Governance Indicators: Approaches, Progress, Promise

As difficult as it might seem to define governance, it appears to be that much more difficult to measure it. Yet ever since the World Bank Institute launched the Worldwide Governance Indicators in the late 1990s, many initiatives seeking to develop ways to measure and assess governance have been launched, and the research field has grown in prominence and policy relevance. The time is ripe to take stock, assess achievements thus far, identify strengths and weaknesses of current approaches, and determine the way ahead. The contributions to this volume explore the scope of existing governance indices and indicator frameworks, elaborate on current challenges in measuring and analysing governance, and offer recommendations on how to overcome them.