Hi Peter,  Below I quoted some senetnces from one of my publications (Hashemi, S.M. and Hedjazi, Y., 2013. Consultants and Directors’ Levels of Authority and Effectiveness of Agribusiness Ventures. Journal of Agricultural & Food Information, 14(1), pp.37-49.). In addition, you may want to take a look at the entire paper as well. It may be of help.

Happy Holidays!

Best wishes,

Mahmoud 

 "the impacts of decentralization depend on the specifics of each situation. In other

words, the advantages of decentralization—such as efficiency, transparency,

and accountability—are not always directly proportional to the degree of decentralization. However, negative gains associated with decentralization have

also been reported in some studies (Sharma, 2006): efficiency losses (Rodden,

2000) and slower growth (Xie, Zou, & Davoodi, 1999), creating destabilization

(Tanzi, 1996)."

"Finally, this study confirmed that consultants and directors’ authority in ABVs are positively related to ABV effectiveness in meeting Aims 1 and 3, but not Aim 2; a positive correlation was not found for all three goals."

I have just finished a study on "Struggles and Strategies of Elected Women Representatives in India". It is a notion that women in politics do not perform hence the decentralization does not matter wherever the women are heading decentralized institutions. This was proved otherwise in our study. The women are able to perform well at the grassroots level.  

"Fiscal decentralisation has gained momentum in capitalist and communist/socialist countries (such as China and Myanmar, for instance) and in unitary and federal states alike since the last quarter of the twentieth century. Country experiences have shown that fiscal decentralisation do enhance public goods and services delivery and poverty reduction (Ehtisham and Brosio, 2009). However, designing of fiscal decentralisation should be country-specific (Fedelino and Ter-Minassian, 2009)."

Ehtisham, Ahmad and Giorgio Brosio, (eds), (2009), Does Decentralization Enhance Service Delivery and Poverty Reduction, Cheltenham (UK): Edward Elgar.

Fedelino, Annalisa and Teresa Ter-Minassian, (2009), Macro Policy Lessons for a Sound Design of Fiscal Decentralization, July, Fiscal Affairs Department, Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund.

The foregoing is from the following publication.

http://sas.sagepub.com/content/19/1/101.abstract

Kindly refer these articles..

http://www.undp.org/content/dam/india/docs/decentralisation_india_challenges_opportunities.pdf

http://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/2440.pdf

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277901610_Functioning_of_Panchayati_Raj_Institutions_in_India_A_Status_Paper

Dr Ritesh Dwivedi

Article Functioning of Panchayati Raj Institutions in India: A Status Paper

For a literature overview of the relationship between decentralization and conflict (which is not necessarily a positive one), see the article in attachment.

Article Decentralization, Institutional Ambiguity, and Mineral Resou...

My and Tyler Dickovick's new book, Decentralization in Africa , Rienner Press, is a good overview of these issues. Also see my article in PAD, Decentralization and Recentralization in Africa.

Several years back I did some work on centralization at the state level.  I don't know whether they will meet your needs or not but here are the citations.

Adkisson, Richard V. "Multi-level administrative structure and the distribution of social service expenditures: A Nebraska example." The Social Science Journal 35 3 (1998): 303-18.

Adkisson, Richard V. "Devolution and recentralization of welfare administration: implications for 'new federalism." Review of Policy Research 17, 2-3 (2000): 160-78.

Good luck.

The best overview of the potential effects of decentralization is, in my opinion, Daniel Triesman's book, 'The Architecture of Government." It is important to consider the potential interactive effects of decentralization and other reforms undertaken simultaneously, however.  On this issue, see my article with Veronica Herrera: "Can Developing Countries both Decentralize and Depoliticize Urban Water Services?  Assessing the Legacy of the 1990s Reform Wave.” 2014. World Development. 46: 621-641.

Steve Hanson Small Towns, Austere Times: The Politics of Deracinated Localism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014) uses dialectical analysis to make the case against localist impulses in rural England during devolution. Hanson points out the middle class, white, protestant prejudices that drive the movement.

Sarah S. Elkind, How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy: Business, Power, and the Environment in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2011) examines the dysfunctions of systems that haphazardly mix decentralization and centralization policies. This is rather the policy wonk version of the Jack Nicholson movie Chinatown. 

Douglas S. Reed, Building the Federal Schoolhouse: Localism and the American Education State (Studies in Postwar American Political Development) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) tracks similar issues in the American educational system over the past 50 years in which centralized federal policy goals run into the decentralized administration of schools.

Kwok-kan Tam, Wimal Dissanayake, and Terry Siu-han Yip, eds. Sights of Contestation: Localism, Globalism, and Cultural Production in Asia and the Pacific (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2002)

Bassel F. Salloukh and Rex Brynen (eds), Persistent Permeability?: Regionalism, Localism, and Globalization in the Middle East (International Political. Economy of New Regionalism Series) (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publications LTD, 2004)

Simon Ricketts and Duncan Field, Localism and Planning (London: Bloomsbury Professional, 2012)

Peter, I can only offer you my limited perceptions.  I hope that they may be helpful by informing your approach..

The above responses appear to confirm my belief that the process of decentralisation, or centralisation, and the adaptation or creation of the institutions, the businesses and the people affected is not a matter of designing in 'process efficiency and resilience' to a seemingly appropriate 'business model'.

The thread running through everything, almost invisible but always present, is the fact that the core issue is not the efficiencies that are expected from the change being contemplated but the relationships of power which it changes, threatens or facilitates amongst every player, both as individual people and separately as organisational representatives, within their own particular networks of influence which they perceive with themselves ( and their own attribution of 'rational self-interest')  as the focus - of their own power outwards and of their historic obligations inwards.

It is these generally hidden, obscured and denied relationships which are in the end the making or the breaking of re-organisation projects.  Of whatever scale.  It is not an aspect talked about very much and I doubt that much funding has been forthcoming to study the matter in any great depth.... for obvious reasons!

I can recommend three books that might lead you into an appreciation of what it might take to design-in mitigating features to each project being planned.  They are by Etsko Schuitema  'Beyond Management', 'Leadership' and particularly 'Intent' .  If they are not in your library try www.careandgrowth.com . 

'People are both the answer and the problem!'

Best Wishes for the New Year

Rob

The recent study quoted below analyses your issue from a somewhat neglected angle. It compares the  policy process of four very decentralised cases: The microstates of San Marino, The Seychelles, Palau and St. Kitts.The outcomes suggest that formal 'smallness' may not be an efficient whay of establishing political participation - or service delivery, one is inclined to add. This is because it may be counteracted by informal procedures, including power imbalances and nepotism.

W. Vermeulen (2015). Politics and Democracy in Microstates. London/New York: Routledge.

In the Spanish case, the efficiency of services improved with the State of Autonomies established in the Constitution of 1978. But the passage from the Franco regime towards the improvement is not a merit in itself because it started from a state very little efficient.

Within Spain, the Basque Country and Navarre, it seems clear that the tax and financial autonomy has made their public services are generally better than in the rest of Spain. The Basque Country is responsible for the fiscal management of almost all taxes and does not depend on central government funding. This responsibility, it seems, has stimulated administrative efficiency and management of public resources to a greater extent than in the rest of the Autonomous Communities, where the central government continues to collect the bulk of the taxes.

If you want more information about the Basque case (Economic Agreement- Concierto Económico), see:

GRAY, Caroline. "A Fiscal Path to Sovereignty? The Basque Economic Agreement and Nationalist Politics." Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 21, nº. 1 (2015): 63-82.

AGIRREAZKUENAGA, Joseba, ALONSO OLEA, Eduardo J. (eds.). The Basque Fiscal System. History, Current Status and Future Perspectives. Center for Basque Studies. University of Nevada, Reno (USA), 2014. ISBN: 978-1-935709-46-6.

AGIRREAKZUENAGA, Joseba. The Making of the Basque Question. Experiencing Self-Government, 1793-1877. Reno: Center of Basque Studies. University of Nevada, 2011.

You want to look at the experience of Canada.  They manage to have different jurisdictions to share budgets and responsibilities among the federal, provincial and territorial governments. See for example Growing forward 1 and Growing Forward 2. 

Mnr. Vrooman makes a very cogent point. In every instance of organisation 'powers' must be assigned to individuals.  The relationships between them will be defined by their attributions of power and  by their opportunities to exercise it.  The larger the organisational structure the greater is the opportunity for both policing the misuse of power, but so are the instances and the magnitude of concentrations of power.  By the same token, according to the size of the organisation the opportunity to conceal abuse and corruption is also greater with larger organised groups than in smaller ones.  Another factor to be considered is that it may be that although the scope of particular instances of misuse in larger organisations may be greater when they are considered in relation the overall scope of the functions undertaken by the larger organisation they may in fact be smaller in relation to that scope when comparing such instances of misuse with those encountered in smaller, decentralised structures. if so, then this factor would also contribute to the relative ease with which misuse in larger organisations can be concealed.

For myself, the main issue is that in designing organisations and particularly, although by no means exclusively, those involving public governance of one sort or another we tend to assume the individuals comprising them to be more trustworthy and self-policing than perhaps we should.  The Ancient Greeks appear to have understood this problem only too well.  Checks and balances were publicly practised and visible parts of their systems, even though by today's standards they were small organisations.  Even with a 'no place to hide' approach they still frequently failed to prevent graft and corruption.

That same focus on today's problems with abuses of power, in small or large organisations, should be unashamedly made a focus of system design and be major consideration in system engineering of all sorts.... until the far(?) future when we have transitioned from our present dysfunctional state, perhaps, and can operate in a social paradigm based on more noble sentiments then the glorification and endorsement of personal greed and advantage.

Given that a course of action or policy needs to be undertaken that affects a complex system, a decentralized, local, bottom up approach trumps a centralized one. Though in the past, for more routine and simple systems it tends to be more effective compared to decentralization.

Assuming that complexity feeds off information, a system that is increasingly information-enriched would tend to require more and more decentralized coordination to maintain its resilience.

The choice dilemma between a market driven or a regulated approach may be viewed in this light.

Article Social rental housing in HK and the UK: Neoliberal policy di...

Book Making apartments affordable: from speculative to deliberati...

From a historical perspective, I would recommend Ken Kollman's book, Perils of Centralization: Church, State and Corporation (Cambridge 2013).  I have always viewed centralization/decentralization as a dilemma.  If you centralize too much you create problems that only decentralization can solve and vice versa.

Hover, in terms of the general trend towards vulnerabilities and instabilities that centralised systems tend to amplify the resilience that complex systems of decentralisation offer can be regarded as having an innate long-term strategic advantage in an increasingly fast moving and unpredictable world.  This is also a consideration when planners start to become sensitive to the long-term durability, resilience and viability of increasingly global societies.

Check an interesting article showing that natural resource booms may create negative effects in fiscally decentralized nations.  In the article  fiscal decentralization comprises

the financial aspects of devolution to regional and local governments, and it covers

two main interrelated issues. The first is the division of spending responsibilities and revenue sources between levels of government. The second is the amount of discretion given to regional and local governments to determine their expenditure and revenues.

The reference:

Perez-Sebastian, Fidel, and Ohad Raveh. 2016. “The Natural Resource Curse and Fiscal Decentralization.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 98(1): 212–30. http://ajae.oxfordjournals.org/lookup/doi/10.1093/ajae/aav051.

As you start to consider the longer term implications of successful decentralisation versus successful centralisation you will find that the considerations that Joaquin Arias highlights will become more and more key.  To the extent that it will become clear, eventually, that the nature and form of a successful system of governance, including fiscal matters, must be matched to the realities of commerce, economics and the distribution of wealth in that state.

Our problem in our present times is that we are continually, as individuals believing in and giving assent to the universally individualistic humanitarian principles manifest to the world through  the United Nations Charter, laudable as that is.  Why is this a problem? 

This is so simply because the reality of the institutions which still characterise our economic and social realities are those which unequivocally manifest the aggregative social structures and institutions of commerce, economics and the distribution of wealth to which the 'fathers' of modern economics fully subscribed in 18th and 19th Century Europe.  This system is now so patched and bandaged in a vein attempt to align its outcomes to those expected by us according to our new universally held morality that it is no longer fit for purpose in either context.

Sustainable and robust decentralisation of governance will, in the end, only come about within the context of the inversion of the hierarchies of accountability and responsibility that exist within the institutions of commerce, economics and the holding of wealth.  This does emphatically not constitute a call to any form of socialism, so please do not disregard what I say on that easy excuse.  I can only assure you, at the moment, that such an inversion is conceivable and can very likely be implemented within the democratic parliamentary or republican models.  Suitable decentralised, of course.

The problem with pursuing the alternative, as we presently are, is that the economic 'model' in a more or less laissez faire mode tends to global corporations and oligarchs whose natural home is in conditions of autocratic governance and puppet assemblages of democratically elected 'representatives'.

In essence the same principles, in microcosm, can be seen at play bedevilling attempts at the decentralisation of naturally aggregative commercial enterprises.

You may not agree with me, but I do strongly suggest that you consider the possibility that there are such factors at play within our societies which must therefore be explicitly considered before they can be eliminated from your study of inhibiting factors  to any decentralisation of a 'power' structure.

i could direct you to the Ghanaian case. kindly follow the link below.

Yeboah-Assiamah, Emmanuel. "Power to the People! How far has the Power Gone to the People? A Qualitative Assessment of Decentralization Practice in Ghana." Journal of Asian and African Studies (2014): 0021909614555349.

http://jas.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/10/31/0021909614555349.abstract

Please refer to my recent study which is available on the RG.