Behind the Good Country Index

On the 2019 index, Uganda does well in the area of international peace and security (42 out 153 countries), world order (52), planet and climate (37) and health and well being (29). What exactly has Uganda done to score highly in these particular categories?

Uganda performs better than many countries in a sufficient number of the 35 indicators to achieve a higher overall ranking. It is easy enough to identify from the website www.good.country which are the individual ranks that push Uganda higher or lower than other countries. But bear in mind that countries can rank high in the Good Country Index as a result of doing less harm as well as doing more good. In the context of the Peace and Security rankings, many countries like Uganda do well mainly because they do relatively little harm outside their own borders, don’t export massive amounts of weapons to other countries, and often because they contribute substantially to UN peacekeeping forces.

Uganda unfortunately scores poorly in the area of science and technology (110 out of 153), prosperity and equality (81) and culture (109). What must the government do to improve in these areas?

Performing better in the Good Country Index would not be, in my view, a very worthwhile aspiration for any country; rather, it is the principle behind the index that really matters. Countries need to find new and imaginative ways of harmonizing the country’s domestic and international responsibilities. It hardly matters whether this behaviour corresponds to a particular dataset or category in the Good Country Index. The important thing is to change the country’s culture of governance from one that has traditionally been fundamentally competitive to one that is fundamentally collaborative and cooperative.

What can we learn from the fact that three of the bottom four (Yemen, Mauritania, Libya and Iraq) on the 2019 index are countries that are currently engulfed in civil strife?

The lesson from these countries is not, of course, that they are in any sense ‘bad’ countries but simply that their internal difficulties—whether this is conflict, poverty, disease, inequality or corruption—takes up all of their resources and energies, so that they are unable to contribute in any significant way to the world outside their own borders. It is hoped that it won’t be too many years before they are able to start thinking about harmonizing their domestic and international responsibilities.

You say that leaders from around the world must realise that they are responsible not only for their own people but, for every man, woman, child and animal on the planet. Unfortunately, there has been an emergence of inward-looking populist leaders around the world. Isn’t this quite a frustrating development?

Not frustrating, exactly. I understand the appeal of nationalism very well, and I certainly don’t think that people who vote for nationalist politicians are mad, bad or stupid. I just happen to think that the world we live in is much more complex than this, and “looking after your own interests” is an over-simplification; it just doesn’t work in the long term. Indeed, it increasingly fails to deliver in the relatively short term too. On the other hand, collaborating and cooperating with other countries isn’t about compromises or self-sacrifice; it’s about enlightened self-interest. Working more imaginatively and courageously with the international community can produce better domestic results, if it is done right. People often frame collaboration between countries as altruism or a moral duty but this misses the point. Of course a head of government is expected to consider his or her own population’s needs first—but the underlying assumption that coming first necessarily means that everyone else must come last is limiting.

How is this brand of collaboration supposed to happen?

Pure “dual mandate” policies are quite hard to find but there are plenty of examples of cooperation and collaboration between countries. In the U.S, for instance, there is the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a government agency that helps American businesses invest in emerging frontier economies. By supporting investment in areas of poverty, famine or war, it promotes stability and creates business opportunities for the U.S. In Australia, the seasonal workers’ programme was designed to support Australian development aid by boosting the incomes of workers from the Pacific region while simultaneously filling chronic farming labour shortages. In Brazil, the Itaipu Dam, one of the world’s largest hydropower projects initiated by Brazil to head off a looming energy crisis is shared between Brazil and Paraguay. It provides 17% of Brazil’s energy needs while in Paraguay it provides 76% of energy needs and has made the country nearly independent of fossil fuel while boosting jobs and development.

What would you say has been the most important achievement of this index so far?

The fact that, almost since the day it first appeared in 2014, millions of people around the world started having new kinds of conversations: instead of asking how well countries were doing, they started asking how much countries were doing. They may not all like the Index or its conclusions, but it produces a different kind of argument, and that’s the point.

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