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Conclusions on Good Governance
public accountant who watches over the efficiency and effectiveness of public programmes. We see such developments at the national level as well as at the EU level. Establishing the effectiveness of policies and programmes often requires a variety of sophisticated evaluation techniques that may also vary within the sector that is being evaluated. Old-fashioned financial accounting or legal scrutiny will not suffice. Audit offices have to establish multidisciplinary teams and interdisciplinary understanding becomes more important. Some of these new roles may also create new dilemmas. Auditors may find it difficult to combine both the traditional accounting role and this new role, in which they have to apply the principle of accountability in the context of good governance. The right to good administration has not developed in isolation. The right to good administration is also the right to good governance in a narrow sense because it is used as a norm by the different powers in the state in relation to the qualification of the administration. Several principles of good governance were already developed in regulations and in codes which are the building blocks for the development of the right to good governance. There were even more developments since the controlling institutions, such as the European Ombudsman, have also developed these principles of good governance in different ways in their assessments of the activities of the administration. In parallel, specific rights such as the right to transparency and the right to participation have been developed.
3. Part III: The Implementation of the Principles of Good Governance In Part III, we described the implementation of the principles of good governance on the national, regional (EU), and international level. The description of the main implementation elements of individual countries and the comparison between countries is based on a study on good governance in the EU member states; several countries outside Europe have also been investigated. After that, the regional level was discussed— the European Union and the Council of Europe were chosen as models as far as it was comparable. The last chapter was about the implementation on the international level. Good governance is part of the modern state not only in Europe, but also in other parts of the world, on both the national and local level. Good governance has a dual nature, comprising both a real (or factual) dimension, and an ideal (or critical) one. In the case studies, a distinction was made between three links of good governance: rule of law, democracy, and institutional. Within each of the three links we distinguished between the following three developments: the general development, the specification, and the intermediate position. For example, in relation to the rule of law dimension: in general development there is a strong focus on legality, and in specific development by the properness and the human rights principles. The intermediate position is a mix of the general and specific development. Within each development we can distinguish between a written development in the constitution, the law, or the regulations, and a development of (un)written principles by case law and/or in the literature. The twenty- eight EU member states were divided into five groups of countries, in which each country separated was studied, in Northern, Western, Southern, and Central Europe, and the United Kingdom and Ireland. Regarding the interpretations of good governance in the member states of the EU and the underlying values (suitability, integrity, and transparency), we concluded that in all EU member states the concept of good governance is used as a norm for the
