Challenges to Good Governance
There are many challenges to enabling good governance. Improving governance may involve changing current practices, norms and beliefs. Promoting changes to governance could be seen as disrupting the current status quo and power balance, particularly when a culture of transparency and information sharing does not exist. It may involve experimenting with information sharing and working to improve how information is communicated to all stakeholders from local communities to government. For this reason it is important to know what the challenges in any given context might be and to think through the implications of these. The following might be useful questions to ask:
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To what extent is civil society able to influence policy making?
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What are the triggers for change in any given context?
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How much freedom of the press is there?
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Is there a process for obtaining documents outlining government expenditure and nutrition activities and if so what is this? What is done with these documents?
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How does the government perceive civil society activity?
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What risks are there in adopting certain positions which might be critical of the government or other key institutions? How might these be mitigated against?
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Eg. Ensuring neutrality in advance of general elections.
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What tensions are there between civil society organisations?
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Physical/Reputational/Economic risks.
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What are the risks of not practising good governance?
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Physical/Reputational/Economic risks.
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Will it be possible for civil society to undertake public advocacy? In what way might tactics and approaches need to be adjusted to the context.
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For example, in some countries advocacy it is not possible to mention advocacy but there are other avenues for influencing outside of public fora.
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Undertaking a power analysis or mapping of process influence when activities are up and running may be useful in elucidating bottlenecks and barriers to the work of the CSA. Resources to assist with this can be found in the appendix at the end of this document under ‘Advocacy Tools for Good Governance’. While it may not be possible to overcome some of the barriers to good governance, identifying them and developing strategies to deal with them could be useful. This may also assist in maintaining a positive outlook in the face of these challenges and targeting of activities to that which is possible to change or influence as part of a broader strategy.