Hereby the CIB Working Group launches the new website! To ease the use of the website, the lay-out of the new website was designed to be well-ordered and clear. Besides the changes in the design, the new website also aims to serve its visitors better content wise. We have improved several of its functions, such as the compendium and the members area, and have rearranged the menu to increase the accessibility of the information.

The 6th edition of the Africities Summit is scheduled to take place at the King Fahd Palace Hotel Dakar, the capital city of Senegal, from 04 to 08 December 2012. Its theme will be:“BUILDING AFRICA FROM ITS TERRITORIES: WHAT CHALLENGES FOR THE LOCAL GOVERNMENTS ?”

Capacity4development has created a new blog post in their Public Sector Reform & Decentralisation group. This post discusses the summary of the ´Grand Panel´ discussion of the advanced seminar on Decentralisation that was held in Brussels in the first week of July, 2012. The main topics under discussion were: Why should donor agencies care more about decentralisation? How can decentralisation be “instrumental” to development? How can donor agencies like the EU provide smart support to decentralisation?

This paper provides a midterm report on a multi-country research effort to shed light on the institutional sources of variation in public goods’ provision at the sub-national level, with a particular focus on key bottlenecks to improvement in maternal mortality, water and sanitation, facilitation of markets and enterprise, and public order and security.

The World Bank decentralisation thematic group has revised its website, including an updated dataset on fiscal decentralisation indicators.