3.  Key Research Issues and Methodology:

This document is a distillation of the findings of empirical studies of experiments with democratic decentralization. The interesting methodological question is 'what approaches did those studies use?' A diversity of methods were employed, but those studies which have yielded the most telling results (on which this document mainly draws) have adopted a 'before and after decentralization' approach. That is, they asked representative samples of the population at the local level how government and development processes worked before and after decentralization - and how (and how much) respondents interacted with agents of government and the policy process before and after. Decentralization has occurred recently enough in almost every case to make the period 'before' a rather recent memory. This approach has made it possible to speak with considerable confidence about the promise and limitations of decentralization. Most of those studies were also undertaken by scholars who had a solid understanding of the workings of politics and society in the countries being analysed – so contexts (which vary and are quite important) are well explained.