Medium Term Expenditure Framework > Decentralisation

Dividing Local Government Units

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Glen Wright:
The trend over the past decades has been to merge small local government units into larger units that cover more area and provide more services with better fiscal capacity.  This has been the trend in the Western European countries and to some extent in the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe.  The balance of efficient service delivery and maintaining citizen participation has been difficult to achieve. I am interested to know if there has been any countries with experience in dividing their large local government units into smaller units.  What was the basis for this in terms of some criteria that was applied? How was this process organized and what were the problems of doing this?  Is there any roadmap or guide as to how best to do this?

FitzFord:
Glen,
I have a limited response to your questions. In most cases of the type of changes that you outlined, the motivation is fundamentally political. In most cases, the consequences are systemic degradation - not a surprise. I think it may  be useful to treat the 2 observations I mentioned as hypotheses, and test them and their outcomes. I believe - strongly - that the results of these test, whether my hypotheses are correct or proven wrong, would make a significant and useful contribution to overall understanding of decentralization and what may be done to contribute to longer term positive development of decentralization as a system for improving governance and achieving positive outcomes.
Fitz.

John Short:
Kosovo has created new decentralised units by splitting them - and often the initial one was not large.  India has bifurcated states and thus created new one.

Glen Wright:
Fitz and John:  Thanks for your responses.  With regard to motivation it is largely of two reasons that I know of.  Here in Georgia where I am working on a technical guide of how to split up municipalities into 2 or more units, one urban centered and the others rural centered, it is basically for political reasons in response to feeling that  the large 70 municipalities were too focused on the urban area and not enough on the rural problems and that funding was not allocated on a more equitable or prioritized basis.  What is surprising to me is that the local officials are largely in favor of this division, but this seems to be due to their party affiliation with the government majority.  The original proposal was to divide the 70 into approximately 4-5 units, but in the end they only managed to divide them into two areas, urban and rural areas.  So now the rural local government will completely surround the urban area, but the administrative offices for the rural unit will stay in the urban center. Doesn't really mean much of a change in service delivery.  I am familiar with Kosovo as well and using it is a model for developing the Memorandum of Understanding that determines how the municipality will be split.  In Kosovo, it is driven my ethnic issues much more than here in Georgia, although some ethnic considerations are also apparent here in drawing the boundaries. I am trying to develop some criteria for determining on what basis the division could be made, but most examples are criteria that merges local governments rather than divide them.  This is the area where I can't find much to guide me.

FitzFord:
Glen,
How about setting out a model that links service efficiency and size and revenues available/necessary (tax and service charges) for the proposed divisions and ask the decision-makers in both the central and local arenas to select the options that balance the stated objectives? and how about putting these to open forums in the affected areas?
Fitz.

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