Research program

The goals of the DFG Research Training Group “Standards of Governance”

Although the democratic form of government is in crisis worldwide, the concept of “good governance”, which commits both public and private actors to standards of good governance, has spread globally. The interdisciplinary DFG Research Training Group ‘Standards of Governance’ at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and Technical University of Darmstadt is dedicated to the question of how these standards are created and codified.

The innovative guiding idea of this Research Training Group is to understand and analyse norms of good governance as standards. The explicit analogy to standard-setting and technology sums up some of the characteristics of good governance: standard-setting by public and private actors, the existence of competing conceptualisations, the claim to universalisation, the need for quantification and the logic of optimisation that are often associated with standardisation. By linking subjects of research that are not normally considered together, this guiding principle also enables a dialogue between political theory and institutional theory with political economy, international relations (IR), law and sociological modernisation research.

At the same time, the idea of ‘standards of governance’ also opens up a new perspective on the phenomenon of standardisation itself. In the attempt to optimise government processes, standardisation is transformed from a steering instrument into a self-reflexive undertaking. The research group will empirically analyse how standards of governance emerge, how they spread, how they are operationalised in practice and how attempts are made to enforce them. How standards of governance relate to the ideal of democracy in complex, internationally networked societies with a high degree of division of labour, and how they support, change or undermine the possibility of collective self-determination, will also be critically examined within the framework of the Research Training Group. The RTG combines an empirical micro-perspective on social interactions and discourses in which standards of governance are codified, propagated and applied with a normative evaluation from a democratic theory perspective.

What does “Good governance“ actually mean?

The concept of “good governance” is now widespread worldwide and is actively promoted by international organisations such as the World Bank and the OECD. This includes general standards of good governance such as transparency, participation and accountability of those in power, but also very specific ones such as gender equality, anti-corruption and systematic evaluation of policies, depending on the concept. Catalogues of norms of good governance are codified by many bodies, both public and private, and they compete with each other.

They become effective in practice by being quantified, measured and enforced with the help of indicators. Even if they are usually formulated in Western-style institutions, they claim to be universally valid. Concepts of ‘good governance’ are aimed at both the public and private sectors. States and municipalities, listed companies, financial market players and non-governmental organisations – today they are all assessed and ranked according to their performance on scales of ‘good governance’.

The five key questions of the Research Training Group “Standards of Governance”

The Research Training Group will focus on four policy areas, at least in the first few years. These are economics and finance, environment and climate protection, development and regional promotion, and fundamental rights and the rule of law. This results in the following key questions:

1. How exactly do standards of governance emerge and why are they codified?

2. Why do standards of governance spread across territorial and possibly sectoral boundaries?

3. How are standards of governance operationalised in practice and how is compliance measured?

4. How are attempts made to enforce standards of governance and why is resistance to such attempts being formed?

5. What are the consequences of the rise of standards of governance and how are these consequences to be normatively evaluated?