Decentralized Local Governance and Citizen Participation in South Asia

Meenakshisundaram Ss

Working Papers from eSocialSciences

Abstract: This paper encompasses two major themes - local governance and citizens' participation in five neighbouring countries in South Asia, their trials, achievements and failures. Whether their experiences can help the international community in drawing useful conclusions on these two themes is what this paper proposes to explore. Citizen participation is the essence of democracy. An ordinary local citizen should feel that he is not just an inert subject of an arbitrary government far removed from him, but a person whose views must be considered since the government belongs to him and the ruler exists for his benefit and not the other way round. This can be best achieved only through an elected local government, since the people are likely to choose the ones who care for their interests most. The local rulers will also have to be sensitive to the needs of the people, if they wish to get continued support from them. Citizen participation and democratic local governance are thus closely inter-linked and a discussion on one will necessarily lead to the other.

Keywords: Decentralisation; Local Governance; Citizen Participation; South Asia; international community; Democracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-09
Note: Institutional Papers
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.esocialsciences.org/Articles/show_Artic ... ionalPapers&aid=7466
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:7466

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from eSocialSciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Padma Prakash ().