This is an unusual and intriguing book. It is both erudite and exploratory (as the authors acknowledge), brilliant in conception, and problematic in execution. It is based on the results of the World Governance Survey (WGS) of “well-informed people” (WIPs), such as high-ranking civil servants, long-standing parliamentarians, businesspeople, academics, and so on. At least 35 WIPs were surveyed in each of the 16 developing countries in the study. No one can doubt the importance of the topic that Goran Hyden, Julius Court, and Kenneth Mease address, particularly given the increasing prominence that it occupies in development theory and practice. The authors define governance as “the rules that regulate the public realm” (p. 16). They rightly seek to give badly needed analytical depth to its study.

The book sets the context well, tracing the historical shift and upscaling of development policy from project to program through to policy and now politics. Drawing inspiration from Amartha Sen's work on development as a product of freedom, the authors develop the concept of governance in reference to the near universally accepted (by states) United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The study identifies a number of key questions, such as “are the rules applying to civil society legitimate in the eyes of key actors” (p. 4). Following on from this, Hyden, Court, and Mease develop a questionnaire on governance covering such issues as corruption, respect for property rights (public, private, and communal), living standards, personal security, and so on. This methodology, they argue, does not load the dice in favor of liberal democracies. For them, improved governance is as much about improving indigenous institutions as adopting new ones from the outside.

From the questionnaire, governance scores are then tabulated, and each of the results chapters then tackles a particular theme, such as civil or political society or the judiciary. Some countries, for example Jordan and China, perform notably better on the WGS than they do on other indices, such as the Freedom House Index. In part, perhaps this is because regime stability, which contributes to better scores on this survey, may be negatively correlated with democracy. For the authors, political society is the most critical link in the governance chain, and they argue that this works well in China. They also note that it is possible to have improved governance with a deteriorating economy, as in Indonesia in the immediate aftermath of the Asian financial crisis.

Overall, the study finds that governance has improved in 10 of the 16 countries over five years. The authors cite this as evidence that political and economic liberalization has been successful “at least as far as the rules of the game are concerned” (p. 45). Some might find their focus on process, rather than outcomes, problematic, however. Later in the book it is noted that government social welfare scores are low in countries that have undergone World Bank structural adjustment programs. It is difficult to discern whether “better” governance is the result of liberalization, donors' governance programs (as the authors argue elsewhere in the book), or a secular trend toward greater institutionalization.

The authors make the interesting argument that governance is a prerequisite for both democracy and development. However, they do not find a correlation between a country's governance score and economic growth or development. Nonetheless, they argue that regime type does matter in explaining growth and development, but they do not clearly show how it matters.

There are also some other problems with the methodology chosen. India scores third out of 16 on its aggregate governance score in the survey, but there are at least as many bonded child laborers in India as people in the United Kingdom. Surely this is one of the most egregious governance failures across economic, political, and civil society, and the different branches of the state. A cynic might subtitle the book Voices of the Élite. It is the poor who are on the sharp end of bad governance, for the most part.

Overall, Making Sense of Governance is somewhat difficult to read as it jumps from country to country and covers a substantial number of topics. This makes it hard to discern a unifying thread to the argument. Qualitative work tends to be most successful when it undertakes an in-depth analysis based on extensive engagement and fieldwork. This book employs a large-scale survey, from which it then describes the results. This makes it difficult to support some of the conclusions and hard to see how they were reached, for example, that “civil society appears to be the potential (emphasis added) engine for the improvement in governance” (p. 205). Problematic concepts, such as social capital, are also used without definition. The draft chapters for this project are available on the Web, and some of them are more theoretically developed than the eventual ones, perhaps because of space constraints.

Many questions are left unanswered. Is it really the quality of the state that determines governance? Do developmental states conform to the tenets of good governance? Are there intertemporal trade-offs between different rights, or are they temporally interdependent? Is the rights-based conception of governance adopted in the study sufficient to capture these and other issues? For example, neoliberal economic governance is about much more than respect for property rights and anticorruption measures.

The premise behind this book, that governance deserves more empirical research in order to develop the concept analytically, is well founded. However, the methodology adopted gives us little understanding of the drivers of good governance, beyond somewhat speculative assertions. Nonetheless, this is a provocative and worthwhile book and a clarion call for more research, analytical depth, and clarity about the nature, causes, and consequences of governance.