Executive Summary of the Asia-Pacific Panel 2001

Prof. Yuko Kaneko,
Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Government of Japan & Program coordinator of the Asia-Pacific Panel

September 2001

The Asia-Pacific Panel was organized to look into any commonality in the movement from government to governance among the countries in the Asia-Pacific region, and to discuss about how the evaluation should be exercised for the networking system of governance as well as the future direction of such networking system.

Presentation of the keynote (Iriyama) and four case studies including Japan (Oyama), Bangladesh (Khan), China (Xu) and Singapore (Ho) stimulated interesting comments from several experts who are outside the region of Asia Pacific. While it is agreeably difficult to define Asia Pacific as one region due to its heterogeneity, participants from other regions expressed more interest in the success stories of a small number of countries of this region known as an Asian Miracle during the past decade, of which success was generally attributed to the excellence of government and public administration institutions, rather than the performance of governance.

Governance concept is useful in our reviewing if the government, private sector, or civil society is really functioning for the public good and goodness. While there is discourse in approaches to reforms and governance concept, (from government to governance, or from bad government to good government or from governance to government,) it is clear that scrutinizing the reform efforts through the various components of the governance concepts provokes us as it really did in this Panel, and provides us pragmatic and analytical indicators in evaluating the ongoing public administration, government, and governance reforms.

Government and public administration reforms will continue in Asia Pacific scenes. It is legitimate to seek many more cases of reforms and review these cases through the governance concept. If the policy makers and researchers can identify certain commonality in reform approaches and public management techniques adopted, though vigorous exchange and networking, we practitioners and researchers in public administration may be able contribute to better regional cooperation in the Asia Pacific, if not integration. In doing so, this Panel indeed proved the need for including colleagues from other regions as well as working together in the international forum such as the International Institute of Administrative Sciences.