The Rise and Fall of “Good Governance” Promotion

Description

On 31 October 2003 the UN General Assembly adopted the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC). Fifteen years on, 181 UN member states have already ratified it, reaching near global unanimity. Unlike its older and more famous antecessor, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and subsequent UN human rights covenants, UNCAC did not meet with claims that it imposed some form of Western institutional hegemony on the rest of the world. But how much difference has the covenant made? Professor Mungiu-Pippidi will trace the history of ethical universalism as a governance norm and benchmark, examine the Western record of promoting it, and consider the pitfalls and the challenges of current efforts to implement it.

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is a policy scientist who chairs the European Research Center for Anticorruption and State-Building (ERCAS) at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, where she holds the chair in Democracy Studies. A Romanian by birth, she created and chaired for many years the Romanian Academic Society, the country’s leading think tank, and the Coalition for a Clean Romania, an anti-corruption alliance. She also served in 1996 as the first anticommunist news director of Romanian public broadcasting. Her books include “The Quest for Good Governance: How Societies Develop Control of Corruption” (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and “A Tale of Two Villages” (CEU Press, 2010). The latter was screened as a documentary by the BBC. She has published articles in Nature, Foreign Policy, the Journal of Democracy, and several public policy journals and has frequently been cited in The Economist and other prominent media. She consults for the World Bank and various European institutions, and also serves as a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Democracy and the research council of the International Forum for Democratic Studies.