Reconceptualizing the Neoliberal “Good Governance” Discourse and the Complexity of Global Self-policing

This chapter critically interrogates the discursive shift in the design and implementation of development policies and practices as evinced through the World Bank’s common-sense rhetoric of neoliberal “good governance” as a key ingredient of poverty reduction strategies. This shift was hailed to ostensibly represent a radical rupture from the ineffective aid conditionality of structural adjustment policies (SAPs) espoused by the “Washington Consensus” to a new aid architecture which strongly emphasizes the importance of “good governance” reforms and an opportunity for recipient countries to “own” their development strategies. In retrospect, it is argued that “good governance” reforms in Ghana increasingly articulated within the problematic of new poverty reduction framework with its emphasis on more inclusive framework with greater country “ownership” and “civil society organization” inclusion represent a new form of social control and as a liberal governing technology. The nub for this exploration is the need to reflect on how key intricate development interventions by international donors represent the conduct of multiple subjectivities while relying on mechanisms of self-regulation and societal self-policing. Ghana in the last thirty years represents a key empirical/analytical dimension on the debate around “good governance” discourse and international donors.