Decentralization and Local Governance in Developing Countries

Over the past three decades the developing world has seen increasing devolution ofpolitical and economic power to local governments. Decentralization is considered an importantelement of participatory democracy and, along with privatization and deregulation, represents asubstantial reduction in the authority of national governments over economic policy. Thecontributors to Decentralization and Local Governance in Developing Countries examine thisinstitutional transformation from comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives, offering detailedcase studies of decentralization in eight countries: Bolivia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia,Pakistan, South Africa, and Uganda.Some of these countries witnessed an unprecedented "big bang"shift toward comprehensive political and economic decentralization: Bolivia in 1995 and Indonesiaafter the fall of Suharto in 1998. Brazil and India decentralized in an uneven and more gradualmanner. In some other countries (such as Pakistan) devolution represented an instrument forconsolidation of power of a nondemocratic national government. In China local governments weregranted much economic but little political power. South Africa made the transition from theundemocratic decentralization of apartheid to decentralization under a democratic constitution. Thestudies provide a comparative perspective on the political and economic context within whichdecentralization took place, and how this shaped its design and possible impact.Contributors:OmarAzfar, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Pranab Bardhan, Shubham Chaudhuri, Ali Cheema, Jean-Paul Faguet, BertHofman, Kai Kaiser, Philip E. Keefer, Asim Ijaz Khwaja, Justin Yifu Lin, Mingxing Liu, JeffreyLivingston, Patrick Meagher, Dilip Mookherjee, Ambar Narayan, Adnan Qadir, Ran Tao, Tara Vishwanath,Martin Wittenberg