Local First is an initiative that promotes prioritizing the views and leadership of local people and organizations in the countries affected by specific issues over those of outsiders from the international community in international development cooperation. Local First announced the release of their new book ‘Local First in Practice: Unlocking the power to get things done’, which…
V-Dem, short for Varieties of Democracy, is an exciting project that brings a new dimension to the discourse of democracy . V-Dem describes their project as a new approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy. It is a collaboration between more than 50 scholars worldwide and co-hosted by the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg,…
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”; this timeless saying embodies the sustainable poverty alleviation approaches few development organizations are currently implementing. The conventional, aid focused, top-down poverty alleviation strategy has not been able to deliver its promise.…
In April of this year, the president of Lebanon launched a draft bill for administrative decentralization. The following article analyzes provisions in this new draft law. Reprinted from The Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS) June 2014 By Sami Atallah, LCPS Executive Director The new decentralization draft law may not solve all the country’s ills but, if…
Based on a book published by the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS) and funded by the Open Society Foundations, Mona Harb and Sami Attalah recently wrote a policy brief entitled “Decentralization in the Arab World Must be Strengthened to Provide Better Services.” The authors note that decentralization in the Arab world falls behind other…
Jean-Paul Faguet addresses the issue of decentralization and accountability in Bolivia in the article “Can Sub-National Autonomy Strengthen Democracy in Bolivia?” published in 2013 by the Journal of Federalism. He notes that Bolivia is one of the most radical decentralization reformers, and has recently implemented new reforms granting autonomy to local governments. Faguet seeks to…
In January 2014, World Development dedicated a special issue to the subject of decentralization and its role in development. Jean-Paul Faguet, who has written about decentralization in Bolivia and Colombia, wrote the editorial article called “Decentralization and Governance.” One of the main benefits of decentralization, as argued by its proponents, is that it makes governments…
