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E-book Decentralised Governance : Crafting Effective Democracies Around the World

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Penilaian

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For over 60 years, decentralisation has been one of the most powerful reform movements in the world, affecting all of its regions and most of its coun-tries. This marks a major inversion of the much-longer-term global pattern, which featured centralised public administrations and the gradual march of the bureaucratic instruments of centralisation across large parts of the world over centuries (Faguet 2012). And then, unexpectedly, around the middle of the 20th century, decentralisation began sprouting everywhere. Take, for example, countries across Africa and Asia. Decolonisation bequeathed highly centralised governments to most of them, usually mirroring their previous colonial administrations. Here the backlash was especially quick, with the first decentralisations launched within a decade of independence.What did these decentralisations achieve? The literature and policy consen-sus of the 1970s and 1980s were full of hope about decentralisation’s potential to make government more effective and responsive to citizens. But a wave of empirical studies in the 1980s and 1990s cast doubt on its ability to meet these lofty goals. At the turn of the new millennium, evidence on the effects of four decades of decentralisation remained mixed, unclear, and for many analysts deeply frustrating.Since then, a growing body of research has shown that decentralisation can indeed improve public sector efficiency by, in effect, bringing government closer to the people. While decentralised governments may be captured by elites or undermined by the clientelistic distribution of public resources, a broad consensus holds that – under the right conditions – decentralised sys-tems produce more effective public services and are more democratic. But what these conditions are, and where they hold, have until now remained insufficiently understood. This volume seeks to answer those questions, iden-tifying specific ways in which decentralisation can improve governance, and exploring also how it can go wrong. In this volume we bring together a new generation of studies that blend theoretical nuance with empirical innovation. We begin by taking stock of 50 years of decentralisation studies, arguing that – done correctly – decen-tralisation can improve the democratic accountability and responsiveness of governments by changing the incentives local officials face. We examine how reforms have fallen short of initial expectations due to problems of corrup-tion, elite capture, and political clientelism that can severely distort decentral-ised governance. We provide fresh evidence from around the world, including Bangladesh, China, Colombia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, and Pakistan, highlighting the pros and cons of decentralisation under both democratic and autocratic regimes, providing examples of good and bad practice in both, and drawing lessons for future reforms. Throughout, our goal is to understand in detail, with strong micro foundations, how decentralisation operates differently under different regimes and across a variety of institu-tional and social contexts.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

320.8 FAG d

Penerbit

London : LSE Press., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

391 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781909890855

Klasifikasi

320.8

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Local Government

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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