Faguet, Jean-Paul, & Pal, Sarmistha (Eds.) (2023). Decentralised Governance: Crafting Effective Democracies Around The World. Lse Press. https://doi.org/10.31389/lsepress.dlg

Over the last twenty years, democratic backsliding has emerged as a prominent trend in global politics, making the increasing centralization of power a focal point of scholarly and political discourse. Democratically winning parties decide to change political systems and appropriate more and more spheres of life (like education, management of state-owned companies) worldwide. Thus, power — in still considered as democratic countries — is concentrated in an increasingly smaller group of decision-makers. As global democracy advocates continue to improve their approaches to countering democratic decline, editors Jean-Paul Faguet and Sarmistha Pal have collected a series of chapters that examine processes of governance decentralization in developing countries in order to analyse ways of the crafting effective democracies around the world. The main message of the book is that decentralizing authority from the national government to local authorities has the potential to strengthen democracy, give individuals more influence, enhance public services and spur economic growth in developing countries. However, there is conflicting data about when and how decentralization can yield these advantages. Under the wrong circumstances, corruption and the clientelistic distribution of public resources can weaken decentralized power or allow it to be seized by unaccountable elites. This book provides a new wave of political economics studies, combining theoretical understanding with innovative empirical research to examine these issues analytically.