The State of Bangladesh Governance

Chapter 1

Governance Quality: WGI, CPI, and International Rankings

Bangladesh sits in the bottom quartile of the World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators across all six dimensions. The composite percentile of 22.5 (out of 100, where 50 is the global median) has not improved in any sustained way over fifteen years. GDP growth averaged 4.2% in 2024, down from the 6-7% range of the 2015-2022 period, but even at its peak the gap between economic performance and institutional quality was widening as Bangladesh approached LDC graduation. That graduation, scheduled for 24 November 2026, will remove trade preferences and concessional financing, turning governance quality from a soft development metric into a hard economic constraint.

WGI Dimensions

Government effectiveness scores 26.0, regulatory quality 22.0, rule of law 27.0, and control of corruption 17.0 (all percentile ranks, WB WGI 2022). These figures reflect data collected through 2021-2022; no WGI vintage incorporating post-July 2024 transition conditions is yet published. The corruption dimension converges with Transparency International's CPI: Bangladesh scored 24/100 in CPI 2025 (published January 2026), ranking 150th of 180, only one point above its 2024 nadir of 23. Weak contract enforcement and the judiciary's 4.7 million case backlog are the binding constraints for private investment.

Voice and accountability scores 28.0. The RSF Press Freedom Index ranks Bangladesh 165 globally (2024 edition). Political stability at 15.0 remains the lowest of the six dimensions, reflecting costs imposed by regime transitions, mass protest movements, and three years of politically driven judicial and administrative disruption following the July 2024 uprising.

The CPI 2025 Reading and Its Limits

The one-point CPI improvement from 23 (2024) to 24 (2025) is within the margin of measurement error and reflects perceptions collected primarily in mid-2025, before the BNP government had been in office. Transparency International Bangladesh noted that the improvement reflects the fall of the prior kleptocratic administration rather than structural anti-corruption reform. The CPI will be a more meaningful signal once BNP governance is fully captured in the 2026 release (due January 2027). The World Bank's B-READY 2025 framework, which replaces the discontinued Doing Business index, provides a complementary assessment of Bangladesh's regulatory environment; earlier Doing Business data (last published 2020) placed Bangladesh 168 of 190 economies with startup requiring 19.5 days.

Chapter 2

Civil Service and Institutional Capacity

Bangladesh maintains approximately 1,400,000.0 civil servants (MoPA) within a system designed during the colonial era and modified incrementally since independence. At roughly 8 per 1,000 citizens the public sector is lean by international standards, but misallocated: too many generalists in administrative roles, too few specialists in technical ones. The WGI government effectiveness score of 26.0 captures the downstream result. The BNP manifesto pledged to strengthen the Public Service Commission and establish a public administration free from politicization; those commitments remain at the pledge stage as of May 2026.

Merit vs. Patronage

The Bangladesh Civil Service (BCS) examination is formally competitive, but political considerations shape postings, transfers, and promotions. Officers aligned with the ruling party receive favorable placements; those perceived as opposition-sympathetic face punitive transfers. This pattern predates BNP and is structural: it will persist unless the posting authority is shifted from the ministry to a genuinely independent Civil Service Commission with statutory protections. Tarique Rahman's stated priority of law and order as item one in his 180-day plan implicitly depends on depoliticizing the police and administration, but no concrete Civil Service Commission bill has been introduced.

Lateral Entry and Specialization

Bangladesh has no systematic mechanism for bringing domain expertise from outside the career bureaucracy. India's experiments with lateral entry at joint secretary level offer a model. Critical sectors where specialist gaps are acute include digital governance (UN e-gov rank 100), trade negotiation for post-LDC market access, climate adaptation finance, and financial sector regulation. The 28 major regulatory bodies operate with varying degrees of independence, often with overlapping mandates and insufficient technical capacity. Regulatory quality at 22.0 percentile is a direct consequence.

Training and Compensation

The Bangladesh Public Administration Training Centre (BPATC) provides foundational training, but mid-career professional development is sporadic. Annual confidential reports (ACRs) remain the primary performance instrument: formulaic, backward-looking, and disconnected from service delivery outcomes. Public sector compensation, despite the 2015 pay revision, remains uncompetitive with NGO and private sector equivalents for technical professionals, sustaining brain drain from government to international organizations and the private sector. An outcome-linked pay framework tied to service delivery metrics is the most direct route to improving effectiveness scores.

Chapter 3

Local Government and Decentralization

Bangladesh's three-tier local government structure comprises 64 districts (zilas), 495 upazilas, and 4,571.0 union parishads (LGRD Division). Despite constitutional recognition in Articles 59 and 60, local government institutions function primarily as administrative extensions of central government rather than as autonomous governance units. The structure is administrative deconcentration, not genuine decentralization.

Fiscal Devolution

Union parishads collect less than 5% of the revenue they spend, depending almost entirely on central government block grants. This fiscal dependence severs local accountability: parishad chairs answer to the national administration that controls funding, not to the constituents who elect them. Bangladesh allocates less than 10% of its national budget to local government, against 25-30% in decentralized economies such as the Philippines and Indonesia. The WGI voice and accountability score of 28.0 partially reflects this gap between formal democratic structure and substantive local power.

Capacity Constraints

Most union parishads operate with a secretary and a few support staff, no professional planning capacity, and inadequate infrastructure. Upazila parishads, the middle tier, have somewhat greater capacity but remain heavily dependent on line ministry officials who report vertically to Dhaka rather than horizontally to elected local representatives. This means local government capacity improvements, absent fiscal devolution and genuine staff authority, are incremental at best.

Land Administration

The most direct governance interface for most Bangladeshis, land titling and mutation processes are plagued by corruption, delays, and disputes. An estimated 60-70% of civil litigation relates to land, consuming judicial resources and deepening the 4.7 million case court backlog. Digital land records and survey modernization are underway but proceeding slowly across districts. Land administration reform, including digital mutation, transparent dispute resolution, and a national land information system, is the single highest-impact governance intervention for ordinary citizens.

Chapter 4

Judiciary and Rule of Law

The judiciary carries approximately 4.7 million pending cases (Supreme Court annual report). At current disposal rates, clearing the backlog would take decades. This is not a capacity problem alone; it is a structural one: the mixture of under-resourced district courts, case-filing incentives that favor delay, and limited use of alternative mechanisms keeps the system in chronic overload. The WGI rule of law score of 27.0 and contract enforcement weakness are direct outputs of this failure.

Case Backlog and Commercial Justice

Commercial dispute resolution is the most investment-critical dimension. The High Court Division carries tens of thousands of pending writ petitions; subordinate courts in districts and upazilas carry the bulk of the caseload. Criminal cases languish for years, with undertrial detainees constituting a significant share of the prison population. The human cost is acute: families caught in land disputes, businesses unable to enforce contracts, and citizens denied timely justice. Slow enforcement raises the cost of doing business and contributes to FDI at 0.69% of GDP (UNCTAD/WB 2023).

Anti-Corruption Commission Under BNP

The ACC files approximately 850 cases annually (ACC annual report), but its effectiveness has historically been undermined by political selectivity. Under the BNP government, the ACC has moved on several high-profile cases from the Hasina era. A joint investigation team comprising the ACC, Criminal Investigation Department, Central Intelligence Cell, and customs intelligence has filed cases in domestic courts relating to the S Alam Group and Beximco, while four international law firms have been appointed to trace overseas assets. Mutual legal assistance requests have been sent to the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, Jersey, and Singapore (S Alam), and to the United Kingdom and UAE (Beximco). The government estimates S Alam-linked capital flight at close to $10 billion. Transparency International Bangladesh, while welcoming the prosecutorial activity, has cautioned that the ACC must demonstrate independence from the new executive, not merely prosecute the previous government's allies. The contrast with Hong Kong's ICAC and Indonesia's KPK (peak conviction rate above 95% during 2004-2019) remains instructive: institutional independence, not political will, produces durable anti-corruption outcomes.

Parliamentary Oversight

Bangladesh Parliament operates 50 standing committees. Their oversight function remains weak: committee hearings lack the investigative depth, public transparency, and follow-up enforcement that effective legislative oversight requires. Chairs are typically allocated by party loyalty rather than subject expertise; opposition participation has historically been marginalized. A parliamentary reform package that mandates cross-party committee chairs and public evidence sessions would materially improve accountability without constitutional amendment.

Right to Information and Alternative Dispute Resolution

The RTI Act 2009 generates approximately 12,000.0 requests annually (Information Commission), a figure that reflects low public awareness and limited institutional responsiveness. India's RTI Act processes over 6 million requests annually. Strengthening RTI implementation, including mandatory proactive disclosure and penalties for non-compliance, is a low-cost, high-impact transparency intervention. Village courts and mediation mechanisms for ADR exist but are underutilized; scaling ADR could divert millions of minor civil and family cases from the formal court system.

Chapter 5

Reform Roadmap: Digital Governance, Regulatory Quality, and Anti-Corruption

The BNP government sworn in on 17 February 2026 enters office with a zero-tolerance corruption pledge and a 180-day plan that names law and order as priority one. The reform agenda, if implemented, falls into four pillars: digital governance, regulatory quality, anti-corruption architecture, and institutional capacity building. Transparency International Bangladesh has published a detailed implementation scorecard and flagged that the government has so far not incorporated the anti-corruption recommendations of the interim government's Corruption Investigation Commission. The gap between declaration and implementation is the central governance risk of 2026.

Digital Governance

Bangladesh's UN E-Government rank of 100 out of 193 (EGDI 0.6570, UN DESA 2024) places it in the middle tier among developing countries. The National Portal (a2i) has achieved genuine wins in front-end service delivery, but back-end government processes remain largely paper-based. Key priorities: expanding e-GP beyond the current 65% coverage to local government and state-owned enterprises (where corruption risk is highest), enacting a comprehensive data protection law (the draft Data Protection Act remains unpassed), and building interoperable government data infrastructure to support evidence-based policymaking.

Regulatory Quality

The regulatory quality score of 22.0 reflects an environment where businesses face burdensome compliance requirements, unpredictable enforcement, and no systematic regulatory impact assessment. A credible regulatory reform program requires: mandatory cost-benefit analysis for new regulations, sunset clauses for outdated rules, a central regulatory oversight body with independence from line ministries, and a one-in-one-out principle for new compliance burdens. The B-READY 2025 framework provides a new benchmark tool; Bangladesh should commission a B-READY-aligned regulatory audit as a baseline for reform tracking.

Anti-Corruption Architecture

Strengthening the ACC requires genuine institutional independence: appointment of commissioners through a transparent, merit-based process with parliamentary confirmation; operational autonomy in investigation and prosecution free from executive direction; and protection through a strengthened legal framework. The S Alam and Beximco asset recovery cases, while welcome, test a specific model: prosecuting the previous government's oligarchs. The harder test is whether the ACC will investigate politically connected individuals from the current government. Complementary measures include: mandatory asset declarations for all public officials with independent verification, whistleblower protection legislation, and beneficial ownership transparency for government contractors. A CPI improvement from 24 to 35+ within five years is achievable but requires structural changes, not enforcement selectivity.

Sequencing and Targets

Governance reform must be sequenced with political economy constraints in mind. Immediate priorities through 2026 include: Civil Service Commission independence legislation, ACC commissioner appointment reform, and court automation rollout in district courts. Medium-term reforms through 2028 should target fiscal devolution (raising local government's share of the national budget from under 10% to 15%), land administration digitization across all 64 districts, and B-READY-aligned regulatory quality improvement. Long-term transformation through 2030 targets halving the 4.7 million case backlog, full e-GP coverage, and a CPI above 35. LDC graduation on 24 November 2026 is the forcing function: governance improvements must be credible enough to support Bangladesh's pitch for EU GSP+ status and OECD development finance.

Policy Implications

Toward Accountable and Effective Governance

The analysis across five chapters maps a governance ecosystem weak across every dimension: institutional capacity, local autonomy, judicial effectiveness, corruption control, and digital readiness. The BNP government's first three months show selective anti-corruption action and a stated commitment to reform, but structural changes to civil service, local government finance, and judicial architecture remain pending. The following five recommendations are ordered by structural impact and political feasibility.

1. Civil service reform. Establish merit-based promotion tied to measurable performance indicators. Shift posting authority to a statutorily independent Civil Service Commission. Introduce lateral entry for specialist positions in digital governance, climate finance, and trade negotiation. Modernize the 2015 pay scale to retain technical talent. The 1,400,000.0-strong civil service (MoPA) must evolve from a colonial-era administrative apparatus to a results-oriented public service.
2. Genuine fiscal devolution. Raise local government's share of the national budget from under 10% to 15% over three years, using formula-based allocations tied to service delivery outcomes. Build local revenue capacity through reformed property and holding taxes. Establish community-based accountability mechanisms. The 4,571.0 union parishads (LGRD Division) must become genuine units of self-governance, not hollow administrative extensions.
3. Judiciary modernization. Set a 5-year target to halve the 4.7 million case backlog (Supreme Court annual report) through: full court automation (e-filing, virtual hearings, automated scheduling), expanded ADR and village courts, specialized commercial courts in Dhaka and Chittagong, and additional judicial appointments benchmarked to caseload per judge norms. Transparent appointment processes for higher judiciary positions would strengthen independence and public confidence.
4. ACC independence and asset recovery. Restructure commissioner appointments through parliamentary confirmation rather than executive nomination. Provide operational and budgetary autonomy. Legislate whistleblower protection and mandatory asset declarations with independent verification. Sustain and expand the S Alam and Beximco international asset recovery proceedings. Target CPI improvement from 24 to 35+ within five years. The test of institutional independence is prosecution of the current government's allies, not only the previous government's.
5. Digital governance acceleration. Extend e-GP to 100% of public procurement (currently 65% at central government level, CPTU data). Pass the Data Protection Act. Digitize land records in all 64 districts with a dispute-resolution portal. Build interoperable government data infrastructure. Use the B-READY 2025 framework as the tracking benchmark for regulatory quality improvement.