Decentralisation: Comparative Experience in Commonwealth Africa

Until the late 1980s, decentralisation experiments in sub-Saharan Africa tended in the majority of states to reinforce central control rather than enhance local autonomy. However, recent moves towards political pluralism have brought a switch in emphasis to more meaningful types of local participation. These have taken the form of political decentralisation, understood in the sense used by Philip Mawhood to denote the devolution of powers to representative local councils, each with its separate legal existence and its own budget, and with the authority to allocate resources and to carry out multiple functions. However, a number of African regimés also intend to transfer power from the centre to officials of the central government in the field. They therefore attach a broader meaning to the concept of decentralisation, using it to cover both political devolution and the deconcentration of administrative authority. The two processes are, in fact, often complementary rather than separate.