The Electoral Risk Management Tool (ERMTool) is designed to empower people to ensure peaceful and credible elections. Intended users are electoral management bodies, security sector agencies, civil society and other state and non-state actors. The ERMTool aims to build the user’s capacity to understand, analyze, and mitigate electoral risks. The ERMTool can build users' capacity to understand electoral risk factors, collect and analyze risk data, design prevention and mitigation strategies, and record the results of actions. The tool consists of three integrated parts. A knowledge library describes in detail 36 electoral risk factors, both internal and external to electoral processes. An analytical instruments section allows users to create analytical models specific to a country or election, upload data to generate risk maps and trend charts, and create a register of risks and actions. The prevention module consists of a digital library with approximately 100 action points intended to inspire user in designing strategies to prevent and mitigate electoral risks, including election-related violence, at the different phases of the electoral cycle.

Decentralisation has become an integral part of local government reform programmes in recent years. But how to put these changes into effect? This book explores the reasons for making these changes, and applies recent thinking in change management to the particular challenges facing all those who are seeking to make their local governance systems more responsive. Written by internationally renowned experts from the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham, UK, and advisers at the Commonwealth Secretariat, Managing Change in Local Governance looks at the key drivers for change in local government, and at the factors which those implementing change need to take into account to ensure success. For senior managers in local government, policy makers in ministries of local government, and students and researchers in public administration with an interest in local government issues.

Transparency International’s report ‘Corruption in Local Government: The Mounting Risks’ warns that an unintended consequence of recent changes, such as those made in the Localism Act and the Local Audit and Accountability Act, may be the creation of an enabling environment for corruption. The report notes that experts hold widely different views about the scale and prevalence of corruption in local government, but there was general consensus that recent changes would increase the risk of corruption happening in future. It identifies sixteen recent legislative changes which increase the risks, as well as other trends such as the decline in scrutiny by local press and the move to more private sector out-sourcing. This report includes twenty-two recommendations, including that the Government should conduct a corruption risk assessment and strengthen whistleblowing procedures.

In 2013, Glasgow City Council won £24 million in a competition to become a model for demonstrating smart city technology at scale. Here’s how the city is using the latest technology and open data culture to reinvent itself with greater transparency, responsiveness and as an engine of growth.

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.