Delivering the Goods Building Local Government Capacity to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals A Practitioner's Guide from UNCDF Experience in Least Developed Countries October 2005 Foreword | Introduction | Leave Feedback Download pdf version of entire book (3.16 mg)

Foreword

This Practitioner’s Guide has been long in the making – longer even than the 22 month gestation period enjoyed by elephants. But I believe that it has been worth it. It is an important publication for several reasons.

Firstly, and more parochially, UNCDF is an organization which has always prided itself on its internal learning and policy-development processes. We therefore attach a great deal of importance to this kind of attempt to capture and “codify” the various sorts of lessons which are emerging from our growing portfolio of Local Development Programmes – which are now active in some 25 Least Developed Countries. In doing so it also provides a common language or framework (a set of organizing “boxes”) which can be used to continually update and further enrich the lesson-learning process in the future.

Secondly, however, I believe that this Guide should be of wider interest and application – both within UNDP and in the wider circle of development practitioners. The recent Millennium Report to the UN Secretary General highlighted the urgent need for “scaleable models” to ensure that basic infrastructure and service delivery is expanded sufficiently to meet the 2015 targets. The guidelines and lessons highlighted in this Guide provide the elements for developing such models:

• They focus on delivering those types of basic primary infrastructure and associated services that the poor need;
• They are geared to the specific challenges of rural and difficult areas – where the MDG deficits are greater and the problems in improving delivery far more daunting than in big cities, and where “good practices” are thin on the ground;
• They work on reforming delivery systems within the existing national policy and institutional frameworks of local government organizations and procedures, so that they can be the more readily adopted and upscaled (as they already have been in several LDCs);
• They are adaptable to differing contexts;
• They are based on live operational experience, and have a string of attested positive results to their credit.

As the Introduction makes quite clear this is not, however, a cookbook. It simply aims to provide a guiding framework, some insights, and continual reminders of the DELIVERING THE GOODS 2 trade-offs and challenges to be faced for those who are charged with promoting better local infrastructure and service delivery and local governance in difficult areas. It is a first version – based on user and reader feedback. We hope to regularly revise, correct and enrich this Guide in later versions.

This Guide has been prepared as a collective effort by the staff of the UNCDF Local Development Unit. This effort was coordinated by Roger Shotton (Regional Adviser for Asia) and by Mike Winter (Affiliate Technical Adviser) who undertook most of the drafting and the compilation of lessons.

Specific contributions and critical commentary on earlier drafts were provided by Angelo Bonfiglioli, Leonardo Romeo, and Ron McGill (all UNCDF senior technical advisers) and by Joyce Stanley and Christian Fournier (UNCDF regional advisers in East/South and West Africa, respectively). Valuable feedback on the content and substance of the Guide was also provided at the UNCDF Asia Regional Workshop in Thailand in June 2005.

Hitomi Komatsu, Philippe Zysset, Florence Navarro, and Cyril Guillot (all UNCDF Programme Managers) provided reality checks at various points in the process and helped ensure that the content and style of this Guide matched the needs of the field, and avoided too many theoretical digressions.

Lou Leask provided a thorough edit of the text and brought it closer to the English of common usage.