Fostering Legitimate Governance Homepage - Left Column

The Challenge

Even the best governance processes cannot be successful if they do not have the support of the public. No matter how decisions are made – by consensus or negotiation amongst groups of representatives or by legislative, executive, or judicial processes, decisions will be actively and sometimes quite vigorously opposed if they are not widely seen as legitimate. Securing that public support obviously requires that the processes be worthy of the public support (as demonstrated by their ability to meet the other challenges). Still, more is required.

• Realistic Expectations -- Problems can quickly arise if the public has unrealistic expectations of what they can expect from a particular governance process. To prevent this, officials must resist the temptation to over-promise and be willing to make it clear that some desires simply cannot be met.
• Transparency -- When decisions are made in secret and when people don't understand the reasoning behind them, it iss easy for them to assume the worst. This can be combated with transparent processes that make it easy for people to see how decisions are made and that conflicts of interest among decision-makers have been successfully avoided. There are, of course, situations where the release confidential information might undermine, rather than advance, the public trust which require special treatment.
• Accountability -- For those cases when governance processes have not been trustworthy, the public needs to see that remedies have come into play, the guilty parties have been held to account, and improper decisions reversed. Here it is generally better to be the "first with the truth" when problems aris,e rather than relying on someone else to discover the wrongdoing.