Dr Debra Roberts of eThekwini Municipality, Durban, South Africa, gives the 2016 Barbara Ward Lecture. She called for more to be done to join the dots between the 'New Urban Agenda', being prepared for Habitat III, and the realities of implementation at the local level.

Sustainable urbanisation has moved to the forefront of global debate, research and policy agendas over recent years. Rapid urbanisation throughout China, India and many other low and middle income countries poses new challenges both locally and internationally at a time when urban areas worldwide are threatened by climate/environmental change. This compact book is designed to make a signal contribution to the sustainable urbanisation agenda through authoritative interventions contextualising, assessing and explaining clearly the relevance and importance of three central characteristics of sustainable towns and cities everywhere, namely that they should be accessible, green and fair. These three terms form key tenets of the work of Mistra Urban Futures (MUF), an international research centre on sustainable urbanisation based in Gothenburg, Sweden, and working through transdisciplinary research platforms there, in Greater Manchester (UK), Cape Town (South Africa) and Kisumu (Kenya). Additional platforms are being established in southern Sweden, Asia and Africa.

All activities of local government in South Africa are tightly regulated. There are numerous Acts governing how municipalities need to run operations. Municipalities are challenged by not having effective and efficient systems, tools, and processes to support managing their operations. This ultimately impacts on their ability to being able to effectively and timeously monitor their performance against their annual plans. However, the Sedibeng District Municipality was on a manual system that had a negative impact on its effectiveness and productivity. Sedibeng therefore needed to implement a performance management system that would comply with South African legislative requirements. The municipality went on an open tender and awarded the project to Microsoft partner Vision Activ that specialises in performance management solutions for both the corporate and public sectors.

Despite growing fiscal devolution, efficient and effective intergovernmental transfers – the transfer of money from central to lower levels of government – remain a vital sub-national government financing in developing countries. This research study examines different approaches to intergovernmental transfers (ICTs) in developing countries in the Commonwealth, and assesses their relative strengths and weaknesses. It includes detailed case studies of India and Kenya, lessons learned from IGT systems in Australia and the United Kingdom.

This resource guide provides practical guidance for designing, implementing and evaluating decentralisation reforms and local government practices to ensure they are as effective as possible. It also synthesises and presents current debates on the impact of decentralisation and local government on poverty reduction, service delivery and conflict as well as providing links to cutting-edge research and recent case studies.