The current international system of institutions and governance groups is proving inadequate to meet many of today's most important challenges, such as terrorism, poverty, nuclear proliferation, financial integration, and climate change. The International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and UN were founded after World War II, and their structures of voting power and representation have become obsolete, no longer reflecting today's balance of economic and political power. This insightful book examines how to make such institutions more responsive and effective. Institutional reform is critically needed but currently in stalemate. A new push is needed from powerful nations acting together through a reformed and enlarged G-8 that includes emerging economies, such as China and India. Global challenges demand integrated approaches, with greater coordination among international institutions. Global Governance Reform argues that without reconstituting the Group of 8 summit into a larger, more representative group of leaders, with a new mandate to provide strategic guidance to the system of international institutions, the world will fall further behind in addressing global challenges. The path to global reform is defined by the need to act in coordinated ways on summit and institutional reform, and this book lights the way.

This book examines the factors that give rise to successful governance reforms in developing countries, focusing on the importance of political commitment, supportive institutions, and the timing of reforms. It reviews the lessons arising from the design and implementation of successful governance reforms in Brazil, India, Uganda and other parts of Africa through comparative analysis of experience with public financial management, anti-corruption, civil service reform, and innovations in service delivery. The contributors suggest that three factors are critical in explaining positive outcomes: strong, consistent commitment from politicians to initiate and sustain reforms; a high level of technical capacity and some degree of insulation from societal interests, at least in the early phases, for designing and managing reforms; incremental approaches with cumulative benefits are more likely to produce sustainable results. Explicit attention to the political feasibility of reform, identifying and building incentives for reform, and a more gradual and piecemeal approach are all integral to the success of future governance reforms.

In this major new contribution to a rapidly expanding field, the authors offer an integrated analysis of the wave of management reforms which have swept through so many countries in the last twenty years. The reform trajectories of ten countries are compared, and key differences of approach discussed. Unlike some previous works, this volume affords balanced coverage to the 'New Public Management' (NPM) and the 'non-NPM' or 'reluctant NPM' countries, since it covers Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, the UK and the USA. Unusually, it also includes a preliminary analysis of attempts to improve management within the European Commission.

Drawing on cognitive-psychological findings and fieldwork, this book explains how government reforms are enacted and why they succeed or fail.

The ability of governments and the global community to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, ensure security, and promote adherence to basic standards of human rights depends on people's trust in their government. However, public trust in government and political institutions has been declining in both developing and developed countries in the new millennium. One of the challenges in promoting trust in government is to engage citizens, especially the marginalized groups and the poor, into the policy process to ensure that governance is truly representative, participatory, and benefits all.

Features chapters that analyze and compare the experiences of Asian countries in carrying out governance reforms. This book tackles such questions as: how common reform packages designed for developed countries are implemented in developing countries? What happens in the reform diffusion process? And what are the obstacles to reform success?