Local government institutions (LGIs) are widely recognized as the cornerstone of democratic governance and sustainable local development. In Bangladesh, Union Parishads, Municipalities (Pourashavas), Upazila Parishads, Zila Parishads, and City Corporations play a vital role in delivering public services, promoting participatory governance, and fostering socio-economic development. Despite significant progress in decentralization, the financial autonomy of local governments remains limited due to excessive dependence on central government transfers and grants. The inadequate mobilization of own-source revenue (OSR) restricts the capacity of LGIs to finance infrastructure, maintain essential public services, and respond effectively to local development needs. This conceptual paper examines the relationship between strengthening local government institutions and improving own-source revenue mobilization in Bangladesh. Drawing upon theories of fiscal decentralization, public financial management, and good governance, the paper argues that sustainable local development requires financially autonomous local governments capable of generating, managing, and utilizing local revenues efficiently and transparently. The study identifies key institutional, legal, administrative, technological, and political constraints affecting local revenue collection while proposing policy options to enhance fiscal capacity. The paper further emphasizes that digital transformation, improved tax administration, citizen participation, institutional accountability, and fiscal transparency can significantly strengthen local revenue systems. Effective utilization of locally generated revenue not only improves service delivery but also reinforces public trust and democratic accountability. The findings contribute to the growing literature on decentralization and local public finance by providing a conceptual framework for strengthening local government finance in Bangladesh.
Niko Silitonga, Harya Widiputra, Fangky Antoneus Sorongan
Fiscal decentralization has been widely implemented to improve regional fiscal efficiency and strengthen local fiscal capacity. However, empirical evidence regarding its effectiveness remains inconclusive, particularly in developing countries with diverse institutional capacities. This study examines the associations between regional fiscal policy instruments and provincial fiscal performance in Indonesia, proxied by the growth of Locally Generated Revenue (PAD), while investigating the moderating role of fiscal decentralization. Unlike previous studies that examine fiscal instruments separately or focus mainly on macroeconomic outcomes, this research develops an integrated framework that evaluates financing allocation, development expenditure, transfer funds, and other legitimate revenues within a moderated panel-data model. Using panel data from 33 provincial governments during 2017–2024, the study applies a fixed-effects regression model with interaction terms. The results show that development expenditure is positively and significantly associated with provincial fiscal performance, indicating that productive public spending strengthens regional fiscal capacity. In contrast, financing allocation and transfer funds show no significant direct associations with fiscal performance. Other legitimate revenues demonstrate a positive but limited association. Fiscal decentralization plays a dual moderating role by strengthening the association between transfer funds and fiscal performance while weakening the effects of development expenditure and other legitimate revenues. These findings suggest that the effectiveness of fiscal decentralization depends on fiscal instruments and local institutional capacity rather than producing uniform outcomes. This study contributes to the fiscal decentralization literature by providing an interaction-based empirical framework and practical evidence to support more effective decentralization policies and improve provincial fiscal performance in Indonesia.
Purpose This study aims to examine whether fiscal autonomy improves capital expenditure efficiency in decentralized systems by addressing the overlooked possibility that its effects are nonlinear and context-dependent. Focusing on Ghana’s 261 Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs), the study investigates whether fiscal autonomy enhances efficiency uniformly or only beyond certain institutional thresholds. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a balanced panel data set from 2018 to 2024 to detect continuous nonlinear and regime-specific effects using fixed-effects estimation with a quadratic specification and threshold-based robustness analysis. The data were obtained from Ghana Audit Service-certified financial reports and Ghana Statistical Service demographic indicators. Findings Fiscal autonomy is associated with a U-shaped relationship with capital expenditure efficiency, although the nonlinear effect is modest and only weakly statistically supported. At low levels of autonomy, increases in internally generated funds are associated with lower capital expenditure shares, while beyond an estimated threshold of approximately 37% of total revenue, the relationship becomes positive. Intergovernmental transfers complement local fiscal capacity, whereas population density and urban classification are not significant predictors in the regression models. Practical implications The findings indicate gradual capacity-sensitive decentralization strategies. Enhanced fiscal autonomy in the absence of institutional development may reduce expenditure efficiency. Policymakers should prioritize administrative capacity, revenue systems and accountability before increasing budgetary discretion. Originality/value This study provides panel-based evidence consistent with a U-shaped fiscal autonomy–efficiency relationship in African local governments. By highlighting threshold effects and institutional conditioning, it advances fiscal decentralization research and contributes to the application of nonlinear modeling in public finance.
Why do local elected representatives facing similar institutional constraints choose different strategies? This dissertation develops a theory of strategy choice under incomplete decentralization, where municipal councilors remain electorally accountable but depend on bureaucratic and higher-level political actors for implementation, finance, and approval. Administrative, fiscal, and political constraints define the institutional setting, while leverage, the capacity to induce response, and cover, protection from sanction, capture councilors’ unequal positions within it. Drawing on more than 450 interviews, 67 municipal council meeting transcripts, and an original survey of 506 current and former councilors in urban India, I distinguish collaborative strategies based on coordination and follow-up from combative strategies based on public pressure and cost-imposition. Collaboration overwhelmingly dominates. Perceived bureaucratic discretion is the strongest correlate of movement toward combativeness, while leverage and cover do not reliably predict the binary shift between strategies. Instead, leverage more clearly distinguishes procedural from discretionary forms of collaboration. These findings show that incomplete decentralization does not eliminate local representation. It channels representation through continued dependence on actors councilors do not command and shifts attention from whether councilors collaborate to how they collaborate and when they escalate.
Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) represent one of the most consequential experiments in organizational design to emerge from blockchain technology. By encoding governance rules into smart contracts and recording every vote, proposal, and treasury decision immutably on-chain, DAOs offer globally distributed communities a high degree of transparency and accountability in collective decision-making. This study examines governance design and participatory innovation across three DAOs: RARI DAO, Arbitrum DAO, and Optimism DAO. Each has taken a distinct structural approach to the problem of collective decision-making at scale. Using a qualitative comparative case study method, the research draws on governance forum discussions, proposal records, and official documentation, analyzed through thematic coding and cross-case comparison. The theoretical frame draws primarily from Ostrom’s (1990) commons governance principles, with Scott’s (1995, 2014) institutional theory and Donaldson’s (2001) contingency theory applied as supplementary analytical lenses. Across all three cases, the findings indicate the emergence of increasingly formalized governance architectures designed to balance decentralization, coordination efficiency, and operational security. Communities building governance infrastructure from scratch, iterating rapidly in response to community feedback, and developing structural solutions: delegate incentive programs, participation incentive mechanisms, bicameral legitimacy systems, constitutional frameworks, and dedicated legal entities that represent an emerging configuration of governance mechanisms. Two cross-case findings are particularly notable. First, all three DAOs independently converged on a three-body governance architecture comprising a legal foundation, a security council, and token-holder governance — suggesting that similar governance problems, encountered in similar technical and legal environments, tend to produce similar structural solutions. Second, while these architectures are structurally similar, they differ significantly in how governance processes are implemented in practice, reflecting differences in scale, formalization, and community context. These findings contribute to the literature by providing a structured cross-case analysis of DAO governance design and offering practical insights into programmable institutional design and blockchain-enabled coordination systems.