power should be decentralised and which and which tasks should be moved fromthe centre to peripheral areas are questionsthat have on occaslos determined the success of failureof the most advanced forms of government in history When policy makers pursue decentralisation reforms today they act in part from motives similar to those that guided lcaders 2,000-3,000 years ago while other reasons for decentral isation are much newer in a historical perspective for example those expressing modern democratic idcals
In Audacious Rcforms Merilee Grindle (2000) puts her finger on one of the questions most relevant to give up power Her convincing answers shed light on both the personal power ambitions of polit-icians and the pressures of political conflict Welearn from her analysis centres and provinces is to maximise their own power Naturally leaders can be assumed to desire power but their strategies for achiev-ing thisdiffer widely for interesting reasons Ifpolitical leaders always laid their hands on all the levers of power that they could reach as implied by a crude power-maximising assumption their political life spans would be shorter than they actually are today So when we study deccntralisation reforms we keep in mind that political elites are often engaged in a balancing act whwew thepower holder in acentre trits to calculate how little power he or sheneeds o give away in order to be able to hold on to as much as possibe in the long run The time perspective is important here and to paraphrase Grindle (2000:24)politicians may choose to give up some immediate power to be able to retain at least some power in the future So there are certainly concerns that underlie the move towards decentralisation in modern as well as historic times that go beyond the shorter-term perspectives found in many econmic models models Grindle also emphasised how political crises and historicalcontext shape worldviews and the perception of options It is immediately obvious when we start to look empirically at different examples of decentrlisation that nit only do motives for decentralisation vary but so to the meanings and dimensions of the concept itself So before we try to predict how decentralisation reforms in lndia might work we need to define more precisely what decentralisation actually is