Future of governance workshop summary

Abstract This paper presents the results of a workshop on the future of governance held at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The participants were broken into five groups based on different perspectives on governance: local, state, federal, international, and courts. Each group developed a definition of good governance, assessed trends impacting their conception of good governance, developed future scenarios, and tested the scenarios against six wildcards. Good governance is characterized by transparency, accountability, representativeness, and effectiveness. Unfortunately, most trends are negatively impacting good governance, with advanced in information technology being the lone exception. World governments face a catch-22 situation because in order to deal with these negative trends they need to improve in all aspects.