Peace, governance and an indicator that matters

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12/25/2013

Peace, governance and an indicator that matters

John Lennon wrote about Christmas, peace and war over 30 years ago. The core idea of his song was that war could be over...if we want it to be.

Now we know that wars continue, and that conflict is probably the most damaging thing for a country to go through. Peace us huge when it comes to economic growth, social development, and so forth.

But peace is a product of many complex things, many related to a broad version of governance (where governance is the exercise of authority by governments on behalf of citizens).

If powers that be insist on adopting governance indicators in the post 2015 exercise, they could do a lot worse than including an indicator that captures peace. The chart shows an example of this, in a set of scores from the Global Peace Index produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace (http://www.visionofhumanity.org/#/page/indexes/global-peace-index).

I agree that indexes like this always have critics, but it seems to me that this kind of index could provide a good focal point for those thinking about improving governance in a real way. And in an important area for development. Like the road deaths indicator I mentioned yesterday.

Posted at 01:11 PM in Ideas for governance indicators, Post 2015 indicators (my thoughts) | Permalink

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