The Development Partners Network on Decentralisation & Local Governance (DeLoG) cordially invites you to participate to this upcoming webinar on functional assignment. During the webinar, we will discuss how to effectively assign functional responsibilities in multilevel governance systems.
Background
Governments often promise better service delivery as the main rationale and expected outcome of decentralization initiatives. Also, the international development community views the success or failure of decentralization reforms mostly from the perspective of whether or not service delivery has improved. Citizens are interested in obtaining public services such as health, education services and infrastructure quickly, at reasonable costs, with good quality and according to their needs. Translating these ambitions to improved outcomes on the local level still remains a difficult task.
The institutional and organizational set-up of the different levels of government is thereby a critical issue. Defining and deciding on the exact roles and functions of different government tiers is essential for a more effective and successful service provision. The emerging concept of functional assignment (Ferrazzi and Rohdewohld 2017) provides a framework for addressing questions about which and how roles and responsibilities should be assigned to different levels of governments or to different administrative tiers.
This webinar offers practical advice for policy makers from developing and emerging countries and development cooperation practitioners engaged in the field of decentralization and local governance. A short theoretical introduction will be followed by an analysis of real-life country cases that demonstrate the common technical and political challenges to functional assignments and showcase the need to support country made and context-specific solutions to functional assignment processes and results.
Objective
Taking the publication ‘’Emerging Practices in Intergovernmental Functional Assignment’’ by Rainer Rohdewohld and Gabriele Ferrazzi as a starting point, this webinar will bring together different perspectives on the challenges concerning functional assignments in decentralized governance systems. Besides giving concrete examples from Cambodia and Rwanda there will be a space for open exchange on the effects of functional assignments on local governments in different contexts and its implications for development cooperation. Special attention will be given to whether and how functional assignment reforms can open space for local or subnational governments engagement, underlining developmental actors’ responsibility to design context-specific strategies and approaches.
