as a healthy and inclusive decision-making process . Rarely do interventions approach good governance as a holistic construction representing the experience , perceptions , needs and desires of an entire population that in this case may be unwilling to trust or work together . Just as rarely do they approach governance as an idea that pre-dates Westphalian notions of State and sovereignty , which may work well without them .
Interventions have instead prioritized the construction of institutions and infrastructure as set-piece objects which by virtue of their existence help to produce the desired social effects . This frequently goes hand-in-hand with a checklist mentality . An example is measuring success in terms of how many miles of new roads have been built , but missing the fact that local villages avoid them because they are too dangerous to use . Another metric is measuring expansion of the power grid , but failing to notice when the grids go down because repair crews cannot access troubled neighborhoods . In the absence of a national power grid , local industries for power generation and delivery may have sprung up to fill the gap , and will now be supplanted by development initiatives , ultimately resulting in unemployment . Intervention often misses the idea that stability imposed onto such unhealthy conditions comes across as repressive and opens the door to resistance .
Efforts at the construction or institution of improved governance as part of R & S missions have varied greatly over the past several decades — from the Marshall Plan of the 1940s to the reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan most recently . The attempts are many — but the record of successes is disturbingly
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