The Democratic Decentralization Programming Handbook conceptualizes decentralization as a reform that advances democracy and development in a context of stability and the rule of law. Decentralization invests new actors with public responsibilities.The newly involved actors that decentralization empowers (or “should” empower) include appointed offcials in subnational administrations, elected offcials in subnational governments, and increasingly engaged citizens themselves. For the purposes of this Handbook, decentralization is defned as the transfer of power from national governments to subnational governments or to the subnational administrative units of national governments.This defnition is useful because it allows a discussion of decentralization’s two most common forms, deconcentration and devolution, without privileging one over the other.
