In most poor countries, basic services in rural areas are less accessible and of lower quality than those in urban settings. In this paper, we investigate the subnational geography of service delivery and its relationship with citizens’ perceptions of their government by analyzing the relationships between service access, satisfaction with services and government, and the distance to urban centers, using data from more than 21,000 survey respondents across 17 African countries. We confirm that access to services and service satisfaction suffer from a spatial gradient. However, distant citizens are less likely than their urban peers to translate service dissatisfaction into discontent with their government; distant citizens have more trust in government and more positive evaluations of both local and national officials. Our findings suggest that increasing responsiveness and accountability to citizens as a means of improving remote rural services may be less effective than promoters of democratic governance and citizen-centered accountability presume.

This Policy Paper demonstrates the importance of institutionalizing risk management in elections. It discusses key terminological and methodological aspects of risk management in order to derive election-specific definitions, and outlines the key ingredients of risk management in elections. It also takes stock of existing electoral risk-management practices, based on the results of a global survey of 87 countries carried out by International IDEA.

Democratic decentralisation through ‘conventional’ institutions of local government is facing increasing challenges, whether from financial pressures, questions of representativeness, difficult central-local relations and from a perhaps growing belief that local government has failed to realise its potential and there may be better ways of achieving societal goals. It is clear there is need to contemplate quite radical change to ensure local government becomes or remains ‘fit for purpose’. This collection of papers illustrates the way in which the role of local government is evolving in different parts of the Commonwealth and provides practical examples of new local government at work. It showcases emerging practice, and highlights success stories from new ways of working and challenges confronting local government in both developed and developing countries. New Century Local Government makes a very valuable contribution to helping understand the changing role of local government, and will ensure that practitioners are up-to-date with the most innovative initiatives in local government planning and administration.

Workforce planning in Tasmania as a whole, and in the local government sector in particular, is essential to meet the needs of communities and deliver a growing, prosperous Tasmania. As the level of government best placed to meet community needs, councils are in a unique position to identify the skills, knowledge and expertise needed to effectively tailor services, generate economic and employment opportunities and support the overall prosperity of their local and regional communities. Planning a future workforce to deliver vital services needs to be clearly linked to local, regional and state-wide priorities. Councils have a key role to plan for their own workforces as part of strategic planning but also play an important role in partnering with a range of local, regional and state level organisations to identify and support conditions for economic growth. Workforce planning brings important benefits to councils and their communities and these guidelines are intended to help local government plan at a local, sub-regional and regional level to support the future growth of a vibrant Tasmanian economy.

This paper looks into the role of non-state actors in enhancing participatory governance and local economic development under the African Local Government Action Forum, with a main theme of: Enhancing Participatory Governance in Local Development; and a sub-theme of Linking participatory governance to local economic development and poverty reduction.