Fragility, Decentralisation and Local Governance 2015

This course on fragility, decentralisation and local governance was developed around the central questions: what lessons can be learnt from support to decentralisation and local governance in different types of fragile contexts by international development partners? When is support to Decentralisation and Local Governance reforms reasonable? And how can development partners increase the effectiveness of their Decentralisation and Local Governance support within fragile contexts? The training presented an overview of the latest international thinking on the nexus between fragility, decentralisation and local governance and allowed participants to exchange experiences, jointly analyse concrete cases and discuss new ideas and approaches to strengthen decentralisation reforms and local governments in fragile contexts.

Main Goal

The overall objective was to enable a structured exchange of information, experiences, lessons learnt and good practices.

Objectives

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;
• Understand 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; and
• Incorporate good practices and lessons learned from development partners’ experiences in supporting DLG in fragile contexts into their own programming and project design.

Partners