In the IMFG Perspectives Paper (No. 16), Reducing Urban Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Effective Steering Strategies for City Governments, Sara Hughes reviews the unique strategies of three cities leading the charge: Toronto, New York City, and Los Angeles. The paper identifies three strategies that have proven effective: Building and maintaining a broad-based coalition of governmental and non-governmental actors working toward a common goal; Investing in capacity-building, data collection, and education; and Embedding new ideas, financial tools, and standards into local formal and informal decision-making institutions. “Cities are critical climate change actors, and will be for the foreseeable future,” says Hughes. “Given the jurisdictional and financial constraints local governments face, their climate change goals will demand creative partnerships, new tools and systems, and innovative institutional cultures.” This paper is part of a series of IMFG publications and events focusing on cities and climate change.

Democratic decentralisation through ‘conventional’ institutions of local government is facing increasing challenges, whether from financial pressures, questions of representativeness, difficult central-local relations and from a perhaps growing belief that local government has failed to realise its potential and there may be better ways of achieving societal goals. It is clear there is need to contemplate quite radical change to ensure local government becomes or remains ‘fit for purpose’. This collection of papers illustrates the way in which the role of local government is evolving in different parts of the Commonwealth and provides practical examples of new local government at work. It showcases emerging practice, and highlights success stories from new ways of working and challenges confronting local government in both developed and developing countries. New Century Local Government makes a very valuable contribution to helping understand the changing role of local government, and will ensure that practitioners are up-to-date with the most innovative initiatives in local government planning and administration.

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.

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.

The United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) Capacity and Institution Building (CIB) Working Group gather together professional practitioners of local government associations (LGAs) and individual local governments active in international cooperation, with the overall objective to improve the quality, coordination and alignment of their development cooperation interventions.The Working Group is the successor of the CIB Platform, which existed for many years within the former International Union of Local Authorities (IULA) as an informal gathering of staff members of local government associations (LGAs) involved in the field of municipal international cooperation (MIC) and association capacity building (ACB). In addition to information exchange, the CIB Platform undertook specific initiatives such as a World Bank-funded program supporting ACB in several countries. In May 2004, the CIB was integrated into the structures of the newly-founded UCLG organisation, and its membership was expanded to also include staff members of international departments of cities active in international cooperation.