15 A survey of governance in 30 underperforming states Sarah Repucci1
The international community has focused increasing attention on governance in recent years. The US government’s Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) exemplifies this trend – it is a pool of foreign aid that will be given only to countries whose leaders ‘rule justly, invest in their people, and encourage economic freedom’. In May 2004 the Millennium Challenge Corporation announced the first 16 countries eligible to apply for funds. Currently, Freedom House’s Freedom in the World survey provides some of the criteria utilised by the US government to determine whether a country is ‘ruling justly’. In order to examine in more detail some of the issues pertinent to the MCA, Freedom House designed a survey to focus on government performance in 30 countries. These countries represent a range of geographic areas and polities – monarchies, dictatorships, struggling nascent electoral democracies, and those suffering insurgencies – but all are low performers in Freedom in the World. Carried out with support from the US State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, the new Countries at the Crossroads survey is not yet an official indicator for the MCA. However, its methodology was designed to track the MCA criteria and to help inform the MCA process. Of the 63 MCA candidate countries in 2004, 18 were covered in the first edition of Countries at the Crossroads. The other countries were chosen for their geopolitical or strategic importance. The survey combined four core components in narrative and numerical form: civil liberties, rule of law, anti-corruption and transparency, and accountability and public voice. It included 83 questions that were divided into the four topical areas and grouped into 16 subsections. Freedom House hired one expert per country to write narratives answering the questions. The experts came from a variety of backgrounds, both academic and professional (including journalists and policy analysts), both domestic and international. In addition to the narratives, the experts rated their countries on a scale of 0 (weakest performance) to 7 (strongest) for each of the questions. By averaging the scores in each subsection and then averaging the averages within the topical areas, Freedom House came up with four scores for each of the countries covered (see Table 15.1). The reports covered events in the year from October 2002 to September 2003. The corruption section was an especially important feature of the report, since this is the only MCA criterion that can eliminate an otherwise eligible country. Countries at the Crossroads used a distinctive corruption indicator: rather than measuring corruption in each country, it focused on the governmental environment and how it A survey of governance in 30 underperforming states
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