In the new special issue of Public Sector Economics guest editors Yamini Aiyar, Rolf Alter and Linda Bilmes selected articles that deal with challenges of effective governance for sustainable development at subnational government levels. One common message of these contributions – the progress needs creativity and commitment.
Christian Raffer, Henrik Scheller and Oliver Peters in the article The UN Sustainable Development Goals as innovation drivers for local sustainability governance? Examples from Germany provide a vivid example of how SDGs provide a useful framework for socio-ecological transformation favoured by the high degree of federalism and autonomy of cities.
Sean Dougherty and Andoni Montes Nebreda in the article Going global, locally? Decentralized environmental expenditure and air quality claim that despite the importance of the role of intergovernmental institutions for the overall success of SDGs objectives, there is still limited progress at the regional and local levels, due to imperfect institutional capacity and doubts about the electoral consequences that unevenly distributed costs may generate.
Mohammed Aminu Yaru in the article Budget transparency and internal revenue mobilisation at subnational government level: evidence from Nigeria examines the hypothesis that improved budget transparency leads to greater revenue mobilisation. The study also reiterates the need to control corruption in order to make sustainable progress in revenue mobilisation at sub-national level.
Marko Primorac, Jorge Martínez-Vázquez and Pedro Arizti in the article Achievements and unfinished agenda of the fiscal equalization system in Croatia explain how the revenue sharing arrangements and the fiscal equalization system in Croatia have long been perceived as inadequate and ineffective. They try to fill those gaps by analysing the disparities in fiscal capacity and expenditure needs across subnational governments in Croatia, as a test of the effectiveness of the current fiscal equalization mechanisms.
Nejc Brezovar and Tatjana Stanimirović in the article Sustainability aspect of participatory budgeting at the municipal level in Slovenia discuss the Local Self-Government Act which has since 2018 left decisions on participatory budgeting funding, on who can propose and vote on projects, and how, on the nature of proposed and implemented projects as far as they fall under municipal authority and under the public finance rules to the discretion of municipalities.
Dagmar Radin reviews the United Nations World Public Sector Report 2021: National institutional arrangements for implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals: A five-year stocktaking which focuses on the national institutional arrangements in 24 countries and the evaluation of the progress made since the beginning of the implementation in 2016.