Renewing and measuring the effectiveness of governance

Sabah Zrari, PhD in Political Science, IEP of Paris, Academic Coordinator of the degree "Sustainability of port cities" at the University of Valparaiso and Academic Director of the degree "Planning, management and governance of port cities", University of Santiago de Chile. Port city governance is complex and even open to interpretation. Each country has its own legal framework that determines the capacity of key actors like port authorities and municipalities to influence of lead port city development and dialogue processes. In this article, Dr. Sabah Zrari offers a clear definition of port city governance, providing several examples and challenging us to find ways to assess its efficiency. In these columns, Prof Peter Hall wrote “(…) governance urges us to consider how best to take decisions, and with which partners”. That observation neatly encapsulates the complexity and the challenge posed by participatory democracy, and reflects the key priority identified by AIVP in Goal 4 of its 2030 Agenda: “Promoting city port dialogue through a renewed governance approach aimed at reconciling the quest for economic and environmental performance with the well-being and aspirations of the population.” We will begin by defining what we understand by “city-port governance”, enabling us to emphasise its complexity while acknowledging its necessity. We will then illustrate our argument with some real-world examples, before concluding with an invitation to consider creating instruments to monitor and measure governance. The concept of “governance” can be defined in a variety of ways. We will use the definition proposed by Patrick Le Galés, political scientist and specialist in urban sociology, who describes it as a “process whereby stakeholders with different reasons and interests coordinate around an objective that they build together.” This coordination can be done through an ad hoc organisation set up specifically for this purpose, or without any particular body. In all cases, however, it is an additional layer of governance, on top of that of the individual organisations of which each stakeholder is a part. The governance structures of the various stakeholders do not attach the same degree of importance to profitability targets, and to the well-being and aspirations of the population. Yet there are cases where the governance of…