ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the regulation of district councils’ institutions, elections, powers and functions. It describes the central government monitoring instruments of district councils and questions whether the regulation and monitoring thereof serves the overall objective of decentralisation. The chapter addresses the role of co-operation as a means of mitigating some of the weaknesses associated with regulation and monitoring in a decentralised system of government. It examines intergovernmental relations in Uganda from two main angles: supervision and co-operation. Arguably, Uganda’s penalty/reward scheme, as observed by A. Shah, is an honest example of results-based intergovernmental finance that is capable of minimising trade-offs between district councils’ autonomy and accountability in service delivery. Conventional wisdom in the literature on intergovernmental financing is that bailouts provide the wrong incentive and suggest that district councils can expect to receive ‘easy money’ from the central government as long as they perform poorly.
