This Framework outlines key considerations for developing a party’s gender policy, and addresses a variety of thematic areas essential for the advancement of women and promotion of gender equality within political parties, including leadership formation, internal decision making, internal oversight and institutional development, candidate recruitment, party programmes and platform development, outreach to voters, and campaigns.

A trend towards decentralized systems of government and the strengthening of subnational governance is underway globally. However, decentralization has many different meanings, and it is frequently left undefined, even while it is being implemented. This chapter argues that enhanced understanding of concepts and theories can contribute to improved practice during decentralization reforms, and consequently be of benefit both to governments and their citizens. Drawing on the theoretical, research and public administration literature, an approach is adopted that aims to inform decentralization praxis, that is, the interplay of policy, strategy, implementation and review. The material is used as a foundation for presenting a synthesis-framework for praxis that draws attention to: appreciating the theoretical scope of fiscal decentralization; focusing on the country and its goals; considering the design of the system of multi-level governance; focusing on central and local capacity; and adopting flexibility, supported by feedback mechanisms, in the process of decentralization.

This report is a call to action. To realize the Sustainable Development Agenda, there is a pressing need to step up actions to close gender gaps and ensure the full economic empowerment of women. After six months of fact finding, sharing best practices and consulting around the world, the Panel presents its findings about proven and promising actions to address gender gaps and accelerate progress. The High-Level Panel hopes that this report and its ongoing actions and commitments will serve as a call to action to men and women around the world to join together in a global campaign to achieve gender equality and women’s economic empowerment. Empowering women in the economy and closing gender gaps at work are central to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Yet too many gaps persist. How to accelerate progress? Through concrete actions by individuals, businesses, governments, worker and employer organizations, civil society, and multilateral institutions to drive change by addressing systemic constraints. Expanding women’s economic opportunities is central to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. More than two decades after the landmark 1995 United Nations (UN) Conference on Women in Beijing and with the unprecedented consensus on the 2030 Agenda, the global commitment to gender equality has never been stronger. For the first time in history, governments have set a concrete deadline for the elimination of gender inequality—the year 2030. And the potential gains for basic human rights, for human development and for economic growth have never been larger.

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.