Research program

The concept of good governance is in use all over the world and is promoted actively by international organizations such as the World Bank and the OECD. It comprises some rather general governance norms such as transparency, participation and accountability but also quite specific ones such as gender equality, anti-corruption and systematic evaluation of policies. Catalogues of good governance norms are codified by many institution, public and private ones, and they are competing with each other. Standards of governance become influential in practice when indicators are defined, compliance is measured and rankings are made. They are usually codified by Western institutions but pretend to be universally applicable. Standards of governance are used to measure the performance of organizations in the public and the private sector alike. Today, states and cities, companies and hedge funds, public agencies and NGOs are all ranked on lists according to their good governance performance.

As for the public sector, the rise of good governance norms and practices is often seen as an instance of technocratization that has the potential to replace ideals and practices of representative democracy. Against this background, our research training group formulates a twofold research question, which is to be addressed jointly by junior researchers and the PIs. In an empirical-analytical perspective we seek to investigate why conceptions of good governance have become so popular, how they are implemented in practice and what (possibly unintended) consequences this may have. In a normative perspective we are wondering what this implies for the future of democracy.

The guiding idea of this research program is to conceptualize and analyze norms of good governance as standards. This explicit analogy to technical standardizations can help us carve out some characteristics of good governance: norm-setting by public and private actors, the existence of rival conceptualizations, the claim to universality, the need for quantifications and the logic of optimization are all associated with standardizations. This approach brings together traditions of social research that do not normally interact much. It fosters a dialogue among researchers from a range of diverse fields, such as political theory and philosophy, political economy, international relations, sociology and law. At the same time the idea of “standards of governance” also suggests a new perspective on standardization itself. Standards are usually understood as an instrument in the governance toolkit but when trying to imrpove the processes of governance with their help, standardization becomes self-reflexive.

The research training group will analyze how standards of governance emerge, how they spread, how they are operationalized in practice and how social actors try to enforce them. To understand how standards operate it is imperative to study real world practices, causal chains and (possibly counter-intuitive) effects. Yet the group also gives much consideration to the normative assessment of these real-world developments. We will have to analyze critically how standards of governance conform to the ideal of democratic self-determination in complex, functionally differentiated and interdependent societies. We want to know if they undermine or corroborate the possibility of collective self-determination. To achieve this, the research group combines a normative perspective on democratic ideals with an empirical micro-perspective on social interactions and discourses, in which standards of governance are codified, propagated and applied. The following set of research questions will guide our analysis:

(1) How exactly do standards of governance emerge and why are they codified?

(2) Why and how do standards of governance spread across territorial boundaries and sectors of societies?

(3) How are standards operationalized in practice and how is conformity with them measured?

(4) How are social actors trying to enforce standards of governance and why does resistance against them emerge?

(5) What consequences does the rise of governance standards have and how should we assess them from a normative point of view?

During the first years of its work the group will concentrate on four policy fields, which are, however, broadly defined. We will study governance standards in the regulation of the economy and finance, the protection of the environment and the fight against climate change, development policies in the Global South and North (in the form of “regional development”), and protection of basic rights and the rule of law.