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.

By exploring the legislative and structural elements that shape municipal (local) level government in Canada and local government in Ireland and the UK, this paper will seek to provide an analysis of the most accessible layer of government in each country. It starts with a brief introduction and overview of the Canadian political system. It will then assess the relationship that the municipal government has with its provincial levels counterparts as well as comparing it with the local-central level relationship that exists in Ireland and the more comparable system of multi-layered interaction in the UK. Finally, the paper concludes with a comment section outlining what lessons can be learned and applied as a result of this comparative analysis, as well as identifying the challenges that local government faces more broadly in an ever globalizing political climate.

Why are women underrepresented in elected office? We propose a pilot study that will allow us to design plausibly effective and contextually appropriate interventions aimed at increasing women’s descriptive representation in the 2019 Malawian local council elections. Through the collection of open-ended, qualitative candidate surveys and a conjoint survey experiment to detect and disaggregate voter gender bias, we will ascertain whether and where female candidates face particular barriers in the political recruitment process. The results of this pilot will allow us to design future randomized intervention(s) targeted toward potential and / or existing female candidates to increase candidate entry and electoral success in the 2019 local elections. Here we present four documents pertaining to this project: (1) a general description of the project goals, (2) a pre-analysis plan for the conjoint analysis component of the research, (3) a survey designed for local candidates, and (4) a preliminary survey for citizens containing the conjoint analysis.

This study examines the challenges that threaten one of Africa’s most ambitious experiments in political, administrative and fiscal decentralization. Based on extensive interviews with local government leaders throughout Uganda, the research uncovered a complex interplay of conflicts that impact decision-making effectiveness. The sources of these conflicts center around (a) the impact of national politics on local government as the country approaches the 2011 election, (b) the inability to meet rising citizen demand for services as the tax base of local governments continues to erode, (c) the corrosive impact of social conflicts stemming mostly from poverty and illiteracy complicated by tribal and ethnic differences, and (d) the challenges of developing honest and effective leadership in local government. Can Uganda unravel this web of conflicts to bring meaningful governance to this young nation? Indeed, many countries within the developing world are watching this experiment with a great deal of interest.

It is often claimed that decentralisation is effective for the reduction of poverty due to inherent opportunities for higher popular participation and increased efficiency in public service delivery. This paper is a qualitative assessment of the potential of the Ugandan decentralisation reform for poverty alleviation. The Ugandan government initiated an ambitious decentralisation reform in 1992, which represents an example of full-fledged devolution with the transfer of far-reaching responsibilities to local governments. However, several shortcomings, such as low levels of accountability, insufficient human and financial resources, corruption, patronage, and central resistance to decentralisation, constrain the proper implementation of the reform, putting improvements in participation and efficiency at risk and ultimately jeopardising the intended impact on poverty.