Volume 45. Issue 5: Localising Governance

Preface

Introduction – Localising Governance: An Outlook on Research and Policy

The past two decades have seen an enormous increase in academic and policy attention to, and engagement with, governance at the sub?national and local levels. Yet, our understanding of the conditions that enable local ...

Reading the Local Context: A Causal Chain Approach to Social Accountability

There is a general consensus that ‘context’ matters for development outcomes, yet we have little understanding of how exactly ‘context’ affects outcomes. This article focuses on the question of ‘context’ in social ...

Power Above and Below the Waterline: Bridging Political Economy and Power Analysis

The power relations that underlie poverty and exclusion can make or break development programmes, if not understood and addressed at all stages of design and implementation. Political economy and power analysis represent ...

Power, Violence, Citizenship and Agency

Peace-building, state-building and democratisation efforts often focus strongly on the state, and follow the Weberian logic of states holding the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence. In doing so, they may be neglecting ...

Beyond Ballotocracy: Citizens' Voices and the Many Faces of Unruly Politics

This article is an empirical account of how modes of capturing citizen voices from above (via elections) diverged with expressions of citizen dissidence from below (through unruly politics), leading to a disjuncture between ...

Devolving the Power to Divide: Sectarian Relations in Egypt (2011–12)

This article is about decentralisation and social cohesion in religiously heterogeneous communities in times of political transition. Post?Mubarak Egypt is taken as a case study involving the informal devolution of power ...

Distributing the Wealth from the Earth

This article explains different criteria and mechanisms for distributing extractive industries (EI) revenues between central and local governments across countries and territories. It reveals that institutional or systemic ...

Connecting Citizens to the State: Informal Local Governance Institutions in the Western Balkans

There is a growing scholarly and policy awareness of the fact that informal institutions that lie wholly or partly outside formal state structures and that take on various governance?related functions have tremendous ...

Decentralisation and Accountability in War?to?Peace Transitions: The Case of Kosovo

In spite of the scant evidence of a positive correlation between decentralisation and strengthened local development and governance, decentralisation has been promoted as a tool to consolidate peace and re?build states in ...