Under-provision of essential public goods is making development m Africa slouuer and more inequitable than it needs to be. f good part of this problem concerns the governance of provision at sub-national levels. This article provides a mid-term report on a multi-country research effort to shed light on the institutional sources of variation in local public goods provision. The particular focus is on key bottlenecks to improvement in maternal mortality, uuater and sanitation, facilitation of marketsand enterprise, and public order and security. Draining on fielduuork evidence and secondary literature, it identifies three clusters of issues and associated explanatory variables uuhich seem to account for much of the variation in intermediate outcomes. They concern the extent of policy-driven incoherence in the institutional frameaiork, the strength of corporate disciplines in provider organisations and the degree to uuhich self-help is able to be 'locally anchored' in tujo particular senses.
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