ABSTRACT
Economic growth in many developing countries is hampered by excessive government. This chapter suggests new and extreme type of federalism which allows for a much larger number of governments. The proposed units are based on grass-root local democracy which checks government and prevents it from evolving into an oppressive and intervening bureaucracy. Governments in most third world countries are inadequate in a second, quite different sense. They are far from meeting the wishes of the citizens; many are either strongly paternalistic or even dictatorial. The chapter presents the basic idea of functional, overlapping, and competing jurisdictions (FOCJ) for developing countries, discusses possible counterarguments, and examines the question of how FOCJ can be established. To establish a system of FOCJ in developing countries constitutes a radical form of federal decentralization, and at the same time democratization. The ‘culturalist position’ maintains that individuals in developing regions are different from Westerners, and need a different form of government, arguably a more authoritarian one.
