16 – Fredliga och inkluderande samhällen
Choisir la démocratie: la gestion des ressources naturelles pour les décideurs, bailleurs de fonds, et agents de terrain
Appuyer la démocratie locale pour la gestion des forêts est essentiel à l’amélioration du bien-être des populations. Les autorités forestières au niveau national recrutent souvent des experts qui ne rendent pas compte aux populations vivant en zone forestière. Beaucoup de décisions relatives aux forêts devraient être prises au niveau local. Cette note d’orientation politique propose…
Financing Small and Medium Towns
This research project studied the emerging challenges of small and medium towns in India to improve their finances and provide good services to their inhabitants. The study assesses the ability of various local actors, institutions and processes for decentralised planning and governance. Moreover, the researchers used action research to build the capacities of these local…
Impacting Local Democracy: Capacity Building of Local Governments in Zimbabwe
Local governments are key democratic institutions. In Zimbabwe, they have received considerable capacity development since independence through programmes using different approaches. One of the actors providing capacity building for local governments in Zimbabwe is Sweden, through the Swedish International Centre for Local Democracy (ICLD). Since the turn of the century, capacity building for local governments has proceeded within a context of: Having…
Choosing Democracy: Natural Resource Management for Environmental Policy Makers, Donors and Practitioners
Supporting local democracy in forestry is crucial for enhancing local people’s wellbeing. Most public decisions in forestry remain centralized. Forestry authorities on the national level often hire experts who are not accountable to the to the local people living in and around the forests. Many decisions related to forests should be transferred to the local…
Proceedings of the Workshop: Workshop on Devolution and Local Development in Kenya
On June 26 2014, a workshop was held on devolution and local development at the Nairobi Safari Club in Nairobi, Kenya, to discuss the historic devolution reforms one year after their implementation. The workshop was organised by Agnes Cornell, Aarhus University, and Michelle D’Arcy, Trinity College Dublin, with funding from the Swedish International Centre for…
Strengthening local governance in Africa: Beyond donor-driven approaches
Strengthening local governance in Africa: Beyond donor-driven approaches is the twelfth paper to be published in ICLD’s Working Paper series. In this paper Göran Hydén is critical of the donor-driven approaches to decentralization that pays little attention to political realities in Africa. He argues that the focus during the last decades has been on prescriptive…
Decentralizing for Development: The developmental potential of local autonomy and the limits of politics driven decentralization reforms
Decentralization does not always guarantee democratic development, so how then can a model of decentralization be designed so that it also creates incitements for democratic institutions? In this paper the author tries to find the missing link between decentralization reforms and good governance. The important contribution in this paper is that one needs to take…
Participatory Budgeting and Local Governance
Participatory budgeting has become a much used tool in the process of creating decentralized states, but what are the possibilities and risks of participatory budgeting from a democratic perspective? In this paper the challenge of creating well-functioning systems for participatory budgeting that combines both efficiency and civic participation is examined by studying local participatory budgeting…
Real Democratization in Cambodia? An Empirical Review of the Potential of a Decentralization Reform
How can a war-torn country rise and in the process create democratic institutions? This paper uses Cambodia as an example and tries to identify some of the key dimensions of the Cambodian decentralization reform. The question in focus, how the process of decentralization and local development is played out in a post-conflict country is thoroughly…
Citizen Engagement, Deliberative Spaces and the Consolidation of a Post-Authoritarian Democracy: The Case of Indonesia
Is there a correlation of strong civil society organizations taking part in a decentralization process and the possibilities that this process will result in a strong deliberative democracy and a well-functioning local government? By presenting different examples of how local CSO:s in post-authoritarian Indonesia engage with the government, the author argues that there has been…