Public Sector Reform & Decentralisation

The need to embrace and effectively manage such downward re-scaling of the State and facilitate the emergence of the required developmental, autonomous and accountable, sub-national authorities, provides the core rationale of a national policy which is referred here as the “Territorial Approach to Local Development” (TALD). Such policy is based on recognizing the new role that sub-national authorities must play to face the challenges of economic and social development in a globalizing world. Its adoption by decentralizing countries would then make the difference between politics-driven decentralization reforms and the actual empowerment of autonomous and accountable sub-national authorities which is a critically missing link between decentralization and development. Territorial development designates development that is endogenous and spatially integrated, leverages the contribution of actors operating at multiple scales and brings incremental value to national development efforts.

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An adequate definition of territorial development should be built on experience gained in local development…

• Local development is endogenous. In the term local development, “local” does not refer to where, but to how and by whom development is promoted:
  • how = by mobilising resources within the territory;
  • by whom = empowered local political institutions to reach out all relevant actors in the territory

• Local development is incremental with respect to national development efforts because it 

Based on this, the best actors to promote local development are certainly elected local authorities, as they show legitimacy, responsiveness, mandate, stability…

…but to reach a useful definition of territorial development, 2 further ingredients are to be added to a local development definition.

• Local development must have a holistic spatial integration to overcome the fragmentation of sector based policy making and implementation.
• Local development should be multiscalar so as to be promoted at multiple levels (urban rural, local, metropolitan, regional, national, supranational…) and take advantage of interdependence and cooperation between various levels.