Almost everywhere, political leaders don't work with the strange animal known as 'the Public'. They work with 'key stakeholders' when they have to. And they prefer to decide a policy then 'consult' key stakeholders. Then they get on with the business of governing. There are at least three reasons for this. First, in representative democracies, many leaders genuinely believe that they were elected to take all the decisions, that 'the Public' only have a role when they vote during periodic elections. Second, authoritarian rule is still the rule rather than the exception in our world, even where countries have formal democracies.
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Now, it is well-known that the problem of politicized ethnicity bedevils quite a few developing countries. Less well known is the peculiar challenge that this problem poses for governance reform. I will use an example that I know well but disguise the name of the country.
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Roumeen Islam is manager of the World Bank Institute's Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Division. She is an economist by training and, I might add, by conviction. But to anybody who cares seriously about the role of the mass media in development, Roumeen is much admired in a particular capacity: as someone who has made a sterling contribution to how the media is viewed within international development. Although media systems and their impact on development are not the only things that have preoccupied her - right now she is leading major work on international trade indicators, amongst others - she has done as much as anybody I know to put an institutional view of the media on the development agenda. 
New policy and practice fields need intellectual energy; otherwise they don’t go anywhere quickly. Those promoting the new fields need to be producing justificatory essays, applied research, good practice manuals, policy briefs, evaluations, articles in refereed journals...and blogs too! They should be bombarding policy makers with all kinds of output of good quality; and they should be organizing the field as a serious discipline. I am happy to see that the role of the media in development is attracting more intellectual energy. 
I have been forced to think about the role of the news media in the governance reform agenda a lot in the last few weeks. First, CommGAP had 
It often seems to me that in international development today a bifurcated reality exists when it comes to the potential or actual role of the news media in the governance agenda. For instance, in the great bilateral and multilateral agencies, many officials will, if asked, tell you that there is no doubt that the news media are a fundamental part of the architecture of good governance in their own countries. There is in these countries a tradition of thinking about the media as – collectively – the fourth estate of the realm, as co-participants in governance. But ask these same officials what role the news media can play, if supported and developed, in securing improved governance outcomes in developing countries and, suddenly, the conversation gets complicated. Why? Lots of reasons.
For a few years now, I have been developing a theory of media reform in post-conflict environments. It is a reading of the facts, nothing grand. I want to trot it out and see how you react to it. My sense is that when a developing country succumbs to conflict and finds the will to come out of it, or the combatants are simply too exhausted to continue the quarrel, donors rush in to help put Humpty Dumpty back together again. One of the things donors sometimes do is re-build the media system.
I went to New York with a colleague last week to visit the 
There is a fascinating story in this week's edition of The Economist (
Before I joined the World Bank about a year and half ago, I worked for DFID, the British Government's development ministry. DFID is part of the British Civil Service. That means I was a civil servant. And I attended a variety of training courses at the Civil Service College. And the experience taught me a thing or two about the sources of pressures for accountability faced by ordinary civil servants. And here I refer to pressures for accountability emanating from outside the civil service itself. I want to discuss the three leading sources of pressure.
In my last post, I discussed one of the supreme values undergirding the democratic public sphere: the public use of reason, that is, a commitment to reason, to argumentation, and the possibility of agreement. I discussed the threat posed to that value and the possibilities of the public sphere if claims are based on the supposed demands of a Deity. But irrationality in the public sphere comes from another source as well: the loud and insistent claims of ethnic champions in complex, multiethnic polities.
I think it is safe to say that on average religious faith plays a bigger role in public life in most developing countries than in the West or in places like China and Russia. In these latter societies, secular humanism appears to reign supreme. So, while the problem I am about to discuss is not dead in the West - it is certainly still a real issue in the United States of America for instance - it is a major issue in developing countries. It is the problem of basing a claim for public policy change or the resistance of policy change on the supposed commands of your favorite Deity: God, Allah, Jesus, Holy Prophet, the Lord Buddha, Lord Khrishna....and on and on the list goes. In many developing countries, this is a source of real pain and conflict. We don't need to name these countries. You have an entire basket of them to pick from. 
I sat down the other day with a group of specialists from a Country Team within the World Bank. We were discussing efforts to improve the governance system in that country and how a Program like ours - 
What is the basis of the claim that 'People, Spaces and Deliberation' are central to how you achieve good and accountable governance durably? One way of buttressing is to step back and reflect on two competing interpretations of governance, really, politics. The first interpretation of governance or politics is that it is purely and simply the business of the elite. Leaders rule, take all the decisions and that is that. Improving governance is about improve public administration, improving what leaders do. Some technocrats even prefer this authoritarian view of politics. They like it because they say it is efficient. Leaders are clear, decisions are taken quickly and implemented immediately. 
One of the foundational commitments of 
Public opinion is a critical force in politics, including all aspects of governance. To provoke hostile or negative public opinion is to invite a gigantic hammer or a wrecking ball. And I am saying that not because I want to be dramatic but to capture some of the scale of what is happening in the current global financial crisis. For, financial markets are also affected by the power of public opinion. In fact, what market analysts and pundits often describe as public sentiment or market confidence is really the working of public opinion. The point is that whether the market trades in electoral votes or financial securities public opinion is a critical force. It is always better to have public opinion on your side.
We welcome our newest guest blogger, Taeku Lee, Associate Professor of Political Science and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. 
Tom Jacobson, Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the School of Communications and Theater, Temple University. 
Caroline Jaine, 
