Concepts of decentralization have changed rapidly over the past quarter of
a century in tandem with the evolution in thinking about governance.
Until the early 1980s government and the state were generally perceived of
interchangeably. Government was seen as the institutional embodiment of state
sovereignty and as the dominant source of political and legal decisionmaking. In
developing countries, debates over the structure, roles, and functions of government
focused on the effectiveness of central power and authority in promoting
economic and social progress and on the potential advantages and disadvantages
of decentralizing authority to subnational units of administration, local governments,
or other agents of the state. Decentralization was defined as the transfer of
authority, responsibility, and resources—through deconcentration, delegation, or
devolution—from the center to lower levels of administration.