THIS BOOK WAS prepared for the UN World Summit in September 2005 to emphasize the central role of local organizations in meeting the Millennium Development Goals – in local food and farming systems, in securing land and property rights in Africa, in conservation (especially through community conserved areas), in forest enterprises, in urban areas and in managing the local impacts of climate change. In each of these areas, the book highlights the current and potential role of the organizations formed by poorer groups to meeting the MDGs – organizations formed by smallholder farmers, small-scale traders, “slum” and shack dwellers, pastoral herders, fishing communities and indigenous people’s groups. It describes how these organizations are often most effective when local governments support them and work with them. The different chapters also emphasize the fact that these groups are generally invisible to aid agencies and development banks, even as their members’ needs are the justification for these agencies’ very existence.

Achieving most of the MDGs needs more effective local organizations – to provide or improve schools, health care and disease control, to ensure provision for water and sanitation, to manage local resources, to significantly improve the lives of slum dwellers and to develop the programmes or safety nets to reduce hunger. Yet most of the discussions about how to meet the MDGs – and to make poverty history – give little attention to how external development assistance can support the local organizations that can ensure needs are met and which are accountable to those with unmet needs. As examples in the book show, the quality, scale and cost-effectiveness of development assistance can be much improved by working with organizations formed by poorer groups, and supporting their partnerships with local governments and other actors. This can also contribute much to building more effective local governance systems. But this needs all international agencies to consider how they will support pro-poor local organizations; most international agencies lack the capacity and the channels to do so. Indeed, as this book describes, most are actively withdrawing from supporting local development processes. If the poor lack voice and influence in local organizations, and lack protection of their rights by local governments and by the rule of law, then much-increased donor flows and even debt relief and fairer global markets are unlikely to bring them much benefit.