87
ensuring provision of basic services in a specific geographical area.16 Its role should be clearly defined in legislation, vesting it with powers to plan and regulate provision, determine the management regime (in-house, external public utility, PPP, etc.), impose standards of quality and access, and ensure affordability, and technical, environmental and financial sustainability. The organizing authority should respond to user needs, identified through consultation and participation. However, while responsibility is often assigned to local governments (at least officially), their role as organizing authorities often remains unclear or problematic. The extent of this problem varies widely between services and according to the decentralization frameworks in each country. The role of local governments is most clearly defined in high- and some middle-income countries. Europe has a long-rooted tradition of local autonomy in service provision, although increasing EU regulations could challenge local governments’ ‘room for manoeuvre’. In the U.S.A. and Canada, and in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea, both intermediate and local governments also play a dominant role in service delivery. By contrast, there are countries where the role of local government in service delivery is weak or unrecognized. This is the case where there is no decentralization and central or provincial administrations are the organizing authority, or where local authorities act only as agents of higher level authorities (as in many countries in the Middle East and West Asia, Asia and Africa). The same is true of some countries in Eurasia, where local administration and governance are still constrained by the centralization inherited from Soviet times. Between these extremes are many countries where responsibilities transferred in
law are not decentralized in practice. In West and Central Africa, for instance, despite decentralization, central governments continue to carry out most of the official responsibilities of local governments, through national agencies and utilities (sometimes in partnership with the private sector), or ad-hoc special units for development and infrastructure projects, often with support from international donor institutions. Institutional powers and human and financial resources to meet the needs of the population In addition to a lack of clarity on their role, in many regions local governments lack the resources – human and financial – to meet their responsibilities.17 GOLD III highlights wide differences between countries and categories of local governments: those in major urban areas are generally better- resourced than those in peripheral and intermediate cities, towns and rural areas, although large metropolitan areas in South Asia and cities in Sub-Saharan countries also have great backlogs in access. Even in high- and upper-middle-income countries, local governments struggle regularly with inadequate resources and unfunded tasks and responsibilities. For example, current public sector and economic reforms in Europe could weaken local government capacity to respond to increasing demands for basic services in some countries. In other regions, four categories of basic service governance can be identified. In the first, mostly in middle-income countries, progress in decentralization and service provision are positively correlated. Most of Latin America is this group. In the last few decades, national policies have given increased powers and resources to local governments (their share of national expenditure rose from 13% on average in the 1980s to 19-20% at the end of the 2000s).18 However, this process has been far from ho-
The organizing authority and service operator are different roles. The operator (public or private) runs the service on a daily basis. In some cases, the organizing authority may also play the role of operator (e.g. through a local government department). The organizing authority may be a municipality, but the dominant operator can be a public utility owned by the state/ province, as for water in Brazil. 16
See WHO (2012). Over 90% of 74 developing countries assessed have decentralized responsibility for water and sanitation, but only 40% have fiscal decentralization and 60% reported insufficient human resources to operate and maintain urban drinking-water systems, weakening the capacity of local governments to plan and deliver services. 17
18
GOLD II, p 99.