This issue of the GSoD In Focus explores the contribution that the Global State of Democracy (GSoD) Indices can make to the review of progress on the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The GSoD Indices can be used to complement the official indicators of the SDGs, to acquire in-depth knowledge on trends in achieving the specific targets of individual SDGs. In this regard, the GSoD Indices can be used to provide data on the SDGs for poverty (SDG 1), hunger (2), health and wellbeing (3), education (4), gender equality (5), inequalities (10), sustainable cities and communities (11), peace, justice and institutions (16), and partnerships for the goals (17), as well as across the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Kenya has long suffered from identity-based politics that discriminates by ethnicity, contributing to divisions in communities and election violence. Devolution was meant to reduce this discrimination – but has it delivered on the promise of greater inclusion, accountability and peace? To help answer this question, Saferworld’s latest research (as part of the Peace Research Partnership) explores how devolution is affecting inclusion and conflict dynamics in Isiolo County, Kenya. The research reveals some encouraging signs of devolution, but also finds that devolution has brought its own profound challenges that undermine inclusive governance and threaten peace – including ethnic divisions and exclusion, gender inequality, corruption and weak accountability.

Decentralization is an effective conflict resolution mechanism widely used in the countries where ethnic conflicts are experienced. However, the success chance of decentralization is highly dependent on country-specific conditions. In the light of existing theoretical considerations, this study explores the use of decentralization as a conflict resolution mechanism on Kurdish Conflict in Turkey. The research question of "To what extent can decentralization be utilized as a conflict resolution mechanism on Kurdish Conflict in Turkey?" is designed to explore the capacity of decentralization to bring peace in Kurdish Conflict through qualitative content analysis and case study approach. The analysis is constructed in the framework of two theoretical concepts, which are decentralization and conflict resolution, in order to obtain a better insight to the role of decentralization on the solution of Kurdish Conflict. Accordingly, the first part of the analysis focuses the benefits of decentralization, which provide legitimacy and effectiveness in the local governance, with an emphasis on the differences between the national and Council of Europe legislation while the second part examines on the capacity of decentralization to answer the triggers of Kurdish Conflict. Thus, it is mainly aimed to identify the possible benefits of an ideal decentralization model to be used for the resolution of Kurdish Conflict with reference to the existing problems which exacerbates the conflict due to the lack of legitimacy and effectiveness in the governance. On the basis of conducted analysis, this thesis reveals that decentralization as a conflict resolution mechanism can be used on Kurdish Conflict as an alternative and peaceful model across security-based measurements when an appropriate design is provided. However, institutional design of decentralization and regional dynamics in the Middle East can be considered as possible threats in terms of the success of an ideal decentralization model.

The Imperative of Good Local Governance is a true state-of-the-art volume in the field of local governance, decentralization and local democracy summarizing a substantial part of the insights from original research in the last decade. It is also a future-looking volume with explicit policy relevance, paving the way for innovative thinking (and acting) on the next phase of development in the field. In a unique way it brings together authoritative contributions from authors that to a large extent have been defining the field for the last decade or more. From a theoretical perspective it is adjoining top–down and bottom–up rationalities, which is further illuminated through a wide variety of key case studies. The case studies are selected for their relevance for the theoretical perspectives offered, as well as for their paradigmatic power in the current global evolution of decentralized policies and politics. The volume concludes that overall, local development and local politics will not go away – it has a huge potential – but also that the field is full of unfulfilled promises, some of which could be remedied through the perspectives revealed in this volume.

In recent years many countries across the world, especially in Africa, have created large numbers of new local administrative units. This trend has largely gone unnoticed in the scholarly community, with no attempts to understand the underlying processes at work. To examine this phenomenon I take the case study of Uganda, one of the more prominent ‘donor darlings’ of the 1990s. Alongside large-scale economic and political reforms Uganda has also experienced a near explosion in the number of districts (the highest level of local government), going from 39 to 79 in less than a decade. I examine six potential reasons why these districts might have been created, and argue, through the use of election results, interviews and other data, that district creation has been primarily a source of patronage in the ongoing need for Museveni to win elections. I conclude with reflections on the relationship between economic and political reforms and patronage in the developing world.