This paper provides an overview of the efforts of successive Zambian governments to transform and institutionalise democratic local governance, and to come to grips with the socio-economic development challenges facing the country. It assesses the progress and challenges that governments are facing in their efforts to transform local government into democratic, developmental local governance.

The chairperson of the parliamentary Portfolio Committee on local government recently described local government in South Africa as “a chicken whose legs have been tied for too long”. In other words, even when the fetters that bind the chicken’s legs are loosed, it remains at a loss for what to do with its newfound freedom (Tsenoli 2007). This descriptive analogy ostensibly refers to the failure of local government to harness its newfound power in post-apartheid South Africa and to claim its rightful position as the driver of development at the local level, and instigator of bottom-up growth and progress, which is meant to shape and transform society in the new South Africa.

Tanzania has embarked on several radical measures to restructure its economy and governance structures, including local governments. For more than four decades, Tanzania has been striving relentlessly for effective decentralisation measures, yet the progress has been slow. The country has passed through several phases of decentralisation, with each phase inheriting some criticised characteristics that have been difficult to dismantle in the successive phases. For example, previously recognised mistakes have continued to block any attempts to diverge from the direction set by the Ujamaa policies. It is argued here that various attempts at decentralisation by the central government since the 1960s in Tanzania have fallen short of the government’s intentions to establish effective local governance. This being the case, two important questions prevail: Why has Tanzania made little progress towards effective decentralisation, despite various attempts to devolve powers from the centre? Why has Tanzania not fully decentralised, as echoed in the policy paper on Decentralisation-by-Devolution (D-by-D)? There have been a number of explanations for this retardation along the path to decentralisation. This article reflects upon the tenability of path dependency theory which posits that the longer an institution has been in place, the more resilient it is to change.

Politics-administration interface is perceived as the heart of practice of public administration and aims at fostering relationships between administrators on one hand and political leaders and the public on another hand. The interface is the direct opposite of the dichotomy and advocates for a complementary model to be adopted where both politicians and administrators work hand in hand. Woodrow Wilson, widely acknowledged as the founder of Public Administration as an academic discipline, famously asserted that proper administrative questions were not political questions, meaning political questions are different from administrative questions. In his view, politics was outside the purview of public administration. However, it can be argued that politics cannot be separated from public administration because one needs the other. The findings indicate that politics do play an important role in public administration of the country however; the problem starts when the discipline of public administration tries to separate the two. The academic writings try to separate politics from administration nevertheless; it may be possible in writing but difficult in practice. Hence the paper seeks to probe the effects that politics has on public administration specifically in South African public administration. The political leadership in the South African context contributes to the effectiveness of public administration in the country. The paper seeks to analyse the benefits or rather seeks to look at how the political leadership contributes or affect running of public administration. Furthermore, the relationship between politicians and administrators at the local level is the point of view. A comprehensive literature survey or review in the study was the most important research method to gather relevant data that supports the study. Thus, recommendations are that, since politics cannot be separated from administration in practice, the relationship between political leadership and public administration should be strengthened.

The Imperative of Good Local Governance is a true state-of-the-art volume in the field of local governance, decentralization and local democracy summarizing a substantial part of the insights from original research in the last decade. It is also a future-looking volume with explicit policy relevance, paving the way for innovative thinking (and acting) on the next phase of development in the field. In a unique way it brings together authoritative contributions from authors that to a large extent have been defining the field for the last decade or more. From a theoretical perspective it is adjoining top–down and bottom–up rationalities, which is further illuminated through a wide variety of key case studies. The case studies are selected for their relevance for the theoretical perspectives offered, as well as for their paradigmatic power in the current global evolution of decentralized policies and politics. The volume concludes that overall, local development and local politics will not go away – it has a huge potential – but also that the field is full of unfulfilled promises, some of which could be remedied through the perspectives revealed in this volume.