Governance or Governing – the Missing Link?

Governance and governing are two distinct concepts, but they intertwine. “Good governing” exercises good influence on development. “Good governance” supposes first a relationship of power focused on a series of reforms structured at three levels: the political – administrative level, the economic level, and the level of civil society. As this dimension is difficult to measure, the qualitative evaluation of the governing act raised the interest of the World Bank researchers, who elaborated and monitored the dynamics of a set of indicators, which includes six major dimensions of the governing. A retrospective concerning the image of governing in Romania during the period from 1996 to 2005 suggests a modest increase of the score: from -0.138 (1996) to 0.008 (2002); that was partially achieved based on the voice and responsibility index and on the political stability index, not on those that measure more directly the administrative performance or the integrity of the governing act. For a comparative study, we chose seven countries for the purposes of analysis (two new European Union member states: Romania and Bulgaria; two older member countries of the European Union: Slovenia and Latvia; three non-member states: Moldova, Ukraine, and Georgia), which reveal the quality of the governing from a comparative perspective. Corruption control completes the image created by the analyzed indicators. The mere formal accomplishment of commitments made in the pre-accession activity, doubled by recent internal evolutions, bring doubts about the credibility of the anticorruption reforms, as Romania continues to be considered the country with the highest CPI in the European Union. The pessimism of public opinion and the fact that only 34% of the Romanian people consider that the level of corruption will decrease in the following three years constitutes an alarm signal addressed to the governance, in view of the real reformation of the administration system, of giving a sense of responsibility to the public and private sectors, of imposing, observing and materializing a real commitment for preventing and fighting corruption, the risk of which may be a threat to national security. Human governance creates a favorable environment for human development and elimination of poverty. If the preoccupations of the governance institutions are centered on the interests, needs, and fundamental rights of the population, progress may be achieved in the fight against poverty. If a country tries to apply economic policies in order to promote a beneficial increase to the poor ones, along with programs meant to help reach the targeted goals, the effects may be attenuated or annulled, when the governance institutions are ineffective or passive. The conclusion is that the governance is the missing link between the efforts of struggle against poverty and reaching the objective of poverty reduction.