Summary

Hilderbrand raises a number of concerns about possible SDGs in the area of governance, which can be summarized as:

Although these points are all valid, I argue that they do not make governance targets either infeasible or undesirable. My argument is simply that there were similarly serious challenges to the MDG to “eradicate extreme poverty,” but this did not stop it being adopted and becoming a highly visible “flagship” MDG. Allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good risks missing the opportunity to have a governance SDG that renews international emphasis on the importance of good governance, both as intrinsically desirable and as a means to achieving other development goals. Definitions: Despite the conceptual and definitional challenges, the international community operationalized the goal of eliminating extreme poverty by setting three specific targets: to halve the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 per day, to achieve “full and productive employment and decent work for all,” and to halve the proportion of people suffering from hunger. A similar case can be made regarding governance. Despite the profusion of definitions, it is possible to identify a few common themes that are amenable to measurement. Most of them emphasize the importance of a capable state, operating under the rule of law, which is able to provide an array of public goods and be held accountable for failure to deliver them.

Measurement: Agreeing to define “extreme poverty” in terms of the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day raises immense practical measurement challenges. Measuring governance similarly poses a wide range of practical challenges. The first important one is to strike an appropriate balance between subjective measures of perception of governance quality and corresponding objective measures. Despite the pejorative labelling of “soft” data in the case of surveys, both types of data can play an important role. Perceptions matter, as people will not, for example use the police or court services properly if they see them as corrupt. In contrast, “hard” indicators of laws or regulations on corrupt practices may not be useful without knowing how well they are enforced.