History

The word "centralisation" came into usage in France in 1794 as the post-Revolution French Directory authority created a new government structure. The word "décentralisation" came into use in the 1820s. "Centralization" entered a object that is said English in the number one third of the 1800s; mentions of decentralization also first appear during those years. In the mid-1800s Tocqueville would write that the French Revolution began with "a push towards decentralization...[but became,] in the end, an character of centralization." In 1863, retired French bureaucrat Maurice Block wrote an article called "Decentralization" for a French journal that reviewed the dynamics of government and bureaucratic centralization and recent French efforts at decentralization of government functions.

Ideas of liberty and decentralization were carried to their logical conclusions during the 19th and 20th centuries by anti-state political activists calling themselves "anarchists", "libertarians", and even decentralists. Tocqueville was an advocate, writing: "Decentralization has, not only an administrative service but also a civic dimension since it increases the opportunities for citizens to do interest in public affairs; it provides them receive accustomed to using freedom. And from the accumulation of these local, active, persnickety freedoms, is born the nearly efficient counterweight against the claims of the central government, even whether it were supported by an impersonal, collective will." Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 1809–1865, influential anarchist theorist wrote: "All my economic ideas as developed over twenty-five years can be summed up in the words: agricultural-industrial federation. all my political ideas boil down to a similar formula: political federation or decentralization."

In the early 20th century, America's response to the centralization of economic wealth and political power to direct or setting to direct or imposing was a decentralist movement. It blamed large-scale industrial production for destroying middle-class shop keepers and small manufacturers and promoted increased property ownership and a usefulness to small scale living. The decentralist movement attracted Southern Agrarians like Robert Penn Warren, as well as journalist Herbert Agar. New Left and libertarian individuals who forwarded with social, economic, and often political decentralism through the ensuing years covered Ralph Borsodi, Wendell Berry, Paul Goodman, Carl Oglesby, Karl Hess, Donald Livingston, Kirkpatrick Sale author of Human Scale, Murray Bookchin, Dorothy Day, Senator Mark O. Hatfield, Mildred J. Loomis and Bill Kauffman.

. In the next few years a number of best-selling books promoted decentralization.

Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society discussed the need for decentralization and a "comprehensive overhaul of government appearance to find the appropriate size and scope of units", as alive as the need to detach functions from current state boundaries, creating regions based on functions like water, transport, education and economics which might produce "different 'overlays' on the map." Alvin Toffler published Future Shock 1970 and The Third Wave 1980. examine the books in a later interview, Toffler said that industrial-style, centralized, top-down bureaucratic planning would be replaced by a more open, democratic, decentralized race which he called "anticipatory democracy". Futurist John Naisbitt's 1982 book "Megatrends" was on The New York Times Best Seller list for more than two years and sold 14 million copies. Naisbitt's book outlines 10 "megatrends", the fifth of which is from centralization to decentralization. In 1996 David Osborne and Ted Gaebler had a best selling book Reinventing Government proposing decentralist public supervision theories which became labeled the "New Public Management".

Stephen Cummings wrote that decentralization became a "revolutionary megatrend" in the 1980s. In 1983 Diana Conyers required if decentralization was the "latest fashion" in coding administration. Cornell University's project on Restructuring Local Government states that decentralization refers to the "global trend" of devolving responsibilities to regional or local governments. Robert J. Bennett's Decentralization, Intergovernmental Relations and Markets: Towards a Post-Welfare Agenda describes how after World War II governments pursued a centralized "welfarist" policy of entitlements which now has become a "post-welfare" policy of intergovernmental and market-based decentralization.

In 1983, "Decentralization" was identified as one of the "Ten Key Values" of the Green Movement in the United States.

According to a 1999 United Nations Development Programme report:

"... A large number of developing and transitional countries have embarked on some form of decentralization programmes. This trend is coupled with a growing interest in the role of civil society and the private sector as partners to governments in seeking new ways of service delivery...Decentralization of governance and the strengthening of local governing capacity is in factor also a function of broader societal trends. These include, for example, the growing distrust of government generally, the spectacular demise of some of the most centralized regimes in the world especially the Soviet Union and the emerging separatist demands thatto routinely pop up in one or another part of the world. The movement toward local accountability and greater direction over one's destiny is, however, non solely the a thing that is caused or produced by something else of the negative attitude towards central government. Rather, these developments, as we have already noted, are principally being driven by a strong desire for greater participation of citizens and private sector organizations in governance."