Governance and Development: Past, Present and Future

This article ties to survey the evolution trend of development theories to demonstrate that such theories have undergone impressive transformation within the recent 60 years. The first generation of the thinkers paid attention to the macroeconomic neo-classical models and the second generation of them took various factors ranging from market mechanisms to human capital. However, the governance paradigm has turned to be the dominant paradigm in the development thoughts during the recent decade. The “governance” gained significance in development issues because of a number of factors including the failure of previous development plans, growing attention to institutions in socio-economic and political analyses, importance of political factors in the development of countries, economists’ disenchantment with some faulty neo-classical hypotheses as well as the disintegration of communism. Yet, there are some challenges ahead of the new paradigm including the “institutional change” issue. It would be useful to consider “discourse” theories to overcome this challenge.