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Governance assessments for local stakeholders: What the World Governance Assessment offers
Article / Working Paper, Civil Society, Local Governance and Decentralization, Academic/Think TankThis report introduces the basic features of the World Governance Assessment (WGA) and highlights main findings of the second round of WGA that was conducted in 10 countries in the global South during 2006. The report also presents an overview of the methodology and the special Study Management System, a capacity-building component that is also an important part of what WGA offers. The...
Working Paper I What Is Governance?
Article / Working Paper, Local Governance and Decentralization, Academic/Think TankThis paper is part of an effort to better measure governance. The paper points to the poor state of empirical measures of the quality of states, that is, executive branches and their bureaucracies. The author argues, that much of the problem is conceptual, since there is very little agreement on what constitutes high-quality government. The paper suggests four approaches: (1) procedural...
The State of Political Pluralism and Democracy at Local Government Level in Uganda
Africa, Democracy, Local Governance and Decentralization, Report, Academic/Think TankFrom January 2009 to June 2010, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) in partnership with the Uganda Media Development Foundation (UMDF) implemented the project “Strengthening Civil Society, Media and Local Councils’ Capacity to Promote Political Pluralism, Democratic Participation and Representation at Local Government Level in Uganda”, which was funded by the European Union through the European...
Is decentralization good for logistics systems? Evidence on essential medicine logistics in Ghana and Guatemala
Article / Working Paper, Local Governance and Decentralization, Academic/Think TankEfficient logistics systems move essential medicines down the supply chain to the service delivery point, and then to the end user. Experts on logistics systems tend to see the supply chain as requiring centralized control to be most effective. However, many health reforms have involved decentralization, which experts fear has disrupted the supply chain and made systems less effective. There...
Health systems performance in sub-Saharan Africa: governance, outcome and equity
Africa, Article / Working Paper, Local Governance and Decentralization, Academic/Think TankBackground The literature on health systems focuses largely on the performance of healthcare systems operationalised around indicators such as hospital beds, maternity care and immunisation coverage. A broader definition of health systems however, needs to include the wider determinants of health including, possibly, governance and its relationship to health and health equity. The aim of this...
WGA - Governance Perceptions Questionnaire - 2005
Civil Society, Local Governance and Decentralization, Questionnaire , Academic/Think TankCreators/Authors: Goran Hyden, Julius Court and Kenneth Mease The World Governance Assessment uses a standard closed ended questionnaire to capture subjective perceptions on governance at the national level. The questionnaire contains 42 questions, divided into seven parts, covering rules throughout the governance realm, ones that are thought to affect the legitimacy of the polity at large and...
WGA - Governance Perceptions Questionnaire - 2001
Civil Society, Local Governance and Decentralization, Questionnaire , Academic/Think TankEditors/Authors: Goran Hyden, Julius Court and Kenneth Mease The World Governance Assessment uses a standard closed ended questionnaire to capture subjective perceptions on governance at the national level. The questionnaire contains 41 questions, divided into seven parts, covering rules throughout the governance realm, ones that are thought to affect the legitimacy of the polity at large...
Users’ Guide on Measuring Fragility
Conflict, GAP, Local Governance and Decentralization, Users' Guide, Academic/Think Tank, UNDP ProducedState fragility has become a buzzword in international development policy, leading to a dramatic explosion in the production of indices to rank countries according to levels of fragility. Despite this proliferation, no systematic analysis of such indices has yet been produced. The Users’ Guide on Measuring Fragility aims to meet this need by providing a rigorous, comprehensible and...
Problems Measuring Community Health Status at a Local Level: Papua New Guinea's Health Information System | The Communication Initiative Network
Article / Working Paper, Asia and the Pacific, Local Governance and Decentralization, Academic/Think TankThis article highlights problems in evaluating community interventions or local service performance if reliable village-level data is absent. Published in Rural and Remote Health 10: 1539, it draws on an evaluation of a nationwide donor project community development initiative implemented over 7 years (1998-2004) in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The initiative sought to increase community support for...
Good Governance as a Concept, and Why This Matters for Development Policy
Article / Working Paper, Local Governance and Decentralization, Academic/Think TankAlmost all major development institutions today say that promoting good governance is an important part of their agendas. Despite this consensus, ‘good governance’ is an extremely elusive objective: it means different things to different organizations and to different actors within these organizations. This study provides a review of donor approaches and discusses good governance as a concept....