Crises have opened avenues to change and showed the way to progress, in government and governance, that benefited peoples. Examples abound. Crises have proved beneficial whenever peoples and governments have taken pains to explore the lessons they may yield and listen to the messages that come through loud and clear. My goal in this Address is to open a debate, which may shed light on the nature of the ongoing crisis and make sense of the direction which we, in the UNDP, other organizations and governments at large would be advised to follow.

The paper will suggest that, at the heart of the problem, lies a failed model of governance. It’s called the business model or market model of governance because it sought to impose, on government, the methods but also the values and standards of private enterprise. It rested on the assumption that government, by definition, is less efficient than business because it “is insulated from the rigours of the market place” (S. Ellington 2011:139) and overly protected for its own good. This arbitrary assumption started an onslaught on government, which still goes strong, in some places. The attack was mostly directed against the Administrative State, which saw the light of the day during the Great Depression and prospered in the trail of post-war Reconstruction, Decolonisation and the Development Efforts, during the 1950s and 1960s.