Administrative Decentralization

Types of and Reasons for Decentralization

Governments generally use one or more of four types of decentralization to achieve their objectives. First, deconcentration transfers responsibilities and authority to lower levels within the central government.

Second, devolution grants powers for selected functions or activities to local government units. Third, delegation empowers special authorities or quasi-government organizations to carry out specified functions as agents of the central government. Finally, deregulation shifts authority from the government to the private sector or to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

Governments often decentralize to accelerate economic development, increase political accountability, enhance public participation in governance, and help break bottlenecks in decision making that often result from centralized bureaucratic planning and management. Decentralization is a way to help local officials cut through complex central bureaucratic procedures and get decisions made and implemented more quickly. It can relieve officials in central agencies of routine tasks and allow them to concentrate on national policy. Governments are often pressured to decentralize by diverse political, ethnic, religious, and cultural groups seeking greater autonomy in decision making and stronger control over national resources. In federal systems, such as the United States, decentralization encourages experimentation at the state and local levels to develop more creative, innovative, and responsive programs for service delivery.

The Emergence of Decentralization

Countries in North America and western Europe began to decentralize in the late 1970s, after nearly two decades of governments' consolidating power and responsibility. The World Bank reports that by the early 1990s, all but twelve of the seventy-five countries with populations of more than five million had undertaken some form of decentralization, and by the end of the 1990s, about 95 percent of the countries with democratic political systems had created subnational units of administration or government.

In North America and western Europe, central government bureaucracies took on crucial roles in mobilizing resources during World War II, and afterward they consolidated responsibilities for economic and social reconstruction. Strong central management in richer nations offered convenient models for new [Page 19]governments in developing countries. In the postcolonial period, many newly independent governments in Africa and Asia saw local jurisdictions as colonial institutions or as strongholds of ethnic or religious minority opposition. Many ministries in developing countries saw their political power and budgets grow from their expanding roles in planning and implementing large-scale, capital-intensive investments funded through foreign aid. They were generally reluctant to allow private entities or NGOs to participate or compete in many of the service sectors.

Service delivery often suffered, however, because few central government ministries rewarded civil servants for dealing with citizens as customers and government bureaucracies grew more unresponsive to the needs of their constituents. Central planning and management brought economic stagnation and increasing poverty in South and Central America, Africa, Eastern Europe, and South Asia.

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