Government and the Fourth Sector Partnership: Local Governance and Sustainable Development in Bangladesh

Abstract

Since the World Bank (1989) attributed the dismal economic performance of the Sub-Saharan African countries to the problems of governance, the underlying assumption, has been that sustainable development cannot be achieved without good governance. The efforts of devising a process of sustainable development, that was intensified through the publication of Our Common Future (WCED 1987), now focus on: identifying measures in protecting the environment, and developing governmental capability to undertake the measures. The two most important aspects of governance are the process by which authority is exercised in the management of a country’s economic and social development (World Bank 1992b; Crook and Manor 1995), and a government’s capacity to discharge governmental functions by formulating and implementing policies (World Bank 1992b; Moore 1993). Governance is also the process of interaction between the public sector and the various actors or groups of actors in ‘civil society’ — the public life of individuals and institutions outside the control of the state (Harpham and Boateng 1997).