Resources

This report highlights key discussion points that emerged from a workshop on "Strengthening Participation in Local Governance". Conceptual issues around participation, governance, citizenship and decentralisation are discussed. Country presentations highlight various experiences in strengthening participation in local governance: these include looking at the context (particularly with respect to existing legal frameworks), the dynamics of participation, strategies and approaches that are employed to overcome barriers, and the key lessons and proposed ways forward for future research. Lessons and challenges from previous research as well as a summary of action plans for collaboration and future research are also presented.

This research report concerns the poverty reduction policy process in Kampala, Uganda. The report describes and analyses, in turn, the actors involved in policy processes at national level, the kinds of knowledge on which the processes draw, and the spaces, formal and informal, in which policy actors engage with each other. It finds that the contemporary poverty reduction policy context in Uganda holds several opportunities and several risks. The risks relate to: " The contradiction between the nature of the national political space and the way the Government of Uganda (GoU) is energetically opening up new policy spaces and ushering in a range of diverse actors; " The disconnection between the international-national alliance operating in Kampala, and the relationship between Kampala and the rest of the country. Opportunities include: " The current state of flux of poverty knowledge in Uganda; " The already considerable experience of blending diverse kinds of knowledge for policy purposes. These opportunities allow for optimism about how the "new poverty experts", sub-national actors and others outside the GoU-donor nexus might affect the course of policy in future. The report concludes that civil society actors, and especially non-governmental organisation poverty advocates, are at a critical juncture in Uganda today. To enhance their impact on policy, they can either remain passive participants in processes into which government invites them, or exercise greater agency and autonomy. The report also calls for non-governmental policy actors to reclaim from government and its donor partners the territory of participation, and to make it more their own again.