Box 1 Summary of Findings
How can decentralization reform be designed to promote secure livelihoods, sustainable natural resources management, and social equity ?
Livelihoods : Broadly speaking, reforms that increased local authorities accountability to local people demonstrated the best prospects for improving local livelihoods. Means for holding local governments accountable included elections and public consultations. Election, when they are free and fair, provide a direct way to choose leaders to act in the public interest. Consultations are important because they can help shape the design and implementation of specific development plans. Even where decentralization processes were limited to administrative decentralization, consultations shaped government interventions that were more appropriate to local needs. Authorities accountability was also increased when they shared shared social networks with constituents-sometimes referred to as social capital.