Uganda embarked in 1993 on radical decentralization, among other reasons, to enhance local governance and local democracy. The major focus of the decentralization policy was on empowering citizens to participate in decisions that affect their localities. This issue will be examined based on two major themes of the twelve principles of the Commonwealth’s ‘Aberdeen Agenda’ for local democracy – the enabling environment and participation. However, the paper argues that Uganda’s devolutionary decentralization can only foster local governance and local democracy if it is properly conceptualised, the facilitating conditions are given careful attention, and the institutional framework is sufficiently elaborate and effective to enable it to achieve its intended objectives. Short of these measures, the gap between intent and reality might be so great as to disable the decentralization policy from achieving real local governance and local democracy.

This issue of the GSoD In Focus explores the contribution that the Global State of Democracy (GSoD) Indices can make to the review of progress on the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The GSoD Indices can be used to complement the official indicators of the SDGs, to acquire in-depth knowledge on trends in achieving the specific targets of individual SDGs. In this regard, the GSoD Indices can be used to provide data on the SDGs for poverty (SDG 1), hunger (2), health and wellbeing (3), education (4), gender equality (5), inequalities (10), sustainable cities and communities (11), peace, justice and institutions (16), and partnerships for the goals (17), as well as across the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

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.

In recent years many countries across the world, especially in Africa, have created large numbers of new local administrative units. This trend has largely gone unnoticed in the scholarly community, with no attempts to understand the underlying processes at work. To examine this phenomenon I take the case study of Uganda, one of the more prominent ‘donor darlings’ of the 1990s. Alongside large-scale economic and political reforms Uganda has also experienced a near explosion in the number of districts (the highest level of local government), going from 39 to 79 in less than a decade. I examine six potential reasons why these districts might have been created, and argue, through the use of election results, interviews and other data, that district creation has been primarily a source of patronage in the ongoing need for Museveni to win elections. I conclude with reflections on the relationship between economic and political reforms and patronage in the developing world.

Decentralization - an essential pillar of institutional reform - is of critical importance in developing countries, particularly in regard to democratization, effective development, and good governance. Uganda, since 1986 and the start of decentralization measures under Yoweri Museveni and the National Resistance Movement, has represented one of the most serious commitments in Sub-Saharan Africa. With the benefit of extensive fieldwork, Fumihiko Saito demonstrates how conflict resolution, information dissemination, and encouragement of the many and varied stakeholders to form partnerships are critical to successfully bringing services "closer to the people. Decentralization and Development Partnerships: Lessons from Uganda goes beyond theory to compare academic assumptions to the reality of decentralization implementation in modern Uganda. Although the process is by no means free of difficulties, Saito concludes that a "win-win" outcome is a real possibility.