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• Johannes Paul Jütting

Decentralisation has been advocated by donors and development agencies as an important factor broadening citizen participation and improving local governance, thereby promoting poverty reduction from the bottom up. On the basis of a comprehensive review of 19 country case studies documented in the literature, this paper questions this assumption.

The authors find that an unambiguous link between decentralisation and poverty reduction cannot be established. In some of the poorest countries characterised by weak institutions and political conflicts, decentralisation could actually make matters worse. Interestingly, the poverty impact of decentralisation would appear to depend less on the physical country setting, for example a country’s size or quality of infrastructure, than on the capacity and willingness of policy makers to ensure a pro-poor devolution process. Two important policy lessons emerge from this study. First, in an environment where the central state is not fulfilling ...

La décentralisation a été recommandée par les pays donateurs et les agences de développement comme un facteur important d’incitation à une plus large participation des citoyens et à une meilleure gouvernance locale, facilitant ainsi la réduction de la pauvreté en partant de la base. Ce document de travail reconsidère cette hypothèse, en passant en revue 19 études de cas par pays disponibles dans la documentation.

Les auteurs estiment impossible d’établir un lien incontestable entre décentralisation et réduction de la pauvreté. Dans certains des pays les plus pauvres, en butte à la faiblesse des institutions et à des conflits politiques, la décentralisation, dans le contexte actuel, peut empirer la situation. C’est un élément instructif, l’impact de la décentralisation sur la pauvreté parait moins dépendre des caractéristiques physiques d’un pays, telles que sa superficie ou la qualité de ses infrastructures, que de la capacité et de la volonté des décideurs politiques à engager un ...

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Paper provided by OECD Development Centre in its series OECD Development Centre Working Papers with number 236.

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Date of creation: Aug 2004
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Handle: RePEc:oec:devaaa:236-en

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This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

• NEP-ALL-2005-08-13 (All new papers)
• NEP-DEV-2005-08-13 (Development)
• NEP-SEA-2005-08-13 (South East Asia)

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