ASSESSING THE EMPOWERMENT OF SUBNATIONAL GOVERNANCE INSTITUTIONS IN ASIA

The Local Public Sector Alliance (LPSA) is a nonprofit organization seeking to promote inclusive, equitable societies by enriching the understanding of decentralization and localization as complex, cross-cutting, and multi-stakeholder reforms. LPSA elevates the debate on public sector decentralization and localization by maintaining a global platform for policymakers and researchers interested in decentralization. LPSA engaged a Capstone team to perform a regional analysis on the empowerment of subnational governance institutions in South and East Asia, in order to advance the global state of knowledge on subnational governance in the region. The team utilized the Local Governance Institutions Comparative Assessment (LoGICA) framework and conducted fieldwork in India, working with local counterparts to assess the status of urban and rural governance institutions within three Indian states: Kerala, Jharkhand, and Maharastra. Based on its inter-country research, the team produced a detailed case study of the status of decentralization in India, highlighting variance between states. The final report incorporates the team’s research and interviews with country experts and includes a regional analysis to be distributed among LPSA’s professional network.