Published: 28 December 2000
Since its independence in 1971 Bangladesh has been heavily dependent on foreign assistance in order to reduce poverty and attain sustainable growth. But the track record so far has been rather modest and the long-standing problems are still to be tackled. The crisis of governance in Bangladesh is coming under greater scrutiny from both within the country and outside. Over the last few years the key stakeholders in Bangladesh who are involved with the process of development have belatedly realized that the issue of governance could be more important than getting the right policies in place. The focus is on issues such as corruption, transparency and the confrontational politics (appendix 1 – Rethinking Confrontational Politics: A Reform Agenda by the Civil Society by Feroz M. Hassan, President, MSS/SRG and Secretary General, Free Election Monitoring Alliance (FEMA) & Manzoor Hasan, Executive Director, Transparency International Bangladesh, August 2000).
According to Crisis in Governance: A Review of Bangladesh’s Development 1997 (The Centre for Policy Dialogue, June 1998) “This failure of the Bangladesh economy to move on to a sustainable growth path….points to a crisis of governance rather than a failure of macroeconomic policy.” Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) has looked into some of the major sectors and extracts from those reports should suffice to reinforce the aforementioned judgment of the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD).
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