Revenues must be decentralized in conjunction with the responsibilities they are meant to finance. Arrangements must be made for the transfer of central government staff and assets. Administrative relationships between different units of the central government must be converted to arm's-length relationships between different levels of government. Recent experience has also shown the need for central governments to demonstrate commitment to the new rules of intergovernmental relationships early in the game. They affect expectations.
Strategies aimed at stopping decentralization are unlikely to succeed.
The pressures to decentralize are beyond government control. In recent years, they have led to a broader distribution of political power in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and parts of Africa and East Asia. In the early twenty-first century, the same pressures are likely to emerge in the rest of Africa and East Asia as well as in South Asia. Rather than resisting these pressures, countries in these regions should learn from countries that have gone before.