United Nations Capital Development Fund

The growing emphasis on collective action raises new questions for research and practice in communication for development and social change. What actors drive processes of collective action? What are the communication features of their interventions? What type of social change processes do they enhance? What evidence demonstrates the impact of collective action processes? What theoretical frameworks inform our understanding of collective action and social change? What is the role of communication scholarship in this context? In this article, we address these questions, review the contexts of contemporary transformation and key debates in communication for development and social change, and propose a research agenda for an interdisciplinary field of inquiry.

Abstract A paradigm linking public sector decentralisation reforms to poverty reduction via improved local governance and development has provided the rationale for donor support of decentralisation and parallel efforts to build local government capacity. This article briefly considers the paradigm and reviews modalities of external aid to decentralisation, highlighting key limitations and contradictions. In spite of much rhetoric, decentralisation remains marginalised in a donor‐government policy dialogue dominated by macro‐economic and sectoral issues. Compartmentalisation within major aid organisations of the expertise and responsibilities to support administrative reforms, sectoral assistance programmes and community development projects, produces fragmented and competing interventions that do not address and even retard the systemic changes needed to advance decentralisation. New and more effective partnership arrangements between decentralising governments and their external partners are necessary to link ‘downstream’ assistance to local governments to ‘upstream’ development of the national decentralisation reform framework and to help manage a gradual and strategic approach to implementation of the reforms. Donor support to ‘decentralisation policy experiments’ may provide a new model for policy dialogue and the basis for building more effective partnerships. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper is the fourth in a series about institutional development (ID) in government in the developing world. The first sought to establish a general understanding of ID. The second tested ID in the diagnostic phase of organisational analysis in civil service reform. The third looked at the spectrum of ID in civil service reform, in terms of client‐based functional analysis leading to reformed structures and processes. This paper explores the concept and development of these processes, under the generic term performance budgeting (PB). The US federal experience of PB is outlined; it being the birthplace of both the concept and the practice. A comparative review of some OECD countries and US state experience is offered. Resulting general principles are then set against recent practical PB experience by this author in Tanzania and the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The result is to advocate four basic pre‐conditions as the cornerstones of performance budgeting.

1. Remittances and their potential for sustainable development 1.1. What explains the high cost of remittances? 1.2. New business models for cost reduction 2. Opportunities for using blockchain technology for remittances 2.1. Use of cryptocurrencies or stablecoins for transactions 2.2. Use of cryptocurrencies or stablecoins as an intermediary currency or a bridge asset 2.3. Use of blockchain technology for know your customer (KYC) requirements 2.4. Use of blockchain technology for settlement and correspondent banking 3. Challenges for using blockchain technology for remittances 3.1. Last-mile delivery 3.2. Lack of financial inclusion 3.3. Digital divide 3.4. Regulation 3.5. Data privacy risks 4. Conclusions 4.1. Way forward References

Access to appropriate financial services can play a critical role in enabling young people to navigate the challenges and opportunities they face, regardless of their employment or educational status. This paper discusses: 1) the results of a global survey conducted in 2009 by Making Cents International; and 2) findings of leading NGOs and financial institutions which are pioneering youth-inclusive and youth-specific financial products. The outcomes of the survey findings and lessons learned have been synthesized into six ‘Emerging Guidelines’ for linking young people to financial services. Existing concerns are explained regarding defining and achieving impact, sustainability, scale and a favourable regulatory environment as it relates to youth-inclusive financial services. The paper concludes with practitioners’ visions for this nascent field by 2020.

Economic resilience has been identified as the key factor that defines the ability of urban communities to cope with the consequences of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis as well as any other global health-related economic shocks. This paper offers a dynamic action-oriented concept of urban economic resilience defined as the capacity and related capabilities of urban communities to plan for, anticipate negative shocks, including long-term stresses, to their economies, reallocate and mobilize resources to withstand those shocks, recover from the shocks, and rebuild at least to pre-crisis levels as soon as possible, while placing their economies on the path to sustainable economic growth and simultaneously strengthening their capacity to deal with any future shocks. the paper suggests key operational indicators for the identified variables and discusses how the conceptual framework presented in the paper can be used to measure urban economic resilience and assess city performances.

Purpose The purpose of the paper is to outline a practical perspective for testing performance in the process of institutional reform in developing countries. Design/methodology/approach The test is presented from a donor's perspective. The paper does so by introducing a framework for testing the sustainability, impact and replication of reforms, to achieve local development. These areas of performance are set against the institutional development agenda of structures, processes and contextual reforms. The test goes on to highlight the sustainable outcomes and institutional consolidation of such reforms. This is considered at community, local and central government levels. Findings Testing performance is an important part of United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) practice. Its current concerns for sustainability and policy impact are being enhanced by a more explicit connection between institutional reform, through decentralisation, and poverty impact. Practical implications The concepts outlined are designed to be of application to a donor concerned with seeking to achieve decentralisation through local development initiatives. The paper's value is as a reflection of current UNCDF policy experiments in the least developed countries (LDCs). These experiments are designed to enrich its practice and influence its partners in the field. Originality/value There are few normative frameworks for testing performance on institutional reform. This test is particularly acute in the LDCs, the primary focus for UNCDF work. This technical paper is an attempt to develop a framework to allow donors to test their own work concerning institutional reform, particularly at the local government level.

This paper estimates a structural macro-econometric model of the Lebanese economy to simulate the implications of accumulated debt changes on GDP and other economic indicators, and to project the growth–fiscal nexus for the six years following the last year for which national statistics are systematically available, 2015–2020. To these ends, historical and up-to-date national accounts data for the years 1992–2014 were painstakingly collected from individual government agencies, and an economic framework with five macroeconomic blocks (macroeconomic; government; price; monetary and financial sector; and external accounts) was constructed. Our simulations predict that additional deficits and more debt accumulation would deter growth, while fiscal consolidation such as paying off government debt is growth promoting. We use the prospect of future natural gas revenues as a potential external source to pay off Lebanese national debt – rather than as a collateral for additional borrowing – in order to promote sustainable economic growth. These results have important implications for the fiscal position and macroeconomic policy in Lebanon as well as other transitional, potentially resource-rich, open economies, where debt servicing is crowding out other growth promoting government spending activities.

Abstract Proposals to re-energize African decentralization usually include providing local authorities with more financial resources and administrative capacities or giving civil society direct access to decision making in order to bring government closer to the people. But if Africa is to achieve effective democratic decentralization, the policy community must recognize that decentralization is more than a set of ever more refined policies and programs. Politics and politicians must be put in command of a process that can be brought to a successful conclusion only through constant bargaining and negotiation. In Africa, as in Latin America before, only the existence of viable sub-national units and the emergence of a local partisan system can hopefully accelerate the pace of reforms by providing local actors with sufficient space to manoeuvre.

International audience

Group -Kenya, South Africa, Pakistan, United Kingdom and Canada (the Federation of Canadian Municipalities is Vice-Chair). The Group is undertaking a major project in Ghana, and is working with the Commonwealth Local Government Forum in Zimbabwe.

The United Nations Capital Development Fund’s Inclusive Digital Economy Scorecard assesses a country’s aggregate progress on the main components of an inclusive digital economy – skills, innovation, infrastructure, and policy and regulation – and progress specifically to improve women’s inclusion. This chapter draws on the experience of twenty-three countries that have used this tool to design context-specific digitalisation strategies and policies for digital transformation. It highlights that the information generated from this tool can guide governments and development actors in identifying and addressing barriers to equal and inclusive digital economies.

This paper illustrates how contemporary Buddhist practices encounter power conflicts and the supremacy of prominent, upper-level temples over smaller, lower-level ones in Nelugama village in Sri Lanka. The conflict is not only between two temples of the two administrative Districts over the village temple ownership, but also conflicts between villagers and temples. This long-term ethnographic study reveals that there are multiple factors impacting temple hierarchy and supremacy of the prominent temple, other than the caste-based hierarchical temple structure. On the one hand, the government administration system and ethnic representation, which is unique to the proclaimed geographic demarcations and competition among temples for supremacy are the primary causes of the ownership dispute. On the other hand, this conflict has resulted from a tense situation among the original and resettled families of the village and created room for believing in supernatural gods and disconnecting the village temple. Eventually, the spiritual and religious vacuum created in the villagers' lives may have caused them to become emotionally attached to Pulleyar deity worship.

Coral reefs face escalating threats from climate change, yet reducing greenhouse gas emissions alone will not ensure their survival. Local and regional conservation efforts are urgently needed to address immediate, human-induced stressors and build resilience. Although conservation often begins locally, the interconnected nature of reef systems that span borders demands transboundary management, international coordination, and robust governance frameworks. In 2024, a multidisciplinary group of coral reef scientists and conservationists convened at Stony Brook University to develop strategies for strengthening reef resilience globally and regionally, with an emphasis on the Red Sea and Caribbean reefs. Using participatory systems mapping, the group produced a framework identifying six priority areas for international and transboundary action: conservation finance; global knowledge management; regional political coordination; area-based management; ecosystem restoration; and strengthening stakeholder capacity and engagement. The findings demonstrate commonalities as well as regional nuances for coral conservation, and the approach can be replicated elsewhere.