Decentralisation and Local Governance
Any decentralisation process planned or under implementation raises issues of local governance, accountability, service delivery and influence by the local constituents. Nowadays, decentralisation and local governance has come to include several new types of interventions and actors, including how to support local democracy processes and participation and how to ensure improved local service delivery through involvement of private and civil society organisations. Sub-national government may have to collaborate more with civil society and the private sector to jointly deliver services, perhaps even translating into public-private partnerships.
Once a decision to decentralise has been made, ensuring that the required capacity at sub-national government level or in large national and international development organisations is in place, represents a major challenge. In our experience, the long term consequences of most decentralisation processes are seldom fully known in advance, or may not even have been properly assessed beforehand. A good starting point may be to ensure that a proper division of labour and clarity of roles is achieved by an analysis of decentralisation coordination arrangements at national, regional and local level and to determine mandates and resources for effective local service delivery.
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Though it may be easy to decide to decentralise, it is often harder to agree on how to share responsibilities, establish accountabilities and getting private, public and civil actors to work effectively together. |
We offer support to sub-national governments and other local providers for capacity building within areas of planning, management and service delivery, as well as to facilitate consultations related to governance and accountability issues coming out of the decentralisation process. In our experience, these types of support greatly help sub-national governments and private actors develop their institutional capacity to perform their new roles under a decentralised setup while delivering improved services on the ground and remaining accountable. We also advise and facilitate policy development and organisational restructuring processes at relevant levels to further equip these organisations for effective decentralised service delivery. Finally, we provide specific training for capacity development for affected staff and departments operating under new mandates.
Examples of assignments
- Training of Local Government staff and councillors in Uganda on policy development, planning, monitoring and evaluation, taxes resource mobilization, procurement and environmental management;
- Design and facilitation of training programme on decentralization and local governance for Hague Academy/IVNG with internationally recognized lecturers and experts;
- Evaluation of support programme for local governance and decentralization in Mali;
- Training course for SNV advisors working on local governance, focussing on chain approaches in local government basic service delivery, including analysis of cooperation and coordination between different government levels;
- Institutional Strengthening for the Development of a National Decentralised Programme of Training and Research in Environmental Management in Guatemala;
- Training course on decentralisation, local governance and capacity development to ensure proper design process and clarity of roles and responsibilities - InWEnt, Germany;
- Capacity development support for Irrigation Advisory Services staff as part of the national water resource plan reform initiative, which is decentralizing services to local governorates in Egypt.
See our MDF Experiences to read more on these and other assignments
