Making Local Governance Inclusive for the 'Leave No One Behind' Agenda

A major aim of decentralised governance is to bring government closer to people and, in the process, deliver services in an equitable and efficient manner, in accordance with the expressed needs of citizens. The fact that government is located within smaller units with better information and a larger number of local representatives can lead to the greater inclusion of marginalised groups in decision-making and in accessing quality services. Viewed from this perspective, decentralisation is usually seen as a positive reform. However, the reform in and of itself is essentially value neutral – not only can it have both positive and negative effects, but its impact is conditioned by the nature of the reform, and the ways in which it is implemented. Decentralisation reforms that are not explicitly designed to include marginalised populations—women, minorities, and the poor—can lead to worsened service delivery and representation outcomes for these groups (Faguet 2014). Its impact in terms of the inclusion of the most vulnerable is dependent on many of the same constraints that affect higher tiers of government – availability of resources, capacity, and very importantly, political will. In other words, inclusive governance is not synonymous with decentralised governance. Decentralisation reforms will only achieve inclusive governance if they explicitly set out to do so

Informal Local Governance Institutions: What They Do and Why They Matter

There is growing scholarly and policy awareness of the fact that public authority is rarely exercised only by the state. In fact, a host of actors and institutions – some visible and recognised, others invisible and less obvious – exercise authority over and regulate the everyday life of local populations across large parts of the world, with important implications for public policy. While we recognise more and more that such actors and institutions take on various governance-related functions within local communities, our understanding of the role that they play is fairly limited and, possibly because of this, our discomfort with them is often fairly high. This paper represents an effort to deal with this gap. It is led by a central puzzle – as the incidence of electoral democracy has increased across the world, we would expect to see an accompanying formalisation of governance through the consolidation of public authority within institutions of the state. This has not happened. Instead, we find that the role and importance of informal local institutions that take on governance functions has increased and that they are a central component of ‘multicentric’ governance in large parts of the world. Why is this so and how do these informal institutions sustain and perpetuate the local public authority that they exercise across multiple domains? I provide a number of explanations for the persistence of such institutions in large parts of South Asia, Africa and the Western Balkans. Our interest in these informal local institutions is practical and policy-oriented, and I use empirical evidence from a decade of primary research in South Asia and the Western Balkans to draw a boundary around a set of institutions that we call informal local governance institutions (ILGIs)

Action on Under-Nutrition in Pakistan: Opportunities and Barriers

Undernutrition rates in Pakistan have remained unchanged for over half a century. Success in tackling under-nutrition relies on cross-sectoral action across health, food, agriculture, poverty, water and sanitation. A recent positive momentum has involved loose inter-sector coalitions in the provinces supported by international development partners. However, weak understanding of nutrition, low ownership, minimal allocations, siloed working of sectors and lack of effective homegrown coalitions constrain meaningful action. Pakistan requires political championing by the executive leadership, central convening structures in the provinces and common policy and monitoring frameworks.DFI