'This stimulating analysis of subnational politics across key states in sub-Saharan Africa provides an empirically nuanced and in-depth account of the policies and practices of devolution. The institutional focus takes seriously the congruence between national and subnational; formal and informal; party structure, fiscal federalism, judicial independence and the electoral system. Wrestling with challenging issues such as ethnic competition, the resource curse, and continued executive dominance, the authors place subnational governance in context to assess democratic development, representation, accountability and governance.' Rachel Beatty Riedl, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University, USA 'The volume contains a collection of essays that uniformly contain a very rich harvest of cutting-edge research outcomes and insights in engaging prose on such issues and matters on the frontier of intellectual and policy considerations of the often difficult subject of the travails of representation in African governance. In this enterprise, the book has chosen to address a long-standing weakness in the relevant literature, namely, the relative silence on, and neglect of, sub-national legislatures and emerging and subsisting local arenas for policy engagement and policy making. It thus alerts us to the often difficult but equally exciting inter-penetrations between sub-national and national institutions and processes in the determination of the quantum and quality of governance and politics in the everyday life of Africans, majority of whom are locked up in the margins of their society and economy.Written and edited by established and emerging scholars in the mainstream of African(ist) scholarship, all united by fresh perspectives on the subject at hand,he book offers excellent fare for academics, students, policy practitioners and all those interested in coming to an unusually grounded, theoretically informed, and comparative understanding of African governance in the latter part of the second decade of the twenty first century.' Adigun Agbaje, Deputy Vice Chancellor, University of Ibadan, Nigeria
