Fragility, Decentralisation and Local Governance

In November 2015, The Hague Academy organised a three-day learning event on fragility, decentralisation and local governance for around 40 participants of different donor agencies. The course presented an overview of the latest international thinking on the nexus between fragility, decentralisation and local governance (incl. national and intergovernmental aspects of decentralisation and local governance (DLG)).

It provided participants with an opportunity to exchange experiences, jointly analyse concrete cases and discuss new ideas and approaches to strengthen decentralisation reforms and local governments in fragile contexts.

The course helped participants to:

• Distinguish and characterise dimensions and types of fragility and assess in what ways these different types impact the enabling environment for support to DLG;
• Reason the objectives for decentralisation in fragile contexts and structural entry points for DLG processes;
• Discuss critically to what extent DLG support in fragile contexts could have counterproductive effects;
• Develop ideas for assessing and measuring the impact of interventions;
• Incorporate good practices and lessons learned from development partners’ experiences in supporting DLG in fragile contexts into their own programming and project design;
• Build network of practitioners in this particular field.

This learning event was funded by GIZ.

Participants working on a group assignment.