Will Sri Lanka keep the good governance prize?

IT is late September. The World Governance Forum has just announced the 2025 Good Governance Awards. There was no tension before the name of the winner was announced. It had been obvious for months that it would be Sri Lanka. The award is given for improvements in governance over the previous 12 months.

- By Mick Moore

The judges were effusive: “The world has rarely seen such a positive, peaceful transformation in such a short period of time. Previous Sri Lankan governments have been formed through unstable coalitions of elite level political operators intent on using power to make money. They made extensive use of the police for their own narrow purposes, stoked ethnic conflict when convenient, lacked economic strategies, and pushed the economy into an acute foreign exchange crisis and then a debt crisis in early 2022 through sheer incompetence.

“Sri Lanka now has a stable government directed by a single political party that attracted widespread electoral support in successive Presidential, Parliamentary and Local Elections.

The new government so far seems not to have made any major administrative, political or policy errors, or to have been associated with corruption of any kind. It has reaffirmed the agreement that the previous government made with the IMF. Efforts have been made to improve relations with other significant Asian nations.

“Additional government resources have been put into the Aswesuma programme for making cash transfers to the poorest households. Targets for additional tax collection have been met. Foreign investors are showing more interest. A large number of court cases relating to corruption and abuse of power under previous governments have been initiated or unblocked. Elsewhere in the world, other governments that recently have been voted into power have seen their popularity quickly crash. That has not happened in Sri Lanka.”

Success is far from certain