From 2012-2014, the United Nations Democracy Fund supported The Hunger Project to build a community of practice on Participatory Local Democracy. This community was mobilized to comprise dozens of local pro-democracy civil society groups in more than 70 countries.
Following a series of regional meetings in Africa, Asia and Latin America in 2012, a small secretariat team in Washington DC developed a multidimensional Participatory Local Democracy Index and solicited input from all participating countries to issue State of Participatory Local Democracy Reports during the 2013 and 2014 UN General Assembly.
UNDEF does not “renew” grants – it intends to make a catalytic investment, and with this project they succeeded. It led directly to the launch of the Movement for Community-led Development alongside the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015.
Posts on this site
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Introducing the RDLG Bibliographic Database
We are pleased to announce that the Rural Decentralization and Local Government (RDLG) Database, with its 1600 bibliographic entries – is now part of this website. The Royal Tropical Institute in the Netherlands has, for many years, supported its development and operation within its KIT Information and Library Services. When the services closed in August 2013 due…
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Waiting for Local Elections in Pakistan
Local government is a critical feature of the current political landscape in Pakistan. The upcoming and just held local elections in the country’s four provinces place Pakistan in an important phase of decentralization. On December 9th, the new schedule for local body election in Punjab was released from the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP). Local…
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Engendering Local Governance
Tools for Engendering Local Governance (TELG) were produced as part of the continuing efforts of the Caucus for Women’s Leadership (formerly the Kenya Women’s Political Caucus) to build local capacities in matters pertaining to good governance and gender mainstreaming. The tools are intended for use by the leaders of gender groups in conducting a series…
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The Knowledge Portal: Practice in Participation
A web-based knowledge portal called “Practice in Participation” is both a digital resource and a forum for practitioners to share and learn from others’ field-based knowledge on participatory practices. The portal has crossed the 900 member mark and presently more than 100 knowledge resources are available. The portal was opened by Society for Participatory Research…
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The Impact of Decentralization on Corruption
In the paper Decentralization and Corruption: New Cross-Country Evidence, Maksym Ivanya and Anwar Shah present empirical evidence of the impact of decentralization reforms on corruption for a sample of 158 countries. In the paper, decentralization is defined as the empowerment of local governments, (not as decision making at sub-national levels as other literature on the…