Prepared under the authority of the Steering Committee on Local and Regional Democracy (CDLR), it examines local and regional aspects of self-government. For the Russian Federation, local self-government is purportedly one of the foundations of their constitutional system, and this publication sets out the situation as in 1999, and whether measures to improve the development of self-government have been acheived. At present over 13,000 municipalities have been created, but matters such as training, monitoring, effective communications, and the economic and financial basis for self-government needs to be resolved.