42 - Rules Of The Road Are Best Practices For Good Governance

Summary

One fantastic thing about globalization is the knowledge easily available to us about how best to do things in any specific field.

This can be about managing a company, educating a child, running a kindergaren, organizing a kitchen, growing a garden, or maintaining your car.

This incredible access to information is also a great spring for inspiration. A virtual world for competitive innovations is created. And so, through globe-spanning dynamics, we are able to develop for any chosen field what are called “best practices”, which can be applied by anyone.

The world is turned into a laboratory because ideas put into practice in one part of the world can be judged by other parts for efficacy and suitability, and adopted. In a real sense, technical practices are successively improved through learning from the faults of others anywhere in the world, and in any field.

But what about good governance? Can we learn from one another in how best to govern a country? Just as important a question to ask is, how is compliance to be inculcated in members of society and how do citizens best contribute to good governance?

The relationship between the maker and the follower of rules is dialectical, to be sure. The one responds to the other while the other adjusts his behaviour accordingly.

Needless to say, governments do study each other, but more often than not, whenever they see some promising innovation that seems to work but that may threaten their world view or their power, they can always find an excuse to abstain from importing it.

However, there is one wide area of governance where we see a lot of borrowing, and a lot of streamlining towards what must be called “best practices”. This is in traffic control.

Signage and traffic rules tend not to differentiate between rich and poor, young and old, or man and woman. There is an inherent fairness in that sense. The sign that says No Parking demands that of every driver and every vehicle. A Proton must obey as must a Ferrari.

A No Entry sign is not aimed only at bumiputera drivers and not at non-bumiputera drivers, but at all drivers. Breaking the speed limit is not allowed for any driver. The red light means Stop, as does the amber, and the green basically says Don't Stop.