The Local Public Sector Alliance’s (LPSA) Regional Working Group on Asia Open Meeting took place on April 09, 2024 (3:30 PM Delhi, 5:00 PM BKK, 6:00 PM Manila). The meeting was opened and moderated by Peter Yates, Associate Director, The Asia Foundation who serves as one of the co-chairs of the LPSA Asia Working Group.
Nicholas Travis, from the LPSA Secretariat began the session by providing an overview on the LPSA ongoing efforts, LoGICA work in Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. LoGICA focuses on assessing the administrative structures and governance levels, producing publicly available profiles for each country that detail their governance characteristics, autonomy levels, and decision-making capabilities. Travis mentions that this initiative reveals significant differences in governance across countries. These profiles are prepared with the help of local experts and are available on the LPSA website, with some countries in the mentioned regions already partially covered. The project aims to complete profiles for all countries worldwide, using a comparative analysis to identify trends and issues affecting decentralization effectiveness regionally.
The main speaker at the meeting was Ms. V R Vachana, Head, Municipal Law and Policy at Janaagraha. Janaagraha is a Bengaluru based not-for-profit institution working to transform the quality of life in India’s cities and towns. She presented a detailed overview of Annual Survey of India’s City-Systems (ASICS) 2023, a comprehensive diagnostic of the state of India’s city-systems. The study evaluates the complex, mostly invisible factors (such as laws, policies, institutions, institutional processes) that underpin urban governance and strongly influence the quality of life in India’s cities. In its 6th edition, ASICS 2023 evaluates the quality of urban laws (municipal acts and town and country planning acts) of all 35 states/Union Territories (UTs) in India, through 52 questions using the city-systems framework. It recommends 10 instruments of change to strengthen and improve city-systems and thereby, transform urban quality of life.
ASICS 2023 report reveals that progress in addressing systemic challenges is slow, with issues ranging from outdated spatial planning and poor financial management to inadequate human resources and fragmented governance, underlining a significant gap in the implementation of comprehensive and effective urban governance frameworks across India.
A video of the meeting is available on YouTube. The links below provide access to the video segments of the different agenda items.
| No. | Agenda Item | Contributor |
| 1. | Welcoming Remarks | Peter Yates |
| 2. | Update: State of Local Governance Institutions in Asia | Nick Travis |
| 3. | Insights & Learnings from ASICS: Annual Survey of India’s City Systems | VR Vachana |
| 4. | Open Reflections | Peter Yates |
| 5. | AOB & Next Steps. | Peter Yates |
