This book addresses and explores recent trends in the field of local and urban governance. It focuses on three domains: institutional reforms in local government; inter-municipal cooperation; and citizen participation in local governance. In the last decades, in different regions of the world, there is ample evidence that sub-national government, in particular the field of local governance, is in a permanent state of change and reflux, although with differences that reflect national particularities. Since these institutional changes have an impact in the local policy process, in the delivery of public services, in the local democracy, and in the quality of life, it is mandatory to monitor these continued institutional changes, to learn and develop with these changes, if possible before these experiences are transferred and replicated in other countries. The editor and contributors address issues of interest for a wide audience, comprising of students and researchers in various disciplines, and policy makers at both national and sub-national tiers of government.

Asian countries have introduced major reforms and new institutional mechanisms in recent years to promote the engagement of elected local governments, civil society, and the private sector. This book examines emerging issues in democratic local governance and factors that influenced the impetus for and the substance of reforms. It asks the following questions: - What have been the challenges in designing and implementing decentralization policies and programs? - What are the constraints on strengthening citizen participation? - Can reforms promote gender and rights perspectives in local governance? - What is the role of local government in service delivery and access? - How effective are the mechanisms for accountability and transparency in local governance? - What are the driving forces influencing democratic local governance reform? The book addresses these questions as it discusses studies from theoretical and comparative perspectives on specific issues as well as myriad cases across Asia, often dealing with country-specific reforms.

Participatory techniques have established themselves in both project implementation in developing countries and community interventions in industrial countries. Recently, participation has been fashionably dismissed as more rhetoric than substance, and subject to manipulation by agents pursuing their own agendas under cover of community consent. In this important new volume, development and other social policy scholars and practitioners seek to rebut this simplistic conclusion. They show how participation can help produce genuine transformation for marginalized communities. This volume is the first comprehensive attempt to evaluate the state of participatory approaches in the aftermath of the "Tyranny" critique. It captures the recent convergence between participatory development and participatory governance. It revisits the question of popular agency, as well as spanning the range of institutional actors involved--the state, civil society and donor agencies. The volume embeds participation within contemporary advances in development theory.

The relationship between citizens and city governments is gradually transforming due to the utilization of advanced information and communication technologies in order to inform, consult, and engage citizens. Citizen E-Participation in Urban Governance: Crowdsourcing and Collaborative Creativity explores the nature of the new challenges confronting citizens and local governments in the field of urban governance. This comprehensive reference source explores the role that Web 2.0 technologies play in promoting citizen participation and empowerment in the city government and is intended for scholars, researchers, students, and practitioners in the field of urban studies, urban planning, political science, public administration, and more.

This book explores the impact of Bangladesh's Local Government Act of 2009 on the functioning of the local governments or Union Parishads (UP), with a particular emphasis on people’s participation and accountability. Throughout the chapters, the authors review the existing legal framework of UP and its relation to social accountability, examine how much of the social participation is spontaneous and how much is politically induced, question the success of the Citizen's Charter and Right to Information acts as mechanisms for social accountability, and present suggestions to remedy some of the problems facing people's participation and accountability in the UP. This book fills existing gaps in the discourse by adding new information to the literature on development research and legal reforms in Bangladesh, specifically in how those legal reforms have led to strengthening or weakening people's participation in local government. The target audience for this book are students and researchers in Asian studies , international development studies, and public administration, as well as practitioners working in the local governments discussed.

This book investigates participatory budgeting—a mainstay now of World Bank, UNDP, and USAID development programs—to ask whether its reforms truly make a difference in deepening democracy and empowering civil society.

Over the past few decades and throughout the world, numerous government-initiated experiments and attempts at directly engaging and including citizens have emerged as remedies for a variety of problems faced by modern democracies, including political disaffection and insufficient capacity to deal with the complexity inherent in many contemporary public problems, such as climate change and segregation. In practice, these attempts are given many names, such as citizen panels, deliberative fora, collaborative dialogues, etc. In the academic literature as well, the phenomenon falls under many different headings, for instance collaborative, deliberative or interactive governance. Participatory Governance and Representative Democracy refers to this empirical phenomenon as local participatory governance, that is, government-sponsored direct participation between invited citizens and local officials in concrete arrangements and concerning problems that affect them. Participatory governance, we argue, may take many forms, regarding (1) type of interaction and type of communication between participants within the specific participatory arrangement (e.g., deliberative vs. aggregative) as well as regarding (2) the relation and connection between the specific arrangement and the more traditional representative structures (e.g., compatible, incompatible, transformative or irrelevant). The proposed edited volume addresses the matter of institutionalization, highlighting the difficulties associated with establishing stability and a shared understanding of the roles and rules among citizens, local politicians and administrators in participatory arrangements.

More than a century ago, John Dewey challenged the education community to look to civic involvement for the betterment of both community and campus. Today, the challenge remains. In his landmark book, editor Thomas Ehrlich has collected essays from national leaders who have focused on civic responsibility and higher education. Imparting both philosophy and working examples, Ehrlich provides the inspiration for innovative new programs in this essential area of learning.

Successful reforms need coherent approaches in which a range of stakeholders are willing to share responsibilities and resources in order to achieve the ultimate outcome of poverty reduction in developing countries. This book provides a framework to access intended outcomes generated by decentralization measures implemented in Asian and African countries. It is based on comparative analyses of different experiences of decentralization measures in six developing countries.