of literature on the subject and offer rationale for the selection and use of specific indicators and principles in Ghana.

For more information on the good governance workshop in Accra or Mensah’s research, contact jmensah@yorku.ca .

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Media Contact:

Melissa Hughes, Media Relations, York University, 416 736 2100 x 22097, mehughes@yorku.ca