In the two decades from 1995 to 2015, Australian local governments experienced a fourfold increase in expenditure. Even more striking though, is that during this same period many local governments were stripped of their water and sewerage functions – so these figures actually underrepresent the real picture. This report proposes a range of suggestions to address the financial sustainability of local government.

This article discusses gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) at the local level in Kerala by studying a village panchayat, the lowest tier of rural local government. GRB of a rudimentary form, known as Women Component Plan (WCP), had been in existence at the local level for the last 20 years as a key feature of participatory planning. The study adopts a fourfold classification of all projects implemented in the panchayat on the basis of their gender friendliness and calculates allocation and expenditure under each of these categories. The data on which the article relies relate to the expenditure incurred under the annual plans rather than budgets, which are based on inflated and unreliable data. The article ends by making some observations based on the data and the overall experience of Kerala in gender budgeting.

Since 1988, Ghana has embarked on a more vigorous agenda of decentralisation where power and resources have been made available to the local governments to realise their own development agenda. This policy decision has engendered more praise and admiration as a boost in the process of consolidating the county's democratic gains. Rather than waiting on the central government for very minimal level of development support, communities in Ghana now had governments (local political administrations) closer to them usually cited in the district capitals. Complains and agitations for enhanced service delivery no longer had to wait for months and in some cases years to be heard as one could now drive to a nearby government administrative body to lodge such complains. Over three decades of implementing Ghana's decentralisation agenda, local level development has not been exactly what the local residents expected. In recent times, there is even more calls for investment and development in communities that what used to exist some 30 years back. There are increased calls for job opportunities in the local areas in the various districts or municipalities; the lack of which compels the teeming youth to move to cities in search of better livelihoods. Whereas successive governments since Ghana's independence have tried to spread developments across the country with the latest attempts at empowering MMDAs to take charge, the gap in local level investments continuous to widen. The MMDAs themselves have failed to create the platforms for local businesses to spring up and thrive.