Decentralist Challenge

A decentralist seeks to shift authority from central government to local units of administration, private businesses and private voluntary organizations (NGOs). This process is often accompanied by economic liberalization and market development policies that open up public functions to competition from small business, cooperatives, community groups and other non-government sources.

Decentralists believe that in many countries the centralized government controls too much and does so without the knowledge or consent of its citizens. The resulting bureaucratic inefficiency and ineffectiveness contribute to national underdevelopment. Decentralization allows more efficient, responsive and accountable government and frees resources to meet more of the people’s needs.

In the political sphere, Decentralist are concerned that the centralized state preys on its own citizens. They promote the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which argues that management of affairs should be decentralized as far as possible to the lowest level of society: family, block, village, and, only in the rarest cases, the national government. In the United States, the most visible decentralists were the Distributists, who drew inspiration from such figures as G. K. Chesterton and Dorothy Day, founder of the anarchist Catholic Worker movement. Their highly praised 1936 guide, Who Owns America?, had little practical effect on the prevailing trend toward centralization.

How Does a Decentralist Challenge Centralized Authority?

While the goal of stabilization and state-building is to assemble or reassemble fragmented pieces of power into a cohesive whole, decentralists argue that such efforts ignore the informal rules and norms that emerge during periods of conflict. In fact, many of the states that have experienced civil war and collapsed over the past several decades had highly centralized governments prior to their outbreak of civil conflict.

Political decentralization also addresses the aspirations of ordinary citizens, who want more choice, fewer nonnegotiable directives from on high, and more say in how they live their lives. Many of these citizens are natural decentralists, who create their own communities and projects for themselves with little or no outside guidance.

While critics of decentralization point to examples of local corruption, they neglect the reality that centrally controlled governments are more prone to grand corruption. Moreover, this corruption is typically less damaging to social cohesion than the kind of opportunistic behavior that occurs in more decentralized systems.

Nevertheless, decentralists are careful not to confuse their views with libertarianism. They frequently emphasize that they hold no naive faith in market institutions and distrust textbook notions of “pure markets,” such as those exemplified by the Enron scandal or the massive greed of Wall Street. They also emphasize the importance of effective democratic control and monitoring at both the national and the local levels. They are also generally wary of any form of neo-imperialism, which they view as potentially destabilizing.