Ethnic, religious, linguistic, or social groups may be a majority of the
population in certain regions, although distinct minorities in the nation as
Fiscal Administration in Local Government: An Overview 19
a whole.3 Their special interests may well be submerged by the majority in
national politics, and they may become alienated from the life of the nation.
Local sovereignty gives these citizens the opportunity to govern and to provide
local government services, often with a style and substance differing from
those in other regions, without the need to break away and form their own
country. Because of this ability to adjust government services to local tastes and
preferences, local government with decentralized responsibility can be a great
accommodator of regional differences and a moderator of regional tensions.
The decentralized structure can give regional majorities a role in governance
that they would almost certainly never enjoy at the national level. In rural
Africa, providing a degree of self-governance has often “been a response to the
need to provide an often ethnically diverse population with greater ‘voice’ and
representation in the political process—without dismembering the state as a
geographical unit” (Winter 2003: 10). Indeed, decentralization has been the
stabilizing result of long civil wars in Mozambique and Uganda. Of course,
decentralized governance offers no panacea, as the continuing dissatisfaction
of the province of Quebec with its place in Canada demonstrates. But without
the degree of sovereignty over many governmental services that provincial
government provides, citizen dissatisfaction there would likely be even greater.