It’s the governance, stupid!

This policy brief’s key messages are:

• Governance is a broad and complex topic with many overlapping definitions, frameworks and recommendations, but governance concepts and ideas found in the literature can broadly be grouped into five key domains: Transparency, Accountability, Participation, Integrity and Capacity (TAPIC).
• Governance is crucial to successful policy-making and implementation. It affects the likelihood that workable policies are adopted, that they are implemented, and that they produce intended results. At the same time, governance may be the cause of policy problems. But it is only one potential cause of problems, alongside other causes of failure such as inadequate finance.
• Each of the five domains of the TAPIC framework contains many different techniques for policy and procedural change. Rigorous and context-sensitive analysis is required to work out which domains contain governance problems and what those problems might be.