Before developing elaborate plans for decentralization, they must assess the lowest organizational level of government at which functions can be carried out efficiently and effectively and -- for functions that do not have to be provided by government -- the most appropriate forms of privatization. Centralization and decentralization are not "either-or" conditions. In most countries an appropriate balance of centralization and decentralization is essential to the effective and efficient functioning of government.
Not all functions can or should be financed and managed in a decentralized fashion. Even when national governments decentralize responsibilities, they often retain important policy and supervisory roles.
They must create or maintain the "enabling conditions" that allow local units of administration or non-government organizations to take on more responsibilities. Central ministries often have crucial roles in promoting and sustaining decentralization by developing appropriate and effective national policies and regulations for decentralization and strengthening local institutional capacity to assume responsibility for new functions.
The success of decentralization frequently depends heavily on training for both national and local officials in decentralized administration.
Technical assistance is often required for local governments, private enterprises and local non-governmental groups in the planning, financing, and management of decentralized functions. Rationale for Decentralization. Much of the decentralization which has taken place in the past decade has been motivated by political concerns.
For example, in Latin America, decentralization has been an essential part of the democratization process as discredited autocratic central regimes are replaced by elected governments operating under new constitutions.
In Africa, the spread of multi-party political systems is creating demand for more local voice in decision making. In some countries, such as Ethiopia, decentralization has been a response to pressures from regional or ethnic groups for more control or participation in the political process.
In the extreme, decentralization represents a desperate attempt to keep the country together in the face of these pressures by granting more autonomy to all localities or by forging "asymmetrical federations. The transition economies of the former socialist states have also massively decentralized as the old central apparatus crumbled. In many countries, decentralization simply has happened in the absence of any meaningful alternative governance structure to provide local government services.
In some cases particularly in East Asia decentralization appears to be motivated by the need to improve service delivery to large populations and the recognition of the limitations of central administration. Although the main reason for decentralization around the world is that it is simply happening, there are a multitude of design issues that affect the impact of different types of decentralization on efficiency, equity and macrostability.
In this regard, there is a growing body of literature examining the economic rationale for decentralization. The specific services to be decentralized and the type of decentralization will depend on economies of scale affecting technical efficiency and the degree of spillover effects beyond jurisdictional boundaries. These are issues that need to be taken into account in the design of a decentralized system. In practice, all services do not need to be decentralized in the same way or to the same degree.
In an important economic sense, the market is the ultimate form of decentralization in that the consumer can acquire a tailored product from a choice of suppliers. The nature of most local public services limits this option and establishes a government role in ensuring the provision of these services, but it does not automatically require the public sector be responsible for the delivery of all services.
For the most part, it does not even mean the complete transfer of any service to subnational governments. Put so plainly, such a corrective sounds unnecessary. But oddly, many of those who argue against decentralization focus their firepower on an enemy that, on closer inspection, looks surprisingly like a straw man. So let me say it clearly. With the exception of some very local services with few or no economies of scale, like rubbish collection, the center will continue to be involved in local service provision, even after radical decentralization, in important ways.
What decentralization does, rather, is to empower or create subnational governments by devolving significant resources and authority to them. It makes the provision of local, regional, and national public services the joint responsibility of two or more levels of government.
It transforms a simple, linear system of bureaucratic fiat think command and control , run from the capital, into a much more complex system of coordination, cost sharing, and overlapping responsibilities amongst multiple tiers of autonomous government with independent mandates. The downside of increasing complexity is greater cost. But the upsides are potentially far more important.
One is the greater robustness of a multi-tiered system of independent nodes to failure in any one of its parts. Imagine you live in a centralized country, a hurricane is coming, and the government is inept. To whom can you turn?
In a decentralized country, ineptitude in regional government implies nothing about the ability of local government. And even if both regional and local governments are inept, central government is independently constituted, probably run by a different party, and may be able to help. Indeed, the very fact of multiple government levels in a democracy generates a competitive dynamic in which candidates and parties use the far greater number of platforms to outdo each other by showing competence, and project themselves hierarchically upwards.
In a centralized system, by contrast, there is only really one — very big — prize, and not much of a training ground on which to prepare. Another key advantage is the greater, more detailed information that decentralized government should be able to.
To better understand this, consider the types of information required to solve any public problem, or provide any high-quality public service. One kind, of course, is technical expertise. Planning a vaccination campaign, designing an irrigation system, and building a water treatment plant are nontrivially complex problems.
I could not do any of these things competently myself, and my guess, dear reader, is neither could you. They require specialized knowledge that relatively few people have. Such people tend to cluster in cities, not towns or villages. They tend to work for central government, where the pay is better and the challenges more interesting.
Delegation is a more extensive form of decentralization. Through delegation central governments transfer responsibility for decision-making and administration of public functions to semi-autonomous organizations not wholly controlled by the central government, but ultimately accountable to it.
Governments delegate responsibilities when they create public enterprises or corporations, housing authorities, transportation authorities, special service districts, semi-autonomous school districts, regional development corporations, or special project implementation units. Usually these organizations have a great deal of discretion in decision-making. They may be exempt from constraints on regular civil service personnel and may be able to charge users directly for services.
A third type of administrative decentralization is devolution. When governments devolve functions, they transfer authority for decision-making, finance, and management to quasi-autonomous units of local government with corporate status. Devolution usually transfers responsibilities for services to municipalities that elect their own mayors and councils, raise their own revenues, and have independent authority to make investment decisions.
In a devolved system, local governments have clear and legally recognized geographical boundaries over which they exercise authority and within which they perform public functions. It is this type of administrative decentralization that underlies most political decentralization.
Financial responsibility is a core component of decentralization. Fiscal decentralization can take many forms, including a self-financing or cost recovery through user charges, b co-financing or co-production arrangements through which the users participate in providing services and infrastructure through monetary or labor contributions; c expansion of local revenues through property or sales taxes, or indirect charges; d intergovernmental transfers that shift general revenues from taxes collected by the central government to local governments for general or specific uses; and e authorization of municipal borrowing and the mobilization of either national or local government resources through loan guarantees.
In many developing countries local governments or administrative units possess the legal authority to impose taxes, but the tax base is so weak and the dependence on central government subsidies so ingrained that no attempt is made to exercise that authority. Economic or Market Decentralization. The most complete forms of decentralization from a government's perspective are privatization and deregulation because they shift responsibility for functions from the public to the private sector.
Privatization and deregulation are usually, but not always, accompanied by economic liberalization and market development policies. They allow functions that had been primarily or exclusively the responsibility of government to be carried out by businesses, community groups, cooperatives, private voluntary associations, and other non-government organizations.
Privatization can range in scope from leaving the provision of goods and services entirely to the free operation of the market to "public-private partnerships" in which government and the private sector cooperate to provide services or infrastructure. Privatization can include: 1 allowing private enterprises to perform functions that had previously been monopolized by government; 2 contracting out the provision or management of public services or facilities to commercial enterprises indeed, there is a wide range of possible ways in which function can be organized and many examples of within public sector and public-private institutional forms, particularly in infrastructure ; 3 financing public sector programs through the capital market with adequate regulation or measures to prevent situations where the central government bears the risk for this borrowing and allowing private organizations to participate; and 4 transferring responsibility for providing services from the public to the private sector through the divestiture of state-owned enterprises.
Deregulation reduces the legal constraints on private participation in service provision or allows competition among private suppliers for services that in the past had been provided by the government or by regulated monopolies. In recent years privatization and deregulation have become more attractive alternatives to governments in developing countries. Local governments are also privatizing by contracting out service provision or administration. Choosing the Most Appropriate Form of Decentralization.
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