Dolly Ntseane and Kholisani Solo’s book Social Protection in Botswana: Socio-Economic and Legal Perspectives is a careful, well-regarded study of social protection in Botswana, anchored in its historical and socio-economic context. The book reviews existing international, regional and local legal instruments on social protection and their suitability for application in Botswana. This includes United Nations instruments that offer policy guidance that is supplementary to local instruments. The latter part of the book offers practical recommendations to improve Botswana’s social protection regime, and these will be of great use to policy-makers, administrators and those implementing social protection programmes.

Over the last few decades, governance systems across the world have prioritised citizen participation. Direct participation of the citizenry facilitates social accountability, which contributes to the advancement of good governance. In Bangladesh, following the success of donor-funded pathfinder projects, various social accountability mechanisms were legally mandated at the local level. This study examines the prescribed functioning of these mechanisms and compares this to actual practice. The study followed an explanatory, descriptive method for content analysis by reviewing relevant secondary literature. Key findings were: no practical guidelines exist in Bangladesh for managing social accountability mechanisms; citizens have limited access to information; local functionaries have insufficient understanding of their role; and social accountability has not been institutionalised. To ensure successful social accountability, it will be necessary to provide adequate guidelines, take financial and management factors into account, and make people aware of their rights. Government and NGO intervention on the demand side (local people) will be required to make this happen.

This paper critically examines whether the Kudumbashree scheme of the Kerala government was successful in both reducing poverty and enhancing the social capital of women. The evidence shows that while Kudumbashree’s programmes made a significant contribution to Kerala’s broader efforts to reduce absolute poverty and empower women, not enough is being done to remove societal constraints on women’s roles and advancement.

This article discusses the impact of adopting New Public Management (NPM) reforms in the delivery of education services via a case study of the experience of Mwanza City, Tanzania. The case study reveals that NPM reforms, which came with new guidelines for the delivery of education services, have reduced the capacity and discretion of education officers and teachers in the delivery of education services. Furthermore, education services are confronted with scarcity of teaching and learning resources including classrooms, teachers, textbooks and laboratory equipment. Despite the good intentions of the NPM reforms in the education sector, the authors argue that the discretion of education officers and teachers should be protected as an essential tool to translate policies into reality.

Nigeria is a decentralised federation with a three-tier system of federal, state and local governments. Arising from this decentralisation, local governments are empowered to exercise certain powers and responsibilities in areas relating to grassroots development, local democracy and service delivery. Hence, local government plays a pivotal role in local governance. This paper synthesises studies on local government in Nigeria within the broader context of decentralisation and local governance. It takes a careful look at the emergence of local government in Nigeria as well as the debate on local government autonomy. The paper reveals that Nigeria’s decentralisation policy has largely failed to deliver autonomy to local governments, whose funds, functions and activities are controlled by state governments. Key challenges to the effective performance of local government include inadequate funding, constitutional ambivalence, abuse of state control, political instability and corruption. The paper ends with recommendations for improving the functioning of local government to enhance local governance.

The Pacific Islands region has made strong progress on the integration of climate change, disaster management and development frameworks, particularly via the Pacific Urban Agenda and the Framework for Resilient Development in the Pacific. These frameworks highlight the need for local- level collaboration in achieving ambitious pathways for climate- and disaster-resilient development. However, to date little research has investigated the role that local-level collaboration plays in implementation. Additionally, there is a lack of guidance on how to design and implement local-level collaboration that is informed by in-country practitioner experiences. This study addresses those gaps. Its findings indicate that in the Pacific collaborative attributes span individuals, institutions, collaborative arrangements, and broader governance systems. They also suggest that the skills needed to undertake collaboration well at the local level are, in part, already manifest in Pacific cultures as invisible skill sets. More can be done to make the invisible visible by documenting and developing the ‘soft skills’ that are necessary to achieve climate- and disaster-resilient development. This action could contribute to bridging the gap between ambition and reality.

The 2021 local government elections in New South Wales (NSW), Australia delivered a record 39.5% female representation, up from 31.2% in the previous election. The increased number of women elected to councils can be read as evidence of the success of a diversity strategy centred on encouraging and equipping women, and other under-represented groups, to stand for election. However, without detracting from the value of these initiatives, their capacity to achieve a councillor body reflective of the general population is limited. People of non-European ancestry, particularly women of ‘colour’ remain grossly underrepresented, while the gains in women’s representation will fail to reach gender parity unless the practices that sustain male overrepresentation, particularly by Anglo and other ‘white’ European men, are challenged. This article draws upon qualitative interviews with councillors to offer fresh readings of conventional explanations for a lack of diversity in Australian local government, while also underscoring the importance of addressing issues that are currently neglected in ‘technical’ approaches.

A key assumption behind decentralisation in developing countries is that it enhances the accountability of local government and results in policies that reflect the preferences of the local community. However, previous research shows that local politicians and administrators in many developing countries to a large extent behave as if they were primarily accountable to central government, not local communities. The literature suggests various explanatory factors but does not provide insight into their relative weight and into how different factors interact. This paper combines comparative case-study research with in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with local government politicians and officials involved in the delivery of agricultural extension services in Tanzania. It shows that limited administrative and political decentralisation and centralistic human resources management restrict downward accountability to the community. Downward accountability is also constrained by the social rules that local politicians and administrators observe. For downward accountability to materialise, formal systems of public administration need to introduce incentives to that effect.

This article aims to assess whether or not property rates in Ghana are a good potential source of local revenue. Through detailed analysis of six local government case studies, we find that present prospects for most rural local areas to raise substantial rate revenue are circumscribed, but in urban councils they are more promising. Nevertheless, no council is able to collect rates fully and from all rateable properties. This is attributed to several factors: the politicisation of taxation; ethnic homogeneity; intergovernmental transfers; partisan local government elections; resistance caused by elite design; and the denial of public information. Although these factors have been identified in previous literature, the study includes new findings which challenge received academic thinking on how they affect local tax collection in developing countries.

Drawing on innovative local government and community initiatives from the United Kingdom and the United States, Guinan and O’Neill’s 'The Case for Community Wealth Building' is a timely and optimistically critical contribution to discussions on inclusive community-owned local economic development. This short thesis aimed at practitioners, policy-makers and theorists alike, looks at alternative models of local economic ownership. At just 116 pages, this accessible book, whilst drawing on a good if limited range of academic and case study literature, reads more in the tradition of a radical political pamphlet than a dense academic text.