Resources

This handbook is for local level civil society practitioners who want to make services work better for the poor. It builds on current good practices which focus on strengthening local accountability in service provision and governance. Experience shows that accountability is a key issue in promoting more responsive and just service delivery. This handbook gives step-by-step guidance as to how civil society organisations and activists can help to improve local services by focusing on accountability.

Budgets are the starting point of this book, and it continues with different types of revenue and taxes at the local level. Tax Justice is introduced and finally the book explains decentralization and the dilemma local government has in terms of limited independent space for planning and implementing plans. The book is designed for field workers and civil society organisations at the local level. Whilst the political context is very different in each country, it is hoped the book can inspire engagement in budget work at the local level. The book includes tools for analysing budgets and understanding political economy at the local level.

This book is intended for all who are committed to human wellbeing and who want to make our world fairer, safer and more fulfilling for everyone, especially those who are ‘last’. It argues that to do better, we need to know better.

It provides evidence that what we believe we know in international development is often distorted or unbalanced by errors, myths, biases and blind spots. Undue weight has been attached to standardised methodologies such as randomised control trials, systematic reviews, and competitive bidding; these are shown to have huge transaction costs, which are rarely if ever recognised in their enormity.

Robert Chambers contrasts a Newtonian paradigm in which the world is seen and understood as controllable with a paradigm of complexity, which recognises that the real world of social processes and power relations is messy and unpredictable. To confront the challenges of complex and emergent realities requires a revolutionary new professionalism.

This is underpinned by a new combination of canons of rigour expressed through eclectic methodological pluralism and participatory approaches that reverse and transform power relations. Promising developments include rapid innovations in participatory information and communication technnologies (ICTs), participatory statistics, and the Reality Check Approach, with its up-to-date and rigorously grounded insights. Fundamental to the new professionalism, in every country and context, are reflexivity, facilitation, groundtruthing, personal mindsets, behaviour, attitudes, empathy and love.

This collection of eleven cases from Canada and the United States gives expression to the ideal of a new economy based on fairness and environmental sustainability. Grappling with complex problems in their local communities, organized citizens are forging innovation, prying open cracks in the prevailing economic system and seizing opportunities to redirect economic life.

Featured here are examples in urban and rural contexts and ethnically diverse settings — First Nations, Inuit, Latino, African American, predominantly white, and mixed communities — where citizens are challenging the short-term focus of political leadership and taking action now to pave the way for an economy that can sustain future generations. They illustrate a new way of working, tying economic justice to the creation of multiple types of environmental, economic and social assets or forms of wealth.

This is the foundation text for the series and introduces key governance issues for promoting just and democratic governance at the local level.  The resource book presents a people centred, participatory and rights based approach to local democracy. It analyses democratic and decentralised local government and explores the challenges faced by civil society in championing this vision. It examines the crucial link between the political mandates that determine the scope for local democracy, and the fiscal and administrative requirements needed to support them.  Closely connected to this is the interaction between elected and administrative power holders on the one hand and citizens, their accountability work, and claims for voice and representation on the other.  Finally, the resource book also considers the interplay between formal democratic power versus hidden or parallel power.