I examine decentralization through the lens of the local dynamics it unleashed in Bangladesh. I argue that the national effects of decentralization are largely the sum of its local-level effects. Hence to understand decentralization we must first understand how local government works. This implies analysing not only decentralization, but also democracy, from the bottom up. I present a model of local government responsiveness as the product of political openness and substantive competition. The quality of politics, in turn, emerges endogenously as a joint product of the lobbying and political engagement of local firms/interests, and the organizational density and ability of civil society. I then test these ideas using qualitative data from Bangladesh. The evidence shows that civic organizations worked with NGOs and local governments to effect transformative change from the grassroots upwards – not just to public budgets and outputs, but to the underlying behaviours and ideas that underpin social development. In the aggregate, these effects were powerful. The result, key development indicators show, is Bangladesh leap-frogging past much wealthier India between 1990 and 2015.

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 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.

Integrating Amartya Sen's approach with the literature on place-based territorial development processes, this book recognises the interplay between the evolution of local development systems and the expansion of individual and collective capabilities.

Everyone seems to want data or more data. Data that helps target the 'right' people with the 'right' things. Data on the billions who suffer deprivations as legitimation for the entire aid and development business. Data to measure and monitor the global goals and targets that governments have agreed to (or hopefully will agree to within the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There is also an enthusiasm for mining existing datasets. All this was highlighted by A World That Counts, a report prepared at the request of the UN Secretary General. This suggests that the data revolution can be a revolution for equality.