Suchergebnisse

Citizen competence in a democratic society is perceived as an essential mechanism for promoting political accountability in local governance. This paper, thus, qualitatively investigates the relationship between citizen competence and political accountability in Uganda's local governance system across two discrete political regimes, during the post-independence period. Using an in-depth explorative design, it was established that citizens in both regimes were largely inarticulate, disengaged and uninvolved in determining local preferences, suggesting minimal link between citizen competence and the propensity to promote political accountability at district level. The data suggested that citizen competence was less influential in district politics for the greater part of the post-colonial period. Nonetheless, there were also episodes where citizens actively participated in enforcing political accountability at the grassroots under multiparty politics in both the Obote II and NRM regimes, with slight variations in the intensity and pattern between the two periods. Thus, the level of citizen competence and nature of local governance in Uganda mirror the political accountability practices at the local level, mainly shaped by civic challenges and the character of politics in Uganda during the periods studied regardless of differences and longevity. The paper recommended deliberate state intervention for mobilization of citizens and the establishment of state-engineered dynamic social networks to generate capacity for holding local leaders accountable and more empowered civil society to construct robust citizen competence programmes to foster political accountability.

This article examined the effectiveness of the existing framework for intergovernmental coordination in Kenya's multilevel governance system and its effects on the management of water services delivery. Based on a thematic analysis of interviews with policy actors from both levels of government, the findings indicate that, despite agreement among policy actors from both levels that there is a significant functional interdependence in the delivery of water services, the scope and frequency of coordination were less than anticipated under the devolution policy. This has negatively impacted water service delivery in numerous ways. The study demonstrates that the underlying causes of the observed weak intergovernmental coordination are factors related to persistent contestation of functional assignment between the two levels of government, resource allocation, and perceptions of national government encroachment into county functions which erodes trust and undermines service delivery.