Ethnic, religious, linguistic, or social groups may be a majority of the population in certain regions, although distinct minorities in the nation as 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.