During the past decade the Indian state of Kerala has been successfully carrying out democratic decentralization, and has substantially transformed the functions of local governments in line with the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment Acts, which institutionalised the local government system in India. In particular, formulation and implementation of micro plans with community participation has produced remarkable changes in the dynamics of local development and in the public management of local governments. This initiative for participatory planning at the local level taken by the government of Kerala enormously empowered local communities and the different actors in the local political system.

‘Inclusive Growth’ is both the title and the overarching goal of the Eleventh Five Year Plan of India. Economic reforms have led, especially over the last five years or so, not only to accelerated growth but to sustained accelerated growth. Yet, notwithstanding the considerable space given to Panchayati Raj in the Eleventh Plan, there still seems to be some reluctance to accept inclusive governance as the quintessential and unique path to inclusive growth.

This report documents a workshop held on 9–10 December 2016 at the University of Edinburgh hosted by International IDEA, the Edinburgh Centre for Constitutional Law and the Global Justice Academy. The workshop explored the process and design of sub-state constitutions in fragile and conflict-affected settings, and their role in the broader political settlement and/or peacebuilding process.

This article sets out to describe recent approaches to strengthening local government within the framework of the World Bank's Municipal Management Programme (1985–95) in Sri Lanka. The article examines a number of innovations adopted within the programme that are of general relevance to the task of strengthening local government throughout the developing world. The article briefly outlines the background to the present system of local government showing that, whilst existing structures and functions remain relatively weak, a number of important innovations have been introduced to assist with the process of strengthening local resource mobilization and improving performance in service delivery, and enhancing certain aspects of accountability, particularly those areas concerned with the allocation and use of public funds. Since a number of these innovations have wide applicability to the process of local government strengthening and reform it is hoped that this article will demonstrate the practical relevance of certain key innovations for practitioners and policy makers elsewhere.

: This paper describes the work of an alliance formed by three civic organizations in Mumbai to address poverty – the NGO SPARC, the National Slum Dwellers Federation and Mahila Milan, a cooperative representing women’s savings groups. It highlights key features of their work which include: putting the knowledge and capacity of the poor and the savings groups that they form at the core of all their work (with NGOs in a supporting role); keeping politically neutral and negotiating with whoever is in power; driving change through setting precedents (for example, a community-designed and managed toilet, a house design developed collectively by the urban poor that they can build far cheaper than public or private agencies) and using these to negotiate support and changed policies (a strategy that develops new “legal” solutions on the poor’s own terms); a horizontal structure as the Alliance is underpinned by, accountable to and serves thousands of small savings groups formed mostly by poor women; community-to-community exchange visits that root innovation and learning in what urban poor groups do; and urban poor groups undertaking surveys and censuses to produce their own data about “slums” (which official policies lack and need) to help build partnerships with official agencies in ways that strengthen and support their own organizations. The paper notes that these are features shared with urban poor federations and alliances in other countries and it describes the international community exchanges and other links between them. These groups are internationalizing themselves, creating networks of globalization from below. Individually and collectively, they seek to demonstrate to governments (local, regional, national) and international agencies that urban poor groups are more capable than they in poverty reduction, and they also provide these agencies with strong community-based partners through which to do so. They are, or can be, instruments of deep democracy, rooted in local context and able to mediate globalizing forces in ways that benefit the poor. In so doing, both within nations and globally, they are seeking to redefine what governance and governability mean.