DELIVERING THE GOODS
What is the typical structure of an LDP? Typically, an LDP comprises three complementary components or sets of activities: •
• •
Support for local capacity building within sub-national government and community institutions: trialling/development/extension of local planning/budgeting and management systems and procedures, training, basic logistical support, etc. (usually jointly funded by UNDP and UNCDF); Establishment of a local development fund facility to allow financing of investments generated through the local planning/budgeting process (funded by UNCDF); Support at national level for capitalizing the policy lessons learned, raising awareness of policy issues, scaling up and supporting development of the policy, legal and regulatory framework.
• Devising demand-driven planning procedures in rural areas may indeed be harder
– due to a relatively ill-educated and dispersed citizenry, very limited channels of communication, the relative weakness of horizontal associational activity, relative prevalence of vertical patronage relations, and so on; • Devising effective and efficient local government supply may also be harder in ru-
ral areas – due to basic human resource limitations of LGs; the typical institutional ‘split’ between local technical agencies and elected ‘transaction cost’ factors; the lack of supportive oversight by higher levels of government; and, all too often, to a policy, legal, regulatory and financing framework that constrains the responsiveness of rural LGs. Table 1 on page 14 provides a more detailed – albeit very simplified – comparison of the differences between rural and urban contexts, and spells out some of their possible implications for local government service delivery.
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