The principles are deliberately general. They guide how governance arrangements are understood, explained, and assessed. Applying them effectively requires both description and judgement: a clear description provides the basis for a clear judgement. Each principle includes typical actions you could take to apply it.
- Identify the arrangement, act, decision, or conduct being assessed and the question being asked about it.
- State the relevant requirements, criteria, and evidence.
- Identify the roles, powers, authority, responsibilities, duties, rights, and accountability relationships that the arrangements establish.
- Establish what is required, permitted, or left to judgement, and how the arrangements operate in practice.
- Compare and contrast concepts where the difference affects what people may or must do, what an act accomplishes, or how it should be assessed.
- Examine the relationships between the concepts as well as their separate meanings.
- Keep questions about authority, validity, content, effectiveness, and responsibility distinct so that the grounds support the particular judgement made.
- For acts, decisions, conduct, and other things done, establish who acted, in which capacity, what they did, and the circumstances.
- Consider the applicable arrangement, what was intended, and what followed.
- Consider that the same act may have more than one relevant description, each with different consequences for the assessment.
- Use cases to examine whether a description or distinction captures what matters.
- Consider ordinary applications, uncertain cases, and different ways an arrangement can fail.
- Test what changes when the participants, circumstances, procedure, or subsequent conduct change.
- Consider revising the account where the case reveals an ambiguity, omission, or mistaken connection.
- Explain what the arrangements provide for, how their parts work together, and what they are intended to achieve in the given circumstances.
- Give reasons for assigning particular roles, requirements, and powers and for choosing particular processes.
- Give clear reasons for arrangements that are unusual or unfamiliar.
Plain Governance, developed by Dr Julien Maréchal. © 2026 The Governance Practice.
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