It is often associated with pluralistic politics and representative government, but it can also support democratization by giving citizens, or their representatives, more influence in the formulation and implementation of policies.
Advocates of political decentralization assume that decisions made with greater participation will be better informed and more relevant to diverse interests in society than those made only by national political authorities. The concept implies that the selection of representatives from local electoral jurisdictions allows citizens to know better their political representatives and allows elected officials to know better the needs and desires of their constituents.
Political decentralization often requires constitutional or statutory reforms, the development of pluralistic political parties, the strengthening of legislatures, creation of local political units, and the encouragement of effective public interest groups.
Administrative Decentralization. Administrative decentralization seeks to redistribute authority, responsibility and financial resources for providing public services among different levels of government.
It is the transfer of responsibility for the planning, financing and management of certain public functions from the central government and its agencies to field units of government agencies, subordinate units or levels of government, semi-autonomous public authorities or corporations, or area-wide, regional or functional authorities.
The three major forms of administrative decentralization -- deconcentration, delegation, and devolution -- each have different characteristics. Deconcentration--which is often considered to be the weakest form of decentralization and is used most frequently in unitary states-- redistributes decision making authority and financial and management responsibilities among different levels of the central government.
It can merely shift responsibilities from central government officials in the capital city to those working in regions, provinces or districts, or it can create strong field administration or local administrative capacity under the supervision of central government ministries. 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. While structural reforms may be viewed as swings of a pendulum between two extreme ideal states fully centralized or fully decentralized , a growing consensus in the scholarship suggests that centralized and decentralized structures are internally compatible and complementary.
In other words, both centralized and decentralized structures frequently co-exist within the same institutions, often creating a dynamic tension between values. This creates an increasingly complex structural paradigm for the expression of public values.
The result is that many governance structures appear to be evolving toward new models in which elements of both centralized and decentralized control are observed simultaneously. You do not currently have access to this article. Please login to access the full content. Access to the full content requires a subscription. Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Politics. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice.
Oxford Research Encyclopedias. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Oxford Research Encyclopedias Politics. Advanced search. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. From macroeconomic perspective decentralization involves the transfer of political, administrative and fiscal authority from the central government to the regional authorities and the local governments. Decentralized state, is the state, that sacrifices the uniformity of its policies to meet the particular needs of each region.
Bo the centralization and decentralization relate to the decision making organization of the unit. In the first case only central unit is eligible to take the autonomous decision while in the second case, the decision making process can be taken in several subunits. As the result the centralized units have a rather hierarchical management system, while decentralized system is characterized by rather horizontal management system.
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