After more than two decades—that is, the 1940s and the 1950s—of increasing
centralization of government power and authority in both more developed and
less developed countries, governments around the world began, during the
1960s and 1970s, to decentralize their hierarchical structures in an effort to
make public service delivery more efficient and to extend service coverage by
giving local administrative units more responsibility. During the 1970s and
1980s, globalization forced some governments to recognize the limitations and
constraints of central economic planning and management. A shift during the
same period in development theories and strategies in international aid agencies
away from central economic planning and trickle-down theories of economic
growth toward meeting basic human needs, growth-with-equity objectives, and
participatory development also led to increasing calls for decentralization.7
International assistance organizations promoted decentralization as an essential
part of a “process approach” to development that depended primarily on selfhelp
by local communities and local governments.8 National governments
decentralized in order to accelerate development, break bureaucratic bottlenecks
arising from centralized government planning and management, and participate
more effectively in a globalizing economy