This paper summarises key findings from a comprehensive analysis commissioned by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) of the nature of decentralisation in the three East African countries: Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.The specific objectives of the study were: Provide a basic comparative analysis of the forms and processes of decentralisation reforms in the three countries, analyse the specific modalities in the three countries for local service delivery planning and provision within the three sectors of basic education, primary health care and agricultural extension, with a particular emphasis on rural areas. TIDEMAND: Local level service delivery, decentralisation and governance: A comparative study of Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania CJLG May 2009 145, and explore the impact of the specific forms of decentralisation and local level service delivery arrangements in terms of efficiency, accountability (transparency) and democratic process (participation).

Dr Debra Roberts of eThekwini Municipality, Durban, South Africa, gives the 2016 Barbara Ward Lecture. She called for more to be done to join the dots between the 'New Urban Agenda', being prepared for Habitat III, and the realities of implementation at the local level.

Partnerships on Small Island Developing States 2016 - Steering Committee on SIDS Partnerships and UN-DESA, 2016. It has now been two years since the conclusion of the Third International Conference on Small Island Developing States, its groundbreaking outcome document the SAMOA Pathway, and the announcement of over 300 partnerships devoted to the sustainable development of SIDS and the implementation of the SAMOA Pathway. What has worked and what has not worked, for these partnerships? 

This resource guide provides practical guidance for designing, implementing and evaluating decentralisation reforms and local government practices to ensure they are as effective as possible. It also synthesises and presents current debates on the impact of decentralisation and local government on poverty reduction, service delivery and conflict as well as providing links to cutting-edge research and recent case studies.

There has been enormous activity in many countries and by international agencies during the last few decades to develop indicators to measure trends in different attributes of the environment, including indicators for community wellbeing and for sustainable development. Identifying appropriate indicators of economic, social, environmental, cultural and democratic progress across local government boundaries, as a basis for a strategy to enhance community governance, and as part of a national system of sustainability indicators, is a challenging task. An important dimension that is implicit rather than explicit in the current literature is the significance of institutional barriers to developing indicators. Informed by recent New Zealand experiences, our objective in this paper is to examine those institutional barriers within the context of achieving the wider objectives of the New Zealand Local Government Act 2002 to strengthen participatory democracy and community governance, and the ‘whole-of-government’ sustainable development paradigm that underpins it. We argue that the significance of undertaking the task of indicator development in a collaborative and participatory as well as technically satisfactory manner should not be under-estimated.