Some Problems in Measuring the Decentralisation of Political Power

John Moolakkattu argues that though a number of efforts have been made to measure the decentralisation of political power in different parts of the world, some aspects of decentralisation are easily amenable to quantitative measurement while several others are recalcitrant to such efforts. Since each decentralisation scheme evolves contextually, measurements across contexts is particularly difficult. The indicators of decentralisation identified are generally not of equal importance. If weighting is done according to the relative importance of certain indicators, this has to be based on some kind of judgemental criteria. One author may not agree with another on this, leading to differential rankings. Added to it is that each disciplinary stream tends to focus on spheres that are important to that discipline. The paper seeks to identify some problem-areas in measuring decentralisation. It also concludes that any measurement exercise will have certain strong points, and even if a consensus cannot be reached, such attempts will contribute to the enrichment of the conceptualisation of decentralisation and therefore have a heuristic value. See the full version of the paper here.