Governments play a significant role in sustainability programs and in foreign development assistance. These roles are often controversial, in regard to the manner of their involvement, the extent of their involvement, and even whether they should be involved at all.

Governments and development

Governments play a very important role in development, spending large sums on development projects. This is the subject of conflicting calls to:

• Greatly increase the level of foreign aid (e.g. Jeffrey Sachs, Bono)
• Eliminate subsidies as these disempower the recipients - notably by the Indian development consultants Kamal Kar (who developed Community-led Total Sanitation or CLTS) and Dipankar Chakraborti (water expert, early whistleblower on arsenic in groundwater in Bangladesh and India.)
• End tied aid, where aid must be spent on products and services from the donor country
• End development aid and use other means to help development instead (e.g. Dambisa Moyo; William Easterly stops short of this)
• Rethink the aid process - recognize that most aid is not effective or even damaging, and work out how to fix it (e.g. Paul Collier, William Easterly)

Open government

Open government involves:

• Open content, using open licenses or public domain.
• Open data
• Transparency
• Open Source Government

Forms of government

Several forms of government exist, including Democracies, Anarchies, Anocracies, Kritarchies, Republics, Theocracies, Monarchies, Oligarchies, Authoritarian forms of government

One idea that builds further on a council to govern a country has been proposed at this article.

See also

• Subsidies and grants
• Governments and knowledge sharing
• Portal:Governments and sustainability
• Portal:Government supported development programs

Further reading

• Five Reasons Why Libertarians Shouldn't Hate Government. Plus, Five Big Projects That Went Well and Five That Were Disasters - Reason.com 13 Jan 2010.
• Development as Freedom^W by Amartya Sen^W discusses and compares the efficacy of government, notably comparing China and Kerala.