Beirut Explosion and Cedre Implementation: The Last Opportunity for Effective Corporate and Public Governance

Abstract

In any nation across the world, effective governance involves improving the lives of all, providing value for new generations, consistent allocation of duties and functions, accountable decisions, providing quality of information, transparency and responsibility, good performance, a strong legal system, and above all developing sustainability on all levels. Governance is rooted and established based on the collaboration and coordination among nation’s governments, organizations, and people. The sluggishness in setting such governance goals as well as the incapability of many governments, like the Lebanese one, to develop and execute adequate legislative and institutional initiatives coupled with the absence of corporate governance knowledge, given that organizations remain connected to their elderly conventional method to manage their businesses that are based on nepotism, corruption legislation, and sectarian distribution, represent a crucial challenge for any reform and good governance endeavor. This paper aims to approach the need for Lebanon to reconsider new governance strategy and organizational and institutional reforms, especially, in conjunction with the severe economic crisis facing the country, the explosion of the port of Beirut on August 4, 2020, and the awaiting implementation of CEDRE project. The analysis revealed that moving to a new perspective in a complicated social and political environment, like Lebanon, involves multiple aspects. As a result, an in-depth implementation of a New Lebanese Public Governance in Lebanon along with political stabilization must lead to a progressive structural administrative reform and change which will also contribute to boosting confidence with the international community and speed up the international financial donation and support that will help Lebanon to heal its wounds and rise again. The defiance is to figure out if this could be another lost opportunity.