ABSTRACT
For forty years, political and administrative decentralization has been integrated as a core component of the global neoliberal ideology described above by US President George W. Bush (Kohl and Farthing 2006; Peck 2001; Peet 2003). As a result, both high-and low-income countries have transferred planning and administrative responsibilities from national to subnational governments (Oyugi 2000; Samoff 1979; Wunsch 2001). These policies are based on the assumption that decentralized governments are not only more efficient and less corrupt than centralized ones, but also more democratic (World Bank 1997, 2000). In fact, expanding citizen participation in planning is only one of several potential outcomes of decentralization, as experience has demonstrated around the world (Huerta Malbrán et al. 2000; Hutchcroft 2001; Oxhorn, et al. 2004; Schönwälder 1997; Wanyande 2004).
