This Local Integrity System (LIS) Assessment is one of five pilots undertaken by Transparency International (TI) national chapters from Africa, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East to test the relevance and applicability of the LIS Assessment approach in different national and local contexts. The pilots took place between September and December 2013. In Kenya, the assesment was conducted in Kwale and Kisumu Counties between September and December 2013.

In 1997 Local Government Studies published an article (Asquith, 1997) which assessed the perceptions of managerial and political elites in eight English local authorities towards change management against the background of Conservative Governments' reform agendas. The article argued that the authorities could be placed on a continuum depending on their state of organisational evolution, with some authorities being better equipped to manage change than others. During 2005 the authorities were revisited to ascertain how they had adapted to deal with the reforming Blair Governments since 1997. What this article shows is that characteristics evidenced in the original work in the authority deemed to have evolved the most, were present in those authorities revisited.

Social accountability is considered as one strategy of deepening Ghana’s decentralised development administration. Some attempts have been made to empower local people to demand transparency and accountability from the local government system as required by law. The purpose of this paper was to assess the effectiveness of these attempts in 14 Metropolitan and Municipal Assembles. The data for the analyses were sought through key informant interviews with core Assembly staff, and focus group discussions with selected Assembly Members. The analyses revealed that the legal provisions made room for social accountability but the weak capacity of Assembly Members in terms of resources, the understanding of legislative provisions, and the acceptability of the concept challenged its implementation. It is thus recommended that service provision in local communities should have capacity-building components that promote social accountability.

This paper, based on a desk study, adopts a path-dependent perspective to explore how local government authorities in Ghana have attempted to institutionalise performance management at the organisational level. It questions the existing performance diagnostic framework that is used to assess local government authorities by arguing that any attempt to consolidate the prevailing ‘performance assessment regime’ ought to re-examine previous government initiatives that had in-built mechanisms for assessing local government performance. The prevailing system, despite its attempt to empower local authorities further promotes central government manipulation of local government administration. The paper concludes that performance assessment of local governments in Ghana will remain ineffective until local government councils genuinely serve local communities and their citizens by achieving goals and objectives that are consistent with the needs and aspirations of the latter rather than relying on annual performance assessments designed to ignore the opinions of citizens.

The paper examines capacity building in Zimbabwe’s Rural District Councils (RDCs) from 1994 to 2001 and the resultant erosion of capacity during Zimbabwe’s protracted political and economic crisis that followed. It is prudent to ask whether there was ‘capacity building’ or ‘capacity erosion’. The paper establishes that the capacity building was piecemeal and that there was no genuine desire to build capacity, but that Councils embarked on these programmes to access the funding that came with the programmes. In some cases, the design of the Rural District Councils’ Capacity Building Programme (RDCCBP) was too rigid, derailed by the central government’s half-hearted attempts towards decentralisation, and failed to allow RDCs to learn-by-doing. Because of Zimbabwe’s politico-economic crisis, national level politicians were peremptory in their demands for better RDC results and an opportunity to learn was lost. The plethora of other rural development projects coupled with the project-based approach of the RDCCBP condemned capacity building efforts to the rigidities of projects and programmes, yet capacity building is better perceived as a continuous process with experiential learning. The paper concludes by arguing that capacity building efforts in RDCs were largely unsuccessful, and were derailed by the ‘Zimbabwe crisis’; the result can only be described as ‘capacity building that never was’. Internal efforts by RDCs to build their own capacity are more sustainable than efforts prompted by the ‘carrot and stick’ approach of external actors, such as central government (in a bid to ‘hive off’ responsibilities) and funding agencies.