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Second Global Report on Decentralization and Local Democracy. GOLD 2010 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
community participation as depicted in the cases from Jordan, Syria, and Turkey. Turkey and Palestine seem to have the greatest degree of decentralization from the perspectives of expenditure and revenue assignments, and Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Palestine use some form of allocation rules and formulae for transfers. Among the countries analyzed, Palestine gives the greatest fiscal autonomy to its local governments. While this highlights Palestine as an interesting case to consider for other countries in the region, one should approach the decentralization efforts cautiously as the observed decentralization seems to spring from special political and security circumstances of that country, which include both external and internal conflicts, weak central authority and discontinuity in its geographical border.
Conclusions For a variety of reasons (e.g., tradition, history, culture), responsibilities assigned to local governments have not been as extensive as those in many other parts of the world. In their efforts to reform the local government sector, governments should recognize that decentralization requires sharing of fiscal roles and responsibilities between central and local governments accompanied by a robust capacity to deliver services both centrally and locally. The challenge is to determine how to sort out the responsibilities and financing among different types of local governments. The region-wide policy recommendations discussed in the chapter include: •
Application of asymmetric decentralization reforms
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Gradual transformation from deconcentration to devolution while establishing accountability mechanisms
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Providing fiscal space to local governments
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Multilevel government coordinating body for fiscal decentralization reforms
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Private sector participation and public-private partnerships
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Transparent rule-based transfer systems that reduce spatial disparities
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Investment in capacity building
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Budget constraints for local governments
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Multilateral cooperation to sustain decentralization even in conflicts environment
Specific criteria can be set to classify local governments into different categories that have asymmetric taxing, spending responsibilities, and borrowing privileges. This would give impetus to decentralization reform process by which regional governments (governorates) and local governments might be empowered with increased autonomy in expenditure and revenue decisions that remain in line with their capacity to meet these new responsibilities and build toward greater ones. However, there is also a need for systematically reviewing legal and regulatory standards for “sorting out” rules and responsibilities among different types and levels of governments. In addition, existing and future revenue commitments on the part of central governments must be honored both in quantity and timeframe to allow local governments to plan for and deliver their mandated services. In the long run, the governments in the region need to devolve expenditure responsibilities further to local governments while making them fully accountable before their respective constituencies for policy results, in terms of their effectiveness and efficiency in delivering quality public services. To this end, they should consider strengthening local government accountability mechanisms by systemic collection, analysis, and dissemination of information about local fiscal performance and compliance with financial and policy goals. Such information is essential both to informed community participation through political process and to the monitoring of municipal performance by the central government.
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