Actor Atlas

Scope: The public and private sector performance, and initiatives concluded, planned, or ongoing in the municipality involving local actors listed below, national and international actors (see the national Actor Map), and compliant with local, national and international statutes.

Parties in the initiatives: The public authorities and private entities from Bayambang.
MDG Good Practices are available from The Good Practice Databank at UN Development Group.

Constraints: At the Constraint Dictionary common constraints facing development initiatives are classified by COFOG/COPNI class, and dependencies and impact spheres are indicated. The constraint map is under construction. The degree to which a constraint matters to local development, and is (can be) reduced by an initiative, is measured by indicators which are mapped, also by COFOG/COPNI class, at the Indicator Dictionary (under construction).

Achieving synergies across initiatives Initiative management is often the weakest link in the (strategy) execution chain. Traditional project and programme planning and communications approaches insufficiently use the bundling facilities that internet and wikis offer. As a precursor for an initiative atlas, the Local Development Book aims to list all development initiatives and cluster them according to their COFOG classification. In this way, proponents and stakeholders of new initiatives can easily discover what initiatives exist already. Suitable cooperative agreements can be made and double or competing efforts can be avoided early in the planning cycle.

Initiatives by developing country governments, local authorities and private sector must both avoid the fragmentation of public resources and ensure a sufficient coverage of all functions of government for all members of their constituency. The Local Development Book supports striking such a balance.

As indicated in Reform of the Multilateral Development System: Call for a High-Level Commission (J.F. Linn, The Brookings Institution) both the rapidly rising number of multilateral agencies, and the declining average project size reinforce the risks of aid fragmentation, a lack of focus on scaling up development impact, and rising transactions costs.

Initiative books, used both by the multilateral agencies and country development stakeholders will help mitigate the risks of aid fragmentation.
Moreover, by adding Local Development Books to the multilateral and national initiative books, the smaller project size should not be overstraining the limited absorptive capacity of poor recipient communities, it should not lead to inefficient communications with stakeholders, and it could be coupled to a more equitable spreading of the public resources.