local government

This issue of Natural Resource Perspectives from ODI (Overseas Development Institute) examines the benefits and disadvantages of joint water and forest management in India. Policies promoting the joint management (i.e. between the state and resource users) of resources such as forests or water are currently in vogue in India and elsewhere. Many see advantage in the decentralised administration that these arrangements imply.

This brief reviews initiatives focusing on youth and children in city governance, with focus on mainstreaming attention to children's needs into the routine practices of local governments; giving greater attention to children's own perceptions; and drawing on the proven energy and creativity of children and young people to contribute to making their cities better places.

This report documents the proceedings of the 3rd LIFE grantee NGOs workshop, held during two days in Faisalabad, Pakistan, 1998. LIFE (Local Initiative Facility for Urban Environment) was launched in Pakistan in 1993 by the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). It supports local initiatives carried out by city dwellers in cooperation with municipal governments, NGOs and CBOs (community based organisations) to tackle environmental and social issues facing rapidly growing town and cities.

This collection of case studies was prepared for the LogoLink International workshop on Participatory Planning Approaches for Local Governance, held in Bandung, Indonesia, January 2002. The workshop brought together 34 participants from 18 countries to discuss lessons and insights from a wide range of experiences in participatory local governance.

In this book, development and other social policy scholars and practitioners seek to address simplistic criticisms of participation, while addressing key problems of power and politics. The authors describe and analyse new experiments in participation from a wide diversity of social contexts that show how participation can, given certain conditions, be linked to genuinely transformative processes and outcomes for marginalised communities and people.

This document is the summary for a 36 country-wide study evaluating public access to budget information from the perspective of civil society organisations. The International Budget Project (IBP) developed an open budget questionnaire as a measurement tool that was then completed by civil society researchers in different countries in 2004.