Centralization of Power

4 Key excerpts on "Centralization of Power"

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  Decentralizing Governance

  Emerging Concepts and Practices

  • G. Shabbir Cheema, Dennis A. Rondinelli(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Brookings Institution Press/Ash Center

    (Publisher)

  C oncepts 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 govern-ment 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 govern-ments, 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. 1 By the early 1980s increasing international trade and investment; growing economic, social, and political interaction across national borders; and rapidly emerging technological innovations that increased the scope and reduced the costs of communications and transportation and helped spread knowledge and information worldwide, changed perceptions of governance and of the appro-priate functions of the state. The concept of governance expanded to include not only government but also other societal institutions, including the private sector and civil associations. Debates shifted from the proper allocation of responsibili-ties within government to how strongly the state should intervene in economic From Government Decentralization to Decentralized Governance g. shabbir cheema and dennis a. rondinelli 1 1 activities, whether central governments inhibited or promoted economic growth and social development, and the appropriate roles of government, the private sector, and civil society.

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  The Administrative State

  A Study of the Political Theory of American Public Administration

  • Dwight Waldo(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 8CENTRALIZATION VERSUS DECENTRALIZATION 1

  "Centralization versus decentralization’’ is not a classic and recurring problem of political philosophy in the sense that "Who should rule?" has proved to be. Instead, the precedents and analogues are limited to the political writings of modern times, because the problems posed are modern. These problems relate to the nation-state; to large-scale representative government and the ideological force of "democracy"; and to the rise of science and technology, which has transformed the space-time aspects of our life, and has engendered in acute form the problem of "functionalism" or expertise. The literature of federalism versus the unitary state, of local self-government versus centralized administration, of monism versus pluralism in the law, of cultural autonomy versus uniform national culture, of party dictatorship versus corporatism—these are the modern problems in political theory to which the centripetal and centrifugal forces in public administration are analogous, and in relation to which they are seen in their proper perspective.

  The treatment that follows is in no sense exhaustive. Broadly construed, "centralizing" and "decentralizing" would characterize so much writing on public administration that a mere listing of titles would fill the space of a chapter. The objective is: (1) to present, in their derivation and present form, the "centralizing" tendencies that have been so commonly accepted as to have been designated "the dogmas of centralization"; (2) to review the most conspicuous dissents from the "orthodox" position; and (3) to summarize the writings that present the case for or suggest a plan of decentralization.

  The "Dogmas of Centralization"

  Governmental reformers and writers on administration were confronted with certain conditions. Applying their assumptions to these conditions, they arrived at certain schemes, beliefs, formulae, or principles about the proper nature of governmental institutions.

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  Power and Responsibility in Education

  • Keith Watson(Author)
  • 1996(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  Within each &tat, co-ordination is achieved by centrally issued rules and regulations and by a clear hierarchy so that the chains of authority for each service radiate downwards from its ministerial headquarters in A the capital. Military organizations typify most clearly this kind of centralism. Its degree of exten-sion to civilian public services has historically been part of efforts to build a strong modern state -whether by a monarchy (e.g. Prussia, tsarist Rus-sia, France under Napoleon), by modern forms of absolutism (Nazism, Stalinism) or by a democrat-ically constituted national government with strong goals of centrally directed social improve-ment guided by technocratic and scientific ex-pertise. Bureaucratic centralism is pervasive in many developing countries. There is the legacy of colo-nial rule with its needs both to control and to develop in order to meet the needs of colonial rule itself; there is the statism implied by nation-building imperatives after independence. Many developing countries have after independence had policies for social and economic development A Different Forms of Decentralization 5 (certainly in education) which have placed strong emphasis on central planning. Apart from such rationales, bureaucratic centralism is a pattern which tends to emerge when independently con-stituted local and regional government were weak at the time of state formation - a condition com-mon to many developing countries. The shaping of national authority distributions The history of the modern state and that of mass education are intimately linked.

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  Governing Complexity

  Analyzing and Applying Polycentricity

  • Andreas Thiel, William A. Blomquist, Dustin E. Garrick(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  To put it another way, the greater feasibility of monocentric governance at lower levels of aggregation of decision centres leads us to expect to find that the incidence of polycentric governance increases with the level of aggre- gation. Evidence of this relationship is nevertheless yet to be established. Vincent Ostrom (1991, 1997) often used the Leninist organizational model to illustrate his understanding of a monocentric system of govern- ance, and emphasized the practical limitations entailed by efforts to con- centrate so much power in any single centre of authority. He realized that even totalitarian systems incorporate smaller organizations of diverse size and types, if only for the purposes of implementing central commands. A clever supreme leader may purposefully establish multiple organizations engaged in internal policing or the protection of state secrets and use each of them as a check on the potential power of the other. We are convinced that this more nuanced interpretation of monocentric governance fits his 5 Polycentric governance can therefore be distinguished from certain ‘decentralization’ reforms where some implementation tasks are assigned to units but actual policymaking authority remains centralized. 26 Mark Stephan, Graham Marshall, and Michael McGinnis meaning much better than using it as a simple foil for polycentric governance. V. Ostrom similarly critiques the Hobbesian or Woodrow Wilsonian insistence of there being, somewhere in any viable system of societal governance, an ultimate source of authority, a single sovereign. For Wilson that role was played in the United States of America by Congress, for Hobbes by whatever actor satisfies his definition of a Leviathan (V. Ostrom 1991, 2008b). For OTW, advocates of a single consolidated government at the metropolitan level were pursuing the chimera of a Gargantua topped by a single centre of ultimate authority.

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