Overview

Philosophy:

This philosophy of this programme area is to deepen democracy by making the institutions of local governance effective, accountable, transparent and efficient through the active and informed participation of people, especially those from the marginalized and peripheral sections of the population.

Strategy and Activities:

The strategy is to strengthen the social base of democracy by creating peoples’ agencies that can play a pro-active role in making local governance effective, accountable, transparent and efficient.  This includes:

• Strengthening people’s organizations for self-governance and collaborations with local governments.
• Providing technical and financial assistance to civil society organizations/ NGOs to promote and support innovative ideas for improved civic management.
• Supporting studies, expert services and training workshops to promote more participative and professional urban governance.
• Involving academic institutions to support people-centric approaches towards urban governance.
• Engaging the attention of the state to support civic action for better local governance.
• The programme has two components: urban and rural governance.

Urban Governance

The specific objectives of the urban governance programme are to:

• Enable vulnerable and marginalized groups, particularly poor women and youth to participate in local decision making systems in the states of Jharkhand, Bihar and Orissa.
• Work on integrated development of peri-urban settlements for improved urban governance. Over the last couple of years, NFI has specifically focused on small towns and peri-urban interfaces (such as Delwara in Rajasthan) to concertedly work on giving voice to the poor and build platforms of interfaces amongst people and local governments.
• Build/ create citizens networks for improved urban governance.
• Share and disseminate existing models of citizens associations and promote dialogue and collective action for enhanced civic management.
• Enhance public understanding of urban governance and support NGOs and other organizations in promoting better governance.

A current area of focus for NFI is to broaden its geographic focus by working on urban governance issues and building capacities of NGOs and other organizations in Orissa and Jharkhand.

Rural Governance:

The broad objectives of the rural governance programme include empowering the disadvantaged and the marginalized to benefit from decentralized development, promoting poverty alleviation measures from equity-based development agendas, making democracy inclusive and participatory, promoting quality of life, improving the quality of public discourses on democratic decentralization and building capacities of  NGOs and community based organizations (CBOs) on issues of governance and service delivery.

Future Outlook

NFI would like to deepen, expand and disseminate its urban and rural experiences across NFI’s operating areas. This would primarily be done through interventions to strengthen peoples’ participation in habitat issues such as cleanliness, heritage, water, sanitation, people’s participation and waste management.

Program Officers: 

Urban Governance:
Barsha Poricha ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Rural Governance: