When we are talking about governance, we need to talk about decentralization. We have seen it previously, new forms of urban governance presuppose decentralization and the challenge of new players. Decentralization. That's what we are going to look at now. The few different stages and limits of the financial capacity. The three stages according to Gauthier and Vaillancourt, revisited by Paulet. We have decongestion. These are officers that perform functions in the local communities but which are attached to the central government. Delegation. So this is a transfer of responsibilities, often in a particular field to entities that can be autonomous, but which must report to a higher authority. So we are still not at the local community level. And then we have devolution which is a transfer of skills to local governments and these governments have autonomy in the decision process. So it really is the last stage, the only one which corresponds exactly to what we call decentralization. So decentralization can be, at the same time, political, and this fits very clearly in the notion of devolution, but decentralization should, obviously, also be economic, financial, and not only political. And it's there, as we'll soon see, that there is a problem, since often political decentralization has taken place, but in fact, financial decentralization has never taken place. The current state of decentralization in Africa. You can find very old texts that are actually 15, even 20-years-old on the subject of decentralization. Keep in mind that all the processes are not taking place in the same way in all of the African States. It's the first thing that must be mentioned. Secondly, it's that decentralization has never really functioned very well. There are few states which have clearly implemented decentralization, since financial decentralization has never taken place or in rare cases. And it's in seeing the state of finances of local communities that we realize that decentralization has not worked. So there is always an extremely weak point, the weak financial autonomy of local communities. And we can say whatever we want. We can say that the texts are there, it is undoubtedly the application decrees that pose problems. Most of the time, the law is enacted, but its enforcement decrees are not. So to summarize all of this, it's by the financial autonomy of local communities that we will be able to really establish decentralization. Decentralization can also have undesirable effects. Finally, there has been an increase in the number of municipalities in the area. So decentralization also means creation of new entities that want to be autonomous in an area. So that is an undesirable effect. It's that the more you decentralize, the more you will see areas which want this degree of autonomy. So we haven't won anything yet since we are only fragmenting the areas further. And it is well known that especially for management of large cities, it's really not fragmentation that is needed but a joining of these various powers that would in this way allow a higher authority to manage the entire city. What are the skills? One could of course give management of large networks, management of urban services, completely to the local communities, but its weak financial capacity prevents all transactions of this type. So it will remain at the regulations level or at the State level, since the local communities, except in some rare cases, very rare cases compared to all of the cities, agreed, but the communities do not have the means to assume these types of tasks due to a lack of resources. This won't be comprehensive however the skills would be, for example, the maintenance of the public domain, lighting, waste management, basic education, health, everything that concerns environmental issues, so we see that we're mostly dealing with social as well as environmental issues. Agreed? So that's what we have. So when we talk about education, it is of course basic education, since in theory, universities are not considered in this diagram. In fact, the universities are managed, in theory, in every country, at the State level. But basic education, elementary school, high school, are the jurisdiction of local communities. We of course have here items that have a cost which have few possibilities of recovering costs, and on top of that we have the extremely limited resources of the local communities. Financial capacity. We have both what comes from the community's own capacities but also from the transfer of State money, in the form of grants or in the form of taxes, on the value added, for example, where a portion of it should, in theory come back directly to the local communities. But we realize that in practice, that this transfer of funds from the higher authority to the local community is very weak compared to the needs, and the State keeps a large portion of these resources. There you have it, we have quickly looked at the issue of decentralization, by explaining what it is, showing its limits precisely because it is not completely effective, for reasons such as the fiscal year and to also show that with the growing complexity of relations between areas, the birth of large cities which require precisely a more centralized management at the community level, certainly, but a re-centralization of power to be able to manage these cities, we realize that we are on relatively shaky ground. And in my opinion, it's of no help at all to be too dogmatic, because according to the times, depending on the methods, we see that the pendulum swings back and forth. We must simply understand at which stage we are in urban history. In my opinion, we must take care when trying to apply these ready-made solutions. Decentralization can work in a number of cases. It also has its limits, and we must find forms of governance that are sustainable over time.
