Good Governance - Conditions for Trust

Anil Prasad (see http://apletters.gather.com/) has published an article "Good Governance - an 18 Point Policy" (http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976857080) in the Management Practitioners' and Thinkers' Community (MPTC) (see http://mptc.gather.com/) and Speed of Trust Group (see http://speedoftrust.gather.com/).

This article applies a Trust Enablement filter to the 18 policy recommendations in order to determine how they contribute to establishing and ensuring trust.

As a starting position, let's assume that "good government" means the government has the trust and confidence of the electorate (citizens).  If this is the case, then "good government" policies should create conditions that build and maintain their trust and confidence.

Below is a quick, first-impression assessment of my interpretation of how each of the 18 proposed policies can be expected to contribute to creating conditions for trust:

First a brief qualifier:  A certain amount of subjective judgement must used to estimate the effect each of the policies has on contributing to trust, when based only on a brief description.  It could be successfully argued that any given policy item should be placed in at least one additional category of the framework.  However, based on the descriptions that accompany each of the policy recommendations, to do so would have required an inference beyond what was explicitly stated.  Here is an example:  "People centerdness", at first glance, sounds like a "Motivation", but upon closer review of the description, the phrase "facilitating opportunities for public participation" suggests a mechanism that allows the public to experience government in action.  I therefore classified it in the "Experiential Sources" category.  However, one could justifiably argue that it belongs in both.

At a high level, the assessment reveals that the 18 policy recommendation focus more on "ensuring" trust than on "establishing" trust.  There is nothing wrong with that, provided that was the intention of policy-makers.

I found the same to be true with Canada's Federal Accountability Act (see my article "Creating trust in government is more than 'cleaning house'" at  http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976844056).  The difference is that trust in the Canadain government had already eroded significantly and needed to be rebuilt.

My experience is that generally it is a best practice to seek balance; with provisions that are weighted equally across all 6 elements for the Trust Enablement Framework.

I welcome your comments and recommendations about how we could build on these 18 policy recommendations to attain a comprehensive and balanced set of conditions for trust.  I'll try to incorporate your recommendations into my next posting.

In the mean time, I suspect there may be some uncertainty about the nature of each of the elements of the Trust Enablement Framework.   For a brief introduction, I would direct you to my article "Are you a Trust Enabler?" available at http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976845361.