Remember the Flicking Tail of the Lizard: how matauranga Maori is being woven into place-based regulatory decisions in Aotearoa. Te Mana Rauhï Taiao, the Environmental Protection Authority, is adopting a new and comprehensive approach to bringing mätauranga – the Mäori knowledge system – into its regulatory practice. This will potentially have an impact on decision-making on environmental protection in your local area.

From Localism Towards Localism: a personal journey of policy discovery. Localism has become a buzzword in New Zealand politics. Though well-established overseas, it is, however, still a relatively new concept here. In this essay, Oliver Hartwich explains how his experience of German localism shaped his policy work in Britain, Australia and now New Zealand.

Localism is about citizens, not town halls. It engages, encourages and empowers citizens and their formal, semi-formal and informal groupings, street level to citywide, including not-for-profits. To be effective and constructive, citizen-centric localism needs to be bottom-up, not just top-down, driven by iterative interaction to fashion thought-through decisions. Digital technology enables this in ways not possible a decade ago. Local councils are the right level of government to develop and refine that interaction and thereby revitalise local – and in time national – democracy.

Sierra Leone is widely cited as a positive example of the contribution that decentralisation can play in post-conflict reconstruction. This article critically examines this viewpoint from a political economy perspective as applied to an understanding of donor-driven institutional reform as well as the nature of hybridity and its impact on the sustainability of decentralisation processes. It examines the devolution of functions, finance, political and administrative powers, as well as its impact on three aspects of human development – primary health, basic education and rural water supply. The article concludes that external pressure can indeed ‘lock-in’ reforms but that a more nuanced, iterative and locally contextualised approach based on sound political economy analysis is needed in order to foster and sustain reform gains.

For over a decade the governments of Kiribati and Tuvalu have adopted decentralisation policies to strengthen the role of local-level authorities in development. This can be seen as a response to both domestic policy drivers and global trends. However, while Kiribati and Tuvalu share a common past and many of the same development issues, the decentralisation process has taken distinct paths in the two countries. This paper takes stock of the Kiribati and Tuvalu experience, drawing on research, country-specific project evaluations and practitioner perspectives. It focuses on local governance at the outer island level and examines three dimensions of the decentralisation process: policy drivers; central-local relations; and integration of traditional and modern institutions of governance.