A 1957 book blaming sheer bigness for society's ills helped launch a movement
Leopold Kohr's 1957 book The Breakdown of Nations argued that whenever something goes wrong, excessive size is the likely culprit. His ideas shaped E. F. Schumacher's 1973 bestseller Small Is Beautiful, and within a decade pushing power away from the centre had become what one writer called a revolutionary megatrend of the 1980s.
Decentralisation means shifting planning and decisions away from a central authority to smaller units within an organisation, whether a company, a government, a currency system or a computer network. The vocabulary is French and revolutionary. Centralisation came into use in 1794, as the post-Revolution Directory built its new government, and décentralisation followed in the 1820s. Alexis de Tocqueville later observed that the Revolution began with a push toward decentralising but ended by extending central control.
Tocqueville championed local power for civic reasons as much as administrative ones. Handling local affairs, he argued, trains citizens in the habits of freedom, and a mass of small, stubborn local liberties forms the best counterweight to an overreaching central government. Anarchists, libertarians and self-described decentralists took up the theme through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In early twentieth-century America, a decentralist movement blamed large-scale industry for ruining small shopkeepers and manufacturers and urged wider property ownership and smaller-scale living, attracting Southern Agrarians such as Robert Penn Warren. Later voices ranged from Wendell Berry to Paul Goodman. Daniel Bell called for redesigning government around functions like water and transport rather than existing borders, and Alvin Toffler predicted that top-down industrial planning would give way to a more open, democratic style. In 1983 the American Green movement named decentralisation among its ten key values.
Governments followed. After the Second World War, states had built centralised welfare systems; Robert J. Bennett describes a later swing toward a post-welfare mix of intergovernmental and market-based decentralisation. A 1999 United Nations Development Programme report noted that many developing and transitional countries had launched such programmes, linking the trend to growing distrust of government, the collapse of highly centralised regimes such as the Soviet Union and recurring separatist demands. Some scholars asked whether it was merely the latest fashion.
Source: Decentralization
