2.1 Bangladesh
2.2 India
2.3 Nepal
2.4 Sri Lanka
2.5 Philippines
Many of the countries in the region (for example, India, Indonesia, Malaysia) had colonial past and had been subjected to decisions made by a handful of colonial administrators in the centre. For convenience, the colonial administration had carried out deconcentration without or with devolution within very narrow limits. Some countries such as Thailand and Nepal were not under colonial rules but they have histories of centralization not much different from the colonial countries. In the region, however, there are some other countries which had a long history with traditional authority enjoyed by the decentralized units such as Papua New Guinea where 90-97 % of the land resources is owned by groups of families although used by individual households (Talbott and Lynch, 1995).
In the post- colonial period, a general feature valid for the countries with centralized administration was to promote decentralization in the 1950s and early 1960s, waning of interest in it in the late 1960s and renewed interest from early 1970 onwards in some of them (Hye, 1985).
Whatever be the degree of interest, deconcentration was the only important element. The other important element of decentralization namely the development of devolution had been very slow and disappointing. On top of it, in most countries, there has been hardly any structural change to the administrative organization so that within a short period the deconcentrated units became more cosmetic than substantial.
The story of Bangladesh is a typical one namely one of progress and retraction. When the region became independent from Pakistan in 1947, there were moribund administrative institutions at the union and district levels. In the period 1958-1968, two more echelons namely the thana and divisional levels were introduced. In addition, government service institutions were established in the thana levels. Besides, for the first time a thana council composed of the government officials and the elected people of the unions was formed with some devolution of powers and allotment of funds for development. This institution was suspended after Bangladesh became independent of Pakistan. In 1976, for the first time, decentralization to the village level namely gram sabha and gram sarkar (local government) was brought into being. In 1982, with the change of the government, gram sarkar was abolished and instead upgradation of thana into upazila with some powers was done. This means that the decentralization to the village level was curtailed in favour of a higher level namely sub-district level (upzila). Overall, the upazila did not also function well because of weak financial base, stranglehold by the government officials, unrepresentative character of the upazila parishad, and the development of a nexus between the traditional elites and the local administration.
In India, the real process of decentralization was started with the establishment of Panchayati Raj in the 1950s. Over time the Panchayat became a three tier system, one at the district, the second at the block and the third at the cluster of village level. The members constituting the different levels were elected. While the intention was excellent, the effectiveness of the system broke down substantially because of delay in (some states, discontinuance of) regular elections, entrenchment of vested interests of the elites in the Panchayats, disassociation of panchayats in many development projects, failure to garner resources, bureaucratic resistance and lack of government will (Muttalib, 1985). Only recently, the central government has made it mandatory of the state governments to have elections at regular intervals. In some states such as West Bengal, the Panchayats have started to function well as a decentralized unit in development work. However, they still are dependent mostly on the resource grants from the state or the centre.
Nepal introduced partyless Panchayati system in 1959. This consisted of a hierarchy of councils from the village to the central level. This is a return to the traditional system of governance ruled by elites. Popular participation was negligible. In 1982, the government enacted the Decentralization Act, which made the District Panchayat as the focal point of development headed by an elected person (Pradhan, 1985). However, the Act has not made things much different as the government departments continue to act as the major player in most activities.
In Sri Lanka, in 1973, the district administration was restructured with a district political authority. The process of devolution was further improved with district ministership in 1977, the use of decentralized budget in 1974 and establishment of the development councils composed of parliament members, locally elected representatives and the local administrators in 1982. However centralism, failure to promote local participation and the politicians' continued attempt to keep the decision making to themselves rather than share with the people have made the attempt to bring about administrative decentralization substantially ineffective (Gunawardena, 1985).
Philippines, the decentralized government units below the central government are: barangay, municipality, city, province, and the regional government in the national capital region at Manila and regional autonomous governments in regions IX (Western Mindanao) and XII (Southern Mindanao) (Guzman and Padilla, 1985).
The criteria used to make these subdivisions is population, average estimated annual income for the last 3 years, land area and approval of the majority of the votes cast in a plebiscite. For example the required population for qualifying are 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, 150,000, and 500,000 respectively for the five decentralized units levels.
The constitution of 1973 gives the powers to the subdivisions to create their own resources and to levy taxes. But in fact, the smallest unit namely the barangays do not have any significant income and are therefore totally dependent on the other units. The other units, although able to impose some taxes to earn revenue, also have to depend on about 60-80% of its total income from the central government.
The participation of the different units in planning, implementation, supervision, and monitoring is variable. The barangays are too small and unviable while the provinces too big for personal attention to individual citizens. The intermediate units between the barangays and the provinces namely the city/municipality are centre dependent but do deliver services to the people within its jurisdiction.
It is not necessary to go on detailing the history of administrative decentralization for each country of the Asia Pacific region to understand the process. But it will be worthwhile to analyze a little on what led to deconcentration. Lutz and Caldecott (1996) believes decentralization as a means of redistribution of property rights and bargaining power of different levels of society by three distinct processes namely the educational or self discovery process, empowerment process and the process of communication and negotiation. In self discovery process, each level of society perceives the oppressive elements of reality which include harmful environmental problems and act against them. In the empowerment process, each level acquires its bargaining power. The communication and negotiation process is self explanatory. While these three processes cover a lot of ground, they fail to explain some common features of decentralization. For example, why in most countries, deconcentration has been aggressively promoted but devolution has been left unattended. Another interesting element is promotion of deconcentration by the centre although there was no bargaining for it (for example that of introduction of panchayati raj in India). Still another element is plethora of bargaining for decentralization only by a handful of people. These demands often political in nature are sought and sometimes acquired for themselves and not for the people. It is also often noticed that decentralization is often a facade to defuse or pre-empt the rising democratic aspirations of the people. It may also be a method to keep a political tab in the far reaches of the country.
We therefore believe that a more realistic way to divide the factors that bring about decentralization are as follows:
1. State coercion: Superimposition by the top Administration/political authority of the society: The administrative/political authority on its own distributes its officials to geographically decentralized units for local supervision and management.2. Political Democratization: The political authority promotes deconcentration through popular elections at different levels.
3. Peoples' power: Wrenching of power by the lower echelons of the society: This amounts to political unrest and eventual devolution to the revolting group.
4. Popular Pressure: Reluctant deconcentration due to popular pressure exerted by environmental lobby, social activists, judicial courts etc.
5. Traditional: Decentralization existed in the past and have continued to exist at present.
6. The above processes may have acted singly or in combination to influence decentralization noticed in different countries.
We will see in the next section different forms of decentralization in forest management and how they relate to the classification made above.
