ZEF Bonn

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ZEF Bonn ● Center for Development Research – Annual Report 2001/2002
Persisting poverty and the need
for providing and maintaining
public services and infrastructure
drive the rationale for
decentralisation, which many
governments now need. ZEF
projects look at the obstacles
to improving access to public
goods and services.
Government
building in
Havanna
The kick-off workshop for this BMZ/GTZ-funded project took place in Cairo, Egypt,
in June.
4.6 Decentralisation and development
A number of important research questions stem at the same time from an economic
and political-economy perspective regarding poverty effects of decentralisation. As a
ZEF paper contributed to an IMF conference shows, political, administrative and
fiscal decentralisation needs to be considered simultaneously, and the sequencing
and pace of the different types of decentralisation appear to play an important role.
For example, rural decentralisation will not benefit the rural poor if it isolates
hinterland from urban and peri-urban growth centres. Neither will children in poverty
enjoy any advantages from decentralisation if it undercuts the capacity of largescale
child nutrition programs. Results further suggest that political and administrative
decentralisation should precede fiscal decentralisation, because otherwise participation
and accountability are not assured.
Persisting poverty and the need to provide and maintain public services and infrastructure
drive the rationale for decentralisation, which many governments now
require. ZEF projects look at the obstacles to improving access to public goods and
services. One of them analyses the provision of health and education in rural Russia,
while a second project assesses the extent to which decentralisation helps in the
delivery of public goods and services in Ghana.