Case Study

Women’s development has been and shows every likelihood of continuing to be compromised by unsustainable policies, plans, and programmes regarding human settlements. Gender inequalities harm well-being and hinder development. Women and girls, especially the poor, bear the brunt of these inequalities. To attain the objectives of sustainable development of satisfying needs and meeting development goals, to which the international community has repeatedly committed itself, sustainability itself has to be engendered through gender mainstreaming.

This article analyses a decentralised transformative leadership pilot project launched by the UNDP to combat the growing HIV/AIDS crisis in Nepal. The project aims to strengthen district leadership and participatory multi-sector planning, clarify the district government response, and create regional, nationwide, and international networks to effectively respond to HIV/AIDS. The goal is to create leaders who envisage possibilities and see opportunities previously unimagined, and bring voice to those previously unheard.

Since Ghana's decentralisation process began in the early 1990s, government officials as well as international aid agencies and NGOs have engaged in efforts to enhance attention to women's concerns and improve gender sensitivity in development processes at the local level. This article looks at three collaborative projects between international development organisations and district assemblies throughout Ghana to promote gender sensitivity and increase the representation of women in local governance.

The promotion of democracy has often been a top-down process characterised by assistance policies targeted toward the macro level. When bottom-up policies have been attempted, they too have tended to address professionalised NGOs, with scarce grassroots membership and contact. Only over the past few years have donors begun to implement programmes aimed at developing what can be called `micro-assistance' to democracy, defined as democracy assistance directed to small, often community-based, organisations in the field.

This paper reviews the lessons of democratic decentralisation in Madhya Pradesh (MP), a poor and semi-feudal Indian state that emerged as a leader and bold experimenter in institutional design in the 1990s. Despite inauspicious beginnings, political leadership in MP set out to use decentralisation as a lever to expand and improve basic service delivery.