| Decentralisation
and Sustainable Livelihoods: James Manor (IDS) |
 |
4. Essential
Conditions for Success: |
If democratic decentralization is to work reasonably well, three things are
essential. Decentralized authorities must be provided with (a) adequate funds
to accomplish important tasks, (b) adequate powers to make decisions required
to complete such tasks, and (c) reliable accountability mechanisms - to ensure
both the accountability of elected representatives to citizens, and the
accountability of bureaucrats to elected representatives. In the absence of any
one of these things, decentralized systems will founder.
Other things can help such systems to work well - a well-established
democratic tradition, a free press, a lively civil society, abundant social
capital, a comparatively equitable distribution of wealth, prior land reform,
high literacy rates, etc. But none of these things is essential. Decentralized
systems with substantial democratic content have worked tolerably well in their
absence.
Box
1: Inadequate funding damages decentralisation
in The Ivory Coast
In
adequate funding will throttle decentralized systems. This
sometimes occurs when governments that are pursuing structural
adjustment programmes off-load tasks onto decentralized bodies
without the funds to complete them. But it can also happen
in other ways, as evidence from Cote d'Ivoire demonstrates.
A decentralised system was created there in the mid-1980s,
and was adequately empowered and funded. It worked well for
three years and yielded substantial developmental gains. But
in 1988, a national fiscal crisis forced the central government
into drastic cuts in funds for decentralized bodies. This
crippled them and undid much that had been achieved previously.
|
|
